The Invisible (19 page)

I guess our encounter at her old place of business made a big impression on her, because she lets the handlebars go. “What do you want? To send me to jail again? I had to become a snitch because of you!” she hisses.

“So that’s how you got out so fast,” I say, cutting the engine altogether and twisting the key from the bike. “Guess you didn’t snitch to the cops about this little drug racket, right?”

She presses her lips shut. They’re painted a dark magenta. Her long hair is dyed blue-black, and she’s over six feet tall. I won’t pass as her up at the house, but I can tell them I’m her replacement today.

“I needed money,” she hisses, her eyes darting nervously toward the house. Whoever’s in there obviously scares her. “They shut down my club, thanks to you.”

Her club, where she kept binders full of “companions” to be rented out by men. “Forgive me if I’m not sorry for you,” I say. “But I’m not here to bust you. I’m just going to need to borrow your bike. And your bag of cash.”

Her eyes widen. “No
way
.”

“Be smart.” I hear a voice behind me. Serge has joined us, having walked from the bottom of the long driveway. He points a gun at her chest. “You have two choices right now. Wait in the backseat of my car at the bottom of the hill until we let you go home, or wait in the trunk.”

She looks from Serge to me. “Fine. Go ahead. Enjoy yourself in the drug lab. You always were absolutely out of your mind.”

She gets off the bike and makes a sweeping motion with her hands, presenting it to me sarcastically. “It’s all yours.”

“The bag,” I remind her. Serge walks toward her, cocks his raised gun. A small animal skitters in the shrubs at the side of the dirt driveway, and Jessa jumps. I move my gun higher, point it at her long neck.

“Jesus,” she mutters. “Fine.” She takes off her messenger bag and drops it at my feet with a thud. “They’re going to count it. Don’t steal any, unless you want them to kill you. These aren’t like Syndicate thugs. They’re weirder.”

I pick up the bag and open the flap to find eight bricks of cash wrapped in paper, in denominations of $1,000. Serge motions with his gun, telling Jessa to start moving toward the car. “What’s the drug called?” I call out as she walks away.

“SoftServe.”

“SoftServe?”

“Because it comes on slow and easy or something. I don’t use, I’m just a runner.”

“For the Invisible?”

Jessa nods. “I work with a guy named Nat. I don’t ask questions. I tried to, but he said if I got nosy I was out.” She shrugs.

“What’s with the black streaks on people’s faces?” I ask.

“Some people add to the ’Serve by huffing shoe polish.”

Gross.
I make a face, incredulous. Jessa makes it back at me, a mirror to show me she thinks I’m prissy and naïve.

Serge pats her down to make sure she’s not armed. He removes a gun from an inside pocket of her jacket and empties the chamber onto the ground. “Come with me, please.”

When they start walking down the driveway, I get onto the bike and start the engine. Then I’m roaring the last little bit up the hill toward the tiny white house, hoping there’s a chance I’m right about all this, and that they’ll let me in before anyone recognizes me.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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“Jessa couldn’t make it tonight,” I say, shifting from one foot to the other on the cracked cement porch, trying to act like a drug runner in front of two long-haired, scruffy guys in dirty button-down shirts, aprons tied around their waists, both with a week’s growth of five o’clock shadow, both of whom definitely use their product, judging by their glassy eyes and the smears of black grease on their mouths and hands and aprons.

They gape at me standing there in the dark, slack-jawed, a ripple of violence lurking underneath their zonked-out eyes. They could almost be twins based on their demeanor and the length of their hair, but one of them has a stubbier nose and a thicker jaw, and the other, the thinner, slightly taller one, has a wall-eye that keeps drifting off to the right. Wall-eye reaches a hand out and pulls me inside by my shoulder. “Let’s see the cash. Then we talk,” he says. Then he shuts the door and I’m standing in a dim entryway, the walls stained with purple fingerprints, the reek of something chemical filling the air.

I hand Jessa’s bag over to Snub-nose and follow them to the living room of the tiny house, all the while scanning every wall for a seam, hoping against hope that the kids are here somewhere. They don’t bother to pat me down for weapons. I assume I look too harmless to bother with.

