XGeneration 1: You Don't Know Me (34 page)

“I know we’ve been over this a hundred times,” Scott said, his eyebrows arching over the tops of his metal frames, “but…”

“I beep you when Nut leaves.” She pressed the orange button on the side of her talkie and held it for one second. An insect-like whine sounded from Scott’s talkie. “You beep me when you’re in position. And I beep you again when Nut’s wife is about to open the front door.”

“And three quick beeps for any trouble,” he reminded her. Three blips sounded from her talkie. Scott’s lips shook around a smile. “Not that there will be any.”

Janis almost called it off. There was a quality in his voice, an uneasy inflection that resonated with the ominous stirrings in the pit of her stomach. It was only then she realized she didn’t fear for herself—not at all—but for him.

Janis peeked around the bush at the Leonards’ house. It was emerging in the predawn, the sickly yellow shutters just beginning to stand out from the brown siding. In the dim light, they reminded her of the rust-colored spots above the Rottweiler’s eyes.

“All right,” Scott said. “Wish me luck.”

“Hey, maybe we should…”

But he was already jogging to the street. She watched him peer around and then slide feet-first into a storm drain that opened like a mouth beneath the corner curbing. As kids, they used to sneak down into the system of cement tunnels and explore their neighborhood’s underworld on hands and knees, listening to the echoing
vroom
of cars passing overhead. They would crawl as far as they dared, which was never too far—at least not for Janis. Roaches lived down there.

The rest of Scott’s body disappeared, and seconds later, Janis heard the faint sound of small wheels grinding over cement. The evening before, Scott had rolled an old skateboard into the drain. His plan was to lie belly-down and shove off beneath The Meadows, go fifty yards, and take a sharp left. There, he would wait inside the cylindrical opening that became the cement culvert running between Janis’s and Mr. Leonard’s backyards. “That way, the last place anyone will have seen me is walking to the bus stop,” Scott had explained. “And with the skateboard, I’ll be able to stay at the very bottom of the culvert until I reach their fence.”

It made sense, Janis guessed. She looked down at his backpack, which sagged against her own stack of books. She peeked back at the Leonards’ house. It remained dim and still. Janis’s watch read 6:42. When would it be too late? At what point could they call it off?

The Leonards’ garage door gave a shudder and began ratcheting open, the panels creaking and folding into the space above. Pale rear lights spilled out onto the driveway. Janis made herself as thin as she could behind the bush. When the green Datsun emerged, it was not so much rolling as feeling its way backward, like a creature half-blind from being underground too long. The car lurched into the street at an angle, paused, and then started forward. The garage door ratcheted closed. Janis watched the dwindling taillights.

She hesitated, then pressed the orange button on her talkie, counted to one, and released it.

Moments later, her talkie beeped back. Scott had received the signal.

* * *

Scott crooked his arm behind himself and pushed the talkie into the back pocket of his khakis. The skateboard on which he lay shifted beneath his stomach. He reached for the opening of the tunnel and braced himself. Rolling his narrow hips on the board, first one side and then the other, he was satisfied he could feel the flashlight in his right front pocket and the wallet containing his picking tools in the pocket opposite.

All systems go.

His heartbeats punched the flat of his skateboard. From his dim vantage, Scott squinted toward his target. He gauged the end of the chain link fence to be perhaps a hundred yards distant.

He took a deep breath, moved his hands to the lower lip of the opening, and pulled. The front wheels dropped down first, then the back wheels. Out in the open culvert, gravity took over. Scott tried to use his hands and the toes of his shoes to control his descent, but he was moving too quickly, the wheels grinding too loudly. Each time he met the edge of a slab, Scott winced at the teeth-rattling
click-clack
.

One of the advantages of using the skateboard, he’d thought, was that were someone to spot him, he would look like a kid playing around in the culvert—not someone on a stealth mission. But so much for that stealth now.

grind, grind, grind, grind…

click-clack!

grind, grind, grind, grind…

click-clack!

