The rest of Scott’s body disappeared, and seconds later, Janis heard the faint sound of small wheels grinding over cement. The evening before, Scott had rolled an old skateboard into the drain. His plan was to lie belly-down and shove off beneath the Meadows, go fifty yards, and take a sharp left. There, he would wait inside the cylindrical opening that became the cement culvert running between Janis’s and Mr. Leonard’s backyards. “That way, the last place anyone will have seen me is walking to the bus stop,” Scott had explained. “And with the skateboard, I’ll be able to stay at the very bottom of the culvert until I reach their fence.”
It made sense, Janis guessed. She looked down at his backpack, which sagged against her own stack of books. She peeked back at the Leonards’ house. It remained dim and still. Janis’s watch read 6:42. When would it be too late? At what point could they call it off?
The Leonards’ garage door gave a shudder and began ratcheting open, the panels creaking and folding into the space above. Pale rear lights spilled out onto the driveway. Janis made herself as thin as she could behind the bush. When the green Datsun emerged, it was not so much rolling as feeling its way backward, like a creature half-blind from being underground too long. The car lurched into the street at an angle, paused, and then started forward. The garage door ratcheted closed. Janis watched the dwindling taillights.
She hesitated, then pressed the orange button on her talkie, counted to one, and released it.
Moments later, her talkie beeped back. Scott had received the signal.
* * *
Scott crooked his arm behind himself and pushed the talkie into the back pocket of his khakis. The skateboard on which he lay shifted beneath his stomach. He reached for the opening of the tunnel and braced himself. Rolling his narrow hips on the board, first one side and then the other, he was satisfied he could feel the flashlight in his right front pocket and the wallet containing his picking tools in the pocket opposite.
All systems go.
His heartbeats punched the flat of his skateboard. From his dim vantage, Scott squinted toward his target. He gauged the end of the chain link fence to be perhaps a hundred yards distant.
He took a deep breath, moved his hands to the lower lip of the opening, and pulled. The front wheels dropped down first, then the back wheels. Out in the open culvert, gravity took over. Scott tried to use his hands and the toes of his shoes to control his descent, but he was moving too quickly, the wheels grinding too loudly. Each time he met the edge of a slab, Scott winced at the teeth-rattling click-clack.
One of the advantages of using the skateboard, he’d thought, was that were someone to spot him, he would look like a kid playing around in the culvert — not someone on a stealth mission. But so much for that stealth now.
grind, grind, grind, grind…
click-clack!
grind, grind, grind, grind…
click-clack!
He glanced up, glad to find the end of the corner lot approaching. The fencing to his left changed from steep wooden posts to chain linking. Steering to the near side of the culvert, Scott slowed himself. When he looked up again, he nearly choked at seeing the top of the Leonards’ house. It was taller than he’d estimated, most of the second story in plain view.
Which meant he was in plain view, too.
His palms screamed fire when he braked. He shoved himself back up the culvert until he was behind the wooden posts again. He set his board sideways and examined his hands. The heels of his palms looked like a pair of red plums someone had tried to grate. They stung when he blew sand from them. With his fingertips, he reached for his talkie and held it gingerly.
Scott considered his distant position from the shed. Staying where he was would mean more valuable seconds to reach his target, but what choice did he have? It was either that or wait out in the open.
He pushed the orange button.
* * *
Janis jumped at the sound even though she was expecting it — or maybe because she was expecting it. She answered with a quick beep and hid the talkie deep in her pocket. She knelt for her books and folders. When she stood and emerged from behind the bush, the world whorled and dove around her. Head rush. She staggered down to the street and held onto the stop sign. Two cars cruised by. Janis waited for them to fade down the main hill and for her head to clear.
As she crossed the street, books pressed to her stomach to keep the talkie from bouncing, she imagined Scott lying at the culvert’s bottom just outside the fence. She wondered if his body was as cold as hers, if his breaths felt as feral. Her gaze led her sneakers along the rain gutter.
Too soon, she was standing at the Leonards’ front walkway. When she raised her head, a yellow door stared back, like in her To Kill a Mockingbird nightmare. She checked her watch and drew a resolute breath. The door stood beneath a wooden balcony, where dead plants hung down from metal baskets. With each step, the odor of rotting soil grew stronger.
You haven’t done anything you can’t take back, she told herself. Scott’s in a public culvert on a skateboard. You haven’t knocked on the door. Whatever normalcy your life still holds can be preserved.
But Janis knew that wasn’t true — not anymore. Whatever normalcy her life still held could only be prolonged. That was all. And that’s why her legs continued to carry her forward. But when she was nearly to the front porch, another, more powerful thought entered her mind:
Don’t do it! Call it off!
The apprehension was more than a vague stirring now; it banged and clanged like a fire alarm. It came from the part of herself that slipped out of her body at night, the part that experienced a world beyond the physical, that perceived both past and probable future events. And though Janis couldn’t see anything — no ghost images — the danger she and Scott were about to fall into could not have felt starker.
She nearly dropped her books as she dug inside her sweatshirt for the plastic talkie. The speaker crackled and hissed in her grasp. Her thumb searched for the orange button and found it.
