A Taste of You Page 7

  Then I look up and meet Breck’s eye. He looks a hundred years old. I feel caught, as if he can see stuff in that picture I can’t, and I feel guilty and humble. I think, He’s seven, Hel. Doesn’t matter. I swallow, waiting for him to say something.

  In the silence between us, over the voices of mother and doctor at the printer, I say finally, “You know, if you get much quieter, you’ll probably move to another classroom, Breck. I’ll miss you, but I will be very, very happy to see you in a regular school program.” I feel a choke coming on and I’m appalled. Mustn’t get emotional in front of a student.

  He reaches out and touches the picture of me. On the purple spot. “I can always visit you,” he says.

  “You can always visit me,” I say. Now I sound more like a teacher. God help me, I’m falling apart here.

  “Well, honey? Would you like some ice cream?” Virginia says brightly.

  “I want a carrot smoothie,” Breck says.

  “Perhaps I may consult with the boy’s teacher a little while you get your smoothie, hm?” Dr. Katterfelto says. “You can come back for her in a little vile.”

  I’m fluttering inside.

  Breck and I exchange glances. Virginia hauls him off for his smoothie.

  I’m left alone with Dr. Katterfelto and the picture of the rainbow woman, speechless with fear.

  “I see ve haf had some activity,” he says, tapping the purple spot. Cripes. The kid saw something there, too. “Vot has happened?” The good doctor looks at me with bright beady eyes.

  Nick Jones, kissing me at the bar. I bend over the picture, blushing. “You tell me,” I mumble.

  “Ve haf stimulated the second chakra. Und,” he says, with that really lame-o accent, “she is echoing up into fourth chakra. Heart. You are fallink in love?”

  That would be such a bad idea. “God, I hope not.”

  He smiles at me. “Perhaps it is just your tender heart. Ven ve are so young, so new, is all just connected up, so if a boy only kisses you there is a feeling higher up, ja?”

  I make a face to cover the twisting inside me. “I’m not as young as I look.”

  I think of Agent Nick kissing me on the forehead and covering me with a blanket and walking out of my apartment. My heart squeezes.

  “Yet the fourth chakra is trying to return to a normal spin.” His hokey accent is gone. “How has this happened?”

  And now I remember skating as fast as I possibly can, chanting “Straighten up and fly right.”

  “Oh no,” I breathe.

  “Possibly. Possibly it is good news. But you must be very careful. You are not Breck, with one reversed chakra. You have seven reversed chakras, and now the one in the middle is trying to return to its normal course. This is very dangerous for you.”

  I’ve been telling myself that since I set eyes on Agent Nick. He’s dangerous.

  Somehow it’s a whole ’nother thing to have a doctor say it.

  “I met this guy,” I say weakly.

  Dr. Katterfelto sits back and looks at me. I wonder if he can see my colors with the naked eye. “He must be a special guy.”

  I can only shrug. “I just met him,” I say again. Am I supposed to admit that Nick tries to scare me and fails? When he could literally end my life as I know it? Or should I admit to something even weirder?

  Dr. Katterfelto only looks at me, trouble in his blue googly eyes behind his rimless mad-scientist specs. His energy is sweet and joyful, but with a note of concern that twists my insides.

  I decide.

  I take a deep breath and lean forward. “He’s a Federal agent who investigates magic. He wants me to spy on you. He thinks you want to overthrow the government or run for mayor or do action at a distance.” I see Dr. Katterfelto blink, and I plunge ahead. “He found me because I was reading your website, and he’s been monitoring your site and your cable show and stuff. He says he’ll pay me to spy on you.”

  Does this mean I won’t take the money if I get it? Heck no. But my conscience is floating free. I start to relax. At least I’ve warned him.

  Dr. Katterfelto gestures toward the picture on the table. “Does he know what you are?”

  My nostrils flare. “Do you?”

  “We are what we do,” he says.

  I think this is either crazy or very astute.

  I’m in no frame of mind to confess what I do. I feel as if my skin has been ripped off me all at once and a cold wind is blowing across my exposed nerves.

