by Lucas Flint
The main living room was clean enough, but the couch looked old and already had some stuffing poking out of it in a few areas. A large cardboard box stood in the center of the living room, next to the coffee table that sagged in the middle, with a couple of wooden chairs set up on either side of the table for sitting. A small flat screen TV stood on top of a desk next to a couple of those candles that have Jesus on them, though the TV was currently off. A door leading to what I assumed was Mr. Salt’s bedroom stood next to the door to the bathroom, though unlike the bathroom door, it was closed.
“Please, take a seat on my couch,” said Mr. Salt, gesturing at his sofa. “Would you like some iced tea? I just made some. It’s quite fresh.”
I nodded. “Sure, I’ll have some tea. Is the stuff in the box?”
Mr. Salt nodded as he walked over to the kitchen. “Of course. But please don’t touch any of it yet. I do not want you to accidentally break or damage it. It’s my livelihood, you understand.”
“Oh, sure, sure,” I said. “I would never think to touch someone’s stuff without their permission. My parents always taught me to respect others’ property, especially if they make a living from it.”
“You have good parents, it seems,” said Mr. Salt. “Reminds me of my parents, who taught me the value of treating others’ possessions with respect. Not too many people seem to understand that particular virtue nowadays, alas.”
I nodded politely again and sat down on the couch, resting my backpack on the sofa cushion next to me. The couch sagged under my weight and felt lumpy and uncomfortable, but I didn’t complain, because I didn’t want to accidentally offend Mr. Salt and make him kick me out of his apartment. I needed to get close enough to the Watch that I could take it from him, hopefully without him knowing. The last thing I needed to do was jeopardize my plan before it even started.
While Mr. Salt poured me some tea in the kitchen, I said in my head, “TW, can you sense the original Watch yet?”
“Not yet,” said TW. “But I am looking f-for it. T-Tracking is h-hard because of my g-glitch.”
I frowned slightly. TW was stuttering again, which was never a good sign. But before I could say anything to him about that, Mr. Salt appeared and held out a glass of iced tea to me. “Here you are, my friend. A freshly poured glass of iced tea, just as you requested.”
Snapping out of my thoughts, I took the iced tea and said, “Thanks, Mr. Salt. This looks pretty good. I’m thirsty.”
I sipped the tea and winced involuntarily. It was the worst tea I’d ever had in my life. It tasted less like tea and more like tea-flavored ice water.
“Is there a problem, Mr. McDonald?” said Mr. Salt. “You cringed.”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s just that the tea tastes, uh, unique and I wasn’t prepared for it.”
Mr. Salt chuckled as he sat down in one of the wooden chairs near the box. “I suspected that was the case. You see, I used a special family recipe that has been in my family for generations. I’m not going to tell you the secret ingredient to its unique taste, but suffice to say that there is a reason it was the most popular beverage in Mexico for a while there and it wasn’t because my grandparents were great marketers like me, I’ll tell you that.”
I smiled politely, but I knew Mr. Salt was just lying to me. He probably just used store bought tea that he diluted heavily with water. I always suspected Mr. Salt was something of a liar, but to hear him make such an obviously false claim made me think that he also thought I was just a stupid kid who didn’t have enough experience to see through his lies. He was about to be in for a big surprise.
“But enough about my familial legacy,” said Mr. Salt. “We are here to talk business and business we shall talk. You have the money, yes?”
I patted my backpack, which was actually full of old newspaper I had found in the attic of our house, but he thought it had thousands of dollars. “Sure. Enough to buy almost anything you have, I reckon.”
“Really?” said Mr. Salt in an impressed voice. “Well, let’s start with the first artifact I wish to show you. Another lesson I’ve learned is that you never delay business needlessly.”
Mr. Salt put down his own tea glass—which I noticed he hadn’t even sipped from yet—on the coffee table and reached for the cardboard box, but before he could open it, some kind of Spanish song suddenly started playing out of nowhere. I thought it was a radio at first, but then Mr. Salt pulled his phone out of his pocket and I realized that it was actually his ring tone.
