Sleight

by Tom Twitchel

  He nodded slightly. “Trick cards. You do the trick cards good, Benny.”

  It was like he was waking up. “Yeah, that’s right, the trick cards. You love the trick cards.”

  He nodded again and slowly began to shuffle after me as I walked toward the sidewalk. His face was soot smudged and his clothes were so dirty that they were all the same grimy shade of grey. He must have been sleeping in the burned out pier. In addition to getting long, his hair had gotten shaggy. The scruffy beard he’d allowed to grow completed his homeless image.

  We grabbed a seat on a metal bench while we waited for his meal. He sat with his chin on his chest, eyes focused on the sidewalk in front of him.

  “Breno, what have you been doing? Why haven’t you been back to your apartment?” I asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I been bad. Mr. Goodturn, he might be mad at me.”

  “Mr. Goodturn’s still pretty sick, and I’m sure that whatever it is that you did he wouldn’t be mad at you. He cares about you.”

  “Do you think that girl made my food yet?” he looked up and stared blearily at the food stand.

  I reached out and put my hand gently on the dirty sleeve of his raggedy jacket. “It’ll be a few more minutes. Breno I want you to come back with me. Mr. Goodturn’s doing better and he asked for you today.”

  He turned his head in my direction and I could see a little of the old Breno in his face. “He did? He wanted me?” he said hopefully. Then his shoulders drooped. “But he dint know what I did.”

  “Breno, what did you do that you’re so worried about?” I asked, fearing the answer.

  “I made a accident. It was a accident,” He said.

  “If it was an accident Mr. G isn’t going to be mad at you. He loves you Breno. We all do.”

  A brunette wearing a blue apron, bounced over to us carrying a paper sack. “I think this is for you.”

  I took the bag from her. “Thanks, you didn’t have to bring it to us.”

  She smirked, her eyes shining in the afternoon sunlight. “Yeah, well, Cassie would have a cow if you, and I mean your friend, came back to the counter.”

  I shook my head. “Well, it was nice of you to bring it over.”

  She spun on her heel and trotted back to the Fish N Chips stand, where her blond co-worker scowled at us.

  Handing the bag to Breno I stood up and said, “Here. Eat up. Let’s go catch a bus.”

  Breno got slowly to his feet as he opened the bag and shoved a big hand into it. He pulled out a large piece of battered fish.

  “You’ll need to finish that before we get on the bus,” I said as we headed down the waterfront toward the bus stop.

  The bus driver looked unhappy about Breno being on the bus and made a show of covering his nose as we walked by him. I found us two seats toward the back, away from any other passengers. I was getting used to the smell, but it was so strong that it made my eyes water.

  Breno had wolfed down the food in a matter of minutes, with several pieces of deep fried batter sticking in his beard, grease dripping from his hands, which he had casually wiped off on his pants.

  “When we get back to your apartment you need to get a shower and I’ll help you clean the place up,” I said.

  Breno just turned his face away and looked out the window.

  “Look Breno, you’re going to have to trust me. Haven’t I always been good to you?” I felt a guilty twinge because there had been that one time when I’d pressed him for information and upset him.

  But he nodded. “Yeah, you treat me good, Benny. That fish was good. I like that fish and chips.”

  The bus swayed and chugged back into the city and began the uphill trek back to the residential neighborhoods. Breno wasn’t in a chatty mood and I had run out of encouraging things to say so I let the silence lengthen between us. The last time I had been on a bus with him, Maddy had been with us and we had been returning from an afternoon in a park. Performing magic was my source of income and my favorite days had been when Maddy had partnered with me. She would charm the crowd and work them like a carnival barker while I entertained them. Then she’d tease them into tipping us. I always made more money when she came with me, sometimes a lot more. The brunette at the food stand had reminded a little of her. She hadn’t really looked much like Maddy, except for the hair, but her sassy attitude had been similar.

  There were hours where I didn’t think about Maddy, but I missed her a lot. She hadn’t texted me for a few days and after getting over being depressed about it, I’d resigned myself to the fact that the time between texts was probably going to get longer.

