Minders

CHAPTER 7

Dude, your breath is foul. Get off!”

Who said that?

Sadie came awake in an instant. Her eyes and Ford’s snapped open simultaneously, giving them both a close-up view of Copernicus’s big wet nose and lolling tongue.

Pushing it aside, Ford lurched to the bathroom, relieved himself, and started brushing his teeth without washing his hands in between.

Good morning, Sadie said to him politely.

He looked in the mirror and grunted. Still brushing his teeth, he turned left and right, inspecting his profile. Finally he smiled with a mouth full of toothpaste foam, and for a moment he resembled the guy in the graduation picture, goofy and carefree. He spit out the toothpaste, rinsed his mouth, wet his hair to slick it back, and stood up, and the boy with angry eyes was back.

From purely scientific motives she was glad when he removed the T-shirt he’d slept in, providing her first glimpse of any part of him unclothed. In the mirror Sadie observed that his shoulders, arms, and chest looked like something from the ancient Greek wing of the Detroit Institute of Art, while the scars and cuts crisscrossing his knuckles and forearms told of a more recent history. Together they gave him the appearance of a kind of epic hero fighting against long odds.

Which he’d adore, she thought, since as far as she had seen, Ford had done nothing but purposely create conflict with every person he came into contact with except his sister. The Me vs. Everyone Else paradigm apparently appealed to him, and she wondered if some of his more antisocial behaviors—

At least put the seat down, Sadie called as he left the bathroom without showering.

—could be attempts to deliberately antagonize people. That way he could always feel like others wronged him, and never have to take responsibility for his own actions.

Subject in above average physical condition but emotionally stunted, Sadie recorded in her mental notebook, because “looks like a hot guy, behaves like a five-year-old” didn’t sound very scientific.

He got dressed in the clothes he’d been wearing the previous day, had “breakfast”—cold water poured over a packet of instant coffee, which he drank down with the unmixed globs of powder still floating on the surface—and headed down two flights of stairs and out of the apartment building, the anger from the previous night banking around the surfaces of his mind like a trapped fly. Unlocking his bike from beside the DO NOT LOCK BIKES HERE EVER!! sign he pedaled the wrong way down his street toward the busy intersection at Bob’s Burger Boulevard.

As he rode, his mind unfolded into an old-fashioned map, roads and buildings appearing like they’d been sketched out in front of him. His imagined streetscape had some of the same buildings as the one he was riding through but without most of the graffiti, and often with different signs, so that Cha Cha’s Liquor-n-Things and Time 4 Pawn were merged together on his mental map into one building marked SUPERMARKET. A church with broken glass in the windows and a sign in front proclaiming OUT OF SINESS appeared spruced up in Ford’s mind with a sign that said INDOOR SKATE PARK (LASER TAG TOURNAMENTS MONTHLY). There were other buildings on his “map” too, older looking, as though he was simultaneously picturing the streets as they had once been and as they could be.

He rode like he was in a fantasy world of his own design, treating stop signs as optional and the rules of the road as something best avoided. As he jumped his bike onto the sidewalk to avoid the posted twelve-minute wait time at the intersection of Calm Colon Avenue and H₃O Purified Water-Style Beverage Way, his phone buzzed with a text. In violation of the hands-free-only laws he pulled it from his pocket and read it without slowing down or braking. It was from Cali, and it said, “I’M SORRY. YOU WERE RIGHT. I SHOULD HAVE TOLD YOU. FORGIVE?”

Sure, babe, he thought. Later.

Why later? Sadie demanded. What is this stupid game that boys play? You know you’re going to write back to her, why don’t you just—

She interrupted herself. She’d heard “Sure, babe. Later.” Heard the words. In his head. For the first time, she’d been able to hear what he was thinking.

Naturally, it had been something annoying. But she was still excited.

