Sidekicked

by John David Anderson

  “Hey there. You’ve reached Jim Rediford. Unless this is an emergency, I don’t want to talk to you. If it is an emergency, hang up and dial 911.”

  Jim Rediford.

  Red.

  I hang up, but I don’t dial 911. This isn’t that kind of emergency.

  I look at the display, at the phone number that’s listed there. Then quickly use my pen to write it on the back of my hand. My palm is way too sweaty, and it smears a little.

  So Mr. Masters did lie to me. But why? To protect me? Or to protect someone else? Maybe to protect himself.

  I bend down to check the desk drawers when I hear a familiar voice. It’s Ms. Canfield, my history teacher from last year. It’s coming from right outside the teachers’ lounge. “Aren’t you supposed to be teaching this period?” she asks. I hear the door open. Then I hear another voice.

  I freeze.

  “Eighth grade has that convocation, remember?” Mr. Masters says. “Thought I’d hit the coffeepot early.”

  You’ve got to be kidding me.

  I hear Mr. Masters’s feet shuffle across the floor above me. I don’t know his step as well as Jenna’s, but I can still pick it out of a crowd. I think about the vending machine and my blood runs cold. It’s short one bag of pork rinds. And if anyone would notice that, it’s Mr. Masters.

  I’ve got to get out of here, or at least hide. Maybe I can somehow sneak past him once he gets downstairs. If he finds me, he’ll think I’m spying on him, which is technically true, I guess—but he’ll also think that I’m up to something no good, which is only partly technically true.

  As I’m backing up, I bump something from the corner of the desk. Another folder, one I somehow missed before. It spills out all over the floor, and I hiss something my mother begged me not to and bend down to gather the contents.

  Something catches my eye. A blueprint for a hideout of some kind, several rooms, including a garage, a hanger, a boat dock. There are symbols scrawled in the margins indicating entryways and secret passages. Arrows mark the presence of video cameras and infrared beams. There are notes scribbled at the top about possible ways to bypass security. For a moment I think I must be looking at the Dealer’s secret lair. It’s the only thing that makes sense.

  I turn over the folder and look at the label.

  THE FOX.

  “What the heck?”

  My mind races. Why would Mr. Masters have a layout of the Fox’s den? Was this some other trap that the Fox was setting, and she needed Mr. Masters’s help? Or was there something else going on? And why are all the security measures circled?

  A half hour ago I was sitting in math class, thinking that I was in it up to my neck. Now I realize I’m in way over my head.

  There is another sound. Mr. Masters taking a few more steps. I imagine him up there. Staring at the vending machine. Staring at the floor. Fingering the watch in his pocket. Wondering if he should take a minute. If he used the watch, I wouldn’t know it until he was already down here, staring into my face. I’d be caught, crouching on the floor of his office with the Fox’s folder in my lap.

  I try to calm down. I’m overreacting. This is Mr. Masters. He might be hiding things from us, but that’s the nature of the job. It doesn’t mean he isn’t on our side.

  Does it?

  I hear a coin drop, clink-clanking through the inner maze of the vending machine. Then another. And another. I have to move, to get out of here, but I can’t seem to make my legs work.

  Then I hear the springs working, and something heavy falls to the bottom of the machine. The rusted hinge of the door swinging open.

  The vending machine door. Not the secret entrance to the basement.

  The footsteps come again, moving away. Another door opens and then clicks closed.

  He’s gone.

  I close my eyes and concentrate. Sifting through the noise, filtering through the voices in the hall, everything, trying to make sure the lounge is really empty. I think about all those hours Mr. Masters made me sit in my room and listen through the ceiling, up through the floors, targeting people and rooms and conversations, weeding through one after another. “What’s Mrs. Cavendish saying?” “Who’s in the boys’ bathroom?” “What are the lunch ladies talking about today?” I always thought it was kind of a waste of time. Who knew I would one day use it to hide from him? After another minute, I decide it’s safe. Now’s my chance.

  I put the folder back together, then make sure everything is still just the same as when I found it before slipping back through the office door and up the stairs. The room is empty. So is the coffeepot.

