The Adjusters

by Taylor, Andrew

  “Don’t be smart, son.”

  “Sorry, sir,” Henry replied, bringing it down a little. Have to play him just right. He moved forward, pulling the door shut behind him.

  “Been smoking in there?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Takin’ drugs?”

  “No!”

  “Someone else in there?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “You don’t want to lie to me.” Henry could almost feel the cop’s eyes boring into his skull from behind those mirror shades.

  “No one,” Henry said and immediately regretted it…

  The corners of the cop’s mouth twitched and he moved forward swiftly, kicking the door open with his boot. Before Henry could protest, the trooper grabbed a little torch from his belt and started shining it around the darkened toilet.

  “Well now, what’s this?” the trooper said as the beam fell on the girl cowering in the corner. There was a grim satisfaction in his tone now he’d proved he’d been lied to.

  “Hey, she’s sick,” protested Henry, stepping forward.

  The cop pointed a finger in his face without even looking round. “Two paces back right now or I will put you on your ass.”

  There was something so hard in the trooper’s voice that Henry found himself stepping back immediately. The man might be a small-town cop, but Henry didn’t doubt he could knock him down with a flick of his little finger.

  “Get yourself out here,” the trooper commanded, aiming the torch beam right in the girl’s face. When she didn’t move, he added, “Don’t make me come for you.”

  Ever so slowly, the girl walked towards the door, her head bowed. When she got within a metre, the trooper reached out and grabbed her arm, as if worried she’d try to bolt past him. Without another word, he began marching his prisoner across the yard towards the gas station.

  “Where are you taking her?” Henry demanded, following after them. “What’s she done wrong?”

  “Stay out of this,” the trooper snarled without looking back. “Or I’ll have to take you in too.”

  They rounded the side of the building and the cop headed straight for his cruiser, pulling open the rear door with his free hand. By this time, Jennifer Ward was out of the Toyota and walking towards them. Henry ran over to her.

  “She’s in trouble,” he said, indicating the girl as she meekly got into the back of the patrol car. Since the cop had banged on the toilet door, all the fight seemed to have drained from her. “We have to help!”

  Henry’s mother gave him a hand motion that said cool down, before turning her attention to the trooper. “Excuse me, officer. Is there a problem here?”

  Trooper Dan slammed the back door of the cruiser shut and replied, “No problem, ma’am. Nothing for you to concern yourself over.”

  “That girl asked for our help,” Henry persisted. “She’s scared.”

  “Please,” Jennifer Ward said to the cop, “what’s going on here?”

  “She’s a runaway,” said Trooper Dan, the bored tone in his voice making it clear he didn’t have to tell them anything at all. “Danger to herself and others. I’ve been chasing her all over these woods for the last two days. Now I can take her back to her family. No thanks to some people…” He directed his gaze towards Henry.

  Henry glanced at the girl in the back, wishing that she would try to get out of the cruiser or something, but she merely stared at her lap. He turned towards his mother. “She was hiding out back.” Then added in a whisper, “She’s terrified of this guy.”

  Unexpectedly, the trooper reached up and whipped off his sunglasses, revealing a pair of piercing, blue eyes. He was an incredibly handsome man, like some kind of model or old-time film star, but Henry thought he’d seemed more human before he removed the shades. His blue eyes were now locked on Jennifer Ward. They had all the warmth of an iceberg.

  “I asked your son a question pertaining to this troubled young lady,” he said, “and he lied to me. That’s a no-no in my book. Interferin’ in a police investigation, we call it.” He said the word police with heavy emphasis on the first syllable: poh-leece.

  Henry began to protest, but Jennifer Ward placed her hand on his shoulder. “Henry, it’s okay. She’s going back to her family.”

  “Mom…”

  “Henry.” Her tone left Henry in no doubt that the discussion was at an end.

  “Are we finished here?” asked the trooper.

  Jennifer Ward looked at him, annoyance flashing in her eyes for the first time. “I’m sorry, officer. Is answering a few questions too much trouble for you?”

