“Where do you live?”
Amy started to groan in frustration, but turned the sound into a giggle.
“Frankie Yamagashi’s house right there,” she said. “I’m his cousin.”
The deputy looked her up and down for a moment. At last he nodded.
“All right,” he said. “Don’t stay out here too long, and be careful when you cross the road.”
“I promise!”
The deputy got back in his pickup and pulled out with a pop of gravel. Amy waited until his brake lights disappeared around the bend, then stuffed everything into her knapsack and scampered down the rocks. She hid behind a tree until a quiet gap appeared in the traffic, and then dashed across the road to a clump of cinnamon-barked manzanita bushes. Covering her face from the sharp branches, Amy crawled through the shrubbery until she found a dark space next to the redwood fence safe from passing headlights.
She relaxed among the tea leaf and pine smell of the manzanita, and went over her options. The deputy would be back, and he’d forced Amy to give up Frankie’s name. She hoped he wasn’t good police; the kind who’d knock on doors and scope out her story. If a one-of-a-kind game console disappeared from the Yamagashi house, that little blonde Girl Scout with the binoculars would be front and center for any questions.
Amy sighed. This is what happened when you did anything at the last minute. If she walked away, Mary Katherine would break her nose. If she got caught, she could be sent to a group home or another foster family. If she snatched the gold console and gave it to M.K., she’d just be another slave to the giant teenager, who’d threaten to tell the cops.
Ideally she’d have time to case the house, find the location of the console, and maybe leave another gold-painted SNES as a decoy. She’d make friends with this kid Frankie, find out the family travel patterns, and maybe wait for a weekend or a vacation.
But sometimes you had to suck it up and put on the big girl panties, and it looked like this was one of those “sometimes.” Amy thought she could handle any blackmail Mary Katherine threw her way. She might even have time to double-cross her or steal the console back before Frankie noticed it was missing.
Amy stuck her hands into the cop gloves and felt the bottom of the redwood fence for a loose board or gap. Twenty feet along the weather-beaten fence she found a depression in the earth and a wobbly board, probably where that orange cat slipped through. Amy checked but it was too narrow to squeeze through even for her slender body.
She stuffed the Brownie sash into her knapsack and pulled a pair of black jeans over her legs, then tied her blonde hair into a ponytail, pinned it up with a barrette, and covered it with the brown beret.
Amy stood up carefully in the thick shrubbery, listening after every snap of a twig for a sudden bark or a footstep. She stretched her arms, hopped up, and felt barbed wire at the top of the tall redwood fence. The sharp prongs didn’t penetrate her leather gloves, luckily. Amy folded the wool blanket along its length about six times, and then jumped up with her arms extended to lay it over the top of the fence. She still hadn’t heard anything suspicious from inside, so leapt up and pulled herself over the top, using the layers of the blanket as protection against the barbed wire.
The slim teenager dropped behind a lilac bush. She pulled her blanket off the fence and squatted in the dark, watching and waiting.
At the bottom of a slope covered in pine trees, twilight framed the house against a gray ocean. The deep bass and rumble of waves crashing on the rocks was much louder than out on the street, and the moist earth beneath Amy’s feet seemed to vibrate with each regular, unending boom. A brick path wound through the trees, and the air was full of the smell of flowers and pine needles. Apart from the glow of walkway lights and a spotlight at the main door, the majestic house lay dark and silent.
Amy scanned the entire area with her binoculars. A security camera swiveled maliciously above the double red doors of the main entrance. Amy spotted other cameras at the corners of the house.
After ten minutes, nothing had changed. Amy searched the ground around her feet, and then tossed a rock at the main entrance. The pebble cracked on the sidewalk and bounced away. Amy hit the red door on her third try. Still no response. She crept through the trees and threw a handful of tiny stones at the closest window, one after the other. Nothing.
Amy waited in the shadow of a big cedar and thought over the problem. The security cameras at each side of the house panned back and forth, but as they swept away from Amy and toward the ocean, created a blind spot around the wooden skeleton of the new construction. Another camera should have covered that area, and must have been removed while the work was going on. Amy waited until the cameras rotated back to the sea, then sprinted across the garden and into the building site.
