“A few months, but I’ve been searching for the perpetrators a lot longer than that. I took on the case to help cover my expenses. I have a wife and three-year-old boy to feed.”
Maloney grunted. “Hard-luck stories are a dime a dozen. What makes you so interested in what amounts to nothing but a scourge of petty larcenies?”
Stryker looked into his empty palm, and then clenched it into a fist. “Let’s just say, it’s personal.” He lifted his gaze and addressed the cops. “Have you looked around the premises?”
“You mean the house?” Harris said. “Sure. Nothing else is missing. We’re waiting for the fingerprint team to dust the place.”
“I meant outside. Front and backyards. The neighbor’s yards. The lot across the street?”
Maloney said, “I made a pass, sure. I checked the shed and behind the shrubberies. Didn’t find a thing.”
“You’re looking in the wrong places,” Stryker said. He narrowed his black, hawklike eyes, “You’ve got to look…smaller.”
“Are you telling us that a team of midgets pulled off this caper, shamus?” Harris laughed.
Stryker grinned. “Something like that, yeah. Nickel-size midgets, maybe.”
“We’ve got to get out of here, Four,” Cody said. “If the guy goes poking around, Harper and the cache are sitting ducks. We have to find a new safe house until the Death Valley team arrives.”
“Roger that,” Ned said. He uprighted on the windowsill. “Grab some rim and let’s spin out of here.”
The late afternoon sun flashed on the two coins’ shiny surfaces. The glint escaped everyone’s attention but that of Gigi, whose eyes had been glued to the windowsill since Ned and Cody had returned.
Gigi let out a screech and leapt from Mr. Price’s arms. She streaked across the floor and sprang.
“Gigi!” Mr. Price cried.
Caught by surprise, Ned and Cody shrank back and tumbled from the sill to the lawn below.
Stryker ran to the window and tossed the cat behind him. The PI examined the ledge, and then he peered straight down at the ground. He thought he saw the sunlight slant off of two glittering objects below. He charged out of the room.
“Hey!” Maloney shouted. “Where are you going?”
The tall grass broke the coins’ fall. The sturdy blades held the nickel and quarter aloft, but they also made rolling impossible. And if Cody couldn’t roll, he couldn’t obtain liftoff to fly them out of there either.
“Aw, darn it,” Cody said. “Four, I can’t even buck on this stuff.”
“Wiggle down out of sight between the blades,” Ned said. “We’re going to have to slip ‘n’ slog our way through this jungle.”
Stryker sprinted around the corner of the house. He spotted the upstairs window and ran over beneath it. He dropped to his knees and started a frantic search for what had attracted his attention upstairs.
Officers Harris and Maloney stared down at Stryker from above. “What the heck are you doing down there, man?”
Stryker ignored them. He withdrew a pocket comb and examined the lawn inch by inch, separating the blades of grass like a barber does a scalp before he begins cutting. A hose and sprinkler lay in his way and he tossed them aside.
Panic-stricken, Ned and Cody did their best to squeeze between the long, twisting blades, which were still wet from a watering that morning. They had only covered a few inches before a hand crashed down upon them.
“Gotcha!”
Stryker dredged up the coins and stood. He uncurled his fingers and blew away the grass he had pulled up with them. Both coins were face up and expressionless.
The collector pinched Ned between his thumb and forefinger and turned him over. A victorious grin spread across the man’s face.
“We meet again, four-center.” Stryker laughed. “Who would believe it? Not a soul, but that’s fine by me. You’re going to make me a rich man, nickel.”
Recalling how the Indian nickel had chomped through his pocket at the Philadelphia Coin Show some four years earlier, Stryker reached behind and withdrew his leather billfold.
Ned was about to bite the man’s palm, but Stryker turned him over before he could do so.
“Not this time, nickel,” the collector said. He leaned in and scowled at Ned. “This time neither you nor your pal are going anywhere.”
Ned glared back at the collector, an obstinate and steeled look in his Jeffersonian eye.
