Defender Page 3

  “We should practice shooting free throws, Tyne. Don’t want you losing your touch.”

  “What touch? I’m no shooter.”

  My role on the team is shot blocking, rebounding, smackdown defensive demon. I muscle girls out of the way. Stick helps me practice, but him guarding me is like setting a Chihuahua on a Great Dane. With Dad it’s more of a fair fight.

  Thinking of him now, I see his face in the beam of my flashlight down in the dark by the hole in the wall. It’ll seem like a dream. But it’s still so fresh in my head that I drop my slice back in the box.

  “What’s up? You sick or something? I’ve been getting a weird vibe off you today.”

  “Can I tell you something crazy?”

  “Sure. I’m into crazy.”

  So I start with the flood, and the crack in the wall. I describe the body, how it looked all dried up and mummified.

  I keep my eyes off Stick while I’m talking, not wanting to see the same disbelief I got from Dad. After I’m done with how the body was gone when we returned, I let the silence stretch out, waiting for Stick to break it.

  “For real?” he asks.

  I nod, meeting his gaze. I see questions there, but he’s not looking at me like I’m nuts.

  “So?” I say. “What do you think?”

  “Well, I was thinking of fun in the sun. But this beats that.” He gets up from the bench. “Show me. Take me to the tomb.”

  DARKNESS AND DUST.

  But no body.

  I shine the beam of the big flashlight into the hole, with Stick leaning in close. Only there’s nothing to see.

  “It was here.”

  He steps back and looks around the empty room. “So where did it go?”

  I changed the bulb so we wouldn’t be stumbling around in the dark. But something about this place drains the light.

  “Let’s check in there,” Stick says, going over to the huge smoke-blackened door of the incinerator on the far wall.

  “Why? That thing I saw didn’t get out of the wall to go hide in there.”

  “Look at the size of that furnace.” He snaps a shot of it with his phone. “You could stuff a bunch of bodies inside. Come on, let’s just check and see. Open it up.”

  “You do it.”

  “No way. You’re the super’s daughter. You’ve got the master key.”

  I check the latch on the incinerator. “It’s not locked.”

  “Crack it open. If some undead freak jumps out, I’ve got your back.” Stick picks up the garbage shovel leaning against the wall and holds it, ready to swing.

  “You’re my hero.” I shake my head. This is pointless, but now he’s got me wondering what might be inside.

  Grabbing the cold metal latch, I strain to move it. But the thing is stuck like it’s welded shut.

  “Won’t budge,” I say. “Try hitting it with the shovel.”

  Stick whacks it hard twice with clanging booms. “That’ll wake the dead.”

  Gripping the latch again, I twist till it gives with a screech, breaking loose a seal of rust. Opening the door wide, I aim the flashlight into the depths of the furnace.

  Ash and charcoal are heaped two feet deep inside. No bones or body parts.

  “Shovel around in there,” I tell him.

  Just some old cans and bottle caps show up. If there was ever a body in there, it’s long gone to ash. A smoky dust cloud wafts out.

  “Enough.” I cough, waving the dust away as I swing the door shut with a thud.

  “Now what?” Stick leans on the shovel.

  I go back to that hole. The crack runs from the ceiling halfway to the floor. I can peer in, but I can’t reach the shallow layer of trash on the bottom. It’s not deep enough to hide anything. The body’s gone. But maybe there’s something in there. The gap is a little more than a foot wide. Too tight for me. Maybe big enough for Stick to fit through. The shaft inside is a bit wider here in the basement where the chute emptied out.

  “Think you could get in there?”

  “What? Why?”

  “To get a closer look at that crap. See if there’s some kind of…I don’t know, something. Proof of what I saw.”

  “You want me to climb in a hole in the wall where you think you saw a corpse and dig through garbage?”

  I nod.

  “Worst date ever.”

  “Hey, I bought you lunch.”

  “How about I pay you back with something more stimulating,” he says, trying his best sexy, smoldering look on me.