He glanced up, glad to find the end of the corner lot approaching. The fencing to his left changed from steep wooden posts to chain linking. Steering to the near side of the culvert, Scott slowed himself. When he looked up again, he nearly choked at seeing the top of the Leonards’ house. It was taller than he’d estimated, most of the second story in plain view.

Which meant he was in plain view, too.

His palms screamed fire when he braked. He shoved himself back up the culvert until he was behind the wooden posts again. He set his board sideways and examined his hands. The heels of his palms looked like a pair of red plums someone had tried to grate. They stung when he blew sand from them. With his fingertips, he reached for his talkie and held it gingerly.

Scott considered his distant position from the shed. Staying where he was would mean more valuable seconds to reach his target, but what choice did he have? It was either that or wait out in the open.

He pushed the orange button.

* * *

Janis jumped at the sound even though she was expecting it—or maybe
because
she was expecting it. She answered with a quick beep and hid the talkie deep in her pocket. She knelt for her books and folders. When she stood and emerged from behind the bush, the world whorled and dove around her.
Head rush.
She staggered down to the street and held onto the stop sign. Two cars cruised by. Janis waited for them to fade down the main hill and for her head to clear.

As she crossed the street, books pressed to her stomach to keep the talkie from bouncing, she imagined Scott lying at the culvert’s bottom just outside the fence. She wondered if his body was as cold as hers, if his breaths felt as feral. Her gaze led her sneakers along the rain gutter.

Too soon, she was standing at the Leonards’ front walkway. When she raised her head, a yellow door stared back, like in her
To Kill a Mockingbird
nightmare. She checked her watch and drew a resolute breath. The door stood beneath a wooden balcony, where dead plants hung down from metal baskets. With each step, the odor of rotting soil grew stronger.

You haven’t done anything you can’t take back,
she told herself.
Scott’s in a public culvert on a skateboard. You haven’t knocked on the door. Whatever normalcy your life still holds can be preserved.

But Janis knew that wasn’t true—not anymore. Whatever normalcy her life still held could only be prolonged. That was all. And that’s why her legs continued to carry her forward. But when she was nearly to the front porch, another, more powerful thought entered her mind:

Don’t do it! Call it off!

The apprehension was more than a vague stirring now; it banged and clanged like a fire alarm. It came from the part of herself that slipped out of her body at night, the part that experienced a world beyond the physical, that perceived both past and probable future events. And though Janis couldn’t see anything—no ghost images—the danger she and Scott were about to fall into could not have felt starker.

She nearly dropped her books as she dug inside her sweatshirt for the plastic talkie. The speaker crackled and hissed in her grasp. Her thumb searched for the orange button and found it.

Three quick beeps for any trouble.

She managed to press it once before the front door swung open.

* * *

Scott had been thinking about Wayne when the signal came. They had met up at Blue Chip Arcade on Saturday, where they went halfsies on the forty-tokens-for-five-dollars deal.

“Yeah, I remember Mr. Leonard,” Wayne said, leaping back and forth across his joystick and hammering the fire button like a telegraph operator on speed. “I never saw anything wrong with him.”

Yeah, well, you probably didn’t see anything wrong with Rick Moranis’s character in Ghostbusters, either—even after he became possessed.

“And you need him out of the house?”

“For an hour or so,” Scott said. He gunned down a Burwor who strayed into his corner of the screen. “We just can’t figure out how. The fact that he’s a sub might be a starting point…”

Scott had long since learned that it was best to steer Wayne toward the solution you already had in mind and let him believe he’d arrived at it on his own, rather than telling him.

“Call him with a fake assignment.” Wayne said it as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “
Eat laser, turds!
”

“Yeah, but what if he calls the school?”

“Easy, you set it up so that whatever number you’re supposedly calling from remotely call forwards to your number. That way, if he does call back, the phone will ring at your house. That is, until you take off the call forw—
you’re mine, you cross-dressing son of a whore!
”

Scott moved his blue character out of harm’s way while Wayne pursued the teleporting Wizard of Wor, pumping round after round. The screen flashed with bolts and blasts. Wayne laughed maniacally, then screamed when the Wizard’s lightning zapped him.