  “Benny, can I tell you sumpthin’?” Breno asked.

  Surprised by the abruptness of the question, I saw that he had tears in his eyes. “Sure Breno, of course. What do you want to tell me?”

  One tear spilled over and ran down his dirty cheek, making a semi-clean streak as it dripped into his beard.

  “I did two bad things. Two times I was bad. You think Mr. Goodturn will forgive me two times?”

  The hair on the back of my neck tickled. Two? What could he have done? The couch being singed, the bowl of ashes, or something worse? “Mr. G cares about you Breno. Whatever happened we’ll figure it out.” I wasn’t necessarily sure about that but I’m optimistic if nothing else.

  “Okay. Will you come with me when I tell him about the bad things?” he asked.

  “Sure, but he’s still sleeping most of the time so it might have to wait until later.”

  “Later? Like maybe tonight?”

  I held back a sigh. “No, more like next week. A lot later. It’ll be okay.”

  The bus’s brakes hissed and we came to a stop just a few blocks from home. We got up and waited for the doors to open.

  Breno was bobbing his head up and down. “Okay, Benny. Later. That’s good ‘cause I wanna tell you about the mens ‘fore I tell Mr. Goodturn.”

  My hand trembled a little when I grabbed the rail as I got off the bus.

  “The men, Breno?” I asked.

  “Yeah. The mens was hurting me. They grabbed my arm, an they was hurting me.”

  We stood there on the sidewalk and a knot of worry twisted in my stomach. “They were hurting you? Where, Breno? Where did it happen?”

  Stretching out a long arm he pointed back toward the waterfront. “Down there. At the water. They were hurting me an I made them stop.”

  A chill ran through me. “Stop? You made them stop how?”

  Another tear streaked down his face. “They were hitting me. They were like the bad lady. The bad lady that tried to hurt you. I made them stop. It was a accident.”

  I could hardly get the words out, “How Breno. How did you make them stop?”

  Shoulders hunched forward Breno’s hands wiped nervously at his jacket. “I made fire. They hurt me and I made fire. Then they dint hurt me no more.”

  FIVE: OLD FRIENDS

  I STOOD THERE on the sidewalk dealing with the true meaning of what Breno had just said. He’d made fire. And he remembered it. He mentioned the ‘bad lady’ which had to be Sonja. My last hazy memory of her, while she had been trying to use her lethal knack to strip mine from me, was her face being a few inches from mine bursting into flame. Breno had probably ‘made fire’ that day too. He’d created a fire down on the waterfront, and an entire pier had gone up in flames several weeks ago. It was too much of a coincidence to believe that the two weren’t related.

  Breno was looking at me and I didn’t want to damage his fragile confidence.

  “Breno, I want you to stop worrying about that for now. We’ll figure out what to do and I’ll be with you when you talk to Mr. Goodturn.” Okay, optimism is one thing, denial is another, but what’s a guy to do?

  We reached the apartment building and I opened the front door. Breno stood back a few feet, swaying back and forth.

  “Come on Breno. You’ll feel better after a shower.” I held the door open waiting for him to cross the threshold.


  Taking short hesitant steps Breno stepped inside and I let the door close behind us. He looked solemnly around the small lobby.

  “The floor is kinda dirty,” he said.

  “Yeah, but it’s not too bad. You can shine it up tomorrow, or the next day.”

  “Yeah,” he mumbled.

  We went down the hall to his apartment and I got us inside. It took me several minutes to get him to head to the bathroom to get cleaned up. While he was showering I grabbed him some clean clothes and started tidying up around the apartment. I cleaned up the dirty dishes and loaded them in his dishwasher and bagged up all of the food containers and set the full garbage bag out in the hall by his door. The couch cushions that had been burned were in bad shape but they looked much better when I flipped them over. You couldn’t see the burn at all. I opened some windows and found a can of air freshener and gave the living room and kitchen a thorough spraying. That and the chilly air made the place smell a lot better.