  Trooper Dan’s blank expression didn’t waver. “You’ve got a full load there, ma’am,” he said, staring at the boxes piled in the back of the Toyota. “Are you moving to Newton County?”

  “Yes,” Jennifer said, obviously a little taken aback by his change of tack.

  “Well, you’ll find that around here, people follow the rules. And they teach their kids respect for authority.” Oh-thor-rit-taay.

  “Now, what is that supposed to mean…?”

  But Trooper Dan was already climbing into the front of the cruiser. The door slammed and the engine roared into life. The cruiser peeled away, sending up a cloud of dust from the forecourt floor. The last thing Henry saw of the girl was her face looking at him through the back window of the car. She mouthed something, but he couldn’t make out what it was.

  Barely controlling her rage, Jennifer Ward said, “Well I never! That was one rude son of a—”

  The shop bell rang as the white-haired attendant stuck his head out. “That’ll be forty-seven dollars.”

  Jennifer took a deep, calming breath. “Pay him and let’s get out of here, Henry.”

  As she returned to the car, Henry passed the fifty to the attendant, telling him to keep the change. It was only then he realized what the girl had mouthed to him as the cruiser sped away.

  A single word.

  Run.

  “What were you thinking, lying to a cop?” Jennifer was saying five minutes later as the Toyota sped north once more. “I mean, haven’t we discussed this enough?”

  Henry sighed and leaned back against the headrest. Since leaving the gas station he’d been getting the third degree, most of it centred on the fact he’d tried to conceal the presence of the girl from Trooper Dan. “Yes, Mom. We have been through this enough.”

  “You’re very lucky not to be in the back of that patrol car as well,” Jennifer continued as the Toyota negotiated another tight turn through the forest. The road had become narrower since they’d left the gas station.

  “She needed help!”

  “And that is what that cop was giving her.”

  Henry gave her an incredulous look. “Did he look helpful?”

  Jennifer sighed, but didn’t argue. “There was something weird about that guy.”

  “Ah-ha! I knew you felt it too!”

  “But that’s just county policing… They’re obviously a little bit…rough and ready.”

  “A little bit?”

  “Okay, a lot,” Jennifer admitted. “All the more reason not to rile him up. I thought that getting out of the city would put an end to all this. I can’t be worrying about you getting into trouble with the police all the time…”

  Henry groaned. Not this again. “Mom! I got picked up once.”

  “And you got a reputation…”

  “Oh, please…”

  “A name for yourself at your school! Everyone knew!”

  Henry shook his head and looked out of the window at the trees passing by. Six months before he’d been caught spray-painting a fence down by the railway and his mom just wouldn’t let it drop…

  He’d always been artistic and it had actually been Mom who had encouraged him to join the arts club at school. But that’s where he’d met Skiv and Nas, two kids from his year whose idea of art wasn’t exactly watercolours on canvas. Henry was soon accompanying them on their nocturnal trips to the deserted building sites an
d train yards of their neighbourhood, where they released their artistic impulses with spray cans and markers on any available piece of wall.

  The funny thing was, Henry found that he was a natural – much better with a can than his friends, who could only manage the most basic designs. Their work was little more than tagging, crude symbols depicting their names – something that held no interest for Henry. He was too busy bringing to life characters from his imagination – monsters, robots, dragons, ninjas. In his spare time he was reading about the graffiti art scene and how some artists used stencils and had their work exhibited in galleries…

  Then the red and blue lights of a cop car had come out of nowhere one night. Skiv and Nas melted into the darkness, leaving Henry to take the blame. When they sat him down in the interrogation room he’d naïvely tried to explain that what he was doing was art… That he only inked on bare walls no one was looking at anyway… But the cops didn’t share his viewpoint. The others had been tagging all over the area, including bus stops, shopfronts and doorways, and the officer who interviewed him seemed convinced that Henry was the culprit. When he protested that he wasn’t a tagger, the cop in charge had leaned into his face and demanded names. Who had been scrawling their symbols all over his beat?

