Nickel Plated Page 11

  Duiker Road wasn’t far from my house, ten minutes tops, but it wasn’t in exactly the best neighborhood. I prepared my camo accordingly, ripped jeans, Detroit Tigers ball cap, Metallica shirt from a recent tour. Chuck Taylors went on the feet. I pulled the bike out of the garage and rolled out to do some recon. It was warmer than the day before had been, and the sun was shining from what felt like directly over top of me. In my pockets I’d stuck the pepper spray pen, the burner from earlier, and a little point-and-shoot digital camera. I wasn’t ready for war, but I didn’t expect to be in one. This was just to look. I went back in the house and got the starting pistol and tucked it in my waistband where the sweatshirt would cover it. Now I was ready.

  Chapter 32

  There were no train tracks to cross, and it certainly wasn’t on the other side of town, but something changed as I made my way to Duiker Road. Money, that was the only difference. I noticed it first in the yards: landscaping went out the window quickly, then every now and again you’d see one done up beautifully, fighting the darkness that was going to worm its way in no matter what they did.

  Every now and again in this stretch you’d see a house that had given up entirely. Yard littered with children’s toys and beer cans, grass unmowed. Cars in the driveway that run on prayers instead of gasoline. The American Dream in the darkest light possible. Here too you’d see candles awash in the sea of black, trying their hardest to keep a normal life in their yard and on their street. I could almost see that light winking out, just as sure as the sun had over my own head not too long ago.

  I went through it all, the near slum that suburbia can turn into as swift as a bar argument can go ugly. I wasn’t immune; I was used to it. I turned onto Duiker Road and did a quick circuit, rolling past 77 and 92 before coming back. I fastened my bike to a stop sign and walked the road. I could feel eyes on me, but that was normal for suburbia. The homes here weren’t as broken as some I’d passed, but there were a few well on their way. There was an overflowing box of empty beer cans in the road as I approached 77.

  There were two cars in the driveway, an old Ford pickup truck and a newer minivan. I could see an elevated playhouse for children in the back yard. There was minor landscaping, the grass was cut, and the house didn’t need paint. The lights were on, and I could see the glow of that great God of living rooms. It was as average as average gets. I moved on, went to 92.

  It was as different from 77 as it could get without sticking out. One car, newer Ford with a quad cab. Grass looked swept, not mowed, almost as if the wind had bent it. I knew what that really meant; lawn mower had a bad blade. I walked past the driveway, staying in the street. Watching. There was at least one dog, big one too. There were droppings in the front yard but more in the back—I could see them through the chain-link fence. No Beware of Dog sign, no post or dog run. Guard dog. Two sheds in the back yard, both in the same level of disrepair as the house and yard. I could practically hear Shelby yelling for help. I wandered a little further on the side, not in the lawn but close. The feeling of being watched increased. I knelt, pretending to tie a shoe.

  I walked from the house a little further down the street and saw what I was looking for. House with a sign on the door, realtor listing in the yard. I gave a look and slipped through the side yard between houses. They backed up to another row of houses, but there was a ridge of trees between the two. I stayed close to the trees and made my way to 92. If I was being watched, I hadn’t noticed.

  I poked my head through the trees and went through to the other side of them. I knew when I was there. I knelt and stuck myself between a pair of massive pines, finally got a good look at the yard.

  The grass in front had been ill cared for, but in back it was just gone. The sheds framed in the corners, maybe twenty-five feet apart, painted a matching black. On the back of the house a sign said, “Trespassers will be shot.” There was nothing to tell me Shelby was in the house or either of the sheds, but there was nothing to indicate that she wasn’t, either. I’d need to be thorough, go in the house, check the sheds. I’d need help. Arrow.

  I left, went back to the bike. I’d seen all I could see in the light, and it was time to go. I rode home as fast as I could. I walked in, took the burner out of my pocket, and called her. I was breaking one of my laws.

