Blink & Caution (34 page)

On another morning you might have leaped out of bed to see if it was still there. But you don’t bother now. You have come such a long way, young man. Such a great distance. And where will you go from here? How will you get there? She will have taken the Jeep. The keys were there, conveniently, in the pocket with the cash.

You are rested now. You feel as if you slept deeper than you have in years. Maybe that’s why you are so calm.

Something happened to you last night. It wasn’t a dream. And if she has stolen all that money and the car as well, that was the least of what she got away with. You can’t summon up anything like rage. That would require having a heart, and she took that as well.

Then the door to the room opens, letting in a flood of daylight. You shield your eyes, and when the door closes and you can see again, she is standing there.

“Sorry,” she says. Then she holds up two handfuls of paper bags. “Turns out we were only a couple of kilometers from civilization. I bought us breakfast.”

O
h, the glory of a good night’s sleep and a long, hot shower! It is not nearly as much sleep as you need, and you have woken, prodded by the uncertainty of . . . well, everything. The hot car you are driving, the strange wonders of what happened in the night, the knowledge that the motel wants you out of there by eleven o’clock. But still, the blood in your veins seems renewed. Your mind seems razor sharp. You hit the road with something very like hope beating in your chest.

Kitty drives. She keeps looking in the rearview mirror. You ask if she’s looking for cops, and she says yes, she’s expecting one any minute, its lights going haywire, forcing the two of you over to the shoulder. She laughs.

“Can you imagine how cool that will be?”

“It’ll be great,” you say. “I can’t wait.” Then you suddenly turn on the radio to see if there is any news about the kidnapping of Jack Niven, but all you can find is hip-hop and country and static. You are between places. Signals come and go.

“We’ll get thrown in the can,” she says, her voice up-tempo and kind of proud. “They’ll throw away the keys.”

“We’ll have a criminal record,” you say, getting into the spirit of it. “Hey, Kitty, we’re going to Juvie.”

She laughs. Then she says, “They’ll probably lock us up in a mental hospital.”

“Yeah,” you say. “In a rubber room.”

“And put us on meds?”

“Hope so. But as long as we’re real good and not a danger to ourselves or anyone else, they’ll let us get together sometimes to play cards or, like, make craft things — maybe potato prints.”

“Paper flowers,” she says.

“Knitting — except without needles.”

You laugh again, but the knitting made you think of Nanny.

Though neither of you knew it last night, this highway is taking you to Toronto. So, a round-trip after all. You are wanted by the law in Toronto, she is wanted by the lawless, but all you can think of right now is that it’s a good place to get lost in, a good place to dump the car.

You pull Tank’s cell phone from your pocket. “They’ll phone,” you say. She nods. “What do we say?”

That gets you both going again. The ideas pour out. Soon you’re both laughing. And then the laughter dies down, and you just look out at the passing scenery. You’re going home, you think. And then you wonder what exactly that means. You’re a little bit excited about it.

“Where are you going to go?” you ask without looking.

“I’m not sure,” she says. But you get the feeling she does. “What about you?”

“I’m not sure, either,” you tell her, but you have a pretty good idea yourself. You glance at her, and she blushes.

“Keep your eyes on the road,” you say.

You grew up sometime last night. Even before Kitty came into your bed. You grew up when you were talking to Niven. When you could put together what it was he was talking about, because it mattered to you — because it was a matter of life and death. Because you had read up on it.

She turns south on 115, easing down to 401. About ten minutes later, the cell phone goes off in your hands — tinny rock ’n’ roll. It is just before noon.

“You ready?” she says.

You think a bit, nod, push Talk.

“Ontario Provincial Police,” you say. “How may I direct your call?”

You wait. There is nothing. And then the phone goes dead. In another couple minutes, it rings again. This time you don’t bother with the snappy answer.

“Hey,” you say.

“Brent?”

“No, this is Tank, Mr. Niven.”

“What is going on?”

You hold the cell phone up, and Kitty beeps the horn. “Did you hear that?” you say into the cell.

“I gather you’re on the road,” says Jack. He doesn’t sound annoyed. He’s all business, and that’s intimidating. “You do realize you are driving a stolen vehicle and that it is being tracked, don’t you? Right this minute.”

“Yeah,” you say. “We’ve been expecting the cops all morning. Oh, or maybe you didn’t go to them.”

“Have you forgotten our little conversation? Do you really expect that anyone would believe your story?”

“Nope. But there’s two of us,” you say. “They might believe two people telling the same story. Oh, and there’s some saved messages on this cell phone that sure sound suspicious. Tank doesn’t have a password, so it was really easy to listen to them.”

There. You finally slowed him down. But you wait, breathlessly, for the next move. It’s like when you played chess with Granda, and you’d do something clever and hope he hadn’t noticed that his king was exposed.

“Brent,” he says, “I thought we had a deal.”

“We did have a deal. And then, after I accepted the deal, you decided to lock me up. That wasn’t part of the deal. So, I guess it was a kind of open-ended deal.”

“Nobody locked you up. You were a visitor, lost and far from home. We offered you accommodations. You’ve got a very active imagination.”

It sounds as if he isn’t really talking to you anymore. It makes you nervous.

“Well, I didn’t like my accommodations,” you say.

“What is this about, Brent?”

“It’s about Tank trying to kill me. It’s about getting away, okay?”

“Do you have some new extortion scheme up your sleeve?”

You hold your tongue. You’re not sure.

“Is that it?” he says. “Are we entering round two of negotiations?”

Does he really mean he might offer you more? Get a grip, Blink! Have you learned nothing? Can you really trust this man? Please, boyo, get it through your head: something for nothing is a fool’s game.

“How about forty-eight million?” you say.

Kitty whoops with laughter.