  Standing back I looked at my handiwork and decided it was a big improvement, not white-glove ready by any stretch but the place didn’t look like a dump anymore. I plopped down on the couch and waited for Breno to finish up in the bathroom. He must have used all the hot water because he was in there for almost an hour. When he shyly entered the living room he looked a thousand percent better. He’d even tried to shave, but there were a lot of scraggly pieces of hair that he’d missed.

  “You look good Breno.” I said, trying to sound encouraging even though what he’d told me on the street was still weighing on my mind.

  A lopsided smile played over his lips and he walked over to a leather recliner and eased himself into it.

  “Feel better?” I asked.

  He nodded but didn’t say anything. His eyes were flicking back and forth and kept coming back to the couch. I could tell he was looking for the burn marks.

  “I flipped ‘em over. You can’t see it anymore,” I offered.

  Bobbing his head he grimaced and put his hands in his lap.

  Taking a deep breath I decided to jump in and address the elephant in the room. “Breno, what happened in here? I know you fought off the men that were trying to hurt you, but what happened here? The apartment was messy and the couch was scorched, and I found a bowl in the kitchen with ashes in it. So, what’s up?” It was a pretty complicated set of questions for him, and it was hard to predict how he would respond.

  Bowing his head, he began rocking his body. A clenched hand moved to his temple and started tapping it in rhythm with the rocking motion.

  “Breno?”

  “I was bad. I dint do it on purpose. It was on account of I was scared,” he mumbled, still staring at the floor.

  It was a start. “Why were you scared?”

  “The bad lady, she hurt me, but she made the fire come back. I used to do it...before. Before Mr. Goodturn took it away. Can you take it away Benny? I don’t want it no more.” As he talked the tapping on his temple changed to rubbing.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket but I ignored it. “I don’t think that’s something I can do, but we might be able to ask for help with that.” I made a mental note to talk with Kenwoode later. It would mean sharing details with him but I was beginning to feel out of my depth. “When you got scared, how did the fire...come out?”

  His rocking slowed and he raised his head a little, just short of making eye contact. “I was thinking about the lady and...and I got real scared and the fire...just happened. Two times. It happened two times.”

  So, that probably meant the couch and the ashes in the bowl. It seemed simple, but there was another loose end to nail down. “Why were you down by the water, Breno? The time when the men tried to hurt you. Why did you go there?”

  The rocking started again and the temple-rubbing picked up speed. I didn’t need my sensing knack to tell me that he was dealing with some serious anxiety.

  “I was looking for the lady,” he said.

  Of all the answers I could have imagined that was not on the list. “What? Why? How did that lead you to the waterfront?” Too complicated I thought. He’d have trouble processing that jumble of questions. Apparently he decided to just focus on one, and as luck would have it, it was the one that produced the answer I was most interested in.

  “I followed the man with one eye,” he said. His hands dropped back into his lap and the rocking stopped completely.

  A one-eyed man? The only connection that made sense was one of the creeps who had kidnapped me, Justine, and Breno. The one-eyed reference was almost funny. During a scuffle that had led to an almost-escape, I’d thrown some metal playing cards at one of our captors. Using my knack at controlling objects I’d successfully buried one of the cards in his left eye. He, Breno and I had been taken to the same hospital when the cops had found us.

  “How did you find the one-eyed man?” I decided to keep my questions simple and focused.

  He brought his head up and looked at me with a shy smile. “That was easy. He came here lookin’ for you.”

  So, one more answer that I wasn’t expecting and, all things considered, wasn’t happy hearing.

  SIX: CARETAKER FOR TROUBLE

  PART OF THE problem with talking to Breno was that his grasp of any conversation was a slippery thing. When I tried to get him to explain how he knew that the one-eyed man was looking for me he couldn’t. It had been something he just knew, like the way he knew that certain people possessed knacks. Whether it was intuition, a clairvoyant knack or just guessing who could say? Eventually I just gave up because the conversation led nowhere. I spent another hour getting him settled into his apartment, throwing out spoiled food, and trying to calm him down.