“Hello?” said Mr. Salt, holding the phone close to his ear. “Who is it?”
A voice on the other end started talking quickly in Spanish, but Mr. Salt quickly interrupted that voice in Spanish of his own. I wasn’t a Spanish speaker myself, but I knew a few words from my Spanish classes in high school. Even so, I found it hard to understand what Mr. Salt was saying about anything, though perhaps I didn’t need to, because his increasingly angry facial expressions and tone of voice made it clear to me that whatever he was talking about, it wasn’t any good.
Finally, Mr. Salt said one last harsh thing in Spanish and hung up on the call. He looked at me and said, in a polite voice that was the exact antithesis of the angry one he used on the phone, “My apologies, Mr. McDonald. That was the landlord of my apartment, telling me that my payment was late and that if I didn’t pay today, he would evict me and kick me out on the street.”
“What?” I said. “Is that true?”
“Of course it’s not true,” said Mr. Salt. “I paid my rent yesterday and he knows that. Jerk is always trying to get more money out of me and the other people in this building. I should probably find somewhere else to live, but unfortunately that’s easier said than done given how … cheap the rent here is.”
“Uh huh,” I said. “What are you going to do?”
Mr. Salt stood up. “Go down to the office where that jerk is and give him a piece of my mind. I apologize for having to leave you here like this, but this call was the last straw and I am tired of being pushed around by this guy. I’ll be back in about five minutes and we can resume our transaction then.”
Mr. Salt walked past the couch to the front door. I turned around in my seat to see Mr. Salt open the door and close it behind him, almost slamming it in anger. I was kind of glad that I wasn’t the landlord, because I wouldn’t want to find myself the target of Mr. Salt’s anger.
Regardless, this was exactly the opportunity I’d been looking for. While Mr. Salt was away, I could look for the Trickshot Watch and retrieve it. He said he would be back in five minutes, but I suspected that it would take longer than that for him to get his rent problems figured out. Regardless of how long he would be away, this was the best opportunity to look for the Watch.
Rising from my seat, I peeked inside the box, but to my displeasure, I didn’t see the Watch or the box in which it was normally kept. Just a bunch of junk, like the piece of concrete and battery that he had tried to convince me and Debra belonged to some legendary superheroes. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, given how the original Watch was probably the most valuable thing he owned, but it was a bit of a disappointment anyway.
“I found it,” said TW in my head suddenly. “It’s in Salt’s room. Look in there.”
I looked at the door I had noticed earlier and walked over to it. I tried to open it, but the door was locked. I looked around for a key, but did not see any nearby. Mr. Salt probably had the key on him, which made sense from his perspective, but from mine, it just meant that it would be harder to get in.
“Maybe I should try punching it in,” I said. “I could do that.”
“I wouldn’t,” said TW. “Not unless you want his neighbors to hear you trashing his apartment and call the police on you.”
Scowling, I had to admit that TW had a point. “Then how should I get in?”
“Break the lock,” TW said. “Without punching the door in.”
“You’re boring, you know that?” I s
aid, but I nonetheless pressed the button on my Watch and soon wore the Trickshot costume.
I grabbed the doorknob again and twisted it hard enough to hear a small but audible snap come from the knob. Turning the knob, I pushed open the door and entered the room, though I left the door open in case Mr. Salt came back and I needed to make a quick escape.
Mr. Salt’s bedroom was fairly small, with a single bed against the wall, an old-looking chest of drawers with a mirror on top of it, and not much else. The only window in the room was closed and covered with a cheap-looking curtain, which was thin enough that light from outside filtered in nonetheless. There was also a closet door, though it was closed.
Taking off the Trickshot costume, I said, “All right, TW, where is the Watch?”
“It should be in the closet,” said TW. “That’s where the strongest readings are coming from, so I would suggest searching there.”
