Authors: Carol Plum-Ucci
I did, feeling eaten alive.
"So, like, what do you think about? Naked girls?" she asked.
"Mm-mm." End of discussion.
"Are they real girls? Or do you make them up, and that way you don't have to look somebody in the eye in the school corridors the next day?"
I took the thing out and tried not drooling so hard this time. "Rain, get to the punch line. Some things you just don't talk about, okay?"
"Don't be such a prude! Who else am I going to ask? Cora? Here's my problem. I tried my boyfriends on my right hand. Nothing happens. I'm doing something wrong."
I sat forward in case I laughed totally and gagged myself. I could see she was really needing to get a load off her chest, but I pounded the mattress, these laughs coming up all "Hmm hmm hmm."
I wanted to say I thought it was probably different for guys and girls, that maybe girls had to think harder or something. But I figured she would know that, and I didn't want to drool over a redundancy. And I didn't get what she wanted from me. I was not all that familiar with female anatomy. It's one thing to have "wandered downstairs" once or twice, and it's another to explain the fuse box. I felt that female anatomy was a lot like Dempsey's mom's new stovetop. It's flat and there's no huge buttons, so you can't tell where the heat is until you sit yourself up there and you realize the burner's on. (True story. Happened to Dobbins two days after Mrs. Dempsey bought that thing. I will never, ever, ever have one of those stoves in my house.) And it's not like I'd ever had a centerfold of some medical/sex journal shoved in my face detailing some girl's privates with everything numbered and labeled with those italic captions.
What is she thinking?
And yet, she was right that she couldn't ask Cora. Cora might sympathize a moment before passing out in abject terror of a totally personal subject. It seems weird, but Jeanine probably didn't know squat. She could barely remember what happened the next day after each time she drank. Still, I probably would have told Rain to go pound sand, I was not discussing this, except this grand idea sort of went off in my head. It had to do with these new bathrooms they put in here. In my house, our bathroom had been really run-down, in need of new tiles and all this stuff. Our shower had been from the 1970s.
I glanced out into the corridor to make sure Mr. Montu wasn't waking up and standing there. But the hall was clear, and with Rain waiting for an answer without even breathing, I could hear him snoring softly on the floor above us.
I pulled the mouthpiece out. "Try that new thingermabob. The showerhead that's on the six-foot hose." I put it back in.
She looked at me like I was crazy and then collapsed over sideways on the bed, laughing in fits.
It's only a riot when I get personal.
"Mmm?"
Well?
"But every time I get in the shower, you will wonder what's going on!"
Mouthpiece out. I couldn't resist. "Yeah, especially if you use up all the hot water while trying to figure yourself out." Mouthpiece in. Mouthpiece out. "When we hear Marg scream 'cuz there's a thousand-dollar water bill—"
"I cannot believe you are talking to me about the shower!"
I collapsed yet again, defeated. There was no winning in this situation.
"And what if it doesn't work?"
Mouthpiece out. I didn't like her tone. "We've been over this. Don't look at me to solve your problems." I hadn't told her about the lecture I'd gotten from Dan Hadley two days before Nurse Haley.
Do not touch her
had been the point. He was very, very big on the
do not touch
lectures to our whole Young Life group, about pregnancies ruining lives, abortions hiding emotional shocks that can jump out at you, like, twenty years later. He's yet another adult who had been worried about me and Rain up here.
He wasn't here to watch her face turn putrid.
"Pervert," she said. "I was strung out yesterday when I tried to kiss you. I'm not
that
desperate." Then she started moving back and forth like a pendulum, her eyes on my mouth. "Oh-mygosh. Take that thing out again."
"Mmm-mmm."
She was totally staring. "No, take it out! Your teeth! You're not going to believe this."
I still had five minutes to go but went slowly to the bathroom, rinsed fifteen times, came back and shined my teeth in the mirror. They were totally white. Like, shining, searing
white.
"They don't even look like teeth!" I said in horror.
"They look great! Ohmygosh. You'll have the bestest smile at my birthday. Why didn't we think to do this before
People
came?"
