Kick (The Jenkins Cycle Book 1) (16 page)

“Apology accepted,” I said, more or less skyward, and took a sip.

A tree line began about thirty yards back from the expansive deck, and the lawn looked regularly mowed. By laying my face against the glass I could see the neighbor’s house—a starter mansion of some kind, brick-faced and new. Looking around me, I noticed everything in the kitchen seemed new. The walls were plumb, the paint smooth and free of blemishes. Big, sure, but without the character and solidity of an old money, Daddy Warbucks mansion. More like the McMansion next door.

“Do you see me complaining?” I said and downed the rest of my chocolate milk. Then I went back to the master bedroom to have a look at the computer desk I’d seen.

Not bothering with the closed laptop, I skimmed through the loose papers and opened mail that tends to stack up on desks. This offered up some basic information about my ride. His name was Nathan Cantrell, and his mail was addressed to a Centreville, Virginia address. His bank statement almost sent me into another weepy tailspin. It showed him sitting on $183 million in cash.

“Who the
hell
is this guy?” I said again, and not for the last time. He was about as far removed from the late Kevin Richards as he could possibly be. Maybe the Great Whomever did listen to prayers.

Nathan’s statement showed he drew a regular salary from Fairfax County, though it didn’t tell me what he did for a living. Whatever it was, the meager $3,000 or so a month didn’t jibe with his humongous bank balance. He liked to eat out, preferring the Sweetwater Tavern and what I took to be an Indian place, the Taj Palace. The most surprising thing were regular checks made out to various charity organizations, usually in increments of $10,000, though occasionally as high as $50,000. The Children’s Health Fund, Boy Scouts of America, Girl Scouts of the USA and various children’s hospitals were all monthly repeats. He made frequent trips to gas stations—almost daily. Putting two and two together and carrying the one, I figured: he must drive a lot. Beyond that, I couldn’t find anything sinister in his monthly purchases.

Found in another person’s bank statement, this child-centric philanthropy would suggest a golden soul dispensing miracles and light into regions of despair and darkness. We’ve all read stories about aging billionaires vowing to die broke. Usually these stories barely make the news, frequently bumped to make room for the Violent Shooting Of The Week or the breathless, perennial saga of the Latest Missing White Girl. The idea that my ride could be one of those golden souls seemed not only laughable but completely outside the rules I’d been operating under since my death. He was either involved in some chicanery with money laundering or embezzlement or he was a child molester using children’s charities as an excuse to get close to kids.

Reluctantly, I considered the laptop. I didn’t want to look in there. Whatever I found in his computer would remain in my head forever, and by now it should be clear I don’t mean that figuratively. Previous occasions like this, in other bodies, have littered my perfect memory with the broken, tortured images of countless children, and heaven help him if he added any more.

Resolved to this, I pushed the power button.

I’m not a particularly gifted or computer-savvy person. Most of my knowledge comes from cheating—skimming books about an operating system or software application on one trip and applying it on others. As a result, I can tell you how to download, compile and install a new CentOS kernel, provided nothing in the process deviates from the book. The problem is I can’t tell you why I would download, compile and install a new CentOS kernel. I’d like to take a class one day, but the classes I’ve looked at usually want you to sign up at least a month in advance.

When the system came up, it didn’t prompt me for a password. There usually isn’t a password on the home computers I’ve seen, but there always is on the computers of child molesters. This gave me some hope, though faint.

I opened Nathan’s browser and scrolled through his history. Most of it concerned sports-related activities, which went along with some of the gear he had in the basement. His default bookmarks contained places to shop and other crap that comes with a new computer. I closed the browser and opened his “My Documents” folder and then his “My Pictures” folder, and that’s when I found them. Kids. Lots of them. Playing soccer. Attending a school assembly. Receiving awards at the Science Fair. Posing with him in front of the school with other adults.

“Elementary school, my dear Watson,” I said, playing to my favorite audience.

The training whistle looped around his neck in every picture pegged him for a gym teacher. That’s what the Fairfax County checks were for. School these days seemed as normal as I remembered it, since none of the pictures looked remotely pornographic. Most looked to have been taken by the other teachers or parents, or maybe even the kids themselves.