  There are still two bags of pork rinds left.

  I look at the clock in the hall. This one, at least, is working. The last period is almost over. I head down the hall to the boys’ bathroom, staring at the phone number written on my hand, committing it to memory. I scrub it off in the sink, then I check all the stalls to make sure they are empty.

  Most Supers have top-secret lairs that they operate out of, complete with forensics labs and sophisticated computer systems and weapons testing facilities.

  I’ve got the second stall from the right. I’m sitting on the john with my cell phone in my hand, trying to figure out what to say. This Jim Rediford, whoever he is, was clearly not interested in talking to anyone, not even Mr. Masters. Why would he possibly want to talk to me? Even if he knows where the Titan is, what can I say that will possibly convince him to tell me?

  Then again, what do I have to lose?

  It rings four times again. “Hey there. You’ve reached Jim Rediford. Unless this is an emergency, I don’t want to talk to you. If it is an emergency, hang up and dial 911.”

  I clear my throat. “Hi, hey, there . . . Mr. Rediford. This is . . . um . . . Drew, I mean Andrew . . . um . . . Bean. You probably don’t know me, and I really don’t know you, but we both know somebody . . . at least I think you know him, and, see, I was wondering . . .”

  There is another long beep, and the line cuts off.

  I curse under my breath and dial again.

  “Hey there. You’ve reached Jim Rediford. Unless this is an emergency, I don’t want to talk to you. If it is an emergency, hang up and dial 911.”

  “Right. Drew . . . Andrew, again. Bean. Sorry, the last message got cut off. What I wanted to say was that I think maybe you and I know someone who might be in trouble, and even though you’re probably not supposed to know this, I feel like I should tell you that this guy—”

  I’m cut off again.

  “Hey there. You’ve reached Jim Rediford. Unless this is an emergency, I don’t want to talk to you. If it is an emergency, hang up and dial 911.”

  “Right. So, here goes. This is Drew. I need to talk to George. That’s the guy. It’s really important. If he’s there, call me back. If you have no idea who I am or what I’m talking about, then just ignore this message. Um. . . Thanks. I really . . .” Beep.

  I sit there on the toilet, elbows on my knees, staring at the phone. This is stupid. This bathroom stinks. There’s no way this phone is going to ring. Then I realize I didn’t even bother to leave my number. Jim Redford doesn’t even know how to contact me. I go to press redial.

  And then my finger lights up like E.T.’s.

  25

  RED

  By the time the bell rings I’m already standing by Jenna’s locker. I smell her before I see her, the purple passion still a dead giveaway. When she sees me, her face darkens for a moment, almost as if she can sense what I’ve been up to.

  “I think I know where the Titan is,” I whisper as she jerks her locker open. She has a mirror magnetized to the inside, and I look to see I’ve grown a brand-new zit nestled right above my eyebrow. Marvelous.

  Jenna bites her lip and studies me. “The Titan? How? You told me he disappeared. That you didn’t know where to find him.”

  I point to my fingernail. Then I tell her about the message I got while sitting in the boys’ bathroom, projected in green light against
the back of the stall door, underneath MICHELLE M. SUCKS and PRINCIPAL BUCHANAN SUCKS MORE. Jenna knows what it means. Communications go both ways. A click of my fingernail activates the Titan’s ring, but he can use that same ring to send messages to me.

  This was the first one I’d ever gotten.

  It gave me an address and simple directions.

  Have something for you, it said. Come alone.

  “That’s what it said? ‘Come alone’?”

  I nod.

  “And now you’re asking me to join you?”

  “I’m not very good at following directions,” I tell her.

  “Yeah, I guess not,” she says. She grabs her jacket and slams the door shut.

  “So does that mean you’re not coming?” I ask her.

  “I’m not good at following them either,” she says, then grabs me by the elbow and pulls me down the hall and out the door.

  It’s a five-minute walk to the nearest city bus stop, and then another five minutes for us to plan the route. The address that I copied onto a slip of paper is about thirty blocks away, right in the middle of one of the oldest parts of town, full of abandoned apartment buildings and boarded-up restaurants that have been out of business for years. It’s just the kind of place a criminal might go to lay low.

