Back to the Fajitas

by Leena Clover

  “We’ll get there one day,” Tony whispered in my ear.

  The gondolier ducked his head as we passed under a bridge. Real or not, it was a fantastic experience. It put a smile on my face.

  We strolled along the Venetian streets, staring up at the blue sky. This sky is one of my favorite features in Vegas. It changes colors, becomes cloudy and stormy. Lightning flashed and thunder boomed, and it started raining. We rushed to the nearest store. My smile widened when I noticed they sold chocolates.

  We got some assorted truffles for everyone and sat down to enjoy a bowl of ice cream. Someone brushed past me and I got goose bumps as I felt a rough hand slide over me.

  “Hey!” I yelled.

  “What’s the matter?” Tony cried, springing up from his seat.

  “I just got groped.”

  People from adjoining tables turned around and looked at us. I was a bit shook up.

  “Are you alright?” the girl from the shop wanted to know.

  I gave her a brief nod. My hand was shaking. This kind of a thing had never happened to me. I dipped my head, trying to hide the tears that had welled up in my eyes. Then I saw the wad of paper in my lap.

  “Tony!”

  I picked up the crumpled paper and smoothed it out. The message was brief and to the point.

  ‘Outside – Fountain - Five minutes.’

  I was going to get to the bottom of this.

  “Let’s go, Tony.”

  I handed him the paper and started walking. Tony followed without a word and we almost jogged outside. There’s a big fountain outside the casino and I assumed that’s where we were supposed to go.

  I was a bit out of breath by the time we reached the fountain. There was quite a crowd around it. People were tossing pennies in the water, making wishes and taking photos. A cool mist off the water sprayed my back and I shivered. Both Tony and I were looking around, trying to spot something unusual.

  A voice spoke in my ear.

  “Follow me!”

  The hooded figure had moved ten feet away by the time I caught on. I hurried after it, furious at being led on some kind of chase. Tony rushed past me and clamped his hand on the hood.

  “Wait up, dude!”

  The figure turned and a young girl stared back at us, frightened. Her eyes were sunken, and her cheekbones stood out against her pale face.

  “Please don’t hurt me,” she pleaded.

  “Why would I do that?” Tony asked mystified. “And what’s going on?”

  “I’m just the messenger,” the girl said. “We’re almost there.”

  She cut through an alley between stores and took us to some back street. An abandoned gazebo stood to a side in a small overgrown garden.

  The girl made a queer bird like noise and a group of kids walked out from behind a wall.

  “Are you Meera Patel?” one of the kids asked.

  He was older than the girl and seemed to be the leader of the group. I tried not to stare at his clothes. They had seen better days but they were clean. A toe peeped out of his shoe.

  “Who are you?” I got to the point.

  “You can call me Jack,” he said. “This is Jill.”

  He pointed to a girl standing next to him.

  “What about the others?”

  He nodded at the other boy and girl and they walked away and disappeared into the twilight.

  “They don’t need to be here.”

  “Are you threatening us?” Tony asked. “People know where we are. They’ll call the cops if we don’t get back soon.”

  “We don’t want to harm you,” Jack said, holding his arms up. “We just want to talk.”

  “What’s with all the drama?” I asked him.

  Jack pointed to a seat built into the gazebo. We climbed two steps and sat on the bench like thing. Jill and Jack sat down on the floor in front of us. There was a ratty rug on the floor next to them and it struck a chord.

  “We are Leo’s friends,” Jack began.

  “The ones he met in Ponca City?” I asked hopefully.

  He shook his head.

  “No. I don’t know about that but if they are one of us, we can find out.”

  “Who are you exactly? How did you know Leo?”

  Tony held up a hand.

  “Before you answer that, tell me how you know Meera? And how did you know where she was?”

  “Leo told us about you,” Jack said. “He said you were going to take him in. Is that true?”

  I nodded.

  The girl’s expression changed. She looked at me hungrily, as if I held the key to some treasure she wanted.

  “You seem like a good person,” Jack paused.

  He was choosing his words carefully.

  “And Leo said you are smart. So we decided to talk to you.”

  “Why don’t you get to the point?” Tony asked impatiently.

  I put my hand over Tony’s, silently asking him to settle down.

  “Who are you, really? Why don’t you tell me the truth? Then we can talk about what I can do for you.”

  “We are thorks,” the girl blurted out.

  “I’m sorry, what now?”

  “T-H-O-R-K,” Jack spelled it out. “It’s an acronym for Throwaway, Homeless and Runaway Kids.”

  “Are you part of some organization?” Tony asked.

  “More like a secret group,” Jack admitted. “And we are as good as invisible.”

  I raised my eyebrows, asking him to go on.

  “We are the kids no one wants, no one cares about. We have either been abandoned by our parents or relatives, or we have chosen to run away because we couldn’t bear to live on in certain conditions.”

  “Don’t they have foster homes and stuff for kids like you?” Tony asked.

  “We live under the radar. We are not in the system.”

  I was speechless. So was Tony.

  “No one’s looking for you?” Tony finally asked.

  Jack shrugged.

  “Where does Leo come in?” I asked.

