Weakest Lynx (10 page)

Heaps of newspapers and magazines were easy, if exhausting. Many things, though, needed to be sorted through and taken to charity. The porch held piles of donations. Goodwill and the Salvation Army called me by name since my pickup truck swung by several times a week. In my battle with the mound, I worried I’d miss something—like the one picture they had of their beloved uncle, or a precious family ring. I could understand why Manny got overwhelmed by the process.

Finally, I had made my way into the kitchen. Gross was a euphemism. I simply couldn’t deal with what I found. The appliances grew mold like a penicillin factory. Exposed wires tangled with the clutter. Liquefied food had rehardened into amorphous blobs. A biohazard for sure. I duct taped everything shut then went down to the Home Depot, where the day laborers gathered, and paid two guys to come back with me to manhandle all of the appliances into the Dumpster.

“The fridge didn’t work; it’s not repairable.” I stood, hands fisted at my hips. “They don’t make parts for appliances that are forty years old, Manny.” Exasperation colored my words. “And it wouldn’t matter if they did. Everything in your kitchen is a health hazard, and they’re probably fire hazards, too. I’m trying to save your boys from food poisoning and you from jail time.”

The rent-a-muscle guys maneuvered down the steps with the dishwasher. They walked over, took their work gloves off, shook their hair and clothes, and smacked at their legs. The creepy, crawly sensation of invisible bugs scuttling across the skin; yup, I went home with the same feeling every time I left Hoarder House Hell. After pocketing their well-earned cash, the men went on their way.

“Manny, I understand you don’t want to spend any money on the house, and I realize you’re following the recommendation of your lawyer and all. Sometimes common sense has to win out, though. After I scrub everything down, you need to pull up the floor. You have to fix the studs, lay new boards and put in laminate. Something was dripping in there. I dug around, and I found rot. The support beams are soft. At some point, safety overrides frugality, wouldn’t you say?”

“I guess.” He sounded deflated. “How much more time in the kitchen?”

“No clue, Manny. You’re almost done with the deck. Will Justin help you with the kids’ jungle gym Saturday?”

“Yeah, then we’re gonna catch a baseball game on TV.”

“Why don’t I let you spend Friday on the floor problem? Saturday, I’ll check out the outlets for some cheap, but quality, replacement appliances. I assume you want to mount a microwave, too?”

“Yeah. Good plan.”

Giving Beetle and Bella a scratch behind the ears, we motored down Silver Lake toward home. We had been playing Frisbee at the park, celebrating spring after our trek to the appliance store.

Turning into my neighborhood, the “knowing” hit me with a solid blow to the diaphragm. My body slammed back against my seat as if driving through an invisible force field. “Exposed,” flashed in oscillating red. I slowed my car to scan. Nothing seemed amiss. Beetle and Bella had their heads out the window, dangling their pink tongues. Calm.

I pulled up to the curb, set the parking brake, and stuffed my purse under the seat to free up my hands. Carefully opening the door, I spiked my keys between the fingers of my left hand. My right hand gripped the Ruger in my belly holster. Movement coming from across the street had me ducking behind the opened door. I tilted my head to peek through the glass. Dave. He jogged around the side of Manny’s house.

“Lexi, thank God! Come quick!” He hailed me with an urgent, wide-arcing arm.

With the girls at my heels, I took off at a run, following Dave around to the backyard where Justin clutched his wrist and cussed. Manny stood with his mouth hanging open, staring at him.

“He’s burned.” Dave filled in the blank. “Can you do the brush thing with your hand like you did when Fletcher pulled the boiling water off the stove?”

I grabbed at Justin’s arm. “Justin, stand still! Justin! Stand still! I can’t help you when you’re doing that.”

Dave clamped a vicelike grip onto Justin’s wrist to hold his arm out for me. A mean red streak ran from his inner elbow all the way down to his palm. Jeezus. I reached out and brushed the air above his wound. “How’d this happen?” I asked.

“Fucking Manny doesn’t know fucking shit about grilling. That’s how the hell this happened,” Justin spat through gritted teeth, slitting his eyes and bouncing on his toes.