  “Hey. Don’t talk, all right? Can you skip school tomorrow?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “No. Meet me at the gas station just outside of Four Oaks at nine a.m. Dress to move; bring your bike and a backpack.”

  “Anything else?”

  Bring two revolvers, help me catch the bad guys and find your sister alive, and then marry me. We’ll move to the coast and live like royalty. I’ll have a dog, and eventually we’ll have two kids, a boy and a girl. You can name them whatever you want. We’ll die together after a long and wonderful life.

  “Yes. Tomorrow could be bad. Can you deal with that?”

  Silence. Then solid: “Yes.”

  She hung up. I replaced the phone in the cradle and brought my go-chest to my filthy kitchen table. When this was all done, I was cleaning and going shopping. If I could.

  I laid the war chest, my get-out-of-town box, on the ground and opened it. I emptied my pockets on the table, took the starting pistol from my waist, and closed my eyes. Opened them. Built a kit. Hoped it was good enough. Knew it might not be. I accepted that. Arrow shouldn’t be involved. There was no way for her not be. When I was all ready to go, I went to bed. Lay there, thinking about rundown houses in neighborhoods that had run off the tracks. Thought about Shelby—to me, just a picture, to Arrow, her little sister, to her parents, a lifeline back to normalcy. Thought about going to war. If Shelby was there and I couldn’t get her out, I wasn’t going anywhere either. Endless thoughts boiling my brain in cruel waters. I didn’t sleep well.

  Chapter 33

  Arrow met me just like I knew she would, and I handed her the bag with the ghillie suit and mask, an unused burner, and spotting scope in it. Two pictures, as clear as I could get my printer to make them, of Henry and Fred. She looked in the bag, shifted things around, and said, “What’s all this for?”

  “So you can tell me when he shows up to work.”

  “I’m going with you.”

  “No. I need you in the woods so I can be sure it will be safe to break into his house. I need to know if he leaves so I can be out of the house. I need you here much more than I need you there, alright?”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “You don’t have to like it, but I need you to do this and stop arguing with me about it, alright?”

  “Okay.”

  She looked at me, eyes wet and full of hope. “Do you think she’s there?”

  “I don’t know. I just know he’s part of it.”

  “Okay.”

  She looked better having heard that. I wish it had been true, but thinking something might be and knowing it were a far distance apart.

  “When you see them, verify faces and nametags. I wrote their names on the pictures of their heads. Be sure. If it’s not them, we’ll try again tomorrow. They were here yesterday though, and I think they’ll be on the same job today. We just have to hope for the best. Make sure you use the burner to call me; the number for my phone is written on tape on the back of yours.”

  “Okay.”

  I got on my bike, and I didn’t look back. I just rode, tried not to think about the lack of a Beware of Dog sign or the police arresting me for breaking into the home of a man guilty of nothing more than living by a friend and not keeping up on his yard. I thought about what I had to do and how it would play out in the limitless ways this thing could go. My life was about control, thinking three or four steps ahead so I could never fall behind. Today I was jumping headfirst into the zero, into the unknown. If I was smart and stuck to what I knew, everything should be fine. Tell that to Shelby.

  The houses and yards did their little magic trick again, and around me the world bloomed into subservience,
children went to school, adults went to work. They did what they were told, kept their noses clean. Civilians, nothing wrong with it, but if they only knew that they could choose, is that what they would have picked? Would they pay taxes, work for a system that could discard them like yesterday’s trash? The collapse of the auto industry should have been a heads-up—good guys can lose when rich men play with money. If it was a sign, nobody saw it.

  I parked my bike at the opposite end of Duiker from the night before and walked back to the house with the realtor listing in the yard. I felt like I was walking on the African savannah, a stranger surrounded by strange things. I just hoped I’d see the lion before he saw me. I crept between the houses, and being as careful as I could, I slowly moved to 92 Duiker. There hadn’t been a car in the driveway when I came by, but that didn’t mean anything. I sat in the trees, arms wrapped around myself with the burner shaking in my hands. When it rang a half hour later, I almost screamed.

