Blink & Caution

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  “What? Where?”

  “Hell if I know. But it’s most likely in something you have with you all the time. Your purse or something.”

  “I don’t have a purse.”

  “Kitty!” he says, so loud she flinches. “Look. Look for something. I don’t know what. Something that shouldn’t be there. Do you understand?”

  “I guess.”

  “Call me right back,” he says, and hangs up.

  Tamika is looking at her with worried eyes. “What’s wrong?” she says.

  Caution is too embarrassed to say. It’s as if there is suddenly a stench in the room, and this woman doesn’t know where it’s coming from.

  Caution feels the front of her jacket, pressing her fingers down hard to feel through the fleece, through the quilting.

  “Are you all right?”

  Caution shakes her head. Then she stands, unzipping the jacket, as if it were suddenly crawling with earwigs. She starts patting it, then lays it down on the table and presses her hands all over the sleeves and back of it.

  “Kitty?”

  “I can’t explain,” she says. Then she feels it. She presses hard with her index finger around the edge of some hard rectangular shape. She looks up, frantically. “Have you got a knife?” she says.

  She makes a slit on the inside of the jacket and tears open the lining, revealing a black box about the size and shape of a thick lighter, with a knob on the top, an antenna. It doesn’t feel as if it weighs more than two or three ounces.

  Caution sits down hard. Tamika takes the bug from her, staring at it with alarm.

  “What is going on here?”

  Caution picks up the cordless from the table and phones Wayne-Ray. He answers on the first ring. He asks her to look for a product name. She takes the bug back from Tamika, finds a name, and reads it to him. “I’ve got my laptop,” he says. And then a minute later — “Bingo!” he says.

  Caution stares at Tamika, and they share a look of incomprehension.

  “Real-time GPS tracking system with enhanced cellular assist,” says Wayne-Ray, but he’s not really talking to Caution, just reading information on a website. “Locates via Internet . . . works inside buildings . . . low battery drain . . . A-GPS and AFLT . . . three types of locate searches . . .”

  “Wayne-Ray, speak to me in English!”

  “Hold on, hold on,” he says excitedly, and then he mumbles to himself for another moment or so.

  “Okay,” he says. “This explains a lot. This thing — it’s not like on 24 or anything. I mean, it’s not dead accurate.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning he found his way here, but he couldn’t pinpoint where you were, which is why he was waiting in the car, I guess. And it was only when you took off that he started getting a different set of coordinates.”

  “Am I supposed to be relieved?”

  “No. Not really.” He pauses, and she doesn’t speak because she knows he has something else he needs to say. “Kitty, whatever you’re caught up in, this guy does not want to lose track of you.”

  There is no mistaking the tone in her cousin’s voice, the seriousness or the reproach. She has been an idiot, and now she has dragged him into it. And then she looks at Tamika, and the horrible truth comes over her in a wave so icy cold she fears she will go under.

  “Oh, God,” she says. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

  Tamika scoots her chair closer and takes Kitty’s arm in her hand.

  “Take it easy,” says Wayne-Ray. “At least we know what we’re dealing with here.”

  “What do I do?” she says.

  “Get rid of it,” he says. “But not there. Take it a long way away. You know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Good.”

  “Wayne-Ray?”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m frightened.”

  “Get rid of it, Cuz,” he says, his voice gentle now. “And then get back to me. By phone. Be careful,” he says. And then hangs up.

  She puts down the receiver and stares at Tamika. There was something else. They were talking about something important. Tamika was going to tell her something. A child. There was — is — a child. There is a child, but there is no time. All of this flits through Caution’s brain, followed right behind by a tsunami of nausea and guilt. On top of all her other crimes, she has robbed a child of its father, and now her very existence is threatening that child and its mother.

  “I’ve got to go,” she says, jumping to her feet.

  “Can we call the police?” says Tamika. She has no idea what is going on.

