Mind Games (10 page)

“Reading on Internet.”

“Do you ever think about going up there?”

She’s silent for a while. “Packard would forbid it.”

“If he knew,” I say. “What if there’s something to learn here? Something that could help him? He deserves to be free.”

“Many people deserve many things. And we cannot anger nemesis. What if he lives there?”

“What if he does? Why should the nemesis be angry
about two women walking around in an apartment building? It’s a public place.”

Shelby considers this.

“Don’t you kind of want to check it out? Just a little bit?”

She smiles her foxy, chipped-tooth smile. “A little bit.”

We tell our cabbie to wait some more and head toward the front door. Two raggedy boys run out.

“Children! Come!” Shelby calls after them. “Please, come!”

The children stop and regard Shelby with suspicion. She kneels and digs a package of licorice out of her purse. “I will give you each piece of candy if you will let us in and tell us how to get up to that apartment.” She points at the fourth floor. “See? Where it looks like face?”

The boys stare at the licorice.

“Shelby, they can’t take candy from strangers.” I pull out my wallet. “Five bucks each to get us up there.”

The older boy puts his hands on his hips. “Five bucks each and the candy. The whole pack.”

“You got it,” I say.

We follow them into a grimy lobby. One wall is covered by squares of cracked mirrors; the other side is blue concrete with an elevator in the center. The older boy, who’s maybe nine, points at it. “Stay out.” He leads us into a stairwell that smells like urine and mint. We step over bags of garbage and a few bundles that turn out to be sleeping people. It makes me wonder what’s in the elevator.

“You know who lives in the apartment where we’re going?” I ask.

“Not our floor,” the boy says.

“Not our floor, not our problem,” the younger one adds mysteriously.

Soon we’re standing in front of #401, the last door on a moldy-smelling corridor that feels subterranean. The lighting fixtures have little cages around them. The boys are long gone.

Shelby gives me a questioning look that turns to horror when I knock. She whispers, “What if it is, you know—”

The door is opened by a girl, maybe twenty-one, twenty-two years old. Her long, stringy white-blonde hair creates a dramatic contrast with her thick black eyeliner and strappy black tank top. She’s frighteningly thin—her torn jeans would fall right off her if they weren’t held up by her black belt. She has a wary air of damage, like a hurt stray cat.

“Can I help you?”

“Umm …” My thought was to pretend we had the wrong door, but no way is this the nemesis. Packard was sealed up eight years ago; this girl would’ve barely been out of her Disney movie phase.

I glance nosily into her place, which is normal-looking save for a large hole in one wall, like someone went at it with a sledgehammer. On the endearing side, she has pretty paisley curtains on the windows, and a big, beat-up picture book of horses on the coffee table.

“Excuse us, we have wrong door,” Shelby says. “We are looking for somebody else.”

The girl seems disappointed. “Maybe I can help find who you’re looking for. I know everybody in the building.”

“No thanks,” Shelby says.

“We were more looking for information about somebody,” I say. “You probably don’t know him. …” I feel Shelby’s eyes on me, but there has to be a reason Packard told Shelby to stay away. “A man named Packard? Reddish brown hair, tall, good looking? Very, very intense.”

“Highcap? Sees people’s tendencies and shit?”

“Yeah.”

She nods. “Sterling Packard.”

“You know him?”

“Knew him. Guy was shot dead eight years ago.” She turns and strolls into her small room. Shelby and I take this moment to exchange glances. “Man got his head blown off. Couple guys in masks. You didn’t know?” She flops down on a ratty pink couch. “My name’s Rickie. Come on in.”

We step over the threshold. “I’m Justine, and my friend here—”

The door slams behind us before I can finish, and the horse book lifts off the table and traces an arc through the air, gaining speed, spinning like a Frisbee right at Shelby, who’s still mesmerized by the self-slamming door.

“Shelby!”

Too late—the book clonks Shelby in the head, knocking her to the floor. I kneel over her, squeezing her shoulders. “Shelby!” Unresponsive. “Shit!”

Rickie laughs, and I catch movement out of the corner of my eye—the book, circling back toward me. I flatten over Shelby just in time; it sails over me and smashes into the wall, embedding itself in the hole. Rickie laughs as the book trembles, dislodging.