  He’d been sleeping down at the pier because he had been afraid of starting another fire in his apartment. While I wasn’t sure that he wouldn’t, I could tell that his confiding in me had significantly reduced his stress, and it seemed that stress was what had triggered his fire knack. Apparently Sonja’s attempt to knack-suck Breno’s long dormant ability had opened a pathway to it. It was unreliable, and coupled with the fact that Breno had a diminished mental capacity since he had last wielded it, he obviously wasn’t able to control it any better.

  I hadn’t been able to figure out whether the one-eyed man had been one of the men that had been hurting him, or if it had just been a couple of punks looking for an easy score. It was a good bet that Breno’s self-defense had resulted in the pier fire that had destroyed millions of dollars of property. Oddly, he was less concerned about Mr. Goodturn’s opinion on that fire; it was more about the two smaller ones that had taken place in his apartment. Go figure.

  I left his apartment after dark, and locked the door behind me, having planted him in front of the TV to watch cartoons. I figured I’d need to check in on him from time to time. That meant sleeping in my own apartment and letting Kenwoode know that I wouldn’t be coming back to Mr. Goodturn’s for a while. I figured tomorrow would be soon enough to get Mr. G and Breno together.

  As I headed for the stairs I pulled my phone out of my pocket and checked for messages. All that showed were a bunch of missed calls from a blocked number, but no messages. Odd. With Maddy out of town and my friendship with Baffle over, I didn’t really have much of a social circle anymore and random calls were rare.

  I put my hand on the stair railing and hesitated. I’d been gone for most of the morning and afternoon, and Justine might have circled back. She could be waiting upstairs. I stood there for a minute thinking over my options and then got irritated with myself. I couldn’t waste my time worrying about running into her; it was going to happen sooner or later. I needed to get over being freaked out about her appearance and where she’d been and just let it play out. But that didn’t mean I should be careless either. The lavender eye color had spooked me and for good reason, but I decided that if I was prepared I should be able to protect myself.

  I moved up the stairs as quietly as possible. When I got to the landing between the third and fourth fl
oors I looked up and was relieved to see that the hallway in front of my apartment was empty. Courage is one thing, but I’d had enough stress for one day.

  I got into the apartment, checked all the rooms because, you know, just in case, and having satisfied myself that I was alone, decided to take a shower. The trip downtown and cleaning Breno’s apartment had left me bathed in dried sweat and, as Maddy would have called it, ‘dirty boy smell’. Feeling refreshed I called Kenwoode, who didn’t answer. Which was just fine with me, the less conversation with him the better. I left a message.

  Flopping onto my couch and sinking into the worn threadbare cushions I leaned my head back to consider everything that had happened. Breno’s adventures demanded more than just thinking about them. If one of Sonja’s thugs was looking for me, did that mean that she was behind it, or was he seeking payback for losing an eye?

  Mr. Goodturn’s improvement, while minimal, was cause for celebration. The only problem there was that Kenwoode was the only person around that I could really celebrate with and that definitely wasn’t his style. I texted Maddy about it, and her response had been several emojis of various cheerful feelings. She hadn’t called, which she would have in the past. A mournful ballad played in my head.

  Yeah, I know, poor me.

  Then there was Justine. I could dodge her and spend a lot of time looking over my shoulder, or I could pre-empt all the drama and track her down myself. The more I thought about that idea the better I liked it. Her showing up unexpectedly had thrown me, but I could take the bull by the horns and put her on the defensive, a much better scenario.

  Congratulating myself, I decided to get some sleep, feeling like tomorrow would be a better day.

  Like I said, optimistic.

  Also a little naïve.

  SEVEN: COFFEE DATE

  I WOKE UP the next morning to the sound of an angry fly buzzing around my room. Then I realized it was my phone doing its best to vibrate off the nightstand. The number was blocked just like the numerous calls I had missed the night before, but I hit accept anyway curious to find out who it was.