  Henry took the blame.

  It was his first offence, so he was let off with a warning: if he was caught inking again, however, or even in possession of spray cans, it would mean prosecution. That wasn’t the worst thing, however. The worst thing was the hurt in his mom’s eyes as she collected him from the station. And then the ongoing lack of trust. He wasn’t allowed out in the evenings after that. If he was going anywhere she’d double-check on him. Of course, if Henry had wanted to carry on his nocturnal activities, there was nothing she could have done to stop him – he was almost fifteen, not a kid any more, after all. But Henry wasn’t like that. He didn’t want to hurt or embarrass her, although he wished she could understand that. She seemed to regard what had happened as some kind of massive failing on her part…

  “I hoped that coming out here would get us away from trouble, I really did,” Jennifer continued as the Toyota took another turn way too fast. Whenever she drove angry she was heavy on the gas. “But trouble seems to follow us around.”

  Henry sighed. Sometimes she could be hyper melodramatic. “Do you remember when you asked me to tell you if you were being a crazy ubermom? Well, this is one of those times.”

  Jennifer Ward looked as if she was going to carry on arguing, but then without warning let out one of her short, barking laughs and the tension broke.

  “Okay, okay,” she said grudgingly. “I guess we’ve got better things to think about today.”

  Henry looked at her and smiled with more than a little relief. “Who do you think she was?” he asked after a moment. “The girl, I mean.”

  Jennifer shrugged. “Maybe an escapee from a lunatic asylum. A psychotic ex-cheerleader looking for young men to ensnare…”

  Henry groaned.

  “You were lucky that trooper came along when he did, kiddo. I might never have seen you again. She was pretty good-looking, huh?”

  “Mom!”

  “I’m just saying that a nice-looking young man like you should have a girlfriend. Perhaps in Newton…”

  Henry pretended to bang his head against the dash. “Can we go back to giving me a hard time about the cop, please?”

  They reached the outskirts of Newton less than ten minutes later. The tall fir trees thinned out and they crossed a bridge over a fast-flowing river, before coming to a pristine sign that read Newton – where it’s nice to be nice!

  “Well, this is it,” Jennifer said as they passed.

  “Yeah,” Henry said unenthusiastically.

  His mother reached across and put a hand on his shoulder. “Chin up, Henry. It’s going to be okay. Wait till you see where we’ll be living. You’re going to go crazy.”

  “Uh-huh.” She’d been telling him that for the last few weeks, but he was yet to be convinced. He’d seen the Malcorp induction brochure for new employees and the pictures of the worker’s complex. It looked like toy town.

  Newton itself was small – with a population of only a couple of thousand people. Practically every Malcorp employee lived within the facility, while the residents of the town worked mainly in the service industries, the shops and restaurants that catered to their needs.

  “Would you look at this place?” Jennifer said as the Toyota pulled along a main street lined with tiny shops that had names like Olde Curiosity Shoppe, Full of Beans and Newton Style. Everything looked newly painted, like it had been created just yesterday, although the style was that of small-town America from fifty years ago. A Disneyland version of real life.

  “Quaint,” Henry said. He didn’t mean it as a compliment. People walked along the row of shopfronts, taking their time browsing in the sun.

  “This place is so clean!” Jennifer exclaimed. “Not a bit of graf— I mean, I literally have not seen a speck of litter since we drove in here.”

  “That’s amazing, Mom.”

  “Oh, stop being such a grouch. Look, there’s a cinema!”

  They passed a single screen theatre. The letters above the door read BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND: HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 3.

  “It just gets better and better,” Henry said.

  They reached the end of the high street and, after passing a few more houses with immaculately kept front gardens, took a new road leading out of town. After about a kilometre they came to a high brick wall that stretched into the woods in either direction. Double iron gates next to a sign that read Malcorp Research and Development Complex blocked the way ahead. As they pulled up, a uniformed guard appeared from a hut by the gates.