  “I shouldn’t be here,” says Caution, slipping into her lacerated coat. The evil little black device is in her hand. “I shouldn’t even have come.”

  “Oh, yes, you should have. And there is more I need to tell you,” says Tamika.

  “No,” says Caution, cutting her off, shaking her head wildly. “Not now. Later maybe,” she says, trying to imagine a later that might include her ever invading this warm little home again. “I . . . I’ll get back to you . . . I’ll . . .”

  Tamika doesn’t try to hold her back, just nods solemnly. Caution heads toward the hallway, then stops and looks back at the French doors.

  “Is there a way out?” she says.

  “Can you climb a fence?” says Tamika, and then a quick smile comes to her. “If half of what Spence said about you is true, you could climb the CN Tower.”

  She unlocks the French doors and slides one side open.

  Caution wants to bolt, to disappear, to go up in a cloud of smoke. But Tamika grabs her wrist. “You don’t know the whole story,” she says, “and you need to.”

  Caution wants to argue the point. She needs to be oblivious — that’s what she needs. She needs to have never existed. But she nods lamely.

  “You come back to me, sister,” says Tamika. “Do you hear what I’m saying?”

  Caution nods again, not very convincingly. Then Tamika kisses her cheek, her hand warm and firm on the back of Caution’s neck. “Sister,” she whispers into Caution’s ear. She closes the door behind her. Waves through the glass. And then Caution takes off.

  There was a child’s finger painting taped to the door. Red and yellow and blue handprints. There was a name in the corner: SERINA.

  As Caution makes her way through the backyard and hoists herself up and over the fence, she wonders if this was what Wayne-Ray wanted for her. To know of this child, Serina, and thus to crumble the very last bit of her heart into nothing.

  She knows exactly where to ditch the transmitter. She makes her way back down Parliament and finds the Nissan parked where she left it. She figured it would have been towed by now, but she’s glad it’s still there. Watching to make sure no cops are around — though there is a building full of them right here — she unlocks the door and throws the GPS device in the backseat right beside the bag of pot. She considers hiding until Merlin comes into view. Then she could throw a rock at one of the windows of the cop shop, raise the alarm. She imagines Merlin standing there, realizing what she has done to him as a swarm of cops comes running out to drag him away. She wishes there were any joy in this fantasy.

  She phones Wayne-Ray just after eleven. Merlin has not returned, but her cousin has been on patrol. There is another dude parked on the street, he says: short dark hair, sharp beak, two eyebrow rings. “I bent down to take a good long look, smiled when the dude gave me the finger,” says Wayne-Ray.

  Warner, thinks Caution, and remembers the gun he had inside his jacket. In a flash, she imagines a bullet in Wayne-Ray’sforehead. “Don’t piss him off, okay?” she says. “Stay away from him.”

  “I think it’s time you told me who these people are,” he says.

  “They are really bad people,” she says. “I already told you that.” She wants to say they are the fate she deserves, her just desserts — no one else’s. But what she can’t figure out is why Warner or any of Drigo’s people would care what happened to
Merlin’s money, let alone Merlin’s flake of a former girlfriend. “Promise me you’ll be careful,” she says.

  “I will. And you, too, Kitty. What are you gonna do?”

  She needs to go. Get away. Leave. That or maybe throw herself in front of a subway train and be done with. No. That would be too easy. She needs to make this torture last. There can never be enough of it. In fact, maybe she already did kill herself, and this is hell doing a really good job of looking like Toronto. And if it is hell, then she will be running from Merlin and company for the rest of eternity.

  “Keep in touch,” says Wayne-Ray. She never answered his question, which was probably answer enough. “But, Kitty?”

  “Yes?”

  “If you call, don’t say where you are, just in case.”

  Just in case they’ve bugged Wayne-Ray’s place as well; that’s what he means.

  “I won’t,” she says. “Good night.”

  “Good night. I wish . . .”

  She waits, but her cousin can’t seem to think of what it is he wishes for. She knows how he feels.

