by Brian Ewing
“I really, really appreciate this,” Sisto conveyed.
“Glad to help,” Ama replied. “Now, I know you said this could pay, and before you say anything, I want you to know I am putting my neck on the line for you with this search.”
He glanced at her smooth, elegant neck and nodded as he pulled out a wad of folded bills he’d extracted from the ATM after IHOP. When he handed her the money, she skeptically looked at him, ready to say that the hundred or two hundred he was attempting to pay her would not suffice. Running through the now extended bills, her eyes widened as she held ten one-hundred-dollar bills in front of her. She tried to say something, but the statement got caught in her throat, causing her to cough.
Clearing the shock out with a hearty wail into her cupped hand, Ama said, “A thousand dollars?!”
“Shit.” Sisto mistook the response. “Is that not enough? I don’t really know how this works or what a fair price is for cybercrimes.”
“Is the Saratoga City police paying for this, because I don’t feel comfortable taking this much money from you?”
“I will explain everything after this is all over,” Sisto promised. “Just know, it’s all good. I appreciate the help.”
Still in shock, that a random favor and ten minutes later had led her to holding an extra grand in her pocket, she thanked him and reiterated that she would notify him the second the search produced any hits. He stood up and let Ama walk him out to the living room so she could lock the door behind him on his way out. She opened the door and as Sisto was exiting, a frail little Native American woman with long gray strands of hairs that rested on her shoulders stood before the two. The woman, no taller than five-foot-nothing, wore what looked like an antique necklace with a big turquoise stone in the center. She paired the necklace with a simple homemade bracelet that girls made their best friends back in the fourth grade. The woman held four plastic grocery bags, two in each hand, and was in the process of setting one batch down so she could knock to have Ama let her in.
“Hi Ojibwe, perfect timing,” Ama said from behind the visitor in her apartment.
Shit, Sisto thought to himself as his eyes accidentally met with Ojibwe. He knew The Reels came from a supernatural element and over time had come to accept it, but it still freaked him out knowing a virtual stranger was able to analyze his purpose on the planet with her spirituality.
“Hi there, let me take a few of those bags for you,” Sisto managed to stutter out, as he tried to be courteous and help the old soul gazer.
“I am quite capable, Mr. Sisto,” Ojibwe spoke. “I can imagine you are very busy with the darkness surrounding this city right now.”
The bleak assessment, although spot on, was still unnerving, causing Sisto to look back at Ama, who provided nothing more than a shrug.
“You know,” he started, “I really do have to be going. I have heard wonderful things about you, ma’am.”
“You can just call me Ojibwe. A friend of Ama’s is always welcome here and is always considered family,” the woman said, softening her voice from the initial harshness it held outside the doorway.
The statement, remarkably, put Sisto at instant ease and he nodded his gratitude as he left, giving Ama one last glance and signaling her to text him once she found anything. He then proceeded to exit the third floor and go up to his sanctuary to decompress for a bit.
CHAPTER 17
Sisto spent a half hour on the couch watching the Pluto TV app. He found the classic film, Night of the Creeps, on the 80’s Rewind channel and remembered renting it after seeing the cover as a kid every time he walked down the horror aisles at the local Blockbuster. Eddie and he had an average of two hours or more per day after school where neither of his parents were home. Sam and Marilyn Sisto had staggered hours and most of the time, Sam would show up around five-thirty, give or take, depending on traffic. Sisto’s mother, Marilyn, was a nurse and worked long hours, not getting home until dinner time or later, three or four nights a week. Most of the time, Eddie and Sisto would bike home from school and play Super Mario World or Street Fighter II until their Dad would get home and make them address their homework. Here and there, the boys would take their weekly allowance from the list of chores they had to complete—regardless of whether they wanted to or not—to school with them. They would stop on the way home at the Circle K to get a Polar Pop or candy, sometimes going into Blockbuster to grab a movie on VHS, or in their teen years, DVDs.