“Goddammit!” I lunge across the room at Rickie, avoiding the book as I heap onto her, trying to pin her arms and legs and stop her from making stuff fly through the air. A flurry of spoons and cups hit me in the back. Then I see bigger stuff tremble, including a large trophy. Rickie gets hold of my hair and my shirt, keeping me over her, exposed to the next round of stuff. I twist and pull, but she has a real grip on my hair. It hurts. And then I do what I should’ve done all along—I whip out my stun gun and give her a good jolt in the gut. Her laughter ends with a shriek, and everything airborne falls to the floor as she crumples under me.

I rush back to Shelby, who’s unconscious and bleeding from the forehead. I heave her out of there by an arm and a shoulder and sit her in the hall.

Down a ways a door opens and two black guys in warm-up suits saunter out. One of them points at Shelby and laughs. “Rickles getcha?” His wraparound sunglasses are so dark you can’t see his eyes.

“Quick, help me get her to safety,” I pant.

“Don’t you worry, Rickles can’t hurt you out here,” the guy with sunglasses says. “Rickles can’t come out in the hall, and Rickles’s voodoo don’t work out here, neither.”

I look up at him. “Are you saying that girl’s trapped in there?”

“Oh, yeah. She’s been in there, what …?” He looks to his friend.

“Good three years,” the friend says.

Sunglasses nods. “I’m telling you.”

I kneel in front of Shelby, who’s coming around, groggily insisting she’s fine.

“Some kind of electric fence. Whatever she says, don’t you go in there.” He turns his head and points to a scar on his cheek. The friend shows off scars on his head and leg. They both seem amused.

The friend goes and gets towels, and the three of us fall to cleaning and inspecting Shelby’s forehead gash. We’re divided on the need for stitches.

“Please, I am fine.” Shelby presses a towel to her head to prevent further inspection.

The guys leave.

“Head wounds bleed a lot, but it’s nothing to worry about,” I assure her. “Let me look at your pupils.”

“No. You are not really nurse.”

“Do you feel nauseated or sleepy?”

“Stop. I am fine.”

I bite my lip. A hard blow to the head can lead to
a vein star–type vascular bulge and rupture. I want to warn her, but on the other hand, the anxiety of knowing this could elevate her blood pressure and exacerbate it even more.

“Stop looking at me like that.” She shifts her eyes sideways, toward the door. “Telekinetic.”

“Seems so,” I say.

A voice: “Hey! What the fuck?”

Rickie’s at the door, hands flattened against nothing, like a mime. She’s trapped, just like Packard. Are there others?

“What’d you do to me?” Rickie demands.

“What’d you do to
us?
Why would you attack us?”

“Why? Lemme think for a second.” She scrunches up her face. “Oh yeah, I remember. Because I can. So what did you wanna know about Sterling Packard?”

“So now we’re going back to conversation?” I say.

“You got questions; I got answers.”

I stand up, face her across the threshold. “Like we trust you now.”

“Come on, try me,” she says. “’Cause I got more I can tell about Packard.”

“We will hear it,” Shelby pipes up from the floor.

“Now we’re in business,” Rickie says. She disappears into her place. A minute later she returns waving a scrap of paper. “It’ll cost you.”

I stare at the paper.

“My info’s good.” She extends the paper through the invisible wall. Closer and closer. I snatch it away. A shopping list.

   Two hours later we’re back in the hall with a case of tequila, ten bags of French Onion SunChips, a book on pigeons, and an ant farm. We arrange the stuff in the hall just beyond her reach. Lastly the ant farm. I slide the box sideways so she can see the edge of it.

“Slide it out. Let me see the whole front of the box.”

I comply and Rickie stares at it for a long time.

“I always wanted one of those,” she says quietly.

“And it’s Plexiglas. Unbreakable.”

She’s too engrossed in the box to get my joke. “Does it come with the ants?”

I read the contents list on the back. “Oops.”

Rickie looks like she’s about to cry. “What good is it without the ants?”

“If you answer our questions today,” I tell her, “we will give you all this stuff. If your answers prove true—and believe me, we will check them—I will personally bring you a jar of ants.”

“It can’t just be the ants. It has to have the queen.”

After further negotiation, we decide I’ll bring C batteries, more tequila, and a jar of ants to include a queen if her answers are true. As if we have a way to verify them.