“They were arguing about how to stack the charcoals. Manny squirted lighter fluid on the already lit coals, and the flame followed the stream. Justin was standing in the line of fire—literally,” Dave said.

Exposed.
Could it mean this burn? Exposed to the fire? That didn’t seem right. I didn’t get a sense of relief telling me I understood correctly. I scanned the backyard, across the top of the retaining wall, nothing.

I continued to brush the air above the burn. “I’m so sorry, Justin. I think I can take this away, though. Just give me a minute.” The doubt written on his face wasn’t surprising. When Kim taught me this technique to deal with Mom’s radiation burns, I was dubious, too, until I realized how well it worked. Soon, Justin stood flat-footed and panting; some of the strain left his jaw.

“Hey, Manny, can you grab my purse—look under my car seat—and bring it over here?” Beetle and Bella circled us, whining their concern.

Manny marched over with my bag hanging from his shoulder. The four of us huddled in a circle; I brushed the air above the burn until the red faded from Justin’s arm. Now that Justin had stopped struggling, Dave released his wrist. I took my purse from Manny and dug around in the bottom to find my little bottle of lavender oil. I rubbed a drop into Justin’s skin.

Justin jerked away from me. “Hey, stop with the girly stuff!”

“How does that feel?” I asked.

Justin looked down at his skin, then back to me. “That’s the craziest damned shit I think has ever happened to me.”

I giggled at his comical expression—his eyes wide, his eyebrows nearly to his hairline.

“Is that like some sort of magic trick? What the hell did you just do?” Justin examined the spot closely.

“Magic tricks are illusions. This is a simple technique anyone can learn,” I said.

“Like for Ruby?” Justin walked over to a lawn chair and plopped down, still examining his skin.

“Yeah. Well, similar.”

“Huh,” Justin grunted as the three of us grabbed chairs, too. I placed mine with my back to the house, where I had the widest view possible. Beetle and Bella flanked me. My hand rested on my stomach ready to grab my gun.

We sat in silence until Justin said, “Yankees are playing tonight. You guys coming over after we eat?”

I glanced over at the grill. The coals had turned gray along the edges, still a ways to go before they’d be ready for grilling. “I can’t, thanks.” I reached down and rubbed behind Beetle’s ears.

“You don’t watch baseball?” Justin asked.

“Sometimes, but tonight I’m going to do a set over at StarLight. Management wants to see how people like me. I thought it might be good to have a little pocket money. Do you guys know the place?”

“It’s nice,” Dave said. “Kind of neighborhoody. Cathy and me go up every now and then when we have someone to babysit the kids.”

“You sing?” Justin stretched his legs out in front of him and slouched down in his chair.

“Mmmhm and play guitar.”

“Is there anything you can’t do?” Justin asked.

“Yeah, I don’t do geometry or pop culture.” The last of the sun’s rays warmed my face. I’d need to go get ready soon.

Dave snorted. “Lexi can build a rocket ship and fly to the moon, but she doesn’t know the Pythagorean Theorem. Lexi was weird-schooled.”

“Weird-schooled, Dave?” I gave him a little kick.

“Yeah. What’s the capital of South Dakota?”

“No clue.” I scowled at him. I didn’t like being teased.

“I went to normal school, and I don’t know the capital of South Dakota.” Manny rested a beer on his rounded stomach.

“I was unschooled,” I said.

Dave grinned. “And that’s weird.”

“It’s not. Lots of famous people were unschooled.”

“Yeah? Like who?” asked Dave.

“George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt.” I ticked off on my fingers.

“They don’t count; they’re dead.”

“They do, too.” I sounded testy even to my own ears.

“Lexi, what does ‘unschooled’ mean?” asked Justin.

“It means I got my education from reading tons of books and from hanging out with people. So, for example, I speak Spanish from talking to Angel’s great aunt, Abuela Rosa. I never sat in a class or studied verb conjugations. My parents saw formal schooling as a waste of time.”

“What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever learned?” Justin leaned forward, obviously intrigued by all this.

