So Yesterday (8 page)

Chapter 11

OUTSIDE THE COP SHOP:

"What now?"

"There's only one place to go.
Back."

"Crap."

We approached the abandoned building cautiously,
coming up Lispenard, urban commandos dodging from cover to cover—mounds of
trash bags buzzing with midday flies, the half concealment of a phone booth,
crouching behind doorways and stoops.

Actually, it was fun.

Until we spotted them.

The plywood doors were wide open, the padlock swinging
on its chain. A rental truck sat blocking half the street, its elevator
ascending with a whine, stacked high with boxes of the shoes.

"They're moving," Jen said.

We were hidden behind a steel-clad loading dock that
thrust into the street, hot under our fingertips from the noon sun. We spoke in
short bursts, as if on radios.

"Bald guy, by the door," I said.

"I count two more."

"Roger that."

"Roger what?"

"What?"

SoHo tourists walked by, casting puzzled looks in our
directions. Hadn't they ever seen a stakeout before?

Our bald friend watched the work with a foreman's lazy
disinterest while a woman stacked boxes on the curb. She was arrayed in a style
commonly known as Future Sarcastic: a T-shirt emblazoned with a big-eyed alien,
flight-suit trousers with dozens of gadget-shaped pockets, silver hair shining
in the sun. Everything but the jet pack.

The guy riding the truck's elevator was muscular and
lean, very dark. He was wearing a trucker cap and cowboy boots, jeans and a
mesh shirt that showed off his muscles. In a friendlier context I would have
pegged him as a gay bodybuilder doing an ironic take on NASCAR fandom. But
alongside the other two, he
looked more like one of many hopefuls sent down by central casting to try out
for the part of Thug #3 in a hip new thriller.

Of which we were the unlikely heroes, I reminded
myself.

"What do we do?" I asked, trying not to
catch the eye of a curious young mother pushing a double-wide stroller past our
position.

Jen pulled out her cell phone, starting thumbing.
"Well, I'm inputting the license number of that truck."

"It's a rental."

"And rental places keep records."

"Oh, yeah." Maybe if I'd read more books
about shoe consultants who solved crimes, I would've figured that out myself.

"And you should be taking pictures."

"Good idea. I mean, roger that."

I pulled out Mandy's phone and started to shoot.
Between the five-millimeter lens and lack of zoom, they'd be pretty useless
pictures, I was sure. But it was better than just standing there and being
gawked at by passersby.

"Excuse me, is Broadway and Ninety-eighth Street
around here?"

I looked up from my crouch at the two girls in their
Jersey glitter shirts and floppy shoes, white capri pants tied at the calf with
drawstrings, so last summer. I had to take pity on them—plus they were giving
away our position.

"Yeah, it's about two blocks east"—hooking
my thumb over my shoulder—"and about a hundred and ten blocks north."

"A hundred and ten blocks? That's far,
right?"

I told them where to catch the 1 train.

"Your public-spiritedness is appreciated, I
assure you," Jen drawled after the two had left, uncertainly repeating my
directions to each other as they passed out of earshot.

"After when are you not supposed to wear white
pants?" I asked.

"Roughly
1979."

I pointed. "They're leaving."

The truck was loaded, the bald guy scraping shut the
building's doors. The shoes were going away. I thought of rising and dashing
after the truck, jumping on just as it exceeded running speed, concealing
myself behind boxes until I reached their evil lair, sneaking out and stealing
a henchman's uniform, and, after a few captures and escapes, pulling the levers
that made the whole place explode. And I realized why no crimes were ever
solved by amateurs.

"There's nothing we can do, right?"

"Nope," said Jen as the truck pulled away.

************************************

The ground floor was empty.

"This sucks," I
said.

We’d squeezed
our way in through the wooden
doors, which the bald guy
hadn't bothered to chain
together very tightly. There was no point. Eve
ry la
st box was gone.

I checked Mandy's phone for the time. It was coming up
on two o'clock, only two and a half hours since we'd been here.

Jen surveyed the empty cavern of the building, her
eyes scanning the floor inch by inch, finding nothing but spotless concrete.

"We should have come back earlier," Jen said
quietly. "The shoes were right
here."

"Did you forget the running-for-our-lives
thing?"

"Overrated." Jen sighed. "There must be
something we missed before."