Now that she was aware of it, she began to hear other thoughts. It wasn’t easy and primarily she got fragments, but it was clear that most of the sounds in his head weren’t just noises, they were actual words. Some looped in and out, like can’t be late, while others appeared only once. She heard him think something that sounded like burger for lunch, and then a series of blurred dots became his wallet with the two dollars in it and she caught a hint of the stickiness again before it was consumed in a flare of anger.

It was like watching the gears on a clock. A thought triggered a memory, which triggered an emotion, which triggered—

A dozen horns honked, brakes squealed, and a delivery van shuddered to a stop inches from Ford’s back tire as he went speeding across Chef’s Best Lasagna Avenue against traffic.

—action.

Idiots, he thought, as though the commotion were everyone’s fault but his, and Sadie was torn between laughter and dismay.

At five minutes to eight he parked his bike in front of an enormous stone building with a sign that said, THE FORMER ST. CLAIRE APARTMENTS IS BECOMING CLAIRE FARMS! ANOTHER MASON BLIGH COMMUNITY ASSET. Distracted by the effort of holding back his anger, Ford didn’t see the tall, red-headed guy standing on the front steps of the building until he’d plowed into him, nearly knocking him to the ground.

The guy regained his balance and turned to see what had happened. “Are you okay?” he asked Ford. He was skinny and gawky with pink cheeks, red hair, and big green eyes behind round tortoiseshell glasses. At least that was what Sadie noticed. What Ford saw was a guy with four inches on him in height but ten pounds lighter, built like a wimp, around twenty-three years old.

Ford said, “You should watch where you’re standing.” Like it was the guy’s fault Ford had walked into him. Sadie realized he was itching for a fight.

The man, looking a little dazed, blinked. “You’re right. Sorry.” He held out his hand. “I’m—”

Ford walked right by it, into the black-and-white-checked marble hall. An older man wearing jeans and an ironed plaid shirt stood leaning against a fluted wood pillar with a clipboard in his hand.

“Winter, you’re late,” he barked when he saw Ford.

“According to my watch I’m exactly on time, Mr. Harding.” Ford held up his right wrist, pointing to Mickey’s two hands on the twelve and the eight.

The foreman shook his head. “You’re all the way back, with Nix.” He poked a thumb to his right. “And no need to saunter—I want this floor picked clean as a turkey carcass by lunch.”

Ford spotted a sign in the far back corner of the once-grand lobby that read LAUNDRY ROOM, and Sadie heard him think, Nice work, Nix. But when they reached it, she couldn’t see the appeal: There were long channels ripped through the baseboards and across the ceiling and strips of floral wallpaper rolled up from the middle of the walls like chocolate curls on a wedding cake.

A compact dark-skinned kid, younger than the Chapsters Sadie had seen, leaned against one of the walls, two sledgehammers next to him. Seeing him, Ford’s mind struck a single, pleasant chord, and the feeling was apparently mutual, because when Ford walked up, the guy ground out the cigarette he’d been smoking and gave him a dazzling smile.

“Did I or did I not hook us up?” he asked. “With all the wiring and pipes in here to harvest, the scabbies’ve already done most of the work for us.”

A soft, warm sensation Sadie hadn’t felt before spread through Ford. Out of the corner of her eye she caught pinprick images of tomato soup and grilled cheese and soggy mittens as Ford started to laugh.

Amusement, she thought. Amusement felt like tomato soup after a snowball fight.

“Couldn’t have picked better myself, Nix,” Ford said, hoisting one of the sledgehammers. “Though the St. Claire was built as a hotel, so no way was this originally a laundry room. They wouldn’t have put it on the first floor off the lobby.”

“Are we betting? I say dining room.”

“Too small,” Ford said, shaking his head. “I say manager’s office or bar.”

“Loser buys lunch,” Nix said. “On your marks, get set—”

For the next hour all sound and thought was blotted out of Ford’s mind by the noise of the sledgehammer smashing through plaster and brick as they skinned the building’s carcass. The two of them worked opposite sides of the room, their hammers settling into a call and response, where one of them would do a set of strokes, and the other would match it and add one.