  Katterfelto says, as if to warn me, “I cannot promise I can do any better for you than he can.”

  “He’s just a no-neck Fed,” I say tightly. “Those guys put people away.”

  He makes a “meh” face. “Very well. Do you have a little time just now? I would like to show you something.” He stands up. “This is not something for the mother and child, you understand.”

  Huh. I’ve told him about Nick, and all of a sudden he wants to show me a secret? That’s backwards.

  Six reversed chakras. Dangerous.

  I stand up. It’s a huge relief to move. “Sure.”

  “Ven they go, ve take a little drive,” he says, the cartoon Kraut coming back into his voice.

  Virginia shows up with Breck, and I tell her I won’t need a ride home after all, and they leave.

  Soon Dr. Katterfelto and I are trundling southward in a Chevy Suburban that smells of winos and stale latte.

  Katterfelto leans forward and gestures out the windshield.

  I see a huge power tower. There’s a whole line of them here, marching through an abandoned chunk of the industrial south side, a hundred feet tall, with many wires on each of the big branching metal arms. Each giant, four-footed steel tower is bolted into concrete at each corner. The line of power towers crosses the landscape like something out of a science fiction movie.

  We stop. Looking straight up, I see that we are near a foot of one of those monster towers.

  A haze of blue surrounds the base of this tower. Hairs rise on the back of my neck.

  “This is a forbidden zone.”

  “I need someone to go viz me to the blue zone,” Katterfelto says. “In fact, I vould like to inspect this tower and the towers on either side of it.”

  The tower stands in the middle of a factory parking lot. The asphalt looks pretty new, although the lawn and bushes surrounding it are wildly overgrown and there’s a big CLOSED BY FEMA sign over the factory’s employee entrance.

  “Huh.”

  “You are intrigued?”

  “Kinda. Stop here.” He stops the car and I hop out, feeling very daring. I step out onto the asphalt. The tower is appallingly huge.

  The blue haze surrounds the base of the tower, closer to one foot than the other three. Blue zones like this have taken over vast chunks of Pittsburgh, Brussels, other cities. This is the first one I’ve seen in Chicago.

  I hear faint whispering in the back of my mind. It seems to be coming from the blue zone. I should be afraid. Yet I feel optimistic, as if the air is suddenly full of opportunities.

  “Wonder why it’s just around the bottom of this one tower.”

  “I fear I know why,” says Katterfelto at my elbow. He doesn’t say why. And he doesn’t seem to be afraid.

  This guy knows stuff. I could be part of his investigation into the world’s problems.

  I know now that I’m going to take on Nick’s mission.

  But I’m not going to betray Dr. Katterfelto unless I decide to. I’ve only begun to balance my forty-three-year deficit with the planet’s ecosystem, by joining roller derby. This way, I get to make a much greater contribution.

  If I don’t get killed doing it, of course.

  And if Agent Nick doesn’t send me to Hinky Guantanamo.

  My Ma is in the hospital with a killer disease she can’t afford to have treated. The Federal wolf is at the door. I still haven’t had sex. I drank so much after the bout that I had to be put to bed, and thus blew my first shot in ages at getting some nooky.

 
; But I feel glad to be alive.

  I look up at the tower before me and I don’t feel small beside it. I feel like one good hip check and I could show it who’s boss.

  “This asphalt is really nice.” I scuff a toe on the parking lot. “No cracks or frost heave or anything.” I look around the big half-block-size parking lot. “Maybe a few branches here and there. Couple piles of leaves.”

  “You are thinking?” he says.

  “Yup.” But I don’t tell him what, not quite yet.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Dr. Katterfelto leaves me off at the bus stop. For once I’m not hungry. I ride the bus home, holding myself as far away from the commuters as I can, my elbows tucked in. I don’t want to feel what they’re feeling right now. My own emotions are all over the place. The man on the bus seat beside me radiates a thousand decibels of disappointment and anxiety, and I have to get up and move to stand by the back door.

  My head is full of the sight of those towers.

  What’s so interesting to Dr. Katterfelto about them?