Like I needed even more of those crazy cavegirl get-well cards. I started to say to her, "Stand back, and don't get any dumb ideas." Not that she would.
I never said it. Some weird sound made me think a bell was ringing. Then I realized it was Cora, somewhere far off like the basement, screaming her fool head off.
SCOTT EBERMAN
MONDAY, MAY 6, 2002
10:40
A.M.
GRIFFITH'S LANDING
I
DROVE TO GRIFFITH'S LANDING WITH ALAN
, wondering if my great feeling came from Cora pitching backwards when I first let go of her in the basement or from the notion that I was actually going to work. If yesterday was awful, today was fantastic. Life was like that. I'd enjoy today while it was today.
I lay my head on the headrest and put my energy in preservation mode. My throat was still bothering me, and I knew pacing myself would be a necessity. Alan drove to a supermarket parking lot, which was more blacktop than cars as the summer hadn't started yet, and parked near the street. We were dressed in jeans and polo shirts, and he put on a baseball cap and shades. I was already wearing my shades.
"Keep your head down, Mr. Famous, just in case," he said, "and follow me."
We headed across the parking lot to where a black van was parked, with a sign that read
SUITOR'S PLUMBING
on the door. It looked pretty banged up. When we ducked inside, the sight just about gave me whiplash. There were eight monitors on one wall—some on, some bleeping sand—and a thousand wires.
A guy who looked only about a few years older than me had been in the driver's seat reading the newspaper. Alan introduced him only as Nigel, a new agent from Washington.
"Sorry, no seat belts," Alan said, and he pulled a chair off a stack of four chairs in the far back corner and handed it to me. It was hard to get all four legs on the floor without hitting any cables, but as soon as we were sitting, Nigel took off.
Alan laid the pile of old pictures—suspected members of ShadowStrike—in my lap and said, "Start looking through these. Agents on the street already have them memorized. We'll be listening for our guys to make any idents and watching them tail anyone suspicious ... and don't expect miracles."
The only new photo was Cora's, the close-up of one startled guy. Under it was written with a Sharpie pen in black,
Log-in: Pasco. Name: Unknown. Alias: Abdul Khadisha
. I was amazed at how typically American he looked—the biggest problem being there was no typical American look. But he could have been any little kid's granddad. I tried to memorize his features—circular face, curly hair, balding on top, graying on the sides, hazel eyes, thick bottom lip, thin top lip. While I did the same with the other eight photos, all of which had names and even some aliases scrawled beneath them, Alan began playing with the monitors and talking to agents he was hearing on headsets.
I glanced up once to see the Ferris wheel from the Icon Pier three or four blocks to our left. This was a primitive operation in enough ways to startle me. Alan had a roll of masking tape and a stack of index cards in his lap. He would say things into his headset like, "Mike, do a three-sixty ... again ... again," and he'd pick up the monitor that showed three complete circles from the view of someone walking on the street. He'd mark
MIKE
on the index card and say, "Mike, your number today is four." He'd tape the index card in front of the monitor marked 4 with "Mike" and "#4" scrawled onto it.
He did this with eight agents, some on the street, some on the boardwalk, one in front of the Superfresh where we'd just come from, and one in front of the CVS. Nigel had a laptop and clicked a few lines every time Alan would ident an agent. Gauging from the height shown in the monitors, I gathered these guys had the cameras hidden in their collars or in some button on their shirts. I didn't ask questions. But people strolled by them occasionally, and we were looking into their shoulders.
I began watching the monitors with Alan after every picture was stuck in my head and ignored a feeling of seasickness as their constant movement got behind my eyes. Alan would call them "Four" or "Six" and chatter with them, giving me the impression the agents were bored but used to it. Alan would laugh and send back what sounded like a punch line, though I couldn't hear the jokes. This went on for an hour and ten minutes. A preschool passed by Agent Six, two teachers bringing small children in a double line up to the boardwalk. A lot more women passed than men, and since none of the pictures I'd been shown were women, I let my eyes fall to those monitors where men passed. None of them had the facial features I'd memorized while trying to ignore hair, which could easily be changed.