The low-ceilinged room has peeling wallpaper that was once covered in tiny yellow rosettes. On it is a spray-painted unblinking eye that spans the entire width of the wall. The mark of Invisible. I almost trip over a stained mattress on the floor, a television in front of it set up on a stool playing a talk show on mute. Crowded next to that is a torn love seat with springs popping out of it, and a narrow black plastic coffee table covered in baggies and scales.

The rest of the room is all beakers and expensive-looking tubes and scales and large plastic barrels marked with scientific-sounding names I don’t recognize. An old yellow stove on one end has two large beakers bubbling on it. The substance inside is deep purple, black foam forming a layer on top.

But I’m not interested in the drugs. I’m only interested in the kids. I look from one of these drug cooks to the other and wonder if they know anything. How high up they are in the organization.

Then a faint clanking sound reaches my ears. It sounds like it’s coming from underneath the floor. Two beats of sound, then silence. The drug cooks don’t seem to notice—their hearing isn’t like mine. The hair on my arms rises, my skin prickling to gooseflesh. I listen, hoping to hear more, but all I detect is a shuffling sound that fades to silence.

“It’s all here,” Snub-nose says. He stares up at me dully for a beat before turning to Wall-eye. “Should we kill her, though? He said no outsiders.” I straighten, ready to grab my gun, which is wedged into the back of my jeans, coated in sweat.

“Yeah. I guess he did,” Wall-eye muses, calmly, as if they’re talking about what kind of toppings to put on a pizza, or what color shirt they’ve been asked to wear. His glassy eye lands on me, the other drifting off to the corner of the room. “We’re gonna have to put you somewhere until he comes and decides.”

Then, as leisurely as if he were picking up a remote control to change the channel on the TV, he leans down and pulls something from under the couch. Before he has time to raise what looks like a very big Uzi, I prepare to remove it from his hands.

I race toward them and the drug cooks’ mouths open slowly, their vocal cords working to produce sounds of surprise, then they’re rising to their feet, and time has become molasses-slow as Wall-eye attempts to hoist the gun in the air. I can see the threads of saliva in his mouth, the way the gun knocks against a mug full of cold coffee, the way the coffee vibrates inside the mug, the black hairs on Wall-eye’s knuckle—

And then I slam a foot directly into his chin so that the huge gun goes flying through the air, front over back, twisting in air until it makes contact with the purple beaker at the front of the stove, shattering it and producing a cloud of black smoke with a fetid smell like burning hair.

He falls backward against the couch and I begin to pummel and hit and hurt him, fist over fist, until Wall-eye is out cold. It only takes a minute, but my hands, when I pull them away, are bloody and aching.

I turn as Snub-nose is coming up behind me, a thin cord looped around both hands, stretched taut between them as if he intends to strangle me. I grab the cord, throwing it to the stained carpet. In a moment I have him in a chokehold so that he’s writhing, desperate to get away. I pull my gun from my waistband and press it to his temple. The smell from the spilled beaker is making both of us cough.

I cock the trigger of the gun. “Where are the kids?”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says. I can feel him shaking in my chokehold. He has seen the way I move. Knows what I can do.

“Do you want to die today?” I hiss. I bear down on his throat, squeezing it with my elbow and forearm, jamming the bullet end of the gun against his forehead until he yelps. “Because I can kill you right now and wait for your friend to wake up. It makes no difference to me.”

I feel him shake his head.

“Talk, now.” I press the gun harder against his head, grinding it against his skin so that he yelps in pain. “Or I do it.”

“Downstairs,” he says. “We’re not hurting them or nothing.”

My body floods with relief. They’re here. I’m not too late. “Take me there.”

I let his neck go and press the gun to the back of his head until the tip of it is buried in his long greasy hair. “Now!” I yell. The smell of the cloud of spilled SoftServe is making me a little dizzy. It might be disorienting to him too, because without a word, he does what I say, weaving down a dark hallway carpeted in puke-green shag. He comes to a metal door and digs for something in his pocket.

“Stop it,” I hiss, reaching into his pocket in case what he wants there is dangerous to me—a razor, a knife. But it’s just a set of keys. I hand them over and his hands are shaking so much the keys rattle. At last, he unlocks the door. Then we’re in a linoleum-floored laundry room. “The floor,” he whispers. “We peel up the floor.”