  It’s after midnight. Caution stands in the deep shadows of a massive tree on Major Street just down the block from Tamika’s place. The street is deserted. She waits to be absolutely sure.

  She makes her way to Tamika’s door. The houselights are off. From her Little Mermaid backpack, she pulls the money: eight thousand dollars, minus the money she used today and enough to get her through tonight and away tomorrow — somewhere, though she has no idea where. So, seven thousand four hundred dollars she never wants to see again.

  She doesn’t hesitate. In the midst of her long fall into misery, what she is about to do is like a little parachute to slow her descent. She shoves the money into the mail slot, careful not to let the flap make a noise and wake the baby inside.

  Then she takes off down Major in a jog, thinking about the note she has wrapped the money in.

  Dear Tamika,

  This money was stolen from a criminal, so there’s no use going to the police with it. You might as well keep it. It can be for Serina. I would really like that.

  Your sister,

  Katherine Pettigrew

  Tamika had called her sister. Only one other person had ever called her that. It was not a word to use lightly, and when she wrote the note, sitting in a coffee shop on Front Street, she resisted it and then gave into it. She hates the name Katherine. Not even her mother called her that, except when she’d done something really bad. But she wanted the note to be taken seriously, to be like a contract between them, or does she mean a bond?

  She turns onto College and heads east, not sure where she’s going anymore. She’ll stay the night in a hotel — the kind of hotel that won’t ask for a credit card or anything. There are places she knows way downtown that are scurvy enough to take cash and not ask any questions. She looks around from time to time and wishes she weren’t so exposed. College is still pretty busy, so is Spadina. She splits off left at a side street, and then south at the first road she comes to.

  She drifts southward until she finds herself in a place where there are only loud boys and girls with nothing to lose. She recognizes the type; she was one of them when she first came to the city. She walks with her head down, raising a drunken whistle, an offer, a curse or two, until she turns south one more time, and the next thing she knows there’s an arm around her waist and a hand across her mouth, and she is being dragged into the shadows next to an open Dumpster.

  “You must be looking for trouble, foxy lady,” says a voice she doesn’t recognize. It’s a shaky voice on the edge of frantic. She doesn’t know this man, but she knows a crystal meth freak when he’s desperate for a fix. The smell of him is worse than the stink rising from the Dumpster. He just wants my money, she thinks, not struggling at all, submitting to his rough hands, letting him feel through the pockets of her jacket, slip his hands inside her bra, in case she’s hiding anything there, tear open her Little Mermaid backpack. Then he’s gone. And she doesn’t even question the extraordinary coincidence of locating this desperate stranger. It’s another chapter of the nightmare, that’s all. And just her rotten luck that he didn’t take her life along with her last red cent. Shaking, she bends down to pick up the copy of Anna Karenina from a puddle on the concrete.

  Everything changes now. The rules of the street you have been trying so hard to learn these last few months will be of some use to you, but you are entering new territory, Blink, with unknown factors. For one thing, there is somebody watching you.

  You have never taken a train before. You stammer when the ticket man asks if it’s a round-trip. You hadn’t thought that far. Round-trip? That means you’re coming back, doesn’t it? How could you know that? He asks you again, this tired look on his face, even though he probably slept in a bed last night, which is more than you can say for yourself. He’s bored and annoyed, and the day has only begun. You watch his hands in case there’s a button to buzz the cops. You look around, as if they might be moving in on you right now. But you are alone, except for this freakish girl in a fuzzy blue jacket. Her arms are crossed, as if you’re taking way too much time. Beyond her the vast hollowness of Union Station fills your eyes and ears.

  “Kid,” he says.

  “One-way!” you say. You yell it, like he’s hard of hearing and you’ve been saying it over and over. One-way. Because no matter what happens, you won’t be coming back to the same place you left behind.

  She watches the boy take the roll of bills out of his pocket to pay for his ticket. He’s around her age; a street punk — probably stole the money, she tells herself. Like the meth freak stole hers. What goes around comes around.

