Splinters

by Matt Carter

  “So we can cross this one off the list?” I said.

  Mina looked at the mine entrance long and hard before saying, “Probably. It could be that—”

  A car horn started beeping frantically not too far away.

  Billy.

  Without thinking, we ran down the trail back to the main road.

  Billy had gotten his van past the gate. Another car, a Jeep better suited for these roads, was parked right behind it. I didn’t need to see the “PROSPERO SHERIFF’S DEPT.” decal on the side of it to know we were in trouble.

  Billy stood at the front of his van, running his hands through his hair, exasperated. There were two men in sheriff’s uniforms talking to him: one who looked like he’d just graduated high school, the other a stout, balding man with glasses I remembered vaguely from the block party.

  “I swear, guys . . . I didn’t see the signs! The gate was open when I got there. I thought it was, like, a temporary thing! I’m just trying to encourage an interest in the outdoors. Is that really so bad?” Billy pleaded. I’m sure he was doing everything possible to keep them from searching his van. He looked around desperately for help, then caught sight of us in the tree line. I half-expected him to wave us away, but the moment he saw us he called out.

  “See, there they are! They’ll back me up!”

  I wanted a good place to hide, right then and there. Mina sighed heavily. This wasn’t good for either of us.

  “Let me do the talking,” I said.

  “If you insist,” Mina agreed. “You’ve been pretty good at that so far.” She walked down toward the gate, half a step behind me, with her hands raised, looking very ready to kneel and place them behind her head in what I could already tell would be an all-too-practiced motion.

  She didn’t even fake a smile when she said, “Hello, Sheriff Diaz. Deputy Arbogast. What seems to be the problem?”

  The older man looked at Mina as if he wished anyone but her had just walked out of the forest.

  “Mina Todd. What are you doing all the way out here?” he asked.

  “It was my fault,” I said. “I’m not in town long, and Mina was showing me some of the old hiking trails in the forest. I gave her a hard time when she said we should stick to the marked trails. I was looking for a bit more adventure, and we might’ve gone a little too far off the map. Please, please don’t take out on her what was my error in judgment.”

  I was hoping that whatever little credit I still had as a town hero would lessen whatever trouble we were in. The Sheriff sighed, looking at the three of us.

  “I’m not gonna write up anything official about this, this time,” he said. “But I have to tell your mother, Mina.”

  I interjected, “Now that really isn’t neces—”

  The Sheriff pointed at me, “I’m afraid it is, Ben. We got a call about some trespassers, and her name was mentioned. Her mom’s gonna hear about it no matter what happens. Besides, Mina here’s got a history of sticking her nose where it ought not be. And if my reprimand doesn’t stick, you can sure as hell bet her mom’s will. I’m not bringing you in, Ben, because people around here like you, and it’d be a damn shame to see a boy with as promising a future as yours get a mark on his record. Don’t make me change my mind by saying another word. Are we clear?”

  “Crystal,” I said.

  “Good,” Sheriff Diaz said. “Take a word of advice, son. Stay away from this girl. She’s nothing but trouble.”

  I wanted to say something cool then, something along the lines of I like trouble, but fear of arrest shut me up. The Sheriff looked back to Billy.

  “You make sure these kids get back to town safe, and keep a better eye out for signs next time?” he asked.

  “Yes, your highness,” Billy stammered, almost terrified.

  The Sheriff looked at him oddly, then turned about on his feet and walked back to the Jeep, shaking his head.

  Billy looked at both of us, saddened. I couldn’t blame him. Just when it felt like we were making progress, we were being shut down.

  13.

  I Can’t Argue With That

  Mina

  Billy drummed his fingers nervously on the steering wheel for the first few turns down the hill and back into town, keeping perfect rhythm as always.

  “I can’t—”

  “I know,” I stopped him when he tried to apologize.

  “You know I love doing this for you guys—”

  “I know.”

  “But I really can’t afford to get in any more trouble—”

  “I know.”