I started searching the laptop for any jpegs, gifs or movie files, looking for something that would confirm or deny my suspicions, but I didn’t find anything. This didn’t prove his innocence, I decided, just my incompetence.

On a hunch, I began looking through the drawers of his desk in a hunt for external drives, CDs or other removable media. I did find a couple of CDs, but they were for video games or never-opened driver CDs.

“God, I’m dumb,” I said, then double-clicked the email icon hiding in plain sight in the middle of the screen.

Most of Nathan’s correspondence was with the other faculty at the school or a mailing list for the Northern Virginia Hiking Club. I didn’t find any correspondence with friends or family.

“No biggy,” I said, quitting for now. I’d look more later.

After an incredible experience in the enormous shower, with jets of water hitting me from what seemed a thousand different directions, I threw on some briefs, shorts, a black T-shirt I found in his walk-in closet, and the sneakers from earlier. Then I did a quick, successful search of the house for his wallet, car keys, and that all-important cell phone.

After checking the date, I called the phone back, hoping for a personalized message. But unlike the last time I’d pulled this trick all I got was a computerized woman with a lot of bossy instructions. When I got around to it, I’d try the house phone or office number at the school.

Squinting against the late-morning sunlight, I stepped out into a steadily warming Virginia in August.

Centreville is about thirty miles outside Washington DC. I’d been there once before, on a previous ride, and despite being just outside the insta-death radius of a Cold War thermonuclear attack or dirty bomb, I have to tell you: Centreville’s pretty dull. It has two Giant Food stores, some serviceable restaurants, at least two McDonald’s, a movie theater and a handful of shopping centers. It’s unincorporated, so there’s no mayor or local government beneath the county. Nor is there any discernible history or special cultural quirkiness found only among Centrevillians. I imagined them as the real-world, taller equivalent of Hobbits.

Nathan Cantrell’s sprawling, brick-faced monstrosity squatted diagonally across the corner of Obnoxious and Obnoxious 2, the Sequel. It had really green grass and really white sidewalks, and there weren’t any cars in the neighboring driveways. There were no kids playing anywhere, despite it being the middle of summer—a good thing, I figured, given my suspicions about Nathan. In fact, if not for a lonely car parked four houses down, the place looked deserted.

Nathan’s house may have looked nice on the inside, but outside? There were majestic bump-outs and shadowed recesses, soaring columns and giant semicircular or square or round or oval windows everywhere a person could possibly want one. The roof alone had six different elevations. It looked like someone had cut the appendages off twelve different houses and sewn them all together. All it needed were some angry villagers with torches to put the poor, sad monster out of its misery.

I had to go back inside to get into the garage.

He had two vehicles: a car and a black SUV. But I cared only about the car. Judging by the paper tags with the red lettering, it was a brand-new red Ferrari F430. I almost had to take another shower and change my clothes all over again. I managed to stop myself from asking, “Who the hell is this guy?” because I’d figured it out. He was the Devil, gleefully tormenting me in boiling vats of envy and greed. I could almost hear the creepy music.

It took me about half a second to decide I wouldn’t be driving the SUV. With mounting excitement, I found the switch to the garage back by the door and opened it. Then I made a short pilgrimage to the Ferrari, unlocked the door and climbed in. When no bolts from the sky struck me for my sacrilege, I relaxed and took a moment to appreciate the craftsmanship. The seats were firm yet comfortable, all leather, with care and precision oozing from every stitch. The dash looked like something from
The Empire Strikes Back
seen from the perspective of a San Bushman. There were buttons everywhere that I didn’t understand and levers just behind the steering wheel on each side, the left reading “DOWN” and the right, “UP.” Looking behind me and scooting up a bit, I blinked in awe at the engine resting with cool menace just beneath the glass-topped rear engine compartment, then turned back and tried to figure out how to turn it on. I didn’t see anywhere to fit a key. Instead, I found a red button reading, “Engine Start,” which seemed infinitely helpful. I also found a little dial on the right side of the steering column pointing ominously to the word “Race.”