  She sees how he holds his hand out flat to look at the money, like a child inspecting a caterpillar or some other wonder of the universe. Obviously hasn’t lost enough yet to be so reckless. She can help him with that. That’s just the way it is. It isn’t fair, she tells herself, it just is. And now it’s showtime.

  “What’s in Kingston?”

  You look up. It’s the girl in the blue jacket. You’ve taken a seat down in the place where the gates are. Your train doesn’t leave for over an hour.

  “Are you deaf ?” she says. Then she makes a bunch of crazy movements with her hands as if she’s talking in some kind of freak sign language.

  “None of your business,” you say, and her face lights up as if you handed her an engraved invitation to sit and chat.

  “So it’s a big secret?” she says. And before you know it, she’s perching beside you, her eyes big as saucers, as Nanny Dee used to say.

  You get up to leave, and she stops you — grabs your sleeve. You look down at your arm, and her hand slips away. “Hey, sorry,” she says. “I’m just a little wired. Bad night. Not drugs! I mean just bad. Well, you know.”

  She’s looking at you as if she really does know how bad your night was — as if hers was bad in the same way. And her eyes — her eyes are this pale gray like early morning fog with the sun seeping through it.

  He who hesitates is lost, Nanny also used to say, and you just hesitated, Blink. You sit down again.

  “That’s better,” she says. Then she suddenly moves her face in close to yours, staring seriously into your eyes. “Have you got Tourette’s?”

  You shake your head, not knowing what she’s talking about.

  “Tourette’s syndrome. All that blinking,” she says, blinking herself. “It could be a symptom, especially in kids our age. So could the facial grimacing.”

  “It’s just a tic or something.”

  “If you say so. But there was this guy I knew with Tourette’s. It got bad. He’d swear sometimes right out of the blue — right in the middle of class. Very weird.” Her hand comes up, and you pull back as if maybe she’s going to try to touch your eye.

  “Do you sniffle much?” she says. “Grunt?” She grunts.

  “Jesus, no!” You shake your head.

  “Well, good. So maybe this eye thing is just a
tic.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Okay, just checking.”

  Then she sits back, her hands in her lap as if the medical diagnosis exhausted her.

  “What do you want?” you say to her.

  She shrugs. “Apart from a house in Beverly Hills? Oh, I don’t know. Some company, I guess. What do you want?”

  You shrug. She shrugs. It’s a shrug-off. You both sort of smile. But you’re not buying into this con job, although she’s working it hard.

  “Bug off,” you say.

  “Hey,” she says. “Give me a break. There is no one here to talk to. Just old people.” You look at the lines beginning toform at the gates. “Well, okay, there are some young people,” she says, “but it’s Friday, right? They’re all university students skipping classes so they can go home for the weekend and Mommy can do their laundry and cook them a roast-beef supper.”

  You look again, and she’s right: old people and students. And some business types and a few moms with kids . . . So, she’s not entirely right.

  “You and I,” she says. “We don’t have anyone to do our laundry, do we?” You shake your head. “And when was the last time you had a nice juicy roast-beef dinner?”

  Now you’re suspicious. “Are you, like, a social worker?”

  She laughs, shakes her head. “Do I look like a social worker?”

  “So what are you? Hare Krishna?”

  She rolls her eyes. “No turban,” she says. “And, anyway, I look like shit in orange.”

  You sigh. This is too high-energy for you. You fold your arms and look straight ahead. She may be pretty, but she’s wacko.

  “Ah, come on,” she says, punching you lightly in the arm. “Wakey, wakey.”

  “Cut it out,” you say. “And I haven’t got any spare change, so you’re wasting your time.”

  “Huh,” she says. Then she sighs. “Okay. Sorry.” But she doesn’t leave. And the thing is you don’t want her to. You can handle this.

  “You’re an Aries, right?” she says. “Strengths: independent, optimistic. Weaknesses: moody and short-tempered.”