Blink & Caution (10 page)

Then you figure out how to describe what it was you saw, the thing you want to say to her. “Your father was not their prisoner. That’s all I’m trying to say.”

There’s no sound at her end.

“You’re lying,” she says. “You
are
one of them.”

“No way.”

“Yes, you are. You’re telling me my father abducted himself ?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Hey.”

“This is
so
wrong, what you are doing. This is none of your business. What are you? Some freak who gets off on other people’s misfortunes?”

“No! No way.”

“Liar. Why are you phoning me? What do you want?”

Ah, there’s the thing. What do you want, Blink? What’s in this for you?

“You want something,” she says, as if she’s read your mind. And then while your head is reeling, she hangs up. The line goes dead. And the coldness of a late autumn night rushes into the phone booth.

T
he squat stands on the northeast corner of Cherry and Front. It’s a tired brick building — must have been an office once upon a time. The windows are all boarded up; the inside walls are falling down, smashed in. Wiring hangs from the ceiling like exposed guts. There’s a vacant lot across the street surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, and you’ve never been able to figure out what it was they were keeping in or keeping out. On the southeast corner, there’s a building sheathed in heavy plastic like it’s been wrapped up. Like it’s a mummy, a dead thing; your place is next. The whole area is under construction. The Distillery District. Used to be they made whiskey down here. Now they just make money.

There’s this grate over a basement window in the back corner that looks solid enough, but you can move the whole thing, drop down into the window well, and then put it back in place over your head, like you were locking yourself in jail. Then you find your way to your corner of the building with a lighter, making sure not to step on anyone. You’re sharing the place with ten or fifteen people; it varies from night to night. The number of rats is higher.

You don’t sleep so well, Blink. The wind comes pounding at the boarded-up windows of the squat like a wrecking ball. There’s no heat, no light. And winter is out there somewhere lacing on his skates. This place is coming down. You knew that all along, but you didn’t think that meant it was going to fall down all around you. That’s what it feels like tonight.

Another condo will go up in its place. That’s all that grows in this part of town — condos — thousands of them all along the lakefront. Like all the poor people just upped and left town, and a tribe — a whole army — of rich people moved in from who knows where to take their place. You shiver in your Sally Anne blanket. You didn’t even change out of the BBU. No need to keep it clean anymore. Your breakfast days are over. Everything has changed. You pull on a ragged hoodie over your once-fancy duds, but you still shiver.

Somebody upstairs clumps across the floor, and you swear at them loudly and then cower in your blanket, waiting for the guy to come down and beat the tar out of you.

The night passes but just barely, with a D– for taking so long.

You head out as soon as it’s light, looking for somewhere warm. You sit in Balzac’s down in the Distillery District. You can afford to today. You’re rich. You get yourself a big coffee and a Danish. You buy a paper, like you’re a real person.

The story is front-page. Nothing you don’t already know. If Jack Niven has been kidnapped, there’s no ransom note yet. It’s all speculation. There’s a picture of him in his tie and jacket and his trimmed beard. Respectable.

“Whodunit?” says the headline in the
Sun.
A spokesman for the Algonquin First Nations says it isn’t them.

“We have our arguments with Queon Ventures,” says Chief Myra McIsaac, “but we plan on settling those disagreements legally and peacefully. This is not the way we do things.”

Indians? You think of the Moon, the Snake, and the Littlest Hulk. Were they Indians? Were they militant environmentalists? That’s another theory. You never saw a militant environmentalist. What does one look like?

You sit staring off into the coffee-scented air, still trying to shake the frost out of your bones. You’re rich. That’s what you got out of yesterday: five hundred and sixty dollars. Should have been six hundred, but you paid forty for your ticket to enter the weirdness. And what have you got left, Blink?

Four hundred and forty-two dollars and fifty-four cents. That’s what’s left of yesterday.

You head downtown, find a Future Shop on Dundas. You hang out in there, watching the televisions. You’re definitely looking worse for wear. Everything about you is kind of dragged out and night stained, except for your new well-fitting shoes. The folks in the store watch you closely, like you might lift something. Why aren’t you in school? Maybe you should scare them and buy an iPod. Make them smile at you, Mr. Money Bags and all. But you aren’t there for an iPod; you’re there for the news.

And there is news. You can watch it on any of a hundred screens, some as big as your mother’s sitting room. You just can’t hear the sounds, like the words are a secret.

You see the CCTV footage that Alyson told you about. It’s on CNN every few minutes. Those shadowy men lumbering down the painted-white concrete staircase, disappearing — like they’ve been burned up — in the too-bright daylight of the door to the outside. They show it again: Niven with his hands duct-taped in front, his mouth taped shut. They show it again, and there’s the Moon — you recognize his gut. And there’s Tank; he’s got the briefcase now. That big shiny briefcase. The Snake’s got his sleeves rolled down covering his tat. The briefcase — was that where the headgear came from, the duct tape? They show it again: those knitted faces and Niven, his hair all mussed up, like he’s been pushed around. His white-as-snow shirt torn. It wasn’t when you saw it. About the fifth time you watch it, you notice the little CCTV clock in the corner of the screen: 7:16
AM
.

And then there is a talking head and the words “Breaking News” tracking along the screen along the bottom. The next thing you know, there’s another video and it’s Jack Niven again, but now he’s the talking head — larger-than-life. He’s sitting looking out at the camera, and you think, they found him; he’s been rescued. It’s over. You move up close to the screen, but there’s no sound, so you just have to imagine what’s going on. It isn’t long before you realize he has not been rescued. This is not TV footage from a studio. It’s jiggly and jerky with a bright light in his face making him squint. He’s got a Band-Aid on his forehead. Behind him there is a wall of chipboard. Nothing else. His mouth moves; his pale blue eyes try to stay calm. His eyes don’t look like water off the Bahamas anymore, and the skin of his cheeks is not golden in the harsh light.