Three quick beeps for any trouble.
She managed to press it once before the front door swung open.
* * *
Scott had been thinking about Wayne when the signal came. They had met up at Blue Chip Arcade on Saturday, where they went halfsies on the forty-tokens-for-five-dollars deal.
“Yeah, I remember Mr. Leonard,” Wayne said, leaping back and forth across his joystick and hammering the fire button like a telegraph operator on speed. “I never saw anything wrong with him.”
Yeah, well, you probably didn’t see anything wrong with Rick Moranis’s character in Ghostbusters, either — even after he became possessed.
“And you need him out of the house?”
“For an hour or so,” Scott said. He gunned down a Burwor who strayed into his corner of the screen. “We just can’t figure out how. The fact that he’s a sub might be a starting point…”
Scott had long since learned that it was best to steer Wayne toward the solution you already had in mind and let him believe he’d arrived at it on his own, rather than telling him.
“Call him with a fake assignment.” Wayne said it as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Eat laser, turds!”
“Yeah, but what if he calls the school?”
“Easy, you set it up so that whatever number you’re supposedly calling from remotely call forwards to your number. That way, if he does call back, the phone will ring at your house. That is, until you take off the call forw — you’re mine, you cross-dressing son of a whore!”
Scott moved his blue character out of harm’s way while Wayne pursued the teleporting Wizard of Wor, pumping round after round. The screen flashed with bolts and blasts. Wayne laughed maniacally, then screamed when the Wizard’s lightning zapped him.
“Is it easy to do?”
Wayne scowled and jammed another token into the slot. “For some people. Just takes a little social engineering.”
“Sounds dangero
us.”
“Ha! You always were a worm when it came to talking to the Bell South techies.”
“And you think you could pull it off?” Scott tried to affect just the right amount of skepticism. With too much, Wayne would go spazoid on him. He was like one of those chemistry kits in the hobby stores: overdose on a substrate and you’d end up with a foaming mess.
“I guarantee it.”
When Wayne looked over, his pupils were huge — the result of two straight hours of video gaming, no doubt. But his eyes also shone with the anticipation of being able to solve something Scott couldn’t. It was a look Scott knew well.
“Let’s make it interesting, then,” Scott said. “Your broadsword if you can’t?”
Wayne’s grin became so sharp it seemed to send a crease down the middle of his face. More than masterminding the solutions, Wayne loved being told he couldn’t pull them off.
“You’re on, numb nuts.”
In the culvert, Scott’s talkie beeped.
He very nearly signaled back before remembering where Janis was and that her talkie would be off now. As he clicked off his own unit and returned it to his back pocket, the shortness of the beep nagged him. It had lasted a half-second, tops, little more than the length of a confirmation signal.
Then he understood: Janis had had to signal to him and turn off her unit in the short space between Mrs. Leonard’s unlocking the door and opening it. No wonder she’d rushed it. The important thing was that Mrs. Leonard was at the front of the house, which meant it was time for Scott to act.
He brought his wristwatch to his chin and pressed a small button. The timer function blipped to life, the hundredths of a second display scrambling madly. Three minutes. That’s how much time he was giving himself.
He sat on his skateboard, aimed the pointed nose down the culvert, and let it roll. At the end of the fence, Scott skidded to a stop. He turned the skateboard upside down and began scaling the steep slant of the culvert. His palms burned where the skin had rubbed away.
At the top, he found himself on a small ledge of grass between the fence line and the culvert. He looked into a lawn shaded by early morning and then up at the house.
Scott remembered how the backs of the houses in Oakwood — the sides you weren’t supposed to see — had looked sinister to him once. This one still did. He couldn’t point to anything in particular; in fact, the backyard overlooked by the high deck showcased a certain middle-class normalcy. The grass, which had begun to brown with the colder weather, was trim and mostly naked of leaves. A plastic rake leaned beside a tidy coil of green garden hose at the side of the house. No, it was the mood of the house: tall and brooding.
A house with secrets.
The leaning shed stood where Janis had drawn it on the map they’d sketched that weekend. Scott inserted the toe of a shoe into a chain link diamond and pulled himself up. The fence shook softly. He dropped onto the lawn and crouched. A criminal now, he hurried up behind the shed until he was hidden from the house.
Thirty-one seconds gone.
Scott had selected only those picks and wrenches that worked with the widest range of locks. He moved them from the wallet to his mouth in a line and slid the wallet back into his pocket. He stepped around to the front of the shed. Doing his best to ignore the house at his back, he went to work.
* * *
Janis just managed to snap off the talkie, but her heart continued to wallop. She wanted to believe she’d pressed the button more than once, that Scott had received the warning signal, but she knew he hadn’t. The instant the door began to move, her finger had abandoned the orange button in search of the knob that controlled the volume and the talkie’s power. Fortunately she’d twisted it the right way.
“Oh — ah — hi,” Janis stuttered.
The woman’s eyes peered out from a nest of graying hair like a spooked animal’s. Or maybe they only looked large and round to Janis because the woman’s mouth was so small, her lips nearly colorless. She stood in a nightgown as thin and sallow as her skin. The reclusive Mrs. Leonard.