  “And if those police dogs get a whiff of my car—”

  “I know,” I repeated. “It’s okay. It’s not going to do any good, anyway, going out there again now.”

  Ben looked like I’d confirmed his worst fears.

  “So whose place am I taking you to?” Billy sighed.

  The sensible answer would have been, “Both.”

  The sooner I got home, the less worry I’d have to diffuse about how big a spectacle I might be making of myself in front of the cops, and I certainly couldn’t have Ben anywhere near Mom when she got the call.

  Ben and I could regroup later. I was free to use his number now.

  But for reasons I couldn’t fully explain, I just couldn’t leave him looking so disappointed.

  Billy must have noticed, too, because when I didn’t answer right away, he retracted the question.

  “Hey, how about a malt first, on me? Least I can do.”

  “On me” just meant he’d risk getting one of his coworkers not to charge us at all, but it was still a good idea.

  I got the most challenging thing I could think of to drink, a bubble gum thick shake with a double scoop of gummy bears, and waited for Ben’s Cherry Timewarp to arrive before sorting out the edible and inedible globs of sweetness in my mouth enough to talk.

  “This isn’t a loss,” I said. He needed to know that even though I knew he wasn’t going to like the reason.

  “How do you figure?” Ben bit into one of the cherries more violently than usual, as if he could bite the difficult parts out of the day.

  Billy stirred his root beer float a little more quietly, and I almost hoped he’d say it so I wouldn’t have to, but I hadn’t built my Network by delegating the most unpleasant tasks.

  I took another spoonful of shake and sorted it while I sorted words.

  “Someone sent the cops after us.” I bit the frozen gummy bears down to a swallowable size to give my tongue room to maneuver. “That could even be a good thing. It could mean we were getting close. Now we know we definitely have to check the next mine over from the blocked one. We can’t do that until we can figure out how to distract whoever’s watching.”

  Ben seemed to understand this, at least for the most part. “Whoever?” he repeated. “If they’re watching, aren’t they all watching? Aren’t they all part of the same thing?”

  “That doesn’t mean all the parts have to do the same thing at the same time. We’d be one job on a long list.”

  “Okay . . .” said Ben. “That’s easy, then. Who could have known where—No.”

  He’d figured it out, and as I’d anticipated, he wasn’t happy.

  “So she did know where you were going?” I confirmed.

  “Haley is not a Splinter!”

  I’d just taken another bite, and I’m sure I swallowed at least a little gum in order to point out promptly, “You don’t have proof of that.”

  “You don’t have proof she is.”

  “It’s the more probable assumption. She’s been taken by them. She knew where we were.”

  “It wasn’t her!”

  “Guys,” Billy interrupted us, slamming his spoon into the bottom of the glass harder than was necessary to break down the scoop of ice cream. “I’m just thinking out loud here, and I shouldn’t even be talking trash to you kids about anyone for bringing in law enforcement, but just for the sake of, you know, thinking things through, is there anyone else it could
have been?”

  I seriously doubted it, though he was right that it was only fair to give it some thought. I scooped up the chunkiest lump of ice cream the spoon could hold and tried. Ben took a long sip and probably tried harder.

  Gum.

  Gummy bear.

  Gummy bear.

  Gum.

  “Well, if she could have mentioned it in passing to—”

  “What about Kevin?”

  Ben interrupted so decisively that I didn’t bother trying to finish the thought I’d had no particular faith in anyway.

  “No one would have had to tell him. He was there. In fact, he’s just happened to be in a lot of places I’ve been lately.”

  Billy raised an eyebrow at me, asking me if this didn’t sound reasonable.

  I folded a gummy bear into a lump of bubble gum so I could chew it back out while I tried to think of a reason it wouldn’t be reasonable.

  “And his father owns the closest car dealership,” Ben continued.

  “That just means his family’s collaborating! It doesn’t prove he’s one of them!”

  “You don’t have proof about Haley either! How can you not be just as suspicious of him?”