Tom Atkins, the cock of the walk as far as eighties horror was considered, headlined the film and it always made the boys laugh at the cheesy one-liners Atkins said in the film. He found the movie about twenty minutes in on the TV app and after seeing his favorite line spoken, the iconic “Thrill me,” he realized he was too restless to just sit around. His mind was spinning around with possible avenues Carson Vinnova could lead him down on his next act of cat and mouse. He turned the television off and decided to go grab the few single bottles of beer he had remaining in the fridge and left his living quarters to try and see if Craig was at home, being a Saturday. He knocked a few times and waited but after forty seconds, assumed Craig had gone out to do errands or hang out with his recent flavor of the week, Kayla.
Turning away from the door and heading towards the end of the hall, he heard the knob on the door across from his own turn, and Craig popped his head out with his long, blonde surfer mop, looking to see who he had missed.
“What up, buddy,” Craig called from his doorway. “I was wrapping up a furious shit. What are you up to?”
“I was thinking roof beers,” Sisto suggested.
A smile crept across the stoner’s unkempt beard; he disappeared for over a minute, then exited his apartment with two light lawn chairs in one hand and an ice chest with a handle in the other. The smile had not yet dissolved but magically appearing in his attire was a pair of scratched sunglasses propped above his forehead, acting as a headband to keep his long hair out of his face.
“Perfect Saturday, bro.” Craig bumped into Sisto’s shoulder as his friend caught up to him.
The two men went up the stairwell, past the eighth floor, to the door that had an aluminum sign attached to it with the notification: Roof Access - Authorized Personnel Only. The two men walked out the door to a blast of sun smacking them in the face. After their eyes adjusted, they noticed a pleasant breeze accompanied the blazing light. Before letting the door close behind them, Craig opened his ice chest and dug around. The sound of Craig’s hand rustling around chunks of ice, fought to be heard against the wind, paired with the city traffic below. Craig’s relenting look of focus finally relaxed as he gripped what he had blindly searched for within the chest. The man who was normally too stoned to remember his wallet when leaving his apartment, was conscientious enough to throw a rubber door stopper in the ice chest so the two wouldn’t be locked on the roof all night. He shook the loose water from the ice off the stopper and wedged it at the bottom of the door, between the door itself and the frame, leaving only a crack.
“You missed a good time last night, man.” Craig said, after settling in his open lawn chair, signaling to Sisto to cheer him before they drank.
“Randy end up coming over for the fight?” Sisto asked.
“Yeah, him and Marlene.”
“Marlene is that the single mom that lives on the second floor?”
“No, Marlene lives with her sister across from Randy. You’re thinking of Dana,” Craig corrected.
“Sorry, I couldn’t make it. Shit got a little wild at work and it still hasn’t let up yet,” Sisto apologized.
In that moment, Sisto realized how much he appreciated his super-flawed but unjudging neighbor’s friendship. Aside from Caden, Laura, and recently Ama, all women he had or would love the chance to sleep with, Sisto had come to accept that he didn’t have many people he considered a friend. Going into Witsec for almost a year, he had severed most ties with acquaintances, and the first few months back in the city, the people he’d considered frien
ds had treated him like a beaten rescue puppy. Sisto stopped showing up to functions after the first two months of his friends’ first questions always being, “How are you coping?” or “Man, I’m so sorry for what you went through.” He didn’t want to say something he regretted so he halted on going out for a bit and it took barely a month of not meeting up with his usual crowd before he simply stopped receiving the invites. The period of isolation he went through leading up to finding the flyer for C.O.S. that night at the food truck festival was the darkest times he had gone through and knew he still had trouble letting people in. Seeing the bronze-skinned surfer try to rig the door open looked like Dude in The Big Lebowski trying to execute a move from MacGyver, causing him to laugh out loud.
Craig set the ice chest down at the edge of the roof’s three-foot raised brick barrier and started unfolding the chairs. Sisto set two beer bottles in the ice chest and left one in his hand while propping open the other chair. The two sat down, opened their beers, and clinked drinks as they looked out at the downtown city moving a mile a minute.