And now the newsman’s talking head fills the screen, saying whatever it is that is happening, and every hair on his head is in place.

“Can I help you?” says a voice behind you.

It’s a worried-looking salesman — you’re standing way too close to the screen — a Pakistani guy with a turban and not much hope of getting a commission out of you.

“No,” you say. “Just looking.” And you leave. “No, you can’t help me,” you say as you push open the door, but you’re just talking to yourself now.

You kick around the city as the clouds gather. Someone kidnapped the sun and is asking a big ransom. That’s what was happening in the breaking news videotape. Those people want a billion dollars maybe. Something like that.

When you think she might be awake, you phone Alyson.

“I’m sorry,” you say. “Don’t hang up.”

You cringe, waiting for her to swear at you, but she doesn’t speak at all.

“I know what you think,” you say. “It’s not true. I’m not one of them. I don’t even know who they are. I saw something on TV, though. This morning.”

You stop, not sure where you’re going with this.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” she says. And her voice sounds semisweet, more like the girl in the picture in the short white dress.

“It’s okay,” you say. “You must be real scared.”

She doesn’t answer right away.

“I saw your dad talking on TV, but it was in a store and there was no sound. So I don’t exactly know what’s happening.”

She clears her throat. “It’s an organization that calls itself SPOIL.”

“SPOIL?”

“It means ‘Stop Polluting Our Injured Land.’”

“Oh.”

“Is that all you can say?”

Suddenly she sounds testy, or maybe she got as little sleep as you did. And then you realize that she’s frightened. The abduction was real, whatever it was you think you saw.

“So do they want, like, a lot of money?”

“No,” she says. “They want my father’s company to drop its claim on the Millsap Lake property. Do you even know what I’m talking about?”

“Yeah, sort of.”

“Blink,” she says. You listen. She’s switched back to semisweet. “I need to talk to you.” Her voice is quiet. Somehow you get the feeling she’s walking herself somewhere, walking from one room into another. Yes. A door closes and the sound changes. She’s outside.

“What?”

“You told me you saw my father leaving with those men and he wasn’t tied up and they weren’t wearing hoods, right? Is that what you said, or was I dreaming that?”

“Yeah. I mean, no — you weren’t dreaming it.”

“So, explain to me about the hotel room. Did you see the room?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

You take a deep breath. You feel this story welling up in you, like you can’t hold it back one more minute. “Okay. Here’s the thing. I live on the street.”

“Where the Plaza is?”

“No,
on
the street. You know — living on the street.”

“Oh.”

“Living hard.” You pause, the wind spilled right out of your sails, but then you don’t want to hear what she has to say about that, so you start in again. “I go into hotels to get breakfast, like what people leave on their trays outside their door when they get room service. That’s why I was there. I was in the hallway on the sixteenth floor, but I ducked into this little room where they keep the ice machine. It’s right across the hall from your father’s room — 1616. Check it out. You can ask the hotel people if you don’t believe me.”

“Go on.”

“So when they left, the Littlest Hulk —”

“Who?”

“Tank — like I told you. He just tossed the key thing — the card — and I picked it up and went in there.”

“And?”

“And it was smashed up all to shit.”

“So, that’s my point,” she says. “Explain to me how that can be, if what you told me is true?”

You swallow hard. “Well, I heard stuff being broken. I mean, I heard a crash. Then I heard a thump. You know what I mean? Like that. But it was weird, because there was no — were no — shouts.”

“So they covered his mouth.”

“If you say so, but there was no bumping around. No fight, no . . . nothing.”

“It was three on one,” she says. “How big a fight could there be?”

“Okay, you got me. I hear you. Fine. Believe what you want.”

There is a pause. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I just don’t get it.”

“But . . .”

“But what, Blink? I really want to know. I’m trying to understand.”

What is it you hear in her voice? There is something there. Like she doesn’t want to believe you but doesn’t want you to stop, either. Like she’s having this fight, too, and things are crashing and thumping all around in her head, and it doesn’t make sense.

“It’s this feeling,” you say. “It’s like, in my experience, when things get broken and fall over, there has to be other things going on, you know?” Then you figure out how to explain it. “Shit doesn’t happen in silence,” you say.

There. You’ve made your best case. You listen closely because maybe there are cops there, wherever she is. Maybe they’re tracing this call somehow, the way they do on cop shows. You imagine some guy with earphones. CSI. You can picture it, and you can feel Captain Panic coming on, but you fight him down. Because all you can really hear is Alyson and wind sounds. There is just the two of you. Maybe you’re that big a fool, but maybe you don’t care anymore. You look up and out at the world passing by your phone booth. No one so much as looks at you. You’re used to that; right now you’re glad of it.

“Thank you,” she says.

“Don’t thank me. I mean, it’s so freaking weird. But I wanted you to know because maybe it’s not so bad as . . . you know . . .”

“Maybe,” she says. But her voice sounds grouchy, like she didn’t really mean “thank you,” but she was brought up proper and that’s what you say when someone is telling you stuff you don’t want to hear.

“Blink?” she says, and her voice drops to a whisper.

“I’m here.”

“I want to talk to you.”

“So, talk.”

“No, I want to see you.”

You jump back like lightning just shot right out of the phone. You jump back so far, the steel phone cable jerks your head to a stop.

“Yeah, right,” you say.

“I mean it.”

“Yeah, you and the cops or whatever.”

“No. Just us. Here.”