“I see,” Op Nine said. He was frowning, staring at me intensely, which didn’t help matters. I wasn’t crying, but his face was distorted, like a reflection in a funhouse mirror; the earlobes looked particularly long and Goofy-like.
I went on. “But one thing I do know is that you people are hiding something. Something doesn’t add up here.”
I rubbed my temples. The room spun around my aching head. Now it was as if my brain were made of broken glass, like the glass in Betty Tuttle’s hand that fell when Mr. Needlemier said I was worth four hundred million dollars, shattered into a thousand pieces, then slapped back together with glue.
“It doesn’t add up. There’s something you’re not telling me, which is a kind of lie even if you’re not telling a lie lie.”
“ ‘Lie lie’?”
“None of it makes any sense. Why am I here? Why did you bring me, a fifteen-year-old kid with no qualifications whatsoever in the covert op department, on your big mission to find Mike and the Vessel? Tell me why I’m here, Op Nine. Give me one good reason and I’ll shut up and we’ll go get Mike, which there seems to be a very mysterious lack of, the getting part, since that was the reason we flew four thousand miles per hour in the first place to get here. Why are we hanging out in this hotel room? That’s my question.”
“We were waiting for nightfall.”
“Well, it’s almost seven o’clock. It oughtta be fallen by now.”
“Then we ought to be going.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“You offered to come.”
“I did?”
He nodded. I thought about it. “I don’t remember offering that.”
I slid down the door until my butt hit the carpet, dropped my head into my hands, and closed my eyes. I could smell something foreign, a sickly sweet odor like rotting fruit. I sniffed my hand. It came from me. I smelled like a rotten banana. It wasn’t a stench like BO (though I couldn’t remember taking a shower since that day on the Pandora—not that my not being able to remember meant anything), so what was it? I’d heard gangrene can stink to high heaven as your flesh rots right off your bones. Did I have gangrene? Had one of my long toenails cut into my toe, causing an infection? Why was my flesh rotting off? Maybe it was all in my head. Maybe something was leaking from the splintered glass of my mind, and that leaking something smelled like rot.
I felt him touch my shoulder.
“There’s something wrong with me, isn’t there?” I whimpered. “There’s something very bad happening to me.”
“I think so, Alfred.”
“Because I looked into its eyes.” I remembered Carl writhing on the desert sand, screaming gibberish as he tore at his own face.
“It could be.”
“Well, is it or not? Aren’t you the demonologist?”
“Alfred,” he said softly, patting my shoulder. “Alfred, it will soon be over,” he said.
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
36
Op Nine changed his clothes before we left, putting on a rumpled jacket and a tie with a mustard-colored stain on it. He looked like your typical high school assistant principal or a salesman at a low-end used car lot.
We went downstairs and the valet pulled the Taurus around to the front of the hotel. I saw Op Nine slip him a fifty-dollar bill. That seemed excessive for somebody supposedly traveling incognito and didn’t match his getup or the vehicle we were driving. After getting a tip like that, the valet was sure to remember us.
Op Nine jumped back on the interstate and we headed north. A light, freezing rain was falling and we passed a couple of cars that had spun off the slick road, the flashing of their hazard lights sparkling red and yellow in the frozen condensation on the windshield.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Shaky.”
He just grunted back. His whole being seemed focused on the road or what lay at the end of it.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Evanston, just north of the city.”
“Mike lives in Evanston?”
“His mother does. Everyone, Alfred, without exception, has a . . . vulnerability. A pressure point, if you will. For the Hyena, that point is his mother.”
“What are you going to do to his mother, Op Nine?”
“I didn’t say I was going to do anything to her.”
“I read Section Nine. You’re allowed to do anything you want to her, aren’t you?”
He didn’t say anything.
“You could kill her if you wanted.”
“I would not want that. Alfred, simply because I have certain . . . latitude doesn’t mean I take pleasure in it. It is a great responsibility and burden.”
“Yeah. Playing God usually is.”