“Dude, you’re gonna cramp my style if you keep showing up on the news like a celebrity. The ladies are gonna be flocking to you and poor ol’ Craig is gonna be sitting around all high and dry with no one to love him,” Craig stated, half joking as he pushed down the sunglasses from his forehead to his eyes.
“Kayla isn’t my type; don’t worry, I’ll behave around her,” Sisto joked back.
All whimsical tone removed, Craig asked, “You good, brother?”
Laying back on the lawn chair with his eyes closed from the sun reflecting off every building in the city seemingly back into their direction, he replied, “Not by a long shot, but I’ll get there.”
“I was planning on taking some time off in a month or so and wanted to head over to Sin City and see if Lady Luck is still in love with me. Want to go?” Craig asked.
“I would love to commit to it, but I have no idea where this consulting job with SCPD will put me from day to day. Can you remind me when it gets closer?” Sisto requested. “If I can make it, I would love to go.”
Sisto wasn’t lying; he loved Las Vegas. Eddie had taken Sisto on the eve of his twenty-first birthday to the airport and planned it so they landed right at midnight. The lights and energy that came from the city that never sleeps was unlike any other place Sisto had ever been, even to this day. The brothers took a cab to the strip and walked from hotel to hotel, taking in drinks and shots at every bar they saw. The streets were littered with smut prints. The flashy lights kept the momentum going with every building they passed. The eclectic mix of prostitutes, street magicians, and panhandlers scattered the sidewalks. Eddie hadn’t reserved a room. He said if he didn’t get Sisto blackout drunk by morning, he didn’t do a good job in his role as older brother. So, they spent the next eight hours drinking, gambling, and spending their winnings at the strip club, until the chime of the alarm on Eddie’s phone went off and they hailed a cab to take them back to the airport. Sisto didn’t remember how he faked coherency long enough to be allowed on the plane but must have done just fine as his memory skipped from the cab that was airport bound to waking up on Eddie and Kat’s couch. Part of healing was embracing the good things as much as the wrongs that crossed his path, or so Laura had told him on his first session at C.O.S. It was about time for Sisto to go back to a life of flashing lights and good memories here and there. His new line of work gave its share of darkness and he decided in that moment that he would really try to get the time off to go with Craig as it got closer.
“I saw you last week in the lobby talking to that hot, Goth Indian chick,” Craig snuck in, breaking Sisto away from his memory.
“Oh, Ama. Yeah, she fixes computers on the side and I had dropped it off to her. I saw her in the lobby and thanked her for saving me a trip to QuaLED Electronics.”
“She got a boyfriend?”
A slight smolder of jealousy crept into Sisto’s tone. “I don’t know, Craig. Don’t you have a girlfriend?”
Craig, unintentionally summoned up the most clichéd Spicoli-esque reply. “I don’t know, actually. We were out having drinks and tacos and I told her I really dug her but told her I was more about honesty, not monogamy.”
“She didn’t appreciate that, I assume?”
“Well, that was two weeks ago.”
The two chuckled at the somber statement and continued to drink their beers.
“I saw that chick catching me check her out after you left. I think she dug me,” Craig said, with wishful thinking backing his words.
“You are a catch,” Sisto joked.
“You working tonight?” Craig asked.
“Waiting on some stuff to pan out, but I assume I am, yeah.”
They got through another two beers each, giving the sun time enough to descend to ease up on the blinding glare. As the sunset finally showcased a sky filled with fiery blends of orange, purples, and pinks, a buzz went off within Sisto’s pocket. It was Caden. She said he would want to get down to the 22nd precinct as soon as he could, offering to have a patrol unit swing by and get him. A brief thought of ignoring the text and sweeping the nightmare he was thrust into under the rug for the night flashed past his mind, but the pipe dream came and went, and he replied to the text, accepting the offer of the ride. Less than twenty seconds after sending his reply, he felt another buzz and saw the two words—ten minutes—pop into the bottom of the text thread. Sisto finished the last quarter of his third beer, closing his eyes and silently thanking God that his taste of beer hadn’t got cross wired like some other tastes and smells had, courtesy of The Reels.