She wants a tequila up front. I hand it through. “So you know Packard.”

She opens the bottle and throws the cap over her shoulder. “Knew.” She takes a swig. “Man was like a fucking rock star, you know? Everybody loved him. Wanted to be in his gang.” She pulls a chair to the doorway, settles into it backward, and takes another swig, seeming very much like a girl pirate. “First time I talked to him I was a kid, new out on the streets, living at this abandoned house with a bunch of other highcap runaways. I remember I was hanging in the doorway and I see this shiny blue boat of a car roll up, and people jump out of it. Sterling Packard and his gang. One guy with a long coat and chains and shit, girl in some sort of riding outfit. Couple of muscle guys. They all come up, and Sterling Packard, he wants to know is Stoolie Black around. Stoolie was one of the older kids at the house, a short-term prognosticator. Stoolie’d helped
Sterling and his gang on this one job once—some sort of complicated robbery. So I tell Sterling Packard, you come in, and I’ll get that boy.”

“A robbery?”

Shelby gives me a look.

“Yeah. A robbery.” Rickie wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “So I come back down with Stoolie. And I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m a telekinetic, man. You should take me with.’ And Sterling Packard, he grabs this horse book that’s there, right?” She points back at the horse book. “That exact one. And he’s like, ‘Can you embed this motherfucker in that wall over there?’ And I just laugh. I say, ‘Who can do that?’ Telekinetics don’t have that level of force. And Sterling Packard, he points right at me and he says, ‘If you practice, you can do that. And once you’re good enough to embed this book in that wall, come find me and you can join my crew.’” She dangles the bottle from her fingertips, arms stretched long over the back of the chair. “And you saw it, right? I fucking can now. That and more.” She sighs. “Sterling Packard, he had a code. He came up on the streets from pretty young—even younger than me, I think.”

“What? None of you have families?”

“Highcap kids are trouble for families. Tons wind up on their own. But Packard, he put things together. It was bad, him dying. And I’ll tell you this—that horse book is way heavier than the bricks that showoff in the news is throwing around. Bricks are half the weight.”

“So who put you in here?” I ask.

“That’s what I want to know. I’ll tell you this—it involved a revisionist, because everybody thinks I’m dead. You try to call them and they think it’s a crank.” She drinks some more. Softly she says, “Woke up one day and I was here.”

“You ever hear anything about Packard having a nemesis?”

“Of course.” She lowers her voice. “Henji.”

“What’s his deal?” I say, hoping it doesn’t cost us another shopping trip. “This Henji?”

She shakes her head. “You don’t want to know Henji’s deal. Good luck finding anybody alive that even knew Henji. Henji left on a ship when he was eleven. Pretty young age to go travel the world, you know? But it’s pretty young to be a mass murderer, too.”

“Henji was a mass murderer?”

“He could kill people with a thought. Shit, I was barely born when it all went down, but they say Packard sort of adopted him, the way older kids adopt younger kids outside. A group of them were squatting in this old abandoned school by the river. All I know is one day Packard and Henji had this fight that leveled the school where they lived and Henji took off. And Packard stayed behind. Grew up to run highcap gangs, and then he got shot in the head.”

Shelby asks, “Could Packard have had another nemesis?”

Rickie stares at her like she’s nuts. “I think you only get one. Isn’t there a rule like that somewhere?”

“What was Henji’s specific power?”

“To kill. I get the creeps just talking about him.” She raises a hand to indicate the end of that line of questioning.

“Could it be force fields?”

She shrugs. “Sure.”

I look over at Shelby. Is she thinking what I’m thinking? Could force fields level a building? Could force fields kill? Is the face the mark of Henji? I turn back to Rickie. “Can you think of any reason why Henji would put you in here?”

Rickie narrows her eyes. “Henji’s gone.”

“But what if he wasn’t?”

“What are you saying?”

“Is there anything you could’ve done to make Henji mad?”

She regards me with horror, as though she’s spotted a scorpion on my nose. “Henji?”

“I’m not saying—”

“Henji’s back?” She stands unsteadily. “Wait, you think Henji’s the one … Why would Henji put me in here? Look, I never did anything to Henji, I swear. If I hurt somebody he knows, I swear—” She straightens up. “Did Henji send you?”

“No.”

“There’s something you’re not saying. I could tell that this whole time.”