Nickel Plated Page 2

  I hopped on the computer, checked my Facebook and my MySpace, checked the dummy e-mail accounts that I have, and even checked the encrypted real one. Nothing, at least nothing that mattered. I hopped on the Michigan sex offender database and entered Arrow and Shelby’s address. Loaded another window, started lining up “curious tween” chat rooms. Entered as shyBoy on all of them. Threw some hooks out. Went fishing. There’d be lots of bites. There always are.

  I turned up three sex offenders within a ten-mile radius of Arrow and Shelby’s home address, and about a hundred and fifty within a twenty-five-mile scan. I thought about doing my own address again, but it had only been a couple of days. My neighborhood sees about a ten-mile radius of nothing. You’re welcome, neighbors. Arrow and Shelby’s neighborhood was a lot of research all on its own, and I hadn’t even talked the reality of this thing over with Arrow. The site was the first place to check, but chances were it wouldn’t be a listed offender. I clicked on some sicko in the second scan. No luck, he’d only been busted for raping grown women. The next two had a kick for boys. Why is it that two-thirds of these guys have smiles on their faces in their mug shots?

  Fourth one panned out. Had a jones for the minors, third-degree sexual assault with a girl under twelve. Gave the profile a look—too quick. Missed the birthdate on the first pass, but caught it on the second. Poor kid was fourteen, and the girl was a week from twelve. From the sound of things, he got caught touching what passed for her breasts; she was good with it, but her mom wasn’t. I went back to work.

  The next three hits were all within thirteen miles of the house. Same trailer park and same trailer. Three for the price of one? Nope. Halfway trailer I guess, home for nut jobs, and these three were in it. I e-mailed the page to myself but wrote it off inside; halfway houses never panned out. I took a break, went back to my lines. Lots of nibbles, no bites. My pager yelled in my pants. I checked it: Gary, 400. Four ounces, not a bad night. I shut the chats, threw a forty-mile search on the address, and went to the basement. I grabbed four ounces of pot and went back to the garage. Opened it and rode my bike into the blackness.

  The high school was about as far away as the post office, but riding at night made it go much faster. Too many four-way stops on the route, and too many people who didn’t understand how they worked. At night it was a cruise, a spy mission on my mountain bike, black mag wheels and secrets as deep as the Marianas. I rode, my backpack full of pot and my mind full of missing sisters, my heart full of nothing.

  I left the pot in the electrical box that I’d put in before I’d first spoken to Gary. I’d done my homework on him, knew everything about him. All he knew about me was that I sold him pot. The electrical box was easy; I bought tin, put it together, and painted it green. Stuck it on a corner by the high school one night and planted a shrub by it. The box was bolted to some four-by-fours and opened with a button on the opposite side of the lock, but no one from the school had ever checked it as far as I knew. Either way, it was just further proof of the mindset in most civilians: why even question a thing like the electric company stealing some space in your yard?

  Last year, Gary was one of the nerdiest kids in Northland High School; this year, he could pull off prom king if he wanted to. Gary had been my project a year and a half ago, and no project of mine has ever turned out better. I think I’d like Gary, and maybe someday I’ll even meet him.

  Gary’s issue was his mom. She was destroying his life and had been on a steady path for what I assume was forever, a nice mixed diet of hardcore born-again thinking and a set of rules so strict it made Jackson Penitentiary look like summer camp. He was trying to take it in stride as a good boy should, but I could see something more than his yearbook photo was willing to tell me. It wasn’t just the lonely-looking Facebook account covered in tired memes, but missing friends; there was something more there, something I could see that was desperate to break free. I reached out, on a burner cell phone that had limited texting. I sent him a message: “Call this number if you want to have a life.” He paged me, and the rest is history. I’ve got my dopeboy, and he’s got his source.

  Gary stopped being a nerd when he drove his Mustang to prom and had two dates on his arms that he pried off of a stripper pole. He was a junior and even the teachers gave him respect. Gary owed me, but he’d never need to cover the debt—beyond selling my pot and making us both a good sum of money. My sum was better, of course. Today my take was just over three thousand dollars.

  I whistled while I rode my bike home, but it wasn’t to keep up appearances. It was just for me.

  Chapter 4

  I woke up at about seven and made some eggs on the stove. If there’s one thing I hate about not being able to drive, it’s buying groceries. I can’t take a cab every time I go to the store, it would be too conspicuous, which means I’m really limited to what I can carry in my backpack. I used to eat out, but after noticing how people were looking at me, I stopped. A kid should be able to take himself out for a steak dinner if he wants to, regardless of his age. I ate the eggs and checked my pager; Arrow had called, and so had a number I didn’t know. I rinsed the plate and threw it in the dishwasher.

  I have eight different phone lines that I use, all connected to my neighbors’ houses. It was actually a pretty easy hustle—not as easy as stealing Wi-Fi, but other than actually hooking up to their houses, it was a risk-free venture. I made sure to never make more than a couple of phone calls a month per line, and I always kept them as short as possible. When I first started I was using a burner all the time, and then I read about how easy it was to intercept a signal. That was enough for me. I just waited until people went on vacation, and then I put on my lifted boots and my phone company suit. There was a time when neighbors were friendly enough that they would have discussed the phone company digging in their yard while they were out of town. Fortunately for me, those days were long gone.