“Do it.”

He drops to hands and knees and lifts up the linoleum. Underneath is a metal trapdoor. He fumbles for the keys and I smell the reek of the drugs, the other vat of them surely burning now on the stove, and bark at him to hurry up. “Okay, okay,” he mutters. Manages to find the right key after trying two others, twists the lock. Then he pulls the trapdoor open.

And then I hit him once with the side of the gun. In the temple, like Ford taught me. The knockout spot.

He crumples where he stands.

I take a breath and head down a set of stairs, into a flickering room that smells of urine and stale sweat, terrified at what I’m about to find.

My gun still drawn, I head down the stairs, into a dark basement lit with one flickering candle. Someone in the corner gasps and I move toward the sound. In the candlelight I make out a group of people crowded into the corner of the wood-paneled basement, sitting close to one another, probably for warmth because it’s freezing down here, at least ten degrees colder than upstairs.

“I know her,” someone whispers. “She’s not one of them.”

“Ask her,” another voice whispers. It’s someone really young, maybe twelve.

“You go to Cathedral, right?” She gets to her feet, swaying a little.

“Yeah.” I move closer and see it’s Celestial Deal. We’ve met a few times. I’m about to introduce myself, but it seems suddenly like a bad idea. “Let’s get you guys out of here, okay?”

They begin to stand up, looking wobbly on their feet. “The people who took you will be looking for me,” I add, pulling a small, thin girl onto her feet. “I don’t want them to know who freed you. I was never here, okay?”

I see heads nodding. The thin girl coughs and I hear the rattle deep in her chest. They all look so scared. So exhausted and hungry.

“So,” I say, suddenly nervous, afraid for their safety more now than before. There are two candles set up in the center of the room that provide the only light, but it’s enough to see that their eyes are swollen and puffy, and their clothes—satin dresses and suits, all still from the party—are filthy and torn. “Can everyone walk?”

Once they’ve all stood up, I begin to count them. My chest contracts with the horrible realization that there are two kids missing. “Where’s Jasper and Will?”

Mik, who is only twelve, moves toward me. He’s trembling. “Are we really getting free?”

I nod. “Yes. But we need to hurry. Just tell me where we can find the other two . . .”

His big eyes widen. “Will left this morning. When they took Jasper. He said he needed to talk to their leader privately. We don’t know what they did with Jasper. They took him away—”

A fat tear escapes and he paws it away.

Horror rocks through me as I absorb this news. “Never mind,” I manage, my voice husky. “Let’s just worry about getting you guys out of here for now.”

“Thanks,” Celestial says. “We won’t tell anyone who you are. We’ll just say we escaped. I’ll make sure the little ones understand.”

I nod and thank her, but there’s a very good chance Will has already used information about me as his bargaining chip. The kids ready themselves, smoothing their unwashed hair, buttoning their jackets, and slipping on discarded pairs of high heels, Then we head up the stairs. They step gingerly over the still-unconscious body of Snub-nose and move single file toward the front door, squinting even in the low light of the living room, coughing from the fumes coming off the stove. I’m the last one out, and I dash over to the stove and turn off the burner. Then I grab a roll of duct tape sitting on the kitchen table and quickly tie up the two unconscious cooks as best I can, securing their wrists to heating poles in the living room.

I fill up two glasses in the kitchen with water, and bring it to the kids on the porch.

Next, I call the police and give them all the information they need to find the house. I remind the kids: “Remember, tell them you escaped. Or that you don’t know who set you free. Just don’t mention me,” I say. They nod, each of them fighting their own particular brand of shock, isolation, and confusion.

We walk down the long dirt road about a half-mile. When we reach Serge’s car, I stop. “Hide in the ditch,” I say, pointing to the side of the road. “If you see any cars that aren’t police cars, stay low. The police will be here any minute. When you hear sirens, it’s safe to come out.”

They nod, murmur
thank you
.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t get here sooner,” I stammer, not wanting to cry in front of them. Then I run down the driveway, over the sprawling dirt hill to the road, where Serge’s car is parked across the street.