  Ben and Billy both stared at me, waiting for my answer. There wasn’t a good one.

  Gum.

  Gummy bear.

  Gum.

  Gummy bear.

  “I can’t,” I agreed.

  I still believed (or wanted to believe) checking up on Kevin would be a waste of time, but there was no excuse not to, at least not one that hadn’t led me wrong before.

  I don’t work on gut instincts.

  I took out my phone and hit the first number on speed dial.

  “What are you doing?” Ben asked warily.

  “You’re right,” I explained again because he didn’t seem to have understood that part.

  “ . . . Really?”

  “Yes. So now I have to teach you how to set up surveillance.”

  Aldo picked up halfway through the last word.

  “Wait,” he said. “Let me guess what you called for. It ends with ‘ail-ence.’ I’ll be right—”

  “I’m not at home,” I warned him. “Probably won’t get any privacy there today at all.”

  Avoiding home wasn’t the quickest way to get the day’s bust forgotten; however it was better than trying to pick microphones apart right under Mom’s nose while she was lecturing me.

  “Well, we can’t do it here.”

  When it came to Aldo’s parents’ moods, he never had to say more than that.

  “Okay,” I said. “Bring what you can and meet us at Billy’s in ten.”

  Billy sipped his float hesitantly for a few moments after I hung up and checked his own phone. There was only another hour before his evening shift. “Fine. But if you get caught, I had no idea you went there after I trustingly dropped you off in front of a parental residence.”

  “Deal.”

  Billy lived in half an old duplex right next to the interstate. The other half was empty, which was lucky because his soundproofing attempts were more decorative than functional. There was no air conditioner, limited floor space, not much in the kitchen other than expired burger buns, soda syrup, and six half-empty jars of mustard all rescued from the Fountain, and it was going to be a steep uphill walk to the Brundle place when we were ready. At least we had a place to work.

  Ben and I only had a few minutes alone after Billy went back to the Fountain, clearing the laundry off one end of the coffee table in an awkward silence I couldn’t quite understand, considering the fact that I’d surrendered our last argument.

  Then Aldo knocked on the door, and I began to form an idea about where the awkwardness was coming from based on how suddenly it intensified.

  Aldo’s arms were so full when I opened the door that he went straight to the space we’d cleared to collapse among the boxes of cell phone parts and coils of wire before looking at us.

  When he saw Ben, he stood up, straightened his shirt, straighter than I’d known it could get, and held his hand out. Well, out and up, since being even a couple inches shorter than I am, he barely stood as high as Ben’s chest.

  “You’re Ben Pastor,” he said. “I know you are. Mina made me watch six hours of video of you last week,” he explained.

  “You’re Aldo,” Ben responded in kind, accepting the handshake very formally, as if it were being offered by a precocious child. That is, if Ben were the kind of person who gets extremely uncomfortable around children, which I knew from his Facebook he wasn’t. “I haven’t seen any video of you, but Mina’s mentioned you once or twice. Her techie?”

  He emphasized the word “techie” a little harder than he needed to, and I got the strange impression that he was thinking about other words that could almost have fit into that part of the sentence but didn’t. What words they were, I couldn’t guess.

  “Yeah, that’s me.” Aldo gestured around at the equipment. He didn’t start explaining what any of it was or what we were going to do with it, so I gave him a nudge.

  “We haven’t identified a window of time to get anything into his wallet or phone,” I said, “so I’m thinking a couple basic roof cams, a good, long-term bug in his bedroom, a GPS unit for his bike, and another good bug for his father’s office, unless you think you can hack his voice mail.”

  Normally, Aldo would have asked me if I was sure that was all I would need and if I could possibly find a use for his latest invention, whatever that happened to be, but his attention was still on Ben. He just acknowledged with a dignified nod that all those things were possible.

  “Who are we . . . concerned about again?” he asked.

  “Kevin Brundle,” Ben said promptly.