She wandered off again, leaving me in the shaft of
light by the doors, where I silently listed the reasons amateurs didn't solve
crimes in the real world. Professional detectives would have sealed off the
building with yellow tape from the start, dusting for fingerprints, searching
for records of ownership and work permits. Actual police would have arrested
the big guy in black and intimidated him into talking. Real cops wouldn't have
run to the nearest coffee shop and then their friend's house to make expert use
of wax paper. (Okay, maybe a coffee shop would have come into play, but they
would have sent the rookie for doughnuts, leaving plenty of manpower for
stretching out the yellow tape.) Non-amateurs might have the first clue how to
take the license number of a rental truck and turn it into an address. I sure
didn't.

And most importantly, a genuine crime solver wouldn't
be terrified by the idea that the bad guys had his cell phone and were trying
to find him.
 
Real police were machines
for turning coffee into solved crimes. I was a machine for turning coffee into
jangled nerves.

"Hunter?" Jen's voice came out of the gloom,
jangling my nerves.

"What?"

"Looks like someone left you a message."

She emerged, squinting and holding an envelope. A gray
square of duct tape curled from it, the envelope glowing white in the gloom,
carrying the letters
H-U-N-T-E-R
in red marker.

Her green eyes were wide, pupils huge in the dim
light. "This was taped to the wall back there. Right where the shoes
were."

I swallowed, holding out my hand. I'd seen Mandy
scrawling notes during focus groups, her handwriting slanted, impatient, and
unreadable. But my name stretched across the envelope in controlled and
implacable letters.

"Aren't you going to open it?"

I took a slow breath and tore gingerly at the paper,
not sure what I was nervous about. A letter bomb? Contact poison? The ace of
spades?

It was two tickets.

I stared at them dumbly until Jen pulled one from my
hand and read aloud.

'"You are invited to the
launch party of
Hoi Aristoi,
the magazine for those with
discriminating incomes.' Huh. It's tonight."

I cleared my throat.
"That isn't Mandy's handwriting."

"Didn't think so."

"They know my name."

"Of course they do. They
called a friend of yours, who saw the ID and answered, 'Hi, Hunter.' And the
next number they call, they say, 'Hey, I'm a friend of Hunter's,' and maybe ask
for your home number, and so on."

I nodded. Piece by piece, my identity would be sucked
out of the phone. Those Finns had done such a terribly good design job, making
it the center of my life, filled with my friends' names and numbers, my
favorite MP3s, pictures of my sock drawer.

I handed the tickets back. "So what are these
about?"

"Search me. Have you ever heard
of
Hoi Aristoi?"

A vague memory of prelaunch buzz trickled into my
mind. "I think it's the latest magazine for trendies with too much money.
A waste of trees. I think that Hillary Winston-hyphen-Smith did PR for
them."

Jen plucked one from my hand, turned it over, and
nodded.

"I guess they're exactly what they say they
are."

"Which is?"

"An invitation. And I suppose we should go."

Chapter
12

“GO?”

"We've got to, Hunter."

I stared at Jen in bewilderment.

"Look, they already know your name; they could
probably find out a lot more if they tried."

"Gee, that makes me feel better."

"But these tickets show they haven't yet. Because
what they really want to know is how far
you're
willing to go to find
them."

 
"What are you talking
about?"

Jen pulled me deeper into the empty building, pointing
to a spot my unadjusted eyes couldn't see.

"They left the envelope there, right where the
boxes were. They knew that if you really gave a damn about all this, you'd come
back here, looking for Mandy and the shoes. So they left you a message: 'Want
to know more? Show up tonight.'"

"And save them the trouble of finding me."

She nodded. "Very clever of them. Because it's
the best way to find out who they are."

"It's the best way to wind up missing, like
Mandy."

Jen crossed her arms, staring at the blank expanse of
wall. "True, which would suck. So we have to do this in some way they
don't expect."

"How about not at all? They won't expect that, I
bet."

"Or maybe
..."
Jen turned and touched my hair, pulling a strand of my longer right-side bangs
aside. She touched my cheek, and I felt my own heartbeat there beneath her
fingertips.

"That guy only saw you for a few seconds,"
she said. "Do you think he'd recognize you if he saw you again?"

I tried to ignore what Jen's touch was doing to me.
"Yes. Didn't we just learn that human beings are machines for turning
coffee into facial recognition?"

"Yeah, but it was pretty dark in here."

"He also saw us upstairs in the sunlight."

"But it was blinding up there, and you didn't
have your new haircut."

"My
new
what?"

"And the party invite says, 'Dress for
success—black tie preferred.' I bet you look completely different in a
tuxedo."