  “He’s here.”

  “The other one?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Call me.”

  I hung up and stuck the phone in my pocket. Opened my backpack. Took out the length of two-by-four and the steak I’d injected with Ketamine. The kids call it Special K; veterinarians call it a horse tranquilizer. I closed the backpack, tossed it over my shoulder, and gripped the board in one hand, the steak in the other. I hopped the chain-link fence and looked in both directions. Trees in yards broke up my lines; it would take someone actively looking to see me, and I had a feeling people around here were used to not looking at this yard. I took the board, grabbed my lungs a deep breath of the good stuff, and shattered the window out of the back door. I tossed in the steak just as the barking started. I sat on the stoop and waited. The barking stopped. I craned my arm in through the shattered window and turned the knob. I took a deep breath, steeled myself, and held the wood in front of me like a shield. The door swung open, and I went inside.

  Chapter 34

  The pit bull forgot the steak as soon as it saw me. It must have had some training. If it were my dog, I would have taught it not to eat food from a stranger. I knew two things going in. Rhino had taught me to always fight a stronger force by using that force to exploit its own expectations, to set a trap, and he’d taught me to use leverage—that was all jiu-jitsu was. Use his leverage and bend him. It jumped at my throat, and I shoved the board in its mouth. Big dogs expect you to pull away from a bite, to back up and look for space. That’s how they kill you. I drove the board into its mouth, tried to get a look at the steak as I brought Fido to the ground. Two big chunks were missing from the meat. I had to hope it was enough. I held the dog with the board as it struggled and then weakened beneath me before falling on her side. She had scars on her back. It must have taken a big, brave man to beat her enough to make those show through the dog’s fur. I watched her fall into a slumber on the tile floor, and when I was sure she was down, I got to work.

  The house was the polar opposite of the yard. It must have driven him half nuts to have the outside of his home look like that. The inside reeked of money and Pine-Sol. I left the dog and the kitchen and went to look.

  Typical little one-story house, the front room camouflaged like the outside had been, ratty TV, nasty carpet, a few beer cans lying around. The door that led to it in the kitchen was painted white and was very clean. The side that faced the living room was filthy.

  I walked through the crummy parlor. The blinds were pulled tight, and there were three types of locking systems on the front door. I walked past it and went through the other filthy door. It led to a bedroom with an attached bath, both as immaculate as the kitchen had been. I checked the closet—just clothes. So far, I was failing. The front room was proof that something was going on, but not of what.

  I went back to the kitchen and the sleeping dog. Opened all the cupboards, found nothing but dust, three jars of peanut butter, and some canned corn. Opened the fridge and found a pack of hot dogs, tub of margarine, jar of jelly, and a two weeks expired bottle of milk. There were two loaves of white bread on the counter, but that was it for food. I gave the dog a look; she was one passed-out puppy. I felt bad for needing to drug her. I like dogs.

  There was a closet across from the fridge. I opened it. This was where all the food was. There were boxes of macaroni, packages of ramen noodles, cans of every which thing, ravioli, okra, potatoes, boxes and boxes of cereal. Packages of fruit roll-ups, fruit snacks, crackers, chips, and pudding cups. Piles upon piles of comestibles, really a little grocery store—I have to admit, I got some hunger pangs just looking. I stepped back to close the door, thought better of it, and cleared off the top shelf of breakfast cereal, just knocked it all on the floor. Everything was still packaged like they’d just made a Costco run—the pudding was in fours, the chili was in a six-pack string, and the cereal boxes were unopened. Picked up the shelf the food sat on and knocked on the paneling behind it. Nothing there. Hollow.