She crouched with her back to a concrete wall waiting for a yell or footsteps, but heard only the creak of pine branches lifting in the breeze and the rumble of the ocean.
Bare plywood covered the floor of the addition, dotted with scraps of wood and a thin blanket of sawdust. The woody, moist smell of fresh-cut lumber tickled Amy’s nose, and above her head, the dark rafters were framed against a purple sky.
Amy felt around the wall and touched the hinges of a door. The knob turned freely but the door wouldn’t budge, even with Amy’s shoulder and all her weight against it. Something had jammed it in place, intentionally or otherwise. There was no sign of a keyhole and the wooden door sounded hollow against a faint knock of Amy’s knuckles, so she guessed it was jammed for security.
A pigtail was always useful on jobs because it was basically a tiny crowbar. Amy took one from her knapsack and slid the flat end beneath the half-inch gap in the bottom of the door and the kicker plate. The pigtail knocked against something a few inches from the door jamb. Amy started from the other side and worked the pigtail back and forth until the thing popped away and the door swung freely. She pushed the door and inside on the linoleum floor lay a rough-cut wedge of wood––a cheap doorstop. Amy crept inside, shut the door, and put the wedge back in place.
Boxes of ceramic tile and construction tools were stacked around the dark room, and it was full of the chalky smell of drywall. Vertical smears of spackle marked the unpainted walls. Amy moved through the room at a crouch and avoided the windows crossed with blue painter’s tape.
A clear plastic curtain blocked passage into the main house. Nearby, a sign in flowery letters proclaimed, “Please Wear Shoe Covers,” and pointed to a wicker basket.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Amy murmured.
She took a pair of the white cotton sheaths from the basket and slipped them over her shoes. Amy slowly pushed through the plastic and gasped in shock.
She’d been through a mansion or two in the last few years, but nothing like this. Huge paintings of cowboys and Western landscapes covered the walls, and the ceiling glowed from hidden lights at the cornices. The floor was waxed hardwood, and overstuffed leather furniture waited around the room on fluffy rugs. Across the room and to the left were dark wooden doors and a mahogany staircase. To the right lay the foyer and the red doors of the main entrance.
Nothing but the regular tick of a clock broke the silence, not even the high-pitched whine of a television. In Amy’s experience, the only people left in a dark house would either be sleeping or watching television.
Amy scanned the room for cameras, saw none, and then crept through the rooms in the first floor. A house like this probably had a playroom for video games, foosball, pool––a space for kids to hang out. She could have asked Calcetti where the gold SNES was, but that was like yelling “I WANT TO STEAL IT” over the public broadcast system.
Rich places like this were more like a museum or a house on another planet. They could afford a maid, a good one who actually cleaned things. The rooms smelled of lavender and clean metal and leather, not like the places that normal people lived. Normal houses smelled like the people and things inside them, which meant pizza, ripe cantaloupe, cat urine, and bleach.
Amy found a kitchen, dining room, library, exercise room, office, sunroom, conservatory, garage, and several bathrooms on the first floor, but no playroom and no gold Super Nintendo.
She worked her way carefully up mahogany steps to the second floor and poked her head into luxuriously appointed bedrooms filled with more paintings and huge beds covered in puffy down comforters.
The fourth door was ajar. Amy listened for a moment, then pushed it open a bit with her gloved finger. Through the crack she saw a bed covered with a rumpled Spiderman blanket and a Dumb & Dumber movie poster on the wall.
“Bingo,” she said, and crept inside.
G.I. Joes and a spray of tiny plastic weapons covered the red carpet as if Little Big Horn had broken out at the Hasbro factory. Posters of Schwarzenegger and the Lethal Weapon series covered the walls. A bookshelf was loaded down with a battalion of Transformers in the midst of robotic conflict; some hanging by white string, plastic guns extended, and others sprawled in the agony of defeat. The room was filled with the disgusting stench of a teenage boy: Cool Ranch Doritos, model glue, and body odor.