  “Maybe later. This place isn’t putting me in the mood.” I stick my head in the gap, running the light over the pile of debris. “Come on, I need to know if anything’s buried under that.”

  “Why don’t you do it?”

  “I couldn’t fit one leg in there. So get your cute little butt in.”

  He sighs. “Anything for my girl.”

  “Here. Use these to dig.” I pull some latex gloves from my tool kit. “No room for the shovel in there.”

  I drag the abandoned chair over to help Stick climb through. He gets on it, swings one leg into the gap, then squirms and squeezes inside, landing with a crunch in the trash. I give him the flashlight, and he sweeps the beam over the walls of the shaft and up into the impenetrable blackness of the chute.

  “Creepy,” he says. “If something drags me off in the dark for its next meal, I will come back to haunt you.”

  “You already haunt me.”

  He starts kicking around in the garbage. “So what am I supposed to be looking for, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. Anything suspicious, or weird.”

  “We’re way past weird here. You know, there are professors who study old trash. They’re called garbologists. Saw a show on TV about them. They go digging up landfills and dumps to see how people lived centuries ago. They say a lot of archaeology is just digging through crap our ancestors threw out.”

  “Finding anything, Professor Stick?”

  With no room to bend over, he has to squat to pick something up.

  “How’s this for weird?”

  He hands me a filthy stuffed toy. It’s Ernie from Sesame Street, with one eye ripped off, his head hanging on by a thread and his stuffing spilling out.

  “You think Bert did that to him?” Stick says. “He was always screaming at Ernie to shut up at bedtime. Maybe he pushed Ernie down the chute.”

  “Well, Bert did have anger management issues, and that sinister unibrow. But I don’t think this Muppet murder is connected to what I saw.”

  I set the toy down. Stick spends another few minutes sorting through the debris, joking about starring in Indiana Jones and the Slum Mummy’s Tomb.

  Then he freezes.

  “You got something?”

  “I don’t know.” Rising from a crouch, he shines the light on what he’s holding.

  Looks like a gray twig, about three inches long. Or maybe a broken pencil.

  “Tell me that’s not what I think it is,” he says.

  I take it, turning it over in the glare of the beam.

  My breath catches, and my guts go ice cold.

  It’s a finger.

  I CAN’T BELIEVE it.

  Sitting at my desk in my room, deep in the night, I stare at the finger, a dry, brittle and shriveled gray thing. I’ve got it in a clear plastic pill bottle.

  It’s real. I keep staring as if it’s going to disappear like the rest of the body. After making the grisly discovery, we did a thorough search, with Stick dumping everything out to be examined in the light, but there was nothing else.

  Where’s the rest of you?

  Now there’s no doubt that everything I saw was real. But what happened to the corpse between when I found it and when I went back down with Dad?

  That’s what’s killing me. Because I’m sure there were only two sets of shoe prints in the old dust on the floor—mine and his. Nobody else had been there. That door was locked tight.

  It’s insane. But there’s no way around it
: Dad must have moved the body. Then he lied to me and tried to make me think I was seeing things.

  But that’s crazy! Makes no sense. Why would he do that?

  I’ve been hiding out in my room, skipping the spaghetti Mom made before heading to work. I said I ate earlier.

  I can’t face Dad. He made me think I was nuts.

  I replay it all: how nervous he seemed when he came back up from the basement to tell me there was nothing in the chute, how he kept washing his hands and wouldn’t look at me.

  Is it possible?

  Where did he put the body? He was gone maybe twenty minutes. Not enough time to take the corpse off the property. It might still be down there.

  The basement floors of the Zoo have so many hiding places, utility and storage rooms, supply closets, crawl spaces and forgotten compartments. It’s a maze of twisting hallways, some ending in brick walls as if the builders were just making things up as they went along. If Dad hid something, I’d never find it.

  Stick was as shocked as me, but fascinated too. We’ve been talking and texting all night. On my laptop screen right now is one of the links he sent me, to a site that tells you all about “natural” mummification. That’s where, under the right conditions, a dead body will dry out and stay in a “preserved” state. I’m getting the shakes just thinking about it.