  I have to know. Because they interest me.

  It is forbidden to go into the blue, and most people think that’s fine. So of course I want to go.

  And I was worrying only a couple of weeks ago about Ma using a credit card to gamble online.

  I get off the 22 bus and am waiting at the bus stop for my transfer to the 36 when I hear a car honk next to me, and a voice yells out, “Hel Nagazy?” It’s Agent Nick.

  There’s no way he found me here by accident.

  So he was either following me, or he followed Katterfelto and then followed me when I got out of Katterfelto’s car.

  The possibility that he’s planted a bug on me crosses my mind as well. Little GPS radio device. Tracer anklet, as he threatened that night.

  Nevertheless, the idea of sitting in a car with him and his delicious energy, as opposed to riding another bus, is too much for my battered senses. I get in.

  “So?” he says, as I put my seat belt on.

  “So he’s interested in power towers,” I say, because if Agent Nick followed us, he knows that much for sure.

  “He tell you why?”

  “Not yet. He may think I’m just a dumb little girl,” I say pointedly, “and has no intention of telling me anything.”

  “What does he want you to do?”

  “Go into the blue and look at the tower there,” I say coolly.

  I feel Agent Nick seize up in the driver’s seat beside me. Then he slowly relaxes, as if forcing himself to do it, muscle by muscle. Interesting. Agent Nick is afraid of the blue?

  He says, “Let me give you some protective gear and a tracer before you go in there.”

  So he doesn’t have a tracer on me yet. Good to know.

  “Maybe.”

  “Shut up and do it,” Nick says, showing his Fed colors, and I smile quietly to myself. I wonder if anyone ever says no to this guy.

  “Gosh, whatever, Tarzan,” I say, and he flashes me a glance.

  “I’ll drop them by the school tomorrow.”

  “Drop them by my apartment, please,” I say. “It’s not good for me to be visited by obvious federales at my place of work. Parents don’t feel it’s respectable.”

  But he laughs at that, and I remember that Agent Nick has a sense of humor about himself. Dangerous.

  He doesn’t get out of the Cherokee when he drops me at my apartment.

  “Call me if anything else happens,” he says, and now I get it.

  He’s not afraid of the blue. He’s anxious for little Hel, who seems to be under the age of consent.

  I also understand why he abandoned me in my apartment, dry-humping a pillow while I cried.

  He thinks I’m a kid.

  He’s got to be near forty himself. He’s holding back out of freakin’ chivalry.

  This idea fills me with an absurd amount of hope and delight. I duck my head and suck air through my teeth and clench my hand on my purse. Setting him up. “Um, Nick?”

  “What?” I hear his heartbeat jump as I say his name.

  Mine jumps, too. “Would you wait here until I’m in my apartment? Just until I turn on the light?”

  “Sure,” he says. Now I’m acting like a girl. He’s relaxing.

  So I get out of the car and walk slowly inside. Inside, I race up to my apartment, lock the door, and take all my clothes off. I stand naked in the shadows, looking out the window, keeping back so he won’t see me.

  He’s waiting. My faithful protector.

  I take a deep breath, run to the door, and flick on the light.

  Then I dematerialize into a mist.

  I seep out the keyhole and stream downstairs and out the front door keyhole as fast as I can.

  What if I’m not fast enough?

  But he’s waiting out there, watching my lighted window. Ah, chivalry. I would giggle only I don’t have anything to giggle with. I slip into his Cherokee and hover there, until he starts the car moving.

  Then I slip out again, tethering myself to the car and bobbing along behind it like a balloon, so I can watch how we get to his place.

  I want to know everything there is to know about Agent Nick.

  Everything.

  It would seem he is staying at a residential hotel for transient men. It’s a real armpit. For heaven’s sake! From a perch on top of a street light, I watch him park the car on the street.

  Then I focus on his energy pattern, memorizing it, because I don’t want to follow him in the front door.