A neon blue leather sofa stood at the foot of the bed and faced a huge, thirty-two inch television in a black entertainment center. Purple and lilac Super Nintendo controllers lay on the carpet in a tangle of wires. Amy followed the trail of cords to a glass cabinet beside the television, where a golden, blocky treasure reflected the crimson shine from her flashlight.
“Double Bingo!”
Amy opened the glass door. She unplugged the power, video, and all four controllers from the gleaming Super Nintendo, and then pulled it off the shelf.
“Yowza,” she whispered, and set the console on the carpet.
It weighed a ton and Amy was glad she had the cop gloves to protect her fingers. She wondered if the thing would rip through the bottom of her knapsack. The best thing would be to hide it inside the knapsack and carry everything in her arms. It wouldn’t be easy, but nothing about today had been easy.
A swish came from outside the room and Amy flattened against the side of the bookshelf. The door creaked open and the large orange tabby padded inside, his green eyes wide and striped tail held straight up. The cat trotted past the bed and went straight to the gold Super Nintendo on the carpet. He bent down to sniff it.
It was just a cat. Amy let out a loud sigh, and released all her nervous, clenched-up tension.
The cat sprang three feet straight up and landed in the tangle of controller cords. It hissed and spat as it squirmed in the cables for a few seconds, causing Amy to giggle.
The cat freed himself from the cords with a frantic somersault, and bared his teeth at the laughing girl.
“What’s so funny?” said the cat.
Chapter Three
The cat had spoken in a man’s voice with a strange, unfamiliar accent. Amy glanced at the television––still off––and looked around for a clock radio that had probably just switched on.
The orange tabby walked up to the golden Super Nintendo and sat on top of it. His huge green eyes watched Amy and the tip of his tail switched back and forth.
“Are you deaf? I asked you a question,” said the cat.
Amy could have sworn she’d seen the pink lips move. She knelt over the orange-striped feline.
“Must be some kind of Japanese toy,” she murmured. “Man, this kid is loaded.”
The cat sniffed.
“I’m not a toy, stupid girl, but it doesn’t matter. You’ve only got five seconds.”
“Five seconds?”
The cat shook his head. “I swear there’s an echo in here.”
The air crackled with heat and the smell of burnt toast. Blue lightning popped around Amy and formed a dome of energy with the cat at the center. Sparks and white flame cut through the purple sofa and back wall and curved through the television, which exploded in a shower of glass and flame.
Amy was a sharp and practical girl and not the type who screamed at the sight of a Neiman-Marcus catalog, or any catalog for that matter. When the room disappeared in a whirl of oily smoke and was replaced by a vast panorama of stars, spinning planets, flashing comets, and nebulae, however, it was quite reasonable for her to have a reaction.
“Good gravy,” she whispered.
A freezing pain spread through her body. Everything––the circle of carpet, the orange cat, the stars, Amy’s hands and fingers––faded to white. All that was, was not, and all that was not still wasn’t anything.
Amy blinked sleepily at the red carpet pressing roughly on her cheek. Could she have changed her perfectly respectable standing position with very little slouch for a less dignified position of lying on her face? She realized this was the case.
Something jabbed her in the chin. Amy raised her head and a tiny plastic rifle fell to the carpet. She sat up and brushed a battalion’s worth of miniature weapons from her blouse and jeans.
She was surrounded on all sides by a white, brilliant nothingness, not counting the circle of carpet below her. The strange blue lightning or welder’s arc or whatever it was had cut through every single object in what she guessed was a perfect dome ten foot in diameter. This included a corner of the purple sofa, part of the bookshelf and wall behind it, and the left side of the television. Tendrils of smoke curled up from the back of the sliced but still upright cathode tube.
Amy crawled forward to get a better look, but the floor below her knees rocked and crackled. Like a house of cards, the television and all the strangely cut objects crashed to the carpet or tumbled to the glowing white floor with a deafening clang.