  “Leo was one of us. Then he met that old guy. The guy offered him a home and Leo went along with him.”

  We knew Leo was an orphan. But none of us had imagined he was literally living on the streets. Charlie Gibson had done a good deed.

  “Leo lived in Oklahoma. You live here in Nevada.”

  “He was part of our study group,” Jill said. “He was one of the smarter ones. He always got good grades.”

  “You go to school?” I asked, astounded.

  I wondered if these kids even got two square meals a day. And they were talking about study groups.

  “We home-school,” Jack smirked, giving me a knowing look. “We are good kids, Meera. We’ve just had a raw deal in life.”

  I gulped, not knowing what to say.

  “The THORK are the good guys,” Jill said. “We don’t do drugs or cheat or steal. We work on getting our GED so we can go to college or get a job. We just have to stay afloat until we turn 18.”

  “No one can force us then,” Jack said seriously.

  “Did you write letters?” I asked. “How did you study together?”

  Jack and Jill looked at me like I was an extra terrestrial.

  “Aren’t you an engineer, Meera? We communicate via email.”

  I felt suitably chastened.

  “There’s an online group we created. We use it like a message board. It comes in handy. We use email for any personal communication.”

  Where did these kids get access to email?

  “Public libraries,” Jill said. “As long as we don’t stick to a place too long, we are fine.”

  “There’s an art to it,” Jack said proudly. “It keeps us on our toes.”

  “How did you know where to find me?”

  “Leo said you were on this road trip. You were spotted in different places. We got updates from our people.”

  “And those smiley faces? Were they for me?”

  Jack smiled.

  “Just a
couple of them, the ones you saw in Vegas. They are part of our code.”

  “What kind of code?” I asked, fascinated.

  “We have a system,” Jill said. “It’s like a secret language. We leave clues behind us for other THORKs.”

  “But why?”

  “So we have each other’s back,” Jack said grimly. “There aren’t many people looking out for us, you know.”

  I thought of the symbols I had seen in Texas and New Mexico.

  “We are all over,” Jack nodded.

  “I saw the symbols in rest areas, on barns, even on cars.”

  “They mean different things. Some are just motivational, like the flower with the smile. It means keep going, everything will be fine. Then there’s an inverted triangle that stands for drugs. It’s a warning to get out of the area. There’s signs for food, and for barters. See, some people don’t care we are homeless. A kind lady might offer a meal, or a ride on the highway. Some places let us wash dishes in exchange for a bed at night. Some doctors treat us for free when we are sick. Some teachers help us with our lessons.”

  “And you have symbols for all of this?”

  My mouth was hanging open.

  Jill nodded.

  “There’s still a lot of kind people in this world.”

  “How often does someone find a home? You know, like Leo did?”

  “Doesn’t happen often,” Jack admitted. “Leo was one of the lucky ones. Or so we thought.”

  We all knew how that had turned out.

  “All this is hard to take in,” I said.

  “You better believe it,” Jack said. “We have broken every rule to get in touch with you.”

  I sensed what was coming. Jill spelled it out for me.

  “We want you to find out who killed Leo.”

  Chapter 25

  I stared back at Jack and Jill.

  “You think I haven’t tried? I’m up against a wall. The police are convinced he took his life.”

  “That’s impossible. We can vouch for it.”

  “Really?” I pursed my mouth. “You don’t exist as far as the world is concerned. Who’s going to take you at your word?”

  “They don’t have to. Leo was looking forward to his new life. He said it himself in the messages he posted. That has to count for something, right?”

  I thought back to when I last spoke to Leo. It was sometime in the morning. Had he been in touch with anyone since then?

  “He posted a message on the boards soon as he came home from jail. He told us you and that other lady had offered him a home. He was happy. He turns 18 in the fall, you see. And he was very close to finishing his school work.”

  “We were ready to put him up for as long as he wanted.”

  Jack nodded. “He could work once he turned 18.”

  “I have a gas station,” Tony said. “I could have let him have a few hours. But he never said anything.”

  “Your town is pretty small,” Jack said. “It’s best to lie low in such places. He didn’t mingle with a lot of people. And he couldn’t apply for small jobs since that required paperwork.”

  “Did Charlie know all this?” I asked.

  “Sure did. He said he was a lonely guy who didn’t socialize much. Leo just had to follow some house rules and keep up with his school work.”

  Charlie Gibson was set in his ways. So no one expected him to change his ways overnight just because a teenager was living with him. People had wondered how Leo had fallen in line with Charlie’s austere lifestyle. Now we knew. A kid in his position would have done anything to have a safe place to live in.

  I tried to bring the conversation back on track.

  “So he said someone was taking him in,” I repeated. “Was that the last time you spoke to him?”

  I noticed Jack’s face assume an eager expression by the time I finished my sentence.

  “No, it wasn’t. We were chatting on Instant Messenger. He was getting his stuff, putting together a bag to take to this diner lady.”

  “Right.”

  “He found something,” Jack said. “He wouldn’t say what. But he was finding it hard to keep it a secret.”

  “What did he find?” Tony asked, finally taking an interest in the conversation.