“Closet, eh?” I said, looking at the closet door. “Seems like an obvious place to look.”
I walked over to the closet and opened it. Several shirts of various colors and styles hung from the clothing pole, while shoes were scattered about the floor. But my eyes were drawn to the top of the closet, where a familiar box stood like it hadn’t been touched in years.
“There it is,” said TW. “The Watch. Get it down and check on it to make sure it’s still in one piece.”
I didn’t need TW to tell me twice. I pulled the box down from the closet and flipped it open, expecting to lay my eyes on the Watch that I had seen back in the Mall.
Instead, I found that there was nothing in the box at all. It was completely empty and the Watch was nowhere to be seen.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“What the heck?” I said. I turned the box over and shook it several times, but nothing came out. “What happened to the Watch? TW, didn’t you say that the Watch was supposed to be in there?”
TW flashed next to me, looking every bit as confused and worried as I was. “I don’t understand. My sensors said that the Watch was in there, but now I don’t see it anywhere. I’m not sure what went wrong.”
“It must have been your sensors,” I said, looking at TW in annoyance. “With your programming decaying, I bet that your sensors are starting to pick up on things that aren’t even there. They’re not as reliable as they used to be.”
“I … I suppose so,” said TW, who sounded like he had just been sucker punched. “But my sensors have never been wrong before, not once.”
“Do I look like I care?” I said. “I just wasted a ton of time and energy going to this terrible apartment in the bad side of town to meet with a shady merchant who doesn’t even have what I want. All for nothing.”
“It must be somewhere in here,” said TW, floating into the closet and looking around. “Perhaps he doesn’t keep it in that box anymore. Perhaps he keeps it—”
TW was interrupted by the sound of a door being unlocked. With a start, I realized that Mr. Salt was already back and was clearly trying to unlock his front door. I was still standing in his bedroom, in front of his closet, with one of his possessions in my hands, looking exactly like a thief.
Trying not to panic, I closed the box and tossed it up back into the closet before I slammed the door shut and ran out of the room. I closed the bedroom door behind me and practically jumped back onto the couch just as Mr. Salt opened the door and entered the apartment.
“Oh, hi, Mr. Salt,” I said, turning in my seat and waving at him like I’d always been sitting here. “You got back fast.”
“What did I say?” said Mr. Salt as he closed the front door behind him. He flashed me a smile. “My landlord is a jerk, but he’s also a spineless coward who doesn’t know how to handle renters who aren’t willing to put up with his crap. He’s not going to harass me about my rent anymore, at least until next month, anyway.”
I nodded, but took a sip from Mr. Salt’s tea instead of saying anything. The tea tasted as awful as ever, but the point was to keep myself from saying something that might make Mr. Salt suspicious of me. Still, I couldn’t help but glance at the door to his bedroom. It was closed, sure, but it was not locked, and Mr. Salt would notice that sooner or later. Hopefully later, by which time I would be on the other side of Rumsfeld and Mr. Salt would be left with no explanation for why his bedroom door’s lock was broken.
Mr. Salt, luckily enough, sat down on his chair from before. “With that out of the way, I think it is finally time for us to begin our business transaction. Let’s start with something I know you will love: The late Baron Glory’s left sock, recovered from his battle with Titan King in New York City.”
Mr. Salt reached inside the box, but I held up a hand and said, “Uh, before you do that, can I ask if you still have the Trickshot Watch? The one you showed me in the Mall?”
“Hmm?” said Mr. Salt. “Oh, yes. I remember. I sold that one yesterday.”
“What?” I said, but caught myself and said, “Uh, I mean, is that so?”
“It is,” said Mr. Salt, nodding. “And I fetched a pretty penny for it, too. Much more than the three thousand dollars I quoted you. The man who bought it from me must have been very well-off, though I don’t think he is from around here, because I’ve never seen him before.”
“Ah,” I said. “This man, could you describe him to me? What did he look like?”