The man flipped open his wallet and unzipped the coin department. “I see you’ve kept your luster over the years too. All the better.”
He tipped his hand to slide the coins into the pouch, but a silvery blur dive-bombed into his palm and snatched up both coins. Stryker snapped shut his hand, but he was too late.
“Get back here!” he shouted. He ran shaking his fist after the fluttering half dollar.
Hannah soared skyward, and when she was well beyond the man’s reach, she dropped Cody, who went into super-twirl and flew off on his own. Lighter and nimbler now, Hannah circled and darted towards the collector, Ned Nickel in tow.
Stryker slid to a stop and gawked at the incoming missile beelining towards his open mouth. He covered his face with the crook of his elbow, took a dodging step, and stumbled over the lawn sprinkler. He fell flat onto his back, his hat knocked from his head.
Hannah Half Dollar pulled up with Ned and dangled him before the collector’s surprised eyes.
“So this is how it’s gonna be, huh?” Stryker sneered.
“Don’t meddle with the metal,” Ned warned.
The man couldn’t hear Ned, of course, but the fact that fifty-four cents worth of change was hovering before his nose was all the communication he required to understand that the coins meant business, and that he was in the presence of the miraculous.
“I don’t know who or what you are,” Stryker said, “but this isn’t over. This is war, nickel.”
Ned nodded in understanding. “War.”
Stryker shot his hand out to grab the coins, but Hannah was too quick for him. She flew away.
Upstairs, the three men backed from the open window and exchanged mystified looks.
Officer Harris said, “We didn’t see what we just saw, did we?”
“Not if we want to keep our jobs, we didn’t,” Maloney answered.
3
the pugilists
May 1958 — Louisville, Kentucky
From his window seat inside a small jelly jar, Pete Penny observed the tall, wiry teenager stare menacingly into his bedroom mirror. The shirtless black youth strode closer to the mirror, turned away, and then back again; a new, more ferocious expression on his face. The boy curled his lip and growled.
Pete laughed. He had grown to really like the kid over the past year.
The youth shook his head—no, that wasn’t it either. He flipped through a series of tenacious looks, and settled on a hard, steady, pitiless gaze. The teen nodded to himself in satisfaction, and then broke into a big handsome smile. He flexed his stony biceps and struck a series of he-man poses.
Pete laughed again. “You’re the greatest, champ.”
None of the other coins in the jar—almost all of which were glossy nickels, dimes, and quarters—asked Pete what he was laughing at. They had been shunning the unattractive, sepia-brown wheaty since the day the teen dropped him into their midst a year earlier.
Pete dismissed their cold shoulders. He knew who he was and what he was capable of doing. He didn’t hold their ignorance against them—not even when they questioned whether the beat penny was really a coin at all.
The coins ignored the human too, preferring their own chatter to the teen’s tomfoolery. The youth’s playacting didn’t interest them, and besides, only those with a window seat could see the boy.
People never bored Pete. He found their antics a continuous source of entertainment. Other coins could bore him, however, and that was why he opted for the kid’s adolescent displays of machismo over the coins’ incessant blather.
> The youth hopped up and down, shook loose his arms, and began shadowboxing in front of the mirror.
One Year Earlier…
The mission should have been a breeze—no safes, no pets, and the collection was sitting right in the open—but the cocky ’55 quarter just had to show off his stuff in front of an audience of cooing Liberty gals. Instead of snatching up what they needed and flying that coop, Clark Quarter wanted to make sure that the mint condition coins knew they had nothing on his scraped and tainted face.
The rookie quarter had trained at the recently opened Everglades Bullion Base. He was among the best of the recruits there, and had established himself as the group’s leader. The other newbie coins liked his brashness and wisecracking mouth. He played the perfect student, but after training time was done, the quarter was full of swagger and mocking comments for his instructors, and especially for that “butt ugly, goody-goody one-center, Pete Penny.”
Pete tried to hurry Clark along, but the quarter told him to clam it—that they weren’t on the base anymore, and that he, Clark Quarter, wasn’t about to take orders from a beat penny.