He explained to Craig that he had to leave and thanked his friend for the hour of normalcy he desperately needed. Craig, looking around at the diminishing light, said it was a good time to pack up anyways and he could get it all himself. Sisto headed to the roof access and before he could grab the handle, Craig reminded him to not tamper with the door stopper or he would have to “Spider-Man” his way down to the fifth floor. The visual of Craig with his tank top and board shorts and a Spider-Man mask on his head, scaling three floors down to his apartment seeped into Sisto’s thoughts, causing a smirk to plaster on his face as he started heading back to the fifth floor to get his wallet. He felt his pockets for his keys, realizing he hadn’t even locked his place up before heading out. Taking mental note of everything in his apartment, Sisto realized that aside from a hand drawn picture on his fridge he had received from his murdered niece almost a decade ago, everything else in apartment fifty-four held no sentiment to him.
Sisto walked into his apartment and started to look for his keys when his fingertips gave off an electric charge and an engulfing smell of grape held his nose hostage. It was not the true smell of the fruit, but a synthesized smell that you would find within a Jolly Rancher or Kool-Aid. Sisto knew the smell was associated to the feeling of excitement, from interactions at parks where kids finally get the playground into view that they had been pestering their mom to take them to all morning, or anytime he was at a bar when some degenerate had money riding on a sport game and was on the cusp of winning. Unless the apartment recognized Tom Atkin’s request for someone to thrill him, there was no reason his empty apartment should have that scent marinating in it. Unless, it dawned upon Sisto, he was either not alone, or someone had recently been in his home. Searching for anything out of place, he made his way to the kitchen, where he scrambled in a drawer for a sheathed butcher knife he rarely used. There were not many hiding spots, so Sisto knew the suspense would not last long. He would find someone ready to jump out of his bedroom closet or bathroom shower curtain, ready to attack him, or he wouldn’t.
The thirty seconds it took him to thoroughly check the few spots capable of masking a human body came and passed. Could Super Dave have stopped in to fix something? Sisto asked himself with only a fraction of belief supporting it. Plus, Super Dave, as excited as he could possibly get, would more than likely not be able to have anything to surpass
the nasal cocktail of nervous sweat and pineapples, from his strung out self-medicated self always trying to fight the exhaustion his body was trying to convey. Walking back to the kitchen, he re-sheathed his knife and replaced it in the drawer. It was there that he noticed the window to the emergency stairs on the side of the building. The window was closed but the curtain was open, and Sisto never kept those particular curtains open. Carefully, he walked with pristine agility, like a cat creeping upon a rodent with intent to strike at the last moment. The window was unlocked. Pulling back the curtain all the way to give the window full view, Sisto saw a circular hole, the circumference just wide enough for a forearm to reach in and unlock the clasp, allowing themselves into the apartment.
Solidifying the fact that someone had broken in, he still did not see any personal materials missing. His television was still there, laptop in the same exact spot he had placed it earlier. Sisto got a buzz from a number he recognized. It was Caden, notifying him that a patrol unit was waiting downstairs for him. His mind was on auto-pilot as his legs walked over to the bedroom and his arm opened the top dresser drawer where he kept his wallet and keys, while his eyes took on a different task—looking around for anything out of place. Sighing in defeat, he knew he had to give up his search and head downstairs and would resume his search at a later time. One last scan on his way out, and something stood out. A subtle sore thumb, but sore nonetheless. While Sisto’s laptop had been in the same exact spot as before, he noticed his power cord had been neatly wrapped up. Rewinding the moments he’d left Ama’s apartment with the fixed laptop, he remembered setting the laptop down on the kitchen table, then relocating it to his desk. The cord was bunched together but not wrapped up, as Sisto remembered—he’d grabbed the folded feet of wire enough to keep the battery box from sliding off the top of the laptop as he moved it. Now, the six-foot cord was evenly folded numerous times, the last foot wrapping around the center to keep it all together. The charger was off to the side of the laptop as well, not directly on top of it, where Sisto left it. The urgency to get down to the front of the building took a quick backseat to the intrigue tugging in Sisto’s mind.