Mr. Salt frowned, furrowing his brow as he searched his memory. “Let’s see … he was fairly tall and well-built, though his skin was very pale, like he didn’t get out much. He was also bald. As for his age, I would put him in his early thirties or so. He wore a black button down shirt and jeans, which I remember noticing because it was very hot that day and I thought it strange he would wear such warm clothing. He also seemed to be a former prisoner to me.”
“Former prisoner?”
“Yeah,” said Mr. Salt. “I have a few, uh, ex-convicts in my family and they all have this same steely, hardened attitude that they did not have before they went to prison. This man was just like them, but the only difference was that he didn’t look like the kind of man who had ever spent even one day behind bars. Struck me as a respectable member of society, you dig?”
“I think so,” I said. “Did he give you a name?”
Mr. Salt smiled. “Now, Mr. McDonald, you seem rather interested in a complete stranger. Do you know him?”
“Oh, no, I don’t,” I said. “At least, I don’t think so. I’m just interested in the kind of guy who would buy something like the Watch from someone like you.”
“A man of discerning taste and impeccable eye for authentic superhero artifacts, of course,” said Mr. Salt. “But no, he didn’t give me a name. He just gave me a big suitcase of cash that I had thought was from his work. You know those big suitcases of cash you sometimes see in movies but think don’t exist in real life? Well, I guess some people do pay for things that way after all. Life imitates art.”
“Seems a bit odd that a guy would lug around a suitcase full of cash to buy something from you,” I said. “I mean, most people don’t drag suitcases of cash with them to the Mall, not even when they plan to go on a shopping spree or buy something really expensive.”
“It is strange, I agree, but why should I care?” said Mr. Salt. “Money is money, regardless of how it was obtained or who gives it to you. That is another business lesson I’ve learned over the years.”
I nodded, but deep down, I was trying to figure out who this guy who bought the Trickshot Watch could possibly be. Who else could even be aware of the other Watch’s existence? It wasn’t like it was one of Mr. Salt’s most marketed products, either, given how he only showed it to Debra and I when Debra asked to see any Trickshot objects he owned. There was something very fishy going on here and I didn’t like it at all.
“Now that I think about it, though, the man did make a rather strange comment when I gave him the Watch,” said Mr. Salt. “He mentioned something about finally getting his hands on this ‘weapon,’ something he’d been seek
ing for a long time apparently. I found it odd because not too many people refer to the Trickshot Watch as a ‘weapon,’ but I guess it doesn’t matter.”
“Did you see where this guy went?” I said.
“No,” said Mr. Salt. “He just disappeared into the crowds of people in the Mall. Even though he was a very tall and distinctive man, he just vanished like he wasn’t there at all. I’m not sure how he did it, honestly. It seemed like he just took one step away from the booth and then I got distracted by a customer who came up to see what I had. When I next looked, he was totally gone.”
A theory started to form in my mind as to the identity of this man, but I didn’t dare voice it out loud then. “He just disappeared, huh? You didn’t see him leave?”
“No,” said Mr. Salt. “I did not. But I will admit that I thought I saw something black—pitch black, like midnight in the country without any stars—out of the corner of my eye, but it was probably just my eyes playing with me. I doubt it was anything real.”
I figured that Mr. Salt had likely seen one of Holes’, well, holes, but I said nothing. Mr. Salt didn’t need to know right now that he had just sold a potentially powerful weapon to a powerful and dangerous supervillain, though I couldn’t see what Holes would want with the old Watch. Whatever his reasons for buying it, I doubted they were pure or good.
“Anyway, I’m sorry I don’t have the Watch for you to purchase anymore,” said Mr. Salt. “Had I known that you were interested in buying it at a later date, I would have held onto it for you longer than I did. As it is, the Watch is now gone and I doubt you will ever see it again. That is, unless you can track down this man and convince him to sell the Watch to you, though given how he just bought it a day ago, that seems extraordinarily unlikely.”