The elderly numismatist entered the room to retrieve his pipe and saw Coin Team Two on the table. The man knew immediately that the coins weren’t part of his collection and wondered how they got there. He scratched the back of his head. Maybe they belonged to the maid?
Pete had heard the man shuffle into the room and shouted to the others to run for it, but Clark Quarter ordered the coins to “play dead.” Despite Pete being the only veteran on the team, the others listened to Clark, and froze.
The numismatist slammed a karate chop onto the table and swept Clark and half of Coin Team Two off the edge and into his open hand, and then he deposited them into his hip pocket. Pete and two Washington quarters made a break for it, but the man captured the quarters before they could attain flight.
Pete leapt to the floor and took off rolling.
The numismatist watched in curiosity. He assumed that he had brushed the penny to the ground, and that it would follow the laws of motion—swerve, lose momentum, and collapse.
To his surprise, the warped penny seemed to pick up speed and bolt for the open door. The man strolled after the coin. He was certain that upon hitting the large Egyptian rug in the next room the penny would topple over, but it didn’t.
The collector cocked a bushy eyebrow at the bit’s uncanny behavior, and then followed the coin as it hot-rimmed it for the front entrance.
“A peppy little penny, aren’t you?” he chuckled.
Pete raced rolling for the door, and for freedom.
The numismatist halted and waited for the coin to bang into the bottom of the door. He thought it would either ricochet away or flop onto its side. To his continued amazement, however, the penny dropped flat two inches from the door and slid disappearing through the narrow gap beneath it. The old man shook his head. When he opened the door he expected to find the funny penny lying heads or tails-up just beyond.
He looked left and right, and then proceeded down the six steps that led to his entrance.
“Say there, children,” he said to four little girls playing hopscotch on the sidewalk. “You didn’t happen to see a penny come bouncing this way, did you?”
“No, sir, Mr. Jenkins,” replied one of the girls.
Mr. Jenkins looked down at the chalked hopscotch course. In one of the squares he saw a penny the girls used as the game’s marker.
“You can keep it if you did. I’m just wondering where it might have gone.”
The girl’s noted his glance at their penny.
“That’s our penny,” said the youngest girl. “Honest, Mr. Jenkins.”
“Oh, I know it is, Mary,” he said with a smile. “That’s too shiny to be the one I’m looking for. Mine is kinda ugly. I tell you what, though. If you find the penny, I’ll give you a dime for it.”
“Really?” The girls turned their eyes to the steps and sidewalk.
“Is it valuable, Mr. Jenkins?” asked the first girl.
Mr. Jenkins chuckled. “No, Suzy. It might not even be worth a cent.”
“But all pennies are worth at least a cent, aren’t they?”
“Well, yes, but sometimes a coin can become so old and grubby that no one wants it.”
“Then why would you offer us a dime for something no one wants?”
Mr. Jenkins shrugged. “It made me laugh.”
“A penny?” the girl giggled. “That’s silly!”
“I suppose it is.” The old man smiled and toddled back up the stoop and into the house.
The girl’s exchanged greedy looks, cent signs flashing in their eyes. Hopscotch could wait. They dropped to their knees and started searching. A dime could buy a lot of candy…
Pete, who had escaped the girls’ attention and observed the collector’s exchange with them from the next stoop, continued on his way. Once upon a time he’d have enjoyed participating in a game of hopscotch, and the old man seemed kindly enough too, but he wasn’t the same coin anymore. He had a job to do, and that job now included reporting back to headquarters that his mission had failed.
Pete rolled down the sidewalk keeping close to the low wall that separated it from the homes above. He kept his eye out for a puddle that he might use to contact Deirdre back at Coin Island. If he could locate one he knew the director would send the nearest eagle to come and fetch him. It hadn’t rained for a week, however, so he hoped he’d cross a place where someone might have washed a car or a dog. If he had to, he could chance venturing into a home or store where some liquid was sure to be found, but that was a risk he preferred to avoid.