  Or anyone, for that matter.

  On the bus ride over, I tell Jenna everything. Or almost everything, at least. About sneaking into Mr. Masters’s office. About the news clippings and the letter in the Titan’s folder. And the files of all the other Supers. Then I tell her about the plans for the Fox’s lair. She frowns and turns to look out the window.

  “You don’t know of anything going on between Mr. Masters and the Fox, do you?” I whisper. The bus is mostly empty, but it doesn’t hurt to be cautious.

  Jenna shakes her head. “She doesn’t tell me everything, Drew.”

  “Did she tell you about last Saturday? Did she tell you it was a trap? Did she know the Jacks were coming?”

  “She told me to keep an eye out. Just in case.”

  “And she told you to invite us?”

  “She told me to bring a guest,” Jenna says. “I brought two, just in case.”

  I know she’s still holding something back. But the bus stops before I can press her on it.

  “But if you could only bring one,” I say, but she’s already in the aisle, leaving me behind.

  I follow her down the aisle and off the bus and we study the street signs together, walking two blocks to the address in my hand.

  “This place is a dump,” she says.

  I can’t disagree. Thirty-seven fifty-six East Fifty-fourth is an ancient apartment building. Its red brick is cracked, and a third of its black shingles are ripped or missing. The grass is cut short, and the paint on the trim is peeling through all three layers, exposing the wood at its core. One block down is what appears to be a rundown park with rusted swings. Still, this is the address. I have something for you. The row of mailboxes in the hall shows five vacancies and only one occupant.

  J. Rediford.

  I head for the stairs when Jenna’s hand stops me.

  “It could be a trap, you know,” she says.

  “Why do you think I brought you?” I tell her.

  The door to the second-story apartment only tells us it is apartment 2–B. No gold R or “Lord Bless Our Home.” No doormat that says SUPERHEROES WELCOME. No fancy fingertip-scanning entry device. Just a brass knocker, which I hit three times. Through the door I can hear the shuffle of feet. Then an old man’s voice that tells us to go the hell away.

  I look at Jenna. She shrugs.

  “My name is Andrew Bean,” I say. “I called earlier and left a message.”

  There is a pause. “You said you had something for me,” I add, then wait again, listening close. I can hear breathing on the other side of the door. Jenna points to her foot as if offering to kick it, but then it opens a crack and a man with more hair in his ears than on his head peers through.

  He is wearing thick glasses that make his eyes look luminous and large, and his shaggy eyebrows are pressed close together, almost connected. He is dressed in an old gray turtlenecck sweater and baggy brown pants that barely reach his argyle socks. His feet are tucked into slippers made to look like frogs. One of the frogs’ eyes is missing. The guy’s face looks familiar to me, but I can’t place it.

  He looks at me, then at Jenna, then back at me.

  “Andrew Bean?”

  I nod twice. His eyes narrow, and he presses his face farther through the crack in the door. He looks down the hall, down the stairs, then back at me. “Prove it,” he says.

  I guess I should have expected this. I reach for my back pocket, for my wallet that has my school ID in it.

  “I don’t need to see a picture of you. I can see you standin’ right there. I said, ‘prove it.’”

  Then I realize what he’s asking.

  I close my eyes and take a whiff. My heart skips.

  He’s here. The Titan is here. In the back room. I can smell him. Which means this crotchety old man, whoever he is, is an ally or at least someone the Titan trusts.

  “Come on, son, show me what you’ve got,” the old man says.

  I take another whiff. “All right. You had a bagel with cream cheese for breakfast, followed by a glass of iced tea. You use lemon-scented soap when you wash your dishes and you’ve got a fondness for pickles. Also you have an irregular heartbeat and a little indigestion this afternoon.”

  The old man looks down at his stomach, then grunts.

  “That’s all you’ve got?” he says.

  I smile. “And one more thing. There’s a man sleeping in your back bedroom. His name is George Weiss, though you and I know him better as somebody else.”