“Is it easy to do?”

Wayne scowled and jammed another token into the slot. “For some people. Just takes a little social engineering.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

“Ha! You always were a worm when it came to talking to the Bell South techies.”

“And you think you could pull it off?” Scott tried to affect just the right amount of skepticism. With too much, Wayne would go spazoid on him. He was like one of those chemistry kits in the hobby stores: overdose on a substrate and you’d end up with a foaming mess.

“I guarantee it.”

When Wayne looked over, his pupils were huge—the result of two straight hours of video gaming, no doubt. But his eyes also shone with the anticipation of being able to solve something Scott couldn’t. It was a look Scott knew well.

“Let’s make it interesting, then,” Scott said. “Your broadsword if you can’t?”

Wayne’s grin became so sharp it seemed to send a crease down the middle of his face. More than masterminding the solutions, Wayne loved being told he couldn’t pull them off.

“You’re on, numb nuts.”

In the culvert, Scott’s talkie beeped.

He very nearly signaled back before remembering where Janis was and that her talkie would be off now. As he clicked off his own unit and returned it to his back pocket, the shortness of the beep nagged him. It had lasted a half-second, tops, little more than the length of a confirmation signal.

Then he understood: Janis had had to signal to him
and
turn off her unit in the short space between Mrs. Leonard’s unlocking the door and opening it. No wonder she’d rushed it. The important thing was that Mrs. Leonard was at the front of the house, which meant it was time for Scott to act.

He brought his wristwatch to his chin and pressed a small button. The timer function
blipped
to life, the hundredths of a second display scrambling madly. Three minutes. That’s how much time he was giving himself.

He sat on his skateboard, aimed the pointed nose down the culvert, and let it roll. At the end of the fence, Scott skidded to a stop. He turned the skateboard upside down and began scaling the steep slant of the culvert. His palms burned where the skin had rubbed away.

At the top, he found himself on a small ledge of grass between the fence line and the culvert. He looked into a lawn shaded by early morning and then up at the house.

Scott remembered how the backs of the houses in Oakwood—the sides you weren’t supposed to see—had looked sinister to him once. This one still did. He couldn’t point to anything in particular; in fact, the backyard overlooked by the high deck showcased a certain middle-class normalcy. The grass, which had begun to brown with the colder weather, was trim and mostly naked of leaves. A plastic rake leaned beside a tidy coil of green garden hose at the side of the house. No, it was the
mood
of the house: tall and brooding.

A house with secrets.

The leaning shed stood where Janis had drawn it on the map they’d sketched that weekend. Scott inserted the toe of a shoe into a chain link diamond and pulled himself up. The fence shook softly. He dropped onto the lawn and crouched. A criminal now, he hurried up behind the shed until he was hidden from the house.

Thirty-one seconds gone.

Scott had selected only those picks and wrenches that worked with the widest range of locks. He moved them from the wallet to his mouth in a line and slid the wallet back into his pocket. He stepped around to the front of the shed. Doing his best to ignore the house at his back, he went to work.

* * *

Janis just managed to snap off the talkie, but her heart continued to wallop. She wanted to believe she’d pressed the button more than once, that Scott had received the warning signal, but she knew he hadn’t. The instant the door began to move, her finger had abandoned the orange button in search of the knob that controlled the volume and the talkie’s power. Fortunately she’d twisted it the right way.

“Oh—ah—hi,” Janis stuttered.

The woman’s eyes peered out from a nest of graying hair like a spooked animal’s. Or maybe they only looked large and round to Janis because the woman’s mouth was so small, her lips nearly colorless. She stood in a nightgown as thin and sallow as her skin. The reclusive Mrs. Leonard.

Janis recovered herself. “I’m Janis Graystone. I was up at the bus stop and decided to, um, ask a couple of neighbors if they’ve seen our cat. Tiger’s her name. She left the house over the weekend, the one behind yours, and hasn’t come back. We thought she might have ended up in one of your—”