  Hard to tell from what I saw, but she was young. A teenager, maybe. A girl, like me. The thought pierces my heart.

  Holding the bottle under my desk lamp, I study the finger. We noticed some old scarring on the skin where a ring would go. Some kind of design, what looks like a little skull, with some letters. It’s hard to make out.

  What do I do with this? Can’t take it to the cops—not if Dad’s concealing the rest of the body. Who does that? It’s not how an innocent man acts. But there’s no way he could ever be involved in anything like this.

  Impossible. Unbelievable.

  But I’m holding the proof that he’s lying.

  So I lock myself in my room, away from Dad, who’s suddenly a stranger to me.

  I look at the finger, seeing nightmare flashes of the girl in the wall. That poor thing.

  Who were you? How did you die? And why is he hiding you?

  “NO WAY,” STICK says. “My brain just can’t go there.”

  We’re at his apartment on Sunday morning. I sneaked out early before Dad got up. I’m on Stick’s couch, exhausted after a sleepless night.

  “There’s got to be some innocent explanation,” he says.

  “Give me one.”

  He can only shake his head.

  “Exactly. Believe me, I broke my brain trying to come up with one.”

  This is where Stick lives with his foster family. A lot of kids have come and gone from this place—some were sent here by the court while their parents were jailed or in rehab; others were abuse victims removed from their homes or abandoned kids who were given up to the state, like Stick. Most were temporary, till they got sent back to their real families; others left when they got adopted. Then there’s Stick—he’s a lifer. The place is run by Miss Diaz, mom to a mob of stray kids over the years.

  “Come on,” Stick says. “This is your dad we’re talking about. Teddy. Everybody calls him Teddy Bear because he’s always helping people, looking out for everybody. Letting them pay the rent late sometimes. Fixing stuff, even when it’s not his job—you know, like vacuum cleaners, air conditioners and bikes. Checking in on the old folks. When I fell off the jungle gym in the park and dislocated my shoulder, remember how he popped it back in place, then got me to the hospital and later bought me all the ice cream I could eat? He’d never do something like this. You know him.”

  “Yeah, well, I thought I did.”

  Dad’s the closest thing to a father figure Stick’s ever had. I’ve even heard Dad call him son a few times, just being casual, but I could see how Stick felt it.

  “What if you just confront him? I mean, show him that finger and say ‘Here’s the proof. I saw what I saw.’ ”

  “Yeah, and then what? I say, ‘By the way, Daddy, what did you do with the body?’ Believe me, I imagined the scene a million times last night. How it would go. But what could he say? What possible innocent reason could there be? There’s nothing. And he’s already lied about it. Told me I was crazy, seeing things, hallucinating. I can’t take him lying to me again.”

  “But you’ve got evidence. How could he deny it?”

  I’ve thought about that too. “Lots of ways. He could say the finger’s not real. Like it’s a Halloween prop, made to look like the real thing, that somebody threw out. Or it’s from something else—a monkey or something. The way it looks, it’s hard to tell. Or he might even say it’s from some old construction accident.”

  “That’s kind of far-fetched.”

  “Doesn’t matter. He could say anything to talk his way out of it, like he did yesterday. Make enough room for doubt. But I know what’s real. That finger—that body—is real. And I can’t take any more lies.”

  Dad trying to trick me—that’s one hell of a head fake.

  We sit silent for a minute. Stick grabs a Pop-Tart from the box on the coffee table where I’ve got my leg up, resting my sore knee. Nothing keeps him from eating. Not even the photo of the finger, which he brings up on his cell phone.

  “You know,” he says, “the cops could pull a print off it. And if she was ever in the system they could ID her.”

  “Can’t go to the cops.”

  “I know. I’m just saying.”

  “What about that design?” I ask. “The scarring? What do you think?”

  “I might have something on that. You’re not the only one who went sleepless last night. I was searching online and I think I know what it is. See the way the scar is raised?”