“I did not volunteer to be a Superseding Protocol Agent.”
“That’s not the point,” I said. “The point is if you had to hurt her or even kill her to get Mike, you would. An innocent old lady. Not that you could, but you would.”
“If the world were at stake—wouldn’t you?”
I had to think about how to answer that, but thinking was becoming increasingly difficult for me. My head had not stopped hurting since I woke up in OIPEP headquarters. I felt a little better since my breakdown in the hotel room, though. The rotten fruit smell wasn’t as bad, but the inside of my head still felt fragile.
We took the Evanston exit and soon Op Nine was cruising down tree-lined streets with brick sidewalks and quaint little storefronts, their display windows decked out for Christmas. Strands of white lights decorated the bare branches of the trees. I’d had no idea it was the Christmas season. Somehow I had completely missed Thanksgiving.
“Mom was a terrible cook,” I said as Op Nine drove us out of downtown and into a neighborhood of big houses set far back from the road, with those light-up deer and spiral Christmas trees and walkways lined with candy canes. “Every Thanksgiving she made this casserole out of sauerkraut and brown sugar.”
“That seems odd.”
“It wasn’t odd; it was awful, but every year I ate a plateful of that crap—you know, so I wouldn’t hurt her feelings. The turkey was always dry, the mashed potatoes lumpy, and when you sliced into the pumpkin pie, all this brown liquid ran out and filled up the plate. I’m not sure what the brown liquid was about.”
Op Nine had cut the headlamps and slowed to a crawl down the street, lined on either side with huge oaks and maples that must be breathtaking in the fall but now loomed like many-armed monsters reaching over the dark road.
“Sometimes I thought maybe she was cooking that way on purpose, so I’d lose some weight. ‘Why don’t you ride your bike, Alfred?’ she’d ask if she caught me inside reading a book or watching TV. Or she’d go, ‘What’s Nick doing? Maybe you could invite him over to play some basketball.’ She would snack on rice cakes. I don’t think she liked rice cakes, but she ate them in front of me all the time, like every time I saw her she was munching on a rice cake, I think maybe the idea was to make me curious about rice cakes and eat them too. I’ve been meaning to see if there’s been any research into rice cakes as a possible carcinogen, like maybe there’s a connection between all those rice cakes and her cancer. Then I could sue the rice cake people. I don’t really need the money and I know it wouldn’t bring Mom back, but it would send a message and maybe even shut down the whole rice cake industry, so nobody else dies from eating too many rice cakes.”
“What kind of cancer did she have?” he asked.
“Melanoma. Skin cancer.”
“I doubt it was the rice cakes, then.”
He pulled to the curb and cut the engine. We were parked in front of a handsome two-story Colonial with a brick walkway and big columns on the front. Unlike most of the houses on the block, this one had no lights on.
“Doesn’t look like anybody’s home,” I said.
“I would be surprised if she were. The Hyena was a Company operative, Alfred. He understands better than mos
t the pressure point theory.”
“So she’s not here. Doesn’t that mean we’re wasting our time?”
“I prefer to believe he is wasting his time.”
He stepped out of the car and after a second I got out too. The rain had stopped. It was bitterly cold, a dead cold with no wind, but I could hear the wind, high in the cloud cover above us. I looked up where the light from the streetlamp bathed the underside of the clouds, but they weren’t marching across the sky.
“Do you hear that?” I asked Op Nine.
He nodded. “Yes.”
“It’s not wind, is it?”
“No.”
I heard voices whispering, but I couldn’t make out the words, like hearing someone through a wall as they talked in another room. It got under your skin, a maddening itch you couldn’t scratch.
“Are they here?” I asked. “Did they follow us here?”
He started across the street, toward the house directly across from Mike’s mom’s.
“What are we doing?” I asked, trotting to keep up, although my trot was thrown off by my injured leg.
“Say nothing. Follow my lead.”
He rang the doorbell. Our breath fogged and swirled around our heads.