"I bet I look completely different with my face
caved in."

"Come on, Hunter. Don't you want a
makeover?"

Jen's fingers moved to my jaw, gently turning my head
so that she could see my profile. Her gaze lingered, so intent 1 could almost
feel it. I turned and looked into her eyes, and something sparked between us in
the darkness.

"I think shorter and blond," she said,
holding my gaze. "I do a mean dye job, you know."

I nodded slowly, so that her fingertips brushed along
my cheek. She dropped her hand and looked up at my bangs again. Like any
serious Logo Exile, Jen no doubt cut and colored her own hair. I imagined her
fingers massaging my wet scalp and knew the argument was over.

"Well," I said, "if they want to,
they'll find me sooner or later anyway."

Jen smiled. "Might as well look sharp when they
do."

************************************

"What would you usually wear to a formal
party?"

"Formal? Anything without a tie. I've got this
Nehru collar shirt. That and a black jacket, I guess."

"Right, sounds very you. So for the non-you we'll
go for a bow tie."

"A what?"

"They're over here, I think."

We were in a certain well-known store associated with
Thanksgiving Day parades and Santa Claus movies. It was not a place Jen or I
usually shopped. But that was the point, I was learning. We were shopping for
the non-Hunter.

The non-Hunter wore bow ties. He preferred crisply
laundered white shirts and tasteful silk vests. The non-Hunter seemed not to
know it was summer outside; I suppose he went from one air-conditioned place to
another in an air-conditioned limousine. He was going to blend right in at a
party for
Hoi
Aristoi.

And hopefully, the non-Hunter would fly in the face of
all the evidence one might collect from the real Hunter's cell phone. To pursue
the anti-client, I would become the anti-me.

The real me checked out a random price tag.
"These jackets are like a thousand bucks!"

"Yeah, but we can return everything Monday and
get a refund. Fashion shoots do it all the time. You've got a credit card,
right?"

"Uh, yeah." The refund plan seemed like a
risky proposition to me, but Innovators generally lack the risk-assessment
gene. Jen wandered the aisles in a kind of trance, her fingers trailing in the
textures of overpriced fabrics, sucking up the ambience of this entirely
different set of New York tribal costumes.

She stopped to spin a rack of cripplingly expensive
bow ties, and my nerves blipped her radar. "Relax, Hunter. We've got four
hours before the party officially starts. Which means five before anyone will
show. All day to get you dressed."

"What about getting
you
dressed, Jen?"

She nodded, sighing. "I've been giving that some
thought. It'll be too easy to recognize us if we're together. So I'll probably
look for some alternate mode of disguise."

"Wait. We're not going together?"

"Hey, this isn't too bad."

She pulled out a jacket, a jet black synthetic that
sucked the light from the room, double-breasted and textured like rough and
supple paper.

"Wow, cool."

"Yeah, you're right. Too you." She put it
back. "We need something that doesn't make a statement. Something that's
not trying very hard."

"What? You think I'm trying too hard?"

Jen laughed, turning from the racks to catch my eye.
"Just hard enough."

She spun away and headed off toward more jackets,
leaving me to contemplate these words. I wound up hanging out in front of a
triple mirror, wallowing in the discomfort of seeing what I looked like from
unfamiliar directions. Did my ears really stick out like that? Surely that was
not my profile. And when had my shirt gotten half tucked in at the back?

Then I noticed what I was wearing. When cool hunting,
I usually disappear into corduroys, sportswear, and laundry-day splendor,
turning invisible. But this morning I'd unconsciously slipped into my real
clothes. Generic corduroy had resolved into baggy black painters, the usual
oversized chewing-gum-colored tee replaced by a light gray wife beater under
an open black shirt with a collar. No wonder my parents had noticed, somehow
reading the signs, resulting in the unexpected psychic leap when Mom had asked
whether I liked Jen.

Maybe it was obvious to everyone. Maybe I was trying
too hard.

"I think we're all set." Jen appeared behind
me, the mirrors splitting her into multiple views, full hangers swinging from
one hand. I took them from her, regressing to when Mom used to take me
shopping, and equally unsure of the result.

"Are you sure we couldn't just disguise ourselves
as waiters or something?"

"Yeah, right. That is so
Mission Impossible."
(By which she meant the
original TV show and not the movie franchise, so I'll allow it.)

She reached up to ruffle my hair, checking out the
angles in the mirror, and smiled. "Take one last look, Hunter. By tonight
you won't recognize yourself."