  Before I sealed the finger in the bottle, we gave the thing a thorough inspection, feeling the bumps of those lines under our fingertips.

  “That wasn’t cut into the skin. It was burned into it. Branded.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, it’s called a ring brand. Some people get them instead of tattoos. You get stamped by a hot metal brand with some design, and it leaves this kind of scar. Here, check these out.”

  He flips through shots he got off Google of different brands done on shoulders, biceps, necks and fingers, ending with a close-up of the finger’s markings.

  “I played with the contrast on the photo to make the pattern clearer, and I came up with this.”

  The outline of the little skull pops out. The design is only the top half of a skull. There’s something else in the place where the teeth and jaws would be.

  “What is that?” I say. “Looks like a flower.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s it supposed to mean?”

  “No idea. Possibly a gang thing? I’ll check around some sites and see if I can find a match.”

  “What about the letters on the other side?”

  Stick brings up a shot of the palm-side of the finger, with the tiny, hard-to-read letters now standing out pale and clear:

  MIVEM

  “What’s MIVEM?” I ask.

  “Maybe her name?”

  I grunt. “Who gets branded with their name?”

  “Who does any of this, gets white-hot metal burned into their flesh?”

  “She did. So it must have meant something to her.”

  “Could be anything. A message. Some personal code.”

  There’s something vaguely familiar about the little flowering skull, like maybe I’ve seen something like it before. But the feeling is so faint that I might be imagining it.

  As I’m trying to puzzle out those letters, the bedroom door opens and out comes Stick’s foster sister, Vega, in a camouflage T-shirt and boxers.

  She squints at us, just woken up. Vega is half black, half Asian—a blazin, she calls herself. It fits—she’s on fire. She’s lean and muscled, with hair in ragged cornrows that stick up like barbed wire.

>   “Morning, bitches.” Vega goes in the kitchen, grabs a can of Red Bull and chugs it. “Breakfast of champions.” She belches thunderously.

  “Hey, Stick,” she calls, tapping a sheet of paper magneted to the fridge. “This chore chart here isn’t just for decoration. And it’s saying clean the bathroom, like, yesterday. So you better be getting in there and scrubbing that tub. You know Miss Diaz needs a hot soak for her arthritis.”

  “I’m getting to it.”

  “Make sure you get to it before she comes home from church.”

  Vega has always been the enforcer. Miss D is too old to chase kids around anymore, so Vega lays down the law. Which sounds funny, considering her criminal record. It’s impressive, ending with a two-month sentence in juvie, for breaking into cars and stealing stereos and consoles. She used to brag she could get in and get gone before anybody even heard the car alarm—stealing at the speed of sound.

  But Vega’s been clean for over a year now, after Miss D gave her a final ultimatum—get legal or get gone. Now she’s in the Jail to Jobs program, working as a mechanic at a local garage. Fixing what she used to break.

  She grabs a Pop-Tart. “How’s the knee, Stretch? We gonna see you back on the court soon?”

  “Two more weeks. It was only a partial tear, didn’t need surgery. But it’s bad enough.”

  “Yeah? Well, check this out.” Vega leans over to show me a jagged scar on her forearm. “Compound fracture when I was ten. Bone broke through the skin. It scared the crap out of my stepdad after he did that. He thought they were going to jail his ass. But he got off.”

  “Tell her the punch line to the story,” Stick says.

  “Oh. A week later, Stepdick got some antifreeze mixed in with his beer. He wasn’t up for beatdowns after that.”

  Crazy stuff, but not so shocking coming from Vega. I can see her as a ten-year-old poisoner.

  “Ah, memories,” she says, heading toward the bathroom. “Anyway, I’m hitting the shower. Then you can scrub the tub, Stick.”

  Hard to believe she’s only two years older than us. She’s actually aged out of the foster system, but she still lives here with Miss Diaz. You don’t want to get on Vega’s bad side. But in her own way she’s been a badass big sister to Stick.