“I see,” says Jack, and the two words send shivers down your spine, as if he really can see — see you and Kitty and this yellow Jeep. As if he were the Wicked Witch watching Dorothy in her glass ball. You grasp at straws.

“You try anything, and we just hand over this phone to the cops,” you say, your voice more wobbly than you would like. You sound a lot like a sixteen-year-old talking to the CEO of a big mining operation.

“Good-bye, Brent,” he says. “For now.” And the line goes dead.

Kitty doesn’t ask you what he said. It’s as if she can tell. You are nervous again, and it’s his fault. You were fine five minutes ago, on top of the world. Now you’re angry. You open your window and want to toss the phone out.

“Don’t!” she yells. And you roll the window back up. Then you sit there in silence watching the road, the cell lying in your lap. You want only to be somewhere — anywhere. So many things you have thrown away lately.

Without any warning, Kitty tells you her story, the story that led her to Toronto. It’s the story you’ve only heard snatches of that you weren’t entirely sure were true. She tells you everything. How she was shooting in the meadow out back of their place up north and how she missed the target Spence had set up and how that stray bullet passed through an acre of bush and across rough ground the length of three football fields and lodged in the base of her brother’s skull. She tells you how the bush was dense and there was no way in a million billion years such a thing could have happened but it happened anyway. It was a shot no marksman could have made. A tragic fluke. The most terrible thing that had ever happened in the history of forever.

She tells you about the inquest and the therapists and the breakup of her parents. She tells you about leaving home. No one blamed her. Everyone knew how much she loved her brother. But there was this one person who couldn’t stand her anymore: Kitty Pettigrew.

Then she stops talking, and you sit there and sift through it all, like the victim of a fire looking for anything that might have been saved from the blaze. She has told you everything, and when you can speak, you say, “And the worst thing is you were mad at him when it happened, right?”

She is watching the road, watching the speedometer, her hands on the wheel at ten and two, her back straight, like this is a driving test. She shakes her head. “No, the worst thing is that he is dead.”

You don’t argue. Of course she’s right. But you know, somehow, that you were right, too.

There is a huge shopping center in Pickering, just east of metropolitan Toronto, and Kitty pulls off the highway. It’s midafternoon, and the place is crawling with kids your age. You are just another couple of teens, hanging out at the mall. But you have about three hundred and fifty dollars, and your purpose for being there is anything but casual. You divvy up the money and go to work.

You buy nice clothes — not the kind of clothes you like —
nice
clothes. Well, cheap nice clothes. “You’re all kitted out,” says the salesman, who looks relieved that you want to trash the clothes you came in wearing. “Were you, like, at a costume party?” he asks.

“Something like that,” you say. He looks pleased, as if he just helped to do something good, as if selling you these clothes was an act of charity. You’ve made his day.

At the cash register, you buy sunglasses, too. Yellow for her, blue for you.

Then you go to get your hair cut. You come out stylish and blond. This is real camouflage gear, Blink. Time to blend in.

Kitty does the same. When she arrives at the food court, you’re already digging into a large French fries and a gallon of Coke.

“What do you think?” she says, just like a girlfriend might.

Her hair is almost gone, buzzed down to a fine nubble. She’s wearing a Fair Isle sweater dress in a cool rainbow of colored stripes, an icy-blue faux-leather jacket, icy-blue tights, and argyle low-tops.

“I think you look hot,” you say. And she blushes. Then you hand her the yellow sunglasses. “A present.”

She gets some Japanese noodles and joins you, sitting on your side of the table. “Let’s move here,” she says.

You look around. “That’s cool with me,” you say. “We could live here forever.” And then suddenly she’s crying again, softly, leaning on your shoulder. The game of the day has just about drained completely away.

It’s five by the time you head outside again, but you are in no hurry to go to the Jeep and possibly walk into a trap in your nice new clothes.

So many clothes you’ve gone through lately. Like snakes growing so fast, you have to shed every few hours or so.

You watch the Wrangler for a long time, trying to figure out if it’s under surveillance. You parked in a far corner of the lot, which thins out more quickly as closing time approaches. You both look for someone sitting in a car reading a newspaper. Someone hanging around.

“We could just leave it,” you say after a while. “I think the GO train comes all the way out here.”

She shakes her head. “I need it,” she says. You don’t ask why. You have shared so much, become so intimate, and yet your separation from one another is this secret — an unspoken pact. The time is fast approaching when you will have to say good-bye — at least for now. There is nowhere you can go together, though you keep thinking about it.

Your next stop is the Yorkdale Shopping Centre in the north end of the city. It’s a place from which you can catch the subway south.

“Are you going to be all right?” she says, taking your face in her hands.

You nod. “You?”

She nods.

“I’ll miss you,” you say. She rolls her eyes, and you both laugh nervously. Then she leans her forehead against yours.

A passerby might have mistaken the kiss that follows for two suburban teens at the end of a first date. The kiss is so tentative, nervous, as if the matinee is over and the movie wasn’t all that good and neither of you are sure there’s going to be another date. It’s not nerves; it’s fear: fear that if you kiss her like you want to kiss her, then the next bit — the hard bit — would be impossible. You’d both just have to climb back into that bright yellow time bomb and take off to who knows where and keep traveling until the money runs out. Which would be in one more tank of gas.

She pulls away and rests her hand gently on your arm. She looks at you and grins. “Now I owe you way more than sixty bucks,” she says.

You nod. “And I want it back, okay?”

She nods. Then she writes Wayne-Ray’s phone number on your arm. You watch her do it so carefully and think how odd it is that just that morning in the motel you had scrubbed off what was left of Alyson’s number from pretty much the same spot. She finishes and then kisses your arm, and you have to wipe the wet ink off her lips.