  I called Arrow on line two. I put my feet on my computer desk and looked at the forty-mile ring on the screen. A sea of registered offenders had popped up. How many unregistered? How many that had never been caught? I shut the browser tab as the phone rang—forty miles was just too far. I was working the ten-mile when she answered.

  “Hello?”

  “You called.”

  “Is this…”

  “Don’t. Got school today?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Meet me in the park, same spot, four o’clock. You remember?”

  “Yes.”

  I hung up the phone. If Arrow thought this was going to go that fast, she was in for a rude awakening. I looked at my pager, plugged in line seven on the rotary, and dialed. A woman’s voice answered.

  “Hello?”

  “You paged me.”

  “Oh.”

  “Downtown library. Main floor. Fiction. I’ll be holding a book by Joe R. Lansdale. Wear a green dress so I know it’s you. If you don’t have a green dress, then wear green and get a book by Dan Simmons before you walk to Lansdale. One hour.”

  “What?”

  “One hour.”

  I hung up the phone. Good thing I ate before I called. I checked my chat logs for shyBoy. Too bad I’d fallen asleep—there had been sharks out last night. There would be more tonight.

  I showered, dressed in jeans and a shirt that said “Hollister” across the front, and pulled on my All-Stars. I signed the backs of the cashier’s checks, hopped on my bike, and rode downtown. My bank was on the way, so I stopped there first, throwing the checks in the drop-off box with a deposit slip. I glanced at my watch and saw I had fifteen minutes. I put the pedal to the metal, baby—keeping in mind, of course, that the metal in this case tends to oscillate.

  I was at the library in five minutes. If I were smarter, I’d have remembered I had stuff to return. The sad price of too much on my plate. Oh well. I parked my bike, made a big show of wrapping a chain around the frame, and climbed the stone steps to the front door. I walked in, nodded at the guy working the front desk, and s
trolled into fiction. I went straight to Lansdale and grabbed Freezer Burns; I’ve read it five or six times, but a couple more pages wouldn’t hurt anything. She came around the corner just a few minutes after I picked up the book.

  I really need to grow up, I thought.

  She had on a green dress, and I was pretty happy I’d said dress and not sweatshirt. She had curves in all the right places, and even though she was old enough to be my mom, I got myself an eyeful. Some things age well, and she was one of them. The dress was perfectly contoured to her body, and her feet were impossibly balanced on stiletto heels. She had short red hair that looked natural but might have been dyed; I knew I wouldn’t be finding out which one anytime soon. She looked predictably startled when she saw me. Dealing with that was the least of my issues. I pushed Freezer Burns back onto the shelf, extended a hand, and said, “I’m Nickel.”

  She took my hand and shook it twice; it came back smelling like perfume, and not the kind from a drugstore.

  “Nice to meet you. I’m Veronica.”

  “Should we tour the library grounds, Veronica?”

  It was kind of a joke. The closest thing to grounds the library has is a park dedicated to veterans where bums sleep. I thought a little hike in the concrete jungle would be more appropriate. I walked past the park and the old YMCA building and led her next to an old stone church. When we were by the steps, I slowed to walk with her instead of leading her and asked her who’d told her about me.

  “So you really are Nickel? No offense, but I’m not hiring some kid.”

  If I had a nickel.

  “Look, Veronica? I don’t care if you want to hire me or not; I just want to know who told you about me. If you’ve got work for me, great, but if not, I’ve got other fish to fry.”

  She looked at me kind of pouty. I’m the kid, and she’s the one acting like one. “I heard about you from a guy I work with named Mikey. He said you did some work for him that helped with his divorce.”

  I had done some work with Mikey; I slashed his wife’s lover’s tires so that he could catch the two in the act.

  “He never mentioned you were a kid.”

  “Then he followed the rules; good on him. You have a nice day, Veronica.” I turned to walk back to the library, barely made it two feet, and she was next to me. I stopped and said, “What now?”

  “Don’t you want to hear what I have to say?”

  “Aren’t I just a kid?”

  “I’m sorry about that.” She started crying, and I almost felt bad. It passed. She snuffled and said, “It’s my son. He’s in eleventh grade, and he goes to Forest Hills High School. He’s dating a girl and I just can’t stand her.”

  “What can I do about that?”

  “She’s got him out with a bad group—drinking, fighting, I don’t even know what. He was fine before this girl, but now it’s like I don’t even know my own son. I just want him back to how he was.”

  “What if it’s not the girl?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean, what if this was your son all along and he just found out?”

  “You don’t know Jeff. That’s not what he’s like.”

  “It sounds like he’s doing a good impersonation.”

  I stuck a matchstick in my mouth and gave her my cool look, but it came off a little sour, more pickle than cucumber. She gave me the eyes right back, and I said, “I’ll give him a look. Hundred bucks a day. Give me three days to figure out what his deal is.” I handed her a piece of paper with a post office box number on it, a different box than the one for my perv scam. “You get me the three hundred, cashier’s check made out to cash. I’ll start Thursday, try and have his kick figured out by Saturday night. Once I know what the deal is, we can work on fixing the problem.”