  Aldo did a double-take and turned to check with me. Then he must have noticed Ben staring harder at him because he looked back, and I could have applauded them both for their mistrust if it hadn’t been so inconvenient at that particular moment.

  “How much does he know now?” Aldo asked.

  “Almost everything,” I said.

  Both of them looked annoyed with me, Ben for the “almost” and Aldo for the “everything,” I assumed.

  “Everything that matters,” I clarified.

  “How much does he know?” Ben asked.

  “Everything that matters,” I repeated.

  “Like why suspecting Kevin is such a big deal?” he pushed.

  I took one of the wire coils and started re-coiling it to prepare myself. Ben was right. Now that he was a full member of my Network, I needed to break the habit of keeping secrets from him without a really good reason, and I didn’t have one for this.

  “Kevin knows about the Splinters,” I explained.

  “You told him?” Ben guessed. From there it got trickier.

  “Not exactly. You know his brother . . . disappeared?”

  Ben put it together pretty quickly. “The Splinters? But . . . why did he disappear? Why didn’t they just replace him?”

  “I caught them,” I said. That was the simple version. “Kevin and I are the only ones who saw what they did to him after that. I offered Kevin a place in the Network, protection, but he turned me down. He said that he’s not a fighter. And that he would prefer to try to trust people, live a normal life, and accept the end whenever and however it comes, instead of living like me. I hoped his awareness would keep him safe, but that doesn’t mean it did. And he did make me promise that I wouldn’t waste my time watching him for his own good. It’s not for his own good this time.”

  Ben accepted this, but he didn’t stop there. “Does ‘everything that matters’ include all the ways you spy on him? On me?”

  I didn’t fight it. I listed every method of surveillance I’d used on Ben as quickly as I could. “If you fall out of touch for long enough to be replaced, it disqualifies you as an ECNS, so if this is what you want, I wouldn’t—”

  “I’m not going to disable them. I just wanted to know. Does it include the fact
that you don’t know for sure about Haley? Does it include what you think of your dad?”

  “You told him about your dad?” Aldo asked me indignantly. “You waited two years to tell me that!”

  “I’ve had more time to come to terms with it now,” I explained.

  Ben was looking a lot happier, but that didn’t help break down the giant blockade of awkwardness that was still stopping us from getting anything done.

  After a few more seconds of Ben and Aldo staring at each other as if there were infinite visual details between them to keep them occupied, Ben got serious again—a similar kind of serious to the mysterious, disarming way he could interrupt people.

  “Whatever you’re going to do with those boxes, I promise, I won’t tell anyone.”

  Aldo waited just another 2.3 seconds before kneeling to unpack one of the boxes, handing Ben a tiny webcam, and breaking open a few cheap prepaid flip phones.

  “Where do you get all this stuff?” Ben asked, turning the webcam over in his hand.

  “My dad owns Prospero Electronics Repair,” Aldo answered shortly.

  Ben raised an eyebrow.

  “He did promise,” I reminded Aldo. I had no high ground when it came to short answers, but at least Ben had been happy with mine.

  Aldo sighed. “You know the Green Caller free E-waste disposal bin in front of the shop?”

  Ben hadn’t been near Prospero Electronics Repair, but he looked on steadily, as if he had.

  “There’s no company called the Green Caller,” Aldo admitted.

  Ben looked equal parts impressed and frightened, something I thought should have made Aldo very pleased with himself. He changed the subject very quickly.

  “Be careful with that,” he told Ben. “We’re going to set it up for you to plant it on Kevin’s roof.”

  Ben set the camera down on the coffee table, almost as carefully as he asked, “So . . . you are going to help me? With my idea?”

  Aldo set out one of his USB battery packs and a roll of duct tape with a stern look. It didn’t fit easily on his childish face, but somewhere around the time he’d figured out how to get us all that free, life-saving electronic scrap, he’d earned the right to wear it now and then. “You’re a member of the Network. You don’t have to sound so surprised.”