  Jim Rediford shakes his head. Then he nods at Jenna. “And who’s she?”

  “She’s with me,” I say. “She’s . . . another friend.”

  Jenna and the old man contemplate each other. If he’s the least bit intimidated by her, he doesn’t show it.

  “You were told to come alone,” he says at last. “You don’t listen very well.”

  “Yeah, I get that a lot,” I say. For a moment I think he’s not going to let us in and I’ll have to let Jenna have her way with the door. Then Jim Rediford says, “Hrumph,” and steps aside.

  “Welcome,” he says, “to my secret lair.”

  It isn’t much to look at. A two-bedroom apartment, neat but sparsely decorated. An old, boxy television sits silent in one corner of a living room. A bookshelf holds several torn mystery novels and a couple of bent-boxed board games: battleship and backgammon—the kind only playable by two. The sink is full of coffee mugs. A small circular table sits in the corner. There are no posters of superheroes on the wall.

  As Jenna and I enter, Red closes and locks the door behind us. Force of habit.

  “You’re a little taller than I thought you’d be,” he says. “From how George described you, I thought maybe you were a midget.”

  I’m not sure what to say to that, so instead I turn and look down the hall to the last door on the right. I can hear the Titan breathing, slowly and steadily. “He sent me a message,” I say. “Said he had something for me.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see Jim Rediford shake his head. “He didn’t send you that message,” he says. “I did.”

  I turn back around to get a good look at the old man, trying to gauge just how much he knows. About the Titan, about me, about what’s going on.

  Jim Rediford points to the empty chairs at the table. I sit, but Jenna starts pacing, moving through the living room as if making a mental picture of the place. Finally she stops and hovers over a glass case with an antique-looking pistol inside. The old man watches her through his thick glasses.

  “It was my granddaddy’s,” Red says, taking a seat across from me. “Smith and Wesson, 1902, one of the first hand ejector models they ever produced, before John Browning came along and put revolvers outa style
. Never fired it myself. Darned thing blew up in Granddaddy’s face and took two of his fingers with it. It’s just for lookin’ at now.”

  “You know a lot about guns too,” Jenna says, and the old man gets a funny look on his face.

  And then it hits me: where I’ve seen him before. How Mr. Masters knew him. How he knew how to send me a message. Why he called this ramshackle hole in the wall his secret headquarters.

  And why, of all the people in the world, it was him the Titan trusted.

  I saw his face just this afternoon, in fact, on the front page of a six-year-old newspaper.

  “Kid Caliber,” I whisper. Behind me, I hear Jenna’s heart race for a moment, then calm again.

  The old man rubs the stubble of his chin. “Maybe once,” he says. “I’m just Red now. Kid Caliber’s been gone awhile, and he ain’t comin’ back.” The man sitting across from me, with his wisps of hair and his sagging cheeks, looks twenty years older than the picture in the paper, not six.

  “But you are him,” I say. “I mean, you were.”

  Red points to the glasses on his face. “Son, Kid Caliber was the sharpest shot with any firearm this side of the Milky Way. He could hit the backside of a bumblebee from forty yards out in the middle of a hailstorm. He was a tried-and-true member of the Legion of Justice and a menace to villains everywhere. That ain’t me.” He points to the thick Coke-bottle bottoms pinching his nose. “I’m ’fraid I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with a bazooka if I was sittin’ right beside it.”

  Jenna comes and takes the chair opposite me, both of us flanking the former Super, whose right hand shakes as he lifts his cup of coffee.

  “How have you managed to stay hidden all this time? Everyone thought you had vanished,” she says.

  “Or died,” I add.

  Red laughs. “Not dead. Not yet, anyway. And it’s easy to stay hidden when nobody’s looking for ya.”

  “We found you,” Jenna says.

  “Only because I wanted you to,” the former Super and member of the Legion of Justice says. “Or wanted him to, at least,” he says, pointing a crooked thumb at me. “Just because the TV’s broke don’t mean I don’t know what’s going on. I know why you called. And what you’re hopin’ to do by showin’ up here. But I also know it’s not gonna work. Which is what I wanted to tell you.”