  “How much will that cost?”

  “No clue. When I know, you will. What’s Jeff’s last name?”

  “Rogers.”

  “It was a pleasure to meet you, Veronica. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  I shook her hand again and walked away. I could feel her eyes on me as I pounded pavement. If I were a little taller, darker, or handsomer, she’d probably be thinking about getting that hot detective into the sack with her. Instead she had me: short, ginger, and maybe not too ugly, patch of freckles where a scar ought to be and a lean body that came from getting my butt kicked at Rhino’s Gym, not a high metabolism. She didn’t know it, but my specs beat out tall, dark, and handsome any day. Nobody expects anything out of a kid.

  I unhooked the chain and decided to bike on over to Four Oaks. It was near enough to the park, and I still had some time to kill. I hopped on the bike and got pedaling.

  My city passes by me in the wind; I just hope it ignores me as well as I act like I’m ignoring it. The sun’s already drooping in the west—just like the wind, it’s trying to tell me the snow is on the way. I can feel eyes tugging at me, wondering why I’m not in school. As long as none of those eyes wear a badge, I’m good to go. I ride through the city and into suburbia—just as many eyes, but twice the secrets. When I get to Four Oaks, I’m sweaty but smiling. There’s a cool breeze, a reward. I drop to a lower gear and start coasting.

  I found 1138 Oakway without much work. Nice house, big yard, and well kept too. If it wasn’t missing a child, it would have been just fine. It would have been honest to sit Arrow down and talk statistics, specifically on the chances of her sister surviving being kidnapped by a stranger. I set the thought aside. It might have been honest, but it would have been cruel. It was bad her sister was taken; it was worse to say that chances are she’d died bad and would never be found, and if she were found it would be by some very unlucky hikers. I rested atop my bike for a moment and then adjusted my trek to head to the library. Not the one I’d met Veronica at, but a small suburban branch. I got pedaling, slow like, but not too slow. I wanted to be the predator, not the prey.

  I took the little notepad that I keep in my back pocket and made myself zero in, focus on little things that seemed out of place. A house with three sheds, a mansion with no landscaping, anything that seemed out of the cardboard cutout standard of the rest of the neighborhood. The little bit of adult in me was screaming that freaks hid in normalcy, but I couldn’t help but look for the odd stuff first; there was too much normal to see much odd anyways. I crossed through some heavier woods, over a small bridge, and out of the suburbs. A gas station, crossing light, and a sign for the library met me. I turned around to ride back and give a look again when the bridge hit me funny. I walked the bike back, leaned it on the steel guardrail, and sat next to it. There was something just off about the spot. There was a grooved trail that I could tell had been carved by bicycles, but there was new grass in the trail, so it had been a little while since it had been used. The spot was perfect if your goal was to abduct someone; not a single car had passed since I’d stopped. I looked back at my bike, then into the woods again. There was some matted grass on the right side of the path. Someone had been there recently, and it wasn’t an animal bedding down—this was too close to a road for that.

  That’s when I saw a flash of pink beyond that patch of flattened grass—farther down the trail, almost to the creek. Something was down there. I left my bike and jumped the guardrail.

  Whatever I’d seen, it was wind that had showed it to me, so I tried to keep in line with where my bike was above me. I went slowly, let focus remain and let everything else slide out of me. I stumbled but stayed my course. The wind rewarded me because I was a good boy, and I walked to it. It was a pink hair band, big enough for a girl about Shelby’s age. Next to it in the mud was an enormous boot print. It was intricate, and I made a little sketch in my notepad. There were deep grooves in the middle of it, almost as though someone had stuck a spike through the center of the shoe print. I picked up the hair band and shook mud off of it. In addition to being pink, there were some dark red spots on one side. I didn’t figure it was a pattern. I felt watched as I left the creek and biked to the park.
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br />   I was early by a couple of hours, but I didn’t care. I brought the hair band with me to the bench and waved at Eyepatch. He didn’t wave back. I sat and dozed off. Stupid. When I woke, I was sitting on the bench with the hair band in a clenched fist on my chest. In my dream a demon with a face from the blackest pits of my memory was chasing me, but my feet were stuck in mud. I took a deep breath, cleared the thoughts, and waited for Arrow. Four o’clock on the nose, she was there. I let her come to me.

  She was wearing a short blue and green plaid skirt, a white button-up blouse, a short tie to match the skirt, and a gray sweater. She sat next to me on the bench. I could smell her perfume, and it was nice. I wanted to wrap my arms around her, but we really didn’t have that kind of relationship. I said, “You didn’t mention the private school.”

  “Didn’t think I needed to.”

  I smiled, she didn’t. Arrow was probably running out of smiles. I handed her the hair band. “Recognize this?”

  “Where did you find that? Shelby has one just like this!”

  “You know if she was wearing it the day she disappeared?”

  “No, I have no idea, but she could have been. I’ll check her room. Where did you find it?”