Quicksilver(9)
“How do you know that?”
“How could I not? It’s the kind of thing everyone needs to know in the new America.”
“So I should take the plate off my car?”
“That would be a start.”
As traffic whooshed past, sunshine flaring off the windshields, I got out of the van and looked in at him. “What if a cop stops me because I don’t have a plate?”
“Then you’re a burnt burrito. Still sure you don’t want to take a trip to Mexico?”
“No, I’ve got to stay here and clear my name. This is all some terrible mistake.”
After a snort of exasperation, Juan said, “Vaya con Dios.”
“You too,” I said, and closed the door.
As he drove off, I stood there in the searing sun, feeling small and alone. My shadow seemed to be straining to get away, as though it didn’t want to end up in a coffin with the rest of me.
A Ford F-150 crew cab cruised toward me, bulging tarps full of landscape clippings swelling like bulbous mushrooms in its open bed. Rather than draw attention to myself by stomping on my smartphone in a fit of Rumpelstiltskin rage, I tossed it among those tarps so that the ISA might chase it around Phoenix for a while.
|?4?|
The cavernous garage offered an elevator and enclosed stairs, but both felt like traps. The vehicle ramps were two lanes wide, two per floor. I walked up to the long-term parking on the sixth level.
In those days, I never felt safe in a huge public parking structure. I wasn’t concerned about motorists who drove too fast, though some seemed to think they were on a slot-racing track. The massive supporting columns would prevent the ceiling from collapsing on me, so I didn’t worry about being crushed in rubble. Muggers rarely worked these buildings, for there weren’t enough routes by which to make a quick exit. However, such garages always struck me as eerie, especially when I got to the less busy higher floors. Maybe vent fans produced the faint whispery sounds that suggested gremlins conspiring under the vehicles as they watched my feet move past. Maybe the lack of natural light and the granite-gray concrete and the silent cars lined up like rows of coffins inspired thoughts of death. Sometimes I felt that I was on the brink of an encounter with something otherworldly, perhaps a tribe of pale, feral children with smoky eyes and sharp teeth, the big-city twenty-first-century equivalent of the boys from that island in Lord of the Flies.
Later, of course, I’d come to understand that these feelings arose from a subconscious awareness that sinister presences live among us, passing for human. And they aren’t restricted to parking garages; the world is their playground.
Anyway, when I reached the sixth and highest level, I warily surveyed the rows of vehicles, expecting to see among them a brace of men in dark suits and sunglasses, like the pair who’d flanked me at the lunch counter in the diner. Considering that I had escaped the first crew sent to arrest me, maybe I shouldn’t have regarded the ISA as omniscient and omnipresent. However, even though the government is so deep in debt that it’s technically bankrupt, and even though a dollar today will buy only what a dime would buy in the 1950s, the feds can still print money almost as fast as trees can be felled to make paper, which means that when they field an agency like the ISA, its name is Legion. I felt watched where no watchers waited, heard where no listeners lurked, and I approached my Toyota with caution, wishing I had a fresh fire extinguisher and a cloak of invisibility.
In addition to my suitcase and a spare tire, the car trunk contained a simple tool kit. I was able to remove the license plate quickly.
At that point, I began to act with what some might insist was criminal cunning, though I preferred to think of it as the street smarts of a wrongly accused fugitive. A Porsche stood next to my rust bucket. I removed the plate from it, put it on the Toyota, and then attached the Toyota plate to the fancier vehicle. The owner of the Porsche would incur the cost of ordering a new plate, and until he realized what had happened, he was at risk of having his car stormed by ISA agents hot for vengeance.
The chance was small, however, that Mr. Porsche looked enough like me to be gunned down in a case of mistaken identity. Anyway, the ISA didn’t want to kill me. They wanted to interrogate me, and depending on what they meant by “unique,” they might want to put me through a lot of annoying tests, maybe a few exploratory surgeries, but surely nothing worse.
Nevertheless, as I drove down through the garage, I knew the good sisters of Mater Misericordi? would not approve of the cost and inconvenience to which I had subjected the owner of the Porsche. Were I still living at the orphanage, they would have me peeling potatoes for a week.
If I was slightly embarrassed by what I’d done to Mr. Porsche, and if I was afraid for my future and my life, which I was, then I was also pleased with myself because I had devised a plan while swapping the license plates.
If I’d had a list of the dry-cleaning deliveries Juan Santos was making, I would have tried to find him and thank him for having mentored me regarding the need for having a plan. I was so pleased to have one that I wanted not merely to express my gratitude but also share my delight.
My plan was to drive to Peptoe, Arizona, and track down the three men who found me in a bassinet in the middle of that highway nineteen years earlier. During most of my life, I’d been as ordinary as mud. However, the strange magnetism that recently compelled me hither and yon seemed to suggest something might indeed be unique about me. Back in the day, perhaps Hakeem, Bailie, and Caesar had concealed an important fact, or they might have seen something that seemed inconsequential at the time but that would be a key piece of the puzzle that was me.