"Seven, I'm alive, I'm alive," Alan finally said, and I watched the corresponding monitor as Agent Seven started to follow what I thought was a teenager at first. It was a little skinny guy in an oversize sweatshirt and baggy jeans. I could only see the back of his head at first. I watched him move farther down the street, until Agent Seven began following. The skinny guy stopped at a trash can and peeled a banana into it, finally glancing straight at the monitor. That's when I recognized his features as similar to one of my photos, a young suspect named Ibrahim Kansi. The agent passed him by and uttered something that made Alan say into the headset, "Six, pick up suspect Kansi on Ocean and Belmont."
Agent Seven kept going, and I watched Six's monitor as the agent turned a corner and caught the guy peeling the banana from the other side. He was far off. I wondered if the agents were sure it was the same guy as the one in the photos. Alan got his face within a foot of the monitor, slowly shaking his head back and forth, like he was doubtful.
I was, too. Just from the headshot, I would have put Ibrahim Kansi at about five-foot-nine, and this man was more like five-foot-two, and it made me respectful of the challenges intelligence had in making accurate idents.
As Agent Six strolled closer, Alan glanced at me. "What do you think?"
But the agent was on the far side of the street, and the suspect stood by the trash can down in the left corner of the monitor. As soon as I could focus in on the man's face, the agent bent down to tie his shoe, and I was faced with sidewalk and a sneaker toe. It almost made me pitch forward in the chair.
"All I could see is he's got the same nose," I said, and Alan, now standing, laid a hand on my shoulder.
"We'll see if he's meeting someone. That always helps. Seven, circle back around and get the banana peel. Can we fingerprint a banana peel?" Seven must have said something funny about DNA, because Alan laughed and replied, "If you find any bite marks, you get a bonus."
The suspect walked on down the street again, chewing and licking his fingers, a plethora of DNA and fingerprints and information that we couldn't touch. It was frustrating. Eventually the agent followed, and the guy turned into an apartment building, where he knocked instead of pulling out a key. It was impossible to see who let him in.
"Note address: seventeen fifty-one Belmont, bottom floor," Alan said, and Nigel's keypad clattered. We watched Agent Six sit somewhere, and a newspaper kept flying up into the bottom of the screen.
Another twenty minutes passed. I was starting to understand the level of patience these guys needed. The agents up on the boardwalk were getting no hits, and one look-alive at the CVS turned out not to be a match.
Agent Five had switched with Agent Six, I understood from Alan's chatter, and finally the door to the apartment opened on monitor five. The suspect came out with another man, whom I recognized immediately.
"That's Pasco," I said.
"Five, you might have another
bingo,
" Alan said more calmly than I would have expected, and I watched as the two headed west on Belmont Avenue for a couple of blocks, talking away.
My desire to see them knocked to the concrete was eating me alive. "Are you going to arrest them today?"
"I hope we won't have to make any arrests until we're up to our necks in evidence. We may just be getting started. Our next step is to tap their phones, wire their premises. It'll be a couple of weeks, unless we see them folding up the op. We need evidence. Lots of it."
The shorter guy put his hands in his pockets at one point, which pulled up the back of his sweatshirt, and I noticed some sort of short club in his back pocket with something shiny on top.
I leaned into the monitor. "What is that?" I touched the image of the club with the Sharpie.
"Five, get closer," Alan said, which gave me some flinch-worthy sense of power, as I had only been curious. The agent sped up until he was maybe twenty feet behind. The shiny thing was a chain that ran from the top of this little billy club to a matching club that was down deeper in the guy's pocket.
"Looks like nunchucks," Alan said. "It's a martial arts weapon. A properly trained guy can flip those around and hit someone before they even know they're being attacked. Five, is that a set of nunchucks?"
The agent turned while the suspects crossed the street to the Superfresh, but Alan repeated for me, "Affirmative. Note that Ibrahim Kansi might have martial arts capabilities."
Nigel now sat sideways with the laptop on his legs. He clattered a note.
"Three, pick them up and follow them into the Superfresh," Alan said, and the scene on monitor three moved through an alley, then the parking lot, and picked up the two men. They passed by Alan's car and suddenly banged into each other.