At least, it looked like a floor. Amy crawled unsteadily to the edge of the carpet and banged her metal pigtail tool on the white surface. It sounded like metal; not steel, but maybe aluminum. She knelt on the edge and carefully stepped off. The floor felt sturdy like aluminum, but was inscrutably white.
Amy walked around the circle of carpet and the broken objects. The carpet had rocked back and forth because it lay on top of a half foot of wood, electrical wire, and broken drywall. A perfect ten foot sphere had been taken from the house, including part of the ceiling from the room below.
Either she was dreaming or someone had gone to a lot of trouble to play a prank. It was probably meant for that Frankie kid, and she’d triggered the mechanism instead of him. But it was too good, too real, and most importantly for a joke––nobody was laughing. Amy scanned the walls for windows or mirrors, but nothing broke the featureless, glowing whiteness around her.
She sat on the red carpet and had a picnic with the rest of the food from her backpack. Sometimes she could wake herself up from a bad dream by just wanting to wake up. Amy squeezed her eyes shut and “wanted” really hard, but nothing happened. She raised her water bottle and squeezed the last drops into her mouth with a crackle of plastic. Maybe she’d been hit by a car. All important places had a waiting room––why not heaven?
A click and whir came from above her head. Amy looked up to see four tentacles spurt from the ceiling. Each was as thick as her forearm and covered in silver, articulated plates. A large, multifaceted sapphire adorned the tip of one tentacle, but the others ended in three gleaming talons.
A squealing, clattering yowl came from the ceiling, like a cat in steel garbage can rolling down a gravel driveway. An artificial voice began to speak.
“Props 386749001––”
The strange voice continued to read out numbers for a few seconds, giving Amy time to pull out her can of Mace. Whoever was pulling this stupid prank wouldn’t be laughing with a face full of Mace.
“––0991. Primary valuable secured by Operator Badge SF063. Secondary valuable scan begin.”
Blue light shot from the sapphire and waved like a hyperactive flashlight over the carpet, broken material, and Amy.
“Secondary valuables identified.”
The clawed arms sifted through the remains of the bookshelf and grabbed a pair of novels. Another arm plucked a Super Nintendo controller from the carpet
. The tentacles disappeared into the ceiling with the objects, and then sped down to Amy.
She sprayed half a second’s worth of Mace at the gleaming claws before one of them ripped it out of her hands. The straps of her backpack jerked and Amy felt herself being lifted into the air.
“Let me go!”
She coughed, trying not to breathe the Mace, then slipped out of the straps and landed on her feet on the carpet. Above her head the tentacles rooted through her backpack.
“Get out of my stuff, you creep!”
The tentacles pulled out the Brownie sash and dropped the backpack, which landed with a heavy thunk in front of Amy. The clawed tentacles disappeared through a port in the ceiling with the merit badge sash, and left a single, sapphire-tipped tentacle hovering over Amy’s head.
“Biomat scan initiated,” said the trash-can voice. “Biomat detected. Event sound waves analyzed. Spoken language detected. Query: Are you sentient?”
“Stop playing around, you idiots,” yelled Amy. “I’m going to call the police!”
“That response is invalid. Query: Are you sentient?”
“Yes!”
“Cognitive verify: What is the frequency of the spin-flip transition of a hydrogen atom?”
“I’m not even in high school! How should I know that?”
A sound like tin cans banging together came from the ceiling. Amy couldn’t decide if it was a problem with the speaker system or the laughter of an insane computer.
“All right,” said the voice. “I’ll give you an easy one. Who won the Galactic Cup in 3316?”
“The Galactic Cup? Are you serious?”
“I know, it’s really too easy,” said the artificial voice. “But I need your answer.”
“At least give me some choices!”
“Negative. Multiple answer questions are for the sentience-challenged.”
Amy sighed. “Galactic Cup. I don’t know … Alpha Centauri?”
The tin can sound vibrated the room and the single tentacle waved back and forth.
“I can’t breathe … Alpha … Centauri … it’s too hilarious. Sentient scan ended. No intelligent life detected. Gamma radiation cleansing in ten seconds.”
The Girl Who Stole A Planet (Amy Armstrong Book 1) Page 4