  He walks into this dumpy men’s hotel. I extend my senses, feeling for that energy pattern as he moves around in the building, what, maybe getting his mail at the front desk? Then he goes up the stairs to the fourth floor. Why not the elevator? I check the roof. No elevator. What a dump. He walks to a room maybe ten steps from the stairwell, and then I see him at a window.

  I fly closer and search his window for a way in.

  Here. A little triangular hole in the glass, just big enough to let in a fly. And me.

  I stream into the room slowly, listening and watching and smelling for any sense that he might notice I’m here.

  So far so good.

  He’s taking off his Federal jacket and his gun holster, whoa. So big, Nick. He hangs them up neatly on a hook on the wall. Then he lifts up the mattress and there’s a little laptop under it. The laptop is chained to the bed with a bike cable. Whut th—?

  Why doesn’t the government like, give him money for a real hotel? This sucks for sure. I see his room door is closed, which is a good thing, considering the laptop.

  He sits on the bed and types for a while.

  I’d love to read what he’s typing, but I’m uneasy. I don’t know if he can tell I’m in the room. He shoots looks at the door, and sometimes at the window, but he doesn’t get up.

  Finally I can’t resist a peek, and when I look, I see he’s typing into an ordinary Word file. Not a top seke government form or anything. Huh. He’s writing about driving me home:

  Subject went into her apartment and turned on her light. I left her there at oh-eight-hundred.

  Boy is he assuming a lot.

  He sits with the laptop on his lap for a while, then types:

  I believe she’s telling the truth. Katterfelto would be cagey about this project, especially with a chance-met kid like the Subject. I’m a little disturbed at his cavalier endangerment of her, planning to send her into the blue. Doesn’t she think about that? She’s bringing her school children to him for treatment, and yet he’s willing to endanger her like this.

  He looks at this screen for a while. Then, putting his finger on the backspace key, he erases all of it back to “left her there at oh-eight-hundred,” and clicks the save button.

  Then he powers down the laptop and puts it back under the mattress.

  Now he goes to his jacket on the wall and pulls a little notebook out of the breast pocket and sits back down on the bed and writes.

  I have to get closer to read
what he’s writing. His handwriting is large and neat, like a schoolteacher’s.

  He’s writing exactly the same thing he wrote in the computer just now. About Katterfelto endangering me and how dumb I am to do this. But his energy level is higher. He seems more emotional this time.

  She doesn’t seem the least afraid of this whole thing. I’ve never met anyone so careless of her personal safety. I worry that she’ll be unable to recognize a threat in the blue until it swallows her up. Then what? I haven’t been in the blue at this section yet. I don’t know what it’s like, what visibility is like, if the instruments work in there. What if she goes in there and breaks her leg?

  He sits there, staring over the top of his notebook, and I think, You sweetie. He really does worry about me. Lots more than he would about a “subject.”

  At length he goes downstairs and out. I see him walk across the street to the hot dog stand, where he eats four hot dogs with everything and a pint of cole slaw. I stay in his room, hovering between the window and the door, snooping, wishing I had the nerve to open the laptop, and regretting that he has taken the notebook with him.

  I have lots to think about.

  First of all, he has got to be the most underfunded Federal agent I’ve ever seen. Well, I haven’t seen any, outside of TV, but still. Surely there’s money for at least a real hotel, yes? He shouldn’t have to eat two-dollar hot dogs.

  Second, he doesn’t want to put his real thoughts about me on record. So the laptop is bugged somehow, or at least he thinks that whatever goes in that file is official. That means he’s not a hundred percent comfortable with his own Federal agency.

  Third, he lives like a monk in this dump. I float around the room, snooping. In the chest of drawers I find four sets of clean underwear and socks, a similar number of blah colored dress shirts, a better jacket — for infiltrating decent bars? He had on something nice the other night, not that I remember too clearly what it looked like. I sniff the lapel. Silk and linen. Yes, this one, it smells like him. And faintly like me. Like me when I’m horny.

  Cripes, Hel, you really did let yourself go, didn’t you?

  He has a couple of tee shirts, both of them Red Sox shirts, and a ball cap to match. Sneakers. Money belt with no money in it.