A middle-aged lady with dark bobbed hair opened the door. Behind her, in the foyer, were two little kids, staring at us.
Op Nine went Midwestern. “Evening, how are ya? I’m Detective Bruce Givens with the Evanston PD.” He flashed a badge at her. I looked at him. His face had changed again. He didn’t quite look like Op Nine or the face he used for Lord Polmeroy; he looked just like a police detective should look. My opinion might have been influenced by the fact that he just identified himself as one, though. If he had said I’m Bob from Lucky’s Used Cars, I probably would have thought, Yep, that’s Bob.
“Hate to bother you,” he went on. “But I’m wondering if you could tell me if you’ve seen this kid before?” He jerked his head toward me.
The lady squinted at me. “I don’t think so, no.”
“We’ve had a couple calls, some vandalism with the yard decorations. Found him wandering around the Arnold place just now.”
“Agnes’s?” She looked over his shoulder at the dark house across the street.
“That’s right. Says he’s selling magazine subscriptions.”
“Well, I don’t know about that. But Agnes is out of town.”
“He didn’t try to sell you a subscription?”
“No. I’ve never seen this boy before.”
He turned to me. “Thought you said you stopped by this house.”
I shrugged, rolled my eyes, and tried to curl my upper lip like a hoodlum. A prep school hoodlum, judging from my clothes. I didn’t say anything. I was a lot of things, but actor wasn’t one of them.
“That’s what I thought,” Op Nine said. “Okay, let’s call your folks.” He nodded to the lady with the saucer-eyed kids hovering behind her. “Sorry to bother you. Have a good evening.” He took me by the elbow and walked me down the drive.
He stopped at the road, as if he had just thought of something. He turned back toward the house. She was still standing in the doorway, watching us, a faceless silhouette.
“Agnes is out of town, you said?”
“For two weeks. Her son sent her on a cruise.”
“He’s house-sitting, then?”
“No. I think he went with her. Early Christmas present.”
He nodded. “Maybe I’ll just take a look around over there.
Just to make sure everything is okay.”
He turned me back around and marched me across the street to the car.
“She’s watching, Alfred. Get in the back.”
He opened the back door and I slid inside. He got behind the wheel and closed his door.
“What now?” I asked. “She isn’t here.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. This is a subtle game, Alfred. No doubt he has anticipated this move and also anticipated we would understand his anticipation, and therefore would not pursue him here, thus there would be no need to move his mother.”
I thought about it. Then I said, “Huh?”
“Like Poe’s purloined letter, he hides the object in plain sight.”
“Like whose what?” I looked out the window. The neighbor had closed the door, but I thought I saw a shadow in the window next to it.
“Mike took her on a cruise,” I said.
“Unlikely.”
“Why are we just sitting here?”
“I’m interrogating you.”
He pulled a thin black object from his pocket and held it toward me. I thought it was a pen.
“You want me to write something?”
“It is a communication device,” he answered. “Press the red button to speak, release to listen.”
“Oh. Walkie-talkies, I get it.” I had seen one of these before. Ashley had it in the woods outside Knoxville. I took it from him. “In case we get separated.”
“We will be separated,” he said. “You’re staying here.”
“I am?”
“The neighbor is watching,” he said. He reached into his pocket again. This time he offered me the modified flare gun, the mini-3XD loaded with anti-demon ordnance.
“They’re here?” My heart fluttered with budding panic. I thought of the strange whispering I heard high above the clouds.
He shrugged. I said, “I don’t want that thing. I’ll probably just shoot off my foot.”
“It may buy you a few moments. If anything happens, hit the blue button on top of the communicator.”
“What happens when I hit the blue button?”
“It will send a signal to me that you’re in trouble.”
“Like a panic button?”
“Yes. Like a panic button.” He dropped the mini-3XD in my lap and put his hand on the door handle.
“It’s a poor design, if you ask me,” I said, looking at the communicator. “Red to talk and blue to panic. Panic buttons should be red.”