Pete had traveled five blocks when he saw a teen come strolling around the corner.
The youth swung a pair of badly worn, tan boxing gloves and whistled Elvis Presley’s Don’t Be Cruel. The gloves flew from his grasp. “Whoops.”
Pete saw a passing blur, skidded to a halt, and hugged the wall. He gulped.
The lad jogged over to the gloves and squatted to pick them up. “Well, isn’t it my lucky day.”
He snatched up the gloves with one hand and Pete Penny with the other. The boy stood and examined the coin. He turned Pete over, looked him in the face, and frowned.
“Woo-wee, looks like you’ve taken a few whuppings in your life.”
The boy made a motion to fling the coin aside, but then he changed his mind.
“You may have been hit by an ugly stick, but as my daddy always says, a penny saved is a penny earned.”
When the youth returned home he dropped the penny into a jelly jar he used as a piggy bank. Half filled with coins, the boy was saving up for a fancy pair of boxing shorts that he could wear in his first Golden Gloves tournament.
A year passed and not many more coins joined the jar. In fact, more had left than entered. Whenever the boy unscrewed the lid and shook out a few coins, Pete prayed he’d be among them, as the only way he could get back to Coin Island was by reentering the marketplace first. But each time the lad raided his bank to pay for some candy or the Saturday matinee, Pete never made the cut. If he got as far as the boy’s hand, he was plucked out and plopped back into the jar.
Today was just such a Saturday, and the boy and his pals wanted to see Elvis in Jailhouse Rock. He reached for the coin jar from his shelf, sat down at his desk, and shook out some coins. Should he splurge for popcorn and soda?
The youth liked quarters, so he separated those first and tossed them back into the jar. Next, he counted out enough nickels and dimes to cover the afternoon, plus a little extra in case his friend Leroy came with his kid sister, Louise. He was sweet on the pretty, pigtailed girl and wanted to treat her.
He stuffed the chosen coins into the pocket of his jeans and tossed the leftovers back into the jar. His eye fell upon the edge of a lone penny that had rolled away from the others. Its rim peeked out from behind a pencil case.
“I remember you,” the boy said.
He reached out his index fing
er to drag the penny forward, but before he could the coin scooted farther behind the pencil case.
The boy blinked dumbly, unsure what he had just seen. He chucked the case onto his bed and stabbed his finger at the exposed coin a second time, and missed.
“Maybe I need glasses,” the boy mumbled.
He tried nailing the penny a third time, but again it dodged his finger. The lad rubbed his eyes, and then he slammed his palm down on the penny.
“Gotcha!”
The youth slid his hand across the table but something didn’t feel right.
And then he yelped. “Ouch!”
He felt like he was stung by a bee. He turned over his palm and saw a little red dot.
“What the—?”
The teen glanced back at the desk but the penny had vanished. He grumbled a curse and hunted about his messy desktop.
“There you are, you puny penny.”
He found Pete upright, hugging the spine of a thick textbook.
The youth piled his schoolbooks into two stacks and shoved them towards the back of the desk. He pushed aside a three-ringed notebook and knocked an old Sheaffer fountain pen out of the way.
His fighting ring complete, the boxer leaned in close and struck one of his practiced faces. “Now it’s just me and you, penny.”
The youth took a deep breath and blew at the coin, certain it would topple over.
Pete leaned into the gust, and although it scooted him back an inch, he didn’t fall.
The boy’s eyes widened into saucers. He blew a second time.
Pete revolved like a weathervane, but again remained upright.
The boy peered closer. He was no engineer, but he wondered how a warped and beat penny could maintain its balance in the face of such a mighty blast.
He sucked in another deep breath. His cheeks swelled, his eyes bulged, and then he blew like a hurricane. The teen expected the penny to sail right off the desk, but that wasn’t what he saw.
Instead of fighting the gale, Pete caught it and used the wind to spin him like a top.
The Amazing Adventures of 4¢ Ned (Coinworld: Book Two) Page 3