Janis recovered herself. “I’m Janis Graystone. I was up at the bus stop and decided to, um, ask a couple of neighbors if they’ve seen our cat. Tiger’s her name. She left the house over the weekend, the one behind yours, and hasn’t come back. We thought she might have ended up in one of your—”
With the same spooked look, Mrs. Leonard jabbed her finger past Janis. Her nightgown shuddered around her.
“I-I’m sorry?” Janis said, squinting. “Do you want me to leave?”
Only twenty seconds had elapsed, maybe fewer. Not nearly enough time for Scott. She tried again. “Because I just wanted to—”
The woman jabbed her finger with more force, shaking her head now.
No, she doesn’t want me to talk, or she doesn’t want me to leave?
Janis turned to where she was pointing. The newspaper! Protected by a plastic bag, it lay beside the walkway like a deflated balloon. Mrs. Leonard had been coming out to get it, Janis guessed, but now she was asking her to retrieve it. She probably didn’t want to be seen in her nightgown. Or maybe she didn’t want to be seen, period. Throughout her ten years of living here, Janis could count on one hand the number of times she had glimpsed her. And that’s really all they had been, glimpses. The woman was Oakwood’s version of Boo Radley.
“Would you like me to get the paper?”
Still pointing, Mrs. Leonard began to nod.
Thank goodness.
Janis set her books on the porch and returned down the walkway. The long bag dripped with condensation when she lifted it from the grass. Janis bounced it a few times from the neck of the bag, pretending to be concerned about its dampness. As she returned with it, she checked off another twenty-five seconds in her head.
Mrs. Leonard’s lips torqued into an expression of gratitude as she accepted the newspaper. She was younger than she appeared from a distance, her brown eyes sharp and clear. Tucking the newspaper to her side, Mrs. Leonard began to retreat inside the house again.
“Oh, but wait, I haven’t told you what my cat looks like.”
The woman made a quick waving motion with her hand. There was an urgency to it, a pleading.
Come inside, the gesture said.
Janis looked from Mrs. Leonard up to the intersection. The sun had still yet to rise, and the street was blue-gray. “Oh, thanks, but my bus will be here any minute. I don’t want to miss it.”
The woman made a different gesture. She brought two fingers to her closed mouth and shook her head, and then with the same hand, mimed like she was writing something on the palm of her other hand.
“Ahh,” Janis said. Mrs. Leonard was mute. That’s what she was telling her. That’s why she hadn’t spoken. And now she wanted to write something down for her.
“I have a pen and some paper right here,” Janis said, stooping for her books.
Mrs. Leonard grunted. When Janis looked up, the mute woman used her hands to explain her bad back and that she needed to sit down. Another reason she stayed indoors, Janis thought. She felt sympathy clouding over the alarm that continued to pulse in the back of her mind. (Don’t do it! Call it off!) But it was too late to call it off. Scott would be in front of the shed by now, and she’d promised to buy him at least three minutes, more if she could.
Come inside, Mrs. Leonard gestured again.
Janis wiped her hand against the side of her Levi’s, her heart starting into a fresh cycle of pounding.
“All right,” she said. “But just for a minute.”
* * *
For the second time, Scott swore under his breath. He adjusted his pressure on the tension wrench in the bottom of the keyhole and reset his grip on the pick that disappeared just above. At first feel, the lock had seemed like a standard five-pin chamber, which he could have opened in seconds. But these pins had to be pressed in a particular order, he learned; otherwise, they wouldn’t stay trapped along the shear line and the bolt wouldn’t budge.
He hadn’t had a lot of practice with security pins.
He took a quick breath and blinked at the perspiration in the corner of one eye, trying to forget the fact that he was in plain view. The timer on his watch showed more than two minutes. He had figured out the sequence of the first two pins. The third was proving a bitch. Every time he guessed wrong, he lost them all, and the pins were hard to set in the first place.
It took him twenty seconds to retrap the first two pins. The only good thing to be said for having already guessed and lost twice on the third pin was that it could only be the last one. He concentrated, probed the tip of the pin with his pick, pushed it up, and felt it click into position.
The penultimate pin would be a fifty-fifty shot. He chose the nearer one and pushed.
All of the pins fell out.
“Damn it!” he hissed, the spare wrench and picks nearly spilling from his mouth.
He reset the tension wrench, which had become slippery with the serous blood beading from his palms.
The timer raced past two and a half minutes.
The last time he’d done anything like this was when he hacked Army Information in late August. But he’d been under no time constraints then. The hack had taken him nearly fifteen hours, he remembered — fifteen hours to palpate the sequence of zeros and ones. Between the login and password, there had been fourteen characters, 112 bits of data.
The security lock was easier by comparison — far easier. It had components Scott could feel, fewer moving parts, and manageable probabilities. The disadvantage, of course, was that he had less time to sequence those moving parts — minutes, not hours. That, and he was standing in someone’s backyard, not concealed in his own dark bedroom.
But Scott knew the sequence now.
XGeneration, Books 1-3: You Don't Know Me, The Watchers, and Silent Generation Page 26