  I cleared the rest of the shelves off as quickly as I was able to. It looked like there’d been a fight in a grocery store by the time I was done. This had to be a serious pain for these guys every time they wanted to go downstairs. I pulled the remaining boards from the closet one after another. They were loose, made to be removed like this in a hurry. When they were all out, I knocked again on the paneling, harder now that I was closer. The whole thing was hollow. I pressed my hands against it and tried to slide it. Nothing. I tried the other way. Resistance, but there was something there. I stepped back to look at the wood, see if there was a keyhole or something I was missing. I stepped in and tried again, lifting up this time as I pushed to the right.

  My momentum slid me into the wall with the door as it shook free. I was met by a top step and nothing else. The stench from the basement was nearly unbearable. It was utterly putrid, like rotten fruits and meats had been left to molder with one another. Just as unsettling was that until I’d moved the board, there’d been no smell at all. There was no light switch or pull chain visible. I took the flashlight from my pocket and went into the darkness.

  Chapter 35

  The steps were rickety, scary enough on their own, really, even if there had been light. But they were backless, too, indefensible—if someone were under them, they could have gotten to the backs of my legs, and there was nothing I could do about it. I could all but feel a hand gripping my ankle or slicing my Achilles tendon, sending me swirling into the black, the door above slamming behind me. I kept my legs ready to pounce, to leap away from danger, though in the back of my head I knew that would be impossible. Once I got down there, my assailant would also know the room and would probably be armed. I just had to hope that whatever secrets the basement held, one of them wasn’t an enemy.

  The stench grew as I lowered myself into the cavern, and it took a conscious effort to keep my free hand at the ready instead of covering my mouth and nose. As I descended, I saw that in addition to being boards with no backs, the steps entered the basement at its center, defying the logic of the floor plan of the upstairs. This house probably hadn’t been built by a kidnapper or a murderer, but it might as well have been.

  I walked into hell.

  When I reached the bottom of the steps, I saw a corpse. Just off to one side, among some boxes and suitcases, was a man with a bullet hole in the center of his head. There was no reason to check his pulse; he was too bloated to even tell his ethnicity. I stayed away from the corpse as best I was able and tried my hardest to keep my other hand away from my face to keep it ready to strike or grab. Then I turned past a high stack of boxes that separated the stairs from the rest of the room—and I saw her.

  Shelby or not, she was dead.

  The girl was bound to the chair with ratcheting straps, like what you’d use to hold something on a trailer. Her mouth was covered in duct tape, her hair drooped and dirty next to her head. She was naked save for a pair of underwear and a filthy tank top. I grabbed her forehead to tilt her face up, to know. The hair w
as just too dirty. I lifted her up, stared at her face. She was like a mini, wasted version of Arrow. It was Shelby. I let the light go over her face. Her eyes popped open, and I fell backwards.

  She thrashed against the chair, bouncing as hard as she could, but it was bolted to the floor. Hurt and malnourished, but she still wanted to fight.

  “Stop,” I said. “Arrow sent me. Calm down, I’m here to help.”

  She stopped immediately, looked in my eyes.

  I looked back, said, “Trust me.”

  I took the lock-blade out of my backpack, opened it, and got to work sawing at her bonds. The first went easy, but the rest were dulling the edge of my knife. I started to go upstairs to see about a kitchen knife, but her eyes stopped me. They said, “Don’t leave me alone.” I took the tape off of her face and got back to work. I knelt next to a stain that had to be blood and started cutting through the straps that bound her wrists. She spoke, her voice raspy and thick, every word a struggle.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Nickel.”

  I finished a leg, and she kicked it free, testing to see if it still worked. I couldn’t blame her.

  “Your sister hired me to find you. Sorry it took so long.”

  Somehow, even after everything that had happened, she still had the capacity to be surprised. I could see the light in her eyes twinkle for a lost moment as she spoke. “You’re just a kid, like me.”

  “Yep.”

  I got the other ankle free and then got to work on her wrist.

  “Aren’t the cops looking for me?”

  “They think your dad did it.”

  “Kidnapped me?”

  “Killed you.”

  I cut the wrist free; two straps to go.