“I will speak with R and D about it.” He gave me one of his rare smiles, and I had a sudden, nearly overwhelming urge to snatch the demon gun from my lap and blow his head off with it. It was so vivid, I shivered and shoved away the image of his head exploding. The shove caused a shock wave of pain behind my eyes.
“Don’t worry, Alfred,” he said. “Just a quick look around.
He had to remove her quickly and he may have gotten sloppy. No more than fifteen minutes, I should think.”
He got out of the car, slammed the door, and I was alone. I watched him walk up the drive to the dark house. He stood on the front stoop for a minute. I couldn’t really see what he was doing; a hedge blocked my view. I looked to my left and noticed he forgot to lock the doors. I leaned over the front seat to hit the automatic lock button, and when I sat back, Op Nine was gone.
I guessed he used some high-tech gizmo to get in the house. I didn’t have a watch on, so I would have to rely on my own interior clock, which had never been that great. I was always late for class, for example. The bell would ring and I would think, Okay, I got five minutes. Then after only two minutes of Kropp-time, the tardy bell would ring.
A light rain began to fall again, rain mixed with little pellets that I figured was snow but maybe I had some Volkswagen-sized hail coming my way. I looked at the Christmas lights on the lawns, distorted by the wet glass of the car window, blurry-edged and dreamlike, and I remembered my “catch Santa” phase when I was a kid in Ohio. I was nine and determined to get a look at the jolly ol’ elf with my own eyes. I drank four cans of Coke in an hour, and I really had no idea that caffeine was a laxative as well as a stimulant. I spent half the night on the john, doubled over in pain, afraid to call Mom for help, because I’d have to reveal my scheme.
The rain started coming down harder, and the ice pellets pinged on the roof and tapped on the windows. How long had he been gone? I could hardly see the house anymore for the rain. I began to imagine all sorts of horrible
things happening to him in there. Had Mike anticipated this move (Op Nine had said he would) and was he waiting inside, crouched in the dark? Maybe Op Nine was already dead and Mike was sneaking up behind the car . . . I jerked around in my seat and peered out the back window, one hand gripping the gun, the other clutching the OIPEP communicator. I didn’t see anything, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anything, so I hit the red button and said loudly, because I didn’t know where the mike was on the thing, “Op Nine, Op Nine, this is Alfred Kropp. Come back.” I released the button, realized I made a mistake, and pressed it again. “Uh, Op Nine, this is Alfred again. ‘Come back’ means ‘please answer,’ not literally ‘come back.’ Sorry about that. Come back. I mean, over.”
Silence. I examined the sleek metal body of the communicator, but didn’t see any controls besides the two buttons, no on/off switch and no volume control. Maybe there was a wireless earpiece that went with it and Op Nine forgot to give me that one little bit of essential equipment. Whatever was wrong, no sound came from the communicator.
Now what do I do? Wait here for him? I didn’t think it had been fifteen minutes. Ten, tops. Maybe twelve. Twelve and a half, no more than that. Do I go in? And do what? If Mike was in that house, he’d take me out easily, probably much more easily than he took out Op Nine. Okay, so I stay in the car. Thirteen minutes now. Maybe. I could just hit the blue button. If Op Nine didn’t come out, that meant something really bad had happened. If he did, I’d just apologize and say I hit the button on accident. He’d believe that after all the accidents I was responsible for. If Op Nine got killed in this operation, it would be my fault for losing my head in that battle and trying to take on those demons myself. I thought of Carl, or rather Carl’s animated corpse in the morgue, the empty eye sockets and the hole where his heart should have been, and that was my fault too . . . but no, that really wasn’t my fault; why did I think that was my fault? Carl got demon-fried before I laid hands on the ring. So I wasn’t to blame for that, was I? All that happened before I got the Seal, didn’t it? I tried to remember, but my memory was as fuzzy as the Christmas lights through the wet windows. Again I caught a whiff of that odd rotten smell, distinct as when you eat too much garlic and a half hour later you can smell it oozing from your pores.