I pushed the “Engine Start” button—and nearly jumped out of my skin as the car roared to life in a feral, malevolent fury that tickled the bones in my chest.

“This can’t go well,” I said, biting my lip and keeping my foot pressed heavily on the brake while I faced out of the garage at the kidless, neighborless street.

As a confirmed immortal, I promise my fear stemmed not from any worry of death, but rather from destroying so lovely a creation as the Ferrari. Mike’s motorcycle had been a little like a great white shark with me on its back, controlling it. I knew it was a bad sign that I thought the car had more control than I did. Bracing for impact, I pulled my foot from the brake and gingerly fed it some gas. The unexpected rev-roaring from the engine scared the Socrates out of me—but the car didn’t move. I probed around with my left foot, hunting for a clutch that wasn’t there, and then looked everywhere for a lever to throw it into drive
.
Soon, my eyes came to rest again on those weird UP/DOWN paddles.

“Fine, I’ll bite.”

I pressed the brake with my right foot, then pulled the right side lever toward me and released it. Then I took my foot from the brake and slid it over to the accelerator. Before I could apply any pressure, the car began idling along gently in first gear. I tapped the gas and yelped as the car sprang forward with a startling jerk, causing me to slam the brake. This herky-jerky routine played itself out repeatedly as I made my way down the driveway. I fought a wave of panic. I had never driven anything this powerful before. If riding Mike’s Harley felt like riding a shark, driving a Ferrari seemed more like riding in the shark’s belly.

With no one in sight, I let the car drift down the rest of the drive and onto the narrow street, then turned right. Then I gently—
gently
—pressed the accelerator. As a reward, the car responded with a little less power, allowing me to ease it along nicely at a comfortable twenty-five miles an hour.

All the other houses in the area were just as large as you can imagine, all Frankenmansions like Nathan’s, most of them empty of cars, with nice clean driveways that hadn’t been leaked on by the faded clunkers of less fortunate neighborhoods. The street looped through the neighborhood in a circle back to the house, traffic free. I figured either the owners were all retired or they had to work weekends and holidays just to afford to live here. Either way, it gave me a wonderful laboratory in which to learn the Ferrari’s paddle system.

With growing confidence, I brought the car up to second gear, then to third along a straight section, then quickly popped it back down to first while applying the brake. Then I did some experimenting and figured out how to put it neutral (both paddles at once).

For the next ten minutes, I drove around in circles, bringing it up to third and then back down, again and again, until I felt sure I could do it in traffic. That would be the real test, with my attention divided between the car and fleets of gas trucks and buses packed with crying orphans or screaming pregnant women rushed to the hospital by terrified—yet hilarious—taxi drivers.

Through practice, I soon replaced my worry with a sense of growing admiration. All cars should have these paddles.

I pulled left onto a two-lane road that bisected a small wood before opening up to more McMansions on either side. I didn’t remember so many of them on my last visit. That was in the summer of 1996, in the body of a serial arsonist who liked to save newspaper clippings of his exploits. He’d managed to tally eight deaths before writing a full confession and leaping from a seventeen story building yelling, “Sitting Bull!” But only after a three-week tour of D.C., roller coasters and carny games at King’s Dominion and a chartered fishing trip out of Point Lookout, Maryland.

I popped the speed up quickly, accelerating like a rocket ship and yelling “Woo!” a lot. Very cool, but being on small roads with red lights was nothing like the fun I could have on an interstate. So I pulled onto I-66 and did my best to break the boundaries of time, space and dimension.

I easily hit 120 miles an hour, which I deemed a nice cruising speed, grinning madly at the battle raging in the engine behind me between the monster from Aliens and an ancient red dragon named Legion. Cops be damned—they wouldn’t ruin my fun. Besides, it was Saturday morning and the roads were clear of commuters.

After about a half hour zooming in and out of occasional pockets of light traffic, followed by roaring bursts to hyperspace, I decided to turn around and head back to crummy-old Centreville—this time, conscientiously observing the speed limit.