  “Let’s hope this guy is as friendly as everyone else we’ve met so far,” Henry muttered.

  “Shut up,” Jennifer hissed as she lowered her window.

  “Good afternoon,” the guard said, leaning in. He was a chubby guy, spilling out of his uniform. A name badge on his chest read Hank.

  “Hi,” Jennifer said. “Oh, I’ve got a letter… They told me I’d need it to get past the gates…” She reached across and started rummaging in the glove compartment.

  “It’s okay, Mrs. Ward,” Hank said pleasantly. “We’re expecting you. Just drive on through and park in the visitors’ area. Mr. Mallory will be right along to give you the tour.”

  “Great… Hold on. The owner of the company is going to meet us?”

  Hank grinned. “Mr. Mallory likes to welcome all new employees in person.” With that, he stepped back and touched a remote on his belt. The iron gates swung inwards and Jennifer drove through.

  “Mr. Mallory, jeez!” she said, checking out her hair in the mirror as she swung the Toyota into one of the parking bays marked VISITOR. “If I’d known the big boss was going to meet us…”

  “Calm down, Mom,” Henry said. “You’ll be fine.”

  They emerged from the car into the sunlight. The temperature had dropped, perhaps because the facility was located on one of the highest points in the area. Now the afternoon was pleasant, a different world from the intense heat and dust of the gas station. They were standing in a small parking area located on the edge of the Malcorp grounds. Manicured lawns and lines of trees stretched away to the north, while a high wall behind them appeared to encircle the whole compound. Single storey buildings stood here and there among the trees, linked by little roads and pathways.

  “Hmmm,” Jennifer said appreciatively. “Good to be out of that car.”

  “Look,” Henry said as a vehicle approached along the nearest road. It was a four-seater electric car just a little bigger than a golf buggy, with large, spherical wheels. A grey-haired man with a neatly trimmed moustache sat in the driver’s seat.

  “Hello there!” he called as he pulled the buggy up beside them.

  He leaped out with the energy of a much younger man, revealing himself to be tall and broad shouldered beneath his
tailored suit. There was something boyish in his manner. Henry imagined that he’d look right at home in a scoutmaster’s uniform.

  “Nice to see you again, Jennifer,” he said, extending a hand for her to shake. “And you must be Henry. My name’s John Mallory and I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “Great,” Henry said uncertainly as he shook Mallory’s hand. For a brief second the fingers closed around his in a vice-like grip. The old guy must work out, he thought.

  “Well, let me give you the five-dollar tour,” Mallory said, indicating the buggy. “Just leave the keys in your car. I’ll have someone drive it round to your unit.” Jennifer looked unsure about this and Mallory laughed. “Don’t worry, nothing will go missing. This isn’t the city. Is that all your stuff?”

  “The rest is being shipped in the week.”

  “Of course.” Mallory turned his attention to Henry. “Well you look almost old enough to drive. Would you mind?”

  “Sure.”

  Henry climbed behind the wheel while his mom and Mallory got in the back. The buggy was a simple automatic with stop and go levers on the side of the wheel.

  “U-turn, driver,” Mallory said, leaning back and smiling at Jennifer. “Don’t spare the horses. We’ll take a look at where you’ll be living first.”

  Henry sent the buggy in a wide turn and Mallory directed him back up the road towards the nearest set of buildings. Despite himself, he was pleased that Mallory had asked him to drive the vehicle. Perhaps the tour wouldn’t be so bad after all.

  “This facility was built less than a decade ago, as I’m sure you know,” Mallory said. They passed a similar buggy going in the other direction. Two guys in pristine lab coats waved and smiled. “In those days Newton was a town of less than five hundred residents, and slowly dying like so many small towns this far north. Over the years the jobs moved abroad and the people moved to the cities. Since we came the population has increased fourfold, new businesses have opened and we’ve invested over a million dollars in building works.” He rattled this off like it was a speech that he’d given many times before. “We like to give back to the local community.”