“I don’t know.” I thought for a minute. “We had this neighbor once who worked at the National Zoo.” I shielded my eyes with my hand as a cloud moved and the sudden bright light stung me. “I went to work with her all the time. They were having trouble with the monkeys, because people were throwing things into their area and the monkeys ate the debris. The zoo was trying to come up with a better way of protecting the monkeys, so I went through their poop and catalogued stuff that didn’t belong there.” I shifted my chair to take advantage of the shade cast by the house. “I’d call that a little odd, I guess. Mostly, I learned normal kinds of things like computer stuff, cooking stuff, mechanical stuff, fighting stuff.”

“Yeah, fighting stuff, that’s the best,” Dave said.

Justin had his chair rocked back onto two legs, with his fingers laced behind his head, looking very relaxed. A one eighty from the way I found him a few minutes ago. He turned toward Dave. “Fighting?”

Wow. Justin was Mr. Inquisitive today. I wasn’t too thrilled to be the center of all this attention. I searched for a topic to get them going in a different direction. Before I could say anything, Dave started in.

“Yeah, fighting. Lexi’s parents wanted her to know something about everything. One day, my buddy Stan and me had her up to the training academy, we were going to teach her to shoot.” Dave smirked. “Stan looks over at me, and gives me a hard time because I got promoted to detective. He says, ‘They had to promote you; you’re a liability on the beat. You’re so weak you couldn’t win against a baby. Not even Baby Girl there.’” Dave gestured back at me.

“I knew she’d been trained in some martial arts stuff, but so what, right? Stan said, ‘Come on, let’s put you two on the mats.’ I thought we were joking.” Dave paused to smack at a mosquito buzzing around his arm. “I went out there and reached to grab her wrist—next thing I knew, I’d done a face-plant. She had me in some kind of Kung Fu hold, and I couldn’t get up.” Dave was sitting at the end of his chair leaning forward, using big gestures, getting into his story. “Now I gotta bruised ego, and I was gonna show her who was boss.”

When he pointed an accusatory finger at me, I had to work hard to hold in a bubble of laughter. “Lexi handed me my butt on a plate. I tried to get her down. I was sucking wind—dog tired, sweating like a pig, bruised head to toe. Still she tossed me like a garden salad.”

Manny grunted and choked on his beer. “Lexi?”

“Shit yeah. All the guys stood around laughing. Then they had a go at her, and no one could get her down.” Dave leaned back with satisfaction. “Baby Girl had eleven years of daily one-on-one Kung Fu practice with Master Wang—part of the whole unschooling thing.” Dave took a swig from his bottle. “So Sergeant Christophe—he’s in charge of training recruits—was laughing his head off and says Lexi’s gonna be his secret weapon with the new classes coming through.”

“You do that, Lexi? Beat up the recruits?” Justin grinned broadly and twisted open another bottle.

I shrugged and pressed my lips together. I wasn’t sure I wanted everyone to know I had trained. Light and fluffy, innocent and cute, sweet little girl next-door. Dave was blowing my disguise. If someone knew I could fight—
Stalker—
then he’d be prepared. Keeping my skills a secret protected me. Kept me safer.

I checked my watch. I was through talking about myself. I needed to head out.

“Go back to the school thing.” Justin leaned toward me with his elbows on his knees, obviously intrigued. “I don’t understand how that worked.”

“Simple, my parents thought school kids wasted a whole lot of time standing in line and waiting for the other students to catch up. They wanted me to learn by doing. I learned from people around me, mostly from people at my apartment building. Well, there were a few people Mom and Dad said I couldn’t learn from—like the guy who handed out clean needles and condoms to gang members in the inner city. Most everyone else had something to teach me, though.”

“All of your teachers were from your apartments?” Manny asked.

“Most. Some were family friends,” I said. Like Spyder.

Spyder had known my parents for years. Dad did custom adaptations on Spyder’s work cars. Exactly what, I never knew. Those transformations happened in a locked bay. When I was thirteen, Spyder sat in our garage, telling Dad a story about a case he’d just wrapped up. I listened intently, then said it reminded me of the Aesop’s Fable about the Ant and the Chrysalis.