  “He said he needed to go talk to someone.”

  “What time was this?” I asked.

  “Around three his time,” Jack said. “He was going to come back online to tell me how it went. He told me to keep my fingers crossed.”

  “Did you talk to him again?”

  Jack’s expression told me the story.

  “I logged in a couple of times in the evening, but there wasn’t anything from him. We didn’t hear from him again until we read the story in the newspaper.”

  “You didn’t try and call him?” I blurted out.

  “We don’t have that kind of money,” Jack said grimly.

  “I understand how you feel,” I said. “But like I said, no one’s listening to me on this one.”

  “We want justice for Leo. Once word gets around that he was a homeless kid, no one will ever help us. We will lose the faint ray of hope we have, that 1% chance that one of us will find a home.”

  Jill spoke up.

  “He was our friend. Someone thought they could kill him in cold blood just because he had no support system.”

  “That too,” Jack said sheepishly. “We’ll help you in any way possible. We can’t pay you much, but we can work something out.”

  “I don’t want your money,” I protested. “I’m not a professional or anything.”

  “We don’t care about that, as long as you get results.”

  I leaned back and closed my eyes.

  “So these friends Leo was meeting in Ponca City? Did he actually know them, or was it some kind of meeting for your group?”

  “We don’t have meetings,” Jill said. “Kids run into each other in different places. Most of us are pretty cool. We share whatever we have. Meals, blankets, clothes – you run into someone a couple of times, you become friends.”

  “Leo said these people were on Spring Break, driving to the coast and to Florida.”

  “They must have been ex-THORKS,” Jack said promptly. “Kids over 18, you know. Some of them keep in touch.”

  “Can you find out who they were?”

  “We can put a word out,” Jack said. “Why?”

  “The cops found some sand on Leo’s shoes. Chances are he went to the beach with these kids. I just want to check if he really did.”

  “We can find that out for you,” Jack promised.

  “I might be able to talk to some people once I get home,” I said. “But I can’t do much from here.”

  Jack’s face turned hopeful.

  “So you’ll work on this for us?”

  “Leo seemed like a good kid. If anyone harmed him on purpose, I’ll do my best to find out who did it.”

  Jack held out his hand and I shook it. I gave Tony a meaningful look. He stared back at me, uncomprehending. Tony can be so dumb sometimes.

  “How about a burger on us?” I asked Jack.

  He looked hurt.

  “We don’t want anything from you.”

  Tony had finally caught on and was holding out a 20. Both the kids stared at the note longingly. But they didn’t budge.

  “Please, from one friend to another.”

  Jack looked very young all of a sudden. He hesitated, then took the money.

  “You’re too kind, Meera.”

  We said goodbye and Tony and I stood up to leave. Neither of us talked about when we would meet again. If they had something for me, they would find me.

  We cut across the dark alley we had come through and hit the Strip again. It was lit up like ten Christmases. I sighed with relief.

  “Did you notice that blanket?” Tony whispered.

  “They must be sleeping in that gazebo,” I murmured.

  “For how long, Meera?”

  “Until someone turns them o
ut, I guess.”

  We waded through the crowds that thronged the sidewalk and climbed over the bridge. At times like these, I wonder what I have done to deserve my life of luxury. Money flowed around me like water. The over the top lights and neon signs, the casinos where people gambled away money, the shops where they spent a pretty penny were all examples of the infamous Vegas debauchery. How many of the people milling around would spare five bucks for a hungry kid?

  Tony sensed my mood and stayed quiet. We were taking a cab to one end of the Strip, hitting a dinner buffet Jeet had picked out. The family was gathered around inside the Bellagio lobby, waiting for us.

  I hugged Motee Ba and kissed her on the cheek. We split into two cabs and headed to dinner.

  The dinner buffet was bigger and better than the breakfast. They even had a section for Indian food which made Pappa happy. Sweet and spicy aromas assailed my senses and I found my appetite making a comeback. Tony and I chose to walk back to the hotel. We really needed to stretch our legs after that meal.

  “You think those kids were leading us on?” Tony asked me.

  “You saw them yourself. Did they look like pranksters?”

  “I know you feel strongly about this,” he said. “Leo’s innocence, I mean.”

  “Unless someone comes forward with new information, there’s not much I can do.”

  “Do you want to fly home with the others?” Tony offered. “I can get back on my own.”

  The rest of the family was going to fly back home from California. Tony and I were going to drive back home in the LX. We had looked forward to doing it. Driving back would add a few more days to the trip. I had taken extra time off from work for that.

  “It’s a bit too much for one person,” I said. “What do two more days matter?”

  Nothing was going to bring Leo back. But the trail was getting cold. My chances of finding any relevant information diminished as time went by.

  “This is why we should have brought a rental.”

  “One way rentals are too expensive, Meera. And no way we could have been so comfortable in a rented car.”

  Tony wanted to play some slots after we got back. He still had 10 bucks left to lose out of his budget. I rolled my eyes and promised to be back soon.

  It was still early and I was hoping to catch Becky at the diner. She listened spell bound as I told her about THORK.