Ford working, Sadie discovered, was much calmer than Ford doing anything else. She was making a mental note about the importance of jobs to self-esteem when he stopped and dropped the hammer.

“Did I win?” Nix asked over his shoulder.

“Maybe,” Ford said. “It’s a dumbwaiter. It would have gone from here to the kitchens. And it works!” As he spoke he tugged a faded cord, bringing up a dusty wooden box that arrived with a clatter of clinking plates and cutlery. They were filthy and stacked haphazardly, apparently forgotten decades earlier by the last person to use the room. That is very cool, Sadie thought, and Ford gave a whooooop of joy. He was nearly dancing with happiness, shifting from one foot to the other and pointing. “Do you see that?” he asked Nix. “Someone’s last supper.”

Ford carefully stacked the dishes on the floor, surreptitiously pocketing a tiny crystal saltshaker, and poked his head into the dumbwaiter’s shaft. “One of the gears is stamped 1932,” he called to Nix.

“And one of your time cards is going to be stamped FIRED,” the foreman’s voice said. Ford pulled himself out of the wall.

“Harding, you’ve got to look at this,” Ford said, gesturing the foreman over. “It’s the entire mechanism, intact, from 19—”

The foreman shook his head. “Yeah, I heard. Your job is to smash it.”

“But it’s perfect. If we take it out I bet some decorator—”

“Smash, smash, smash.” The foreman pointed to the sledgehammer Ford had dropped to the floor. “Go on, show me you know how to use it.”

“It will be easy to get it out,” Ford kept on. “I swear to you if you tell whatever jackass we’re working for about it, they’ll thank you. It could be worth something.”

“You’re right,” the foreman agreed. “Could be worth your job. Now smash—”

“I’m the jackass.” The tall red-headed guy from the front steps walked into the room. He held out his hand to Ford again. “Mason Bligh.”

This time Ford took it. “Ford Winter.”

“What did you find?” Mason asked.

Ford, suddenly taciturn—You’re shy! Sadie realized, feeling a tiny bit of kinship with him—just pointed his finger up into the shaft. “Dumbwaiter.”

“For the dumb worker,” the foreman said, laughing at his own joke.

Mason gave him a forced smile and looked at Ford. “How would you get it out?”

“Saw around it. Shouldn’t take long, maybe an hour.”

“I’d like to see that,” Mason said. “Let’s do it.” He turned to the foreman. “Do I need to sign anything, Mr. Harding? Pay you more money? Why don’t you draw up contracts for this spot project, and I’ll pay you today.”

“Whatever you like, Mr. Bligh,” the foreman said pleasantly.

Phony, Ford thought, perching himself on the edge of the opening and leaning in. Sadie watched his mind tracing a map of the mechanics of the dumbwaiter the way it had produced the street map earlier. He turned to Mason and asked, “What are you going to do with it?”

“Nothing yet. But it’s too neat to destroy. Have you got a use for it?”

Ford poked his head out of the hole to look at the guy Sadie heard him describe in his head as a twenty-three-year-old bajillionaire nerd. He couldn’t figure Mason out. He said, “I might.”

“Great, you take it. And you find anything else like that, tell me. You’re right, I want to know.” Mason was heading for the door when Ford’s voice called him back.

“Excuse me, sir,” Ford said, his voice sounding young and unsure.

Mason turned. “Yep?”

“I took this.” Ford held out the crystal saltshaker. “I didn’t think anyone would care, but obviously it’s yours. I—I just wanted it for my sister.”

Right, Sadie thought. Because all eleven-year-olds really want a saltshaker.

Mason shook his head. “All yours.”

Ford worked with steady concentration after that, barely pausing to eat, but Sadie sensed an increasing jumpiness in him. Anticipation? Anxiety? By the time he scanned out at the end of the day she was certain he was about to do something illegal, and she was torn between excitement and wariness as he steered his bike in the opposite direction of his apartment.

He rode from the mostly deserted neighborhood around the job site through two traffic-gnarled intersections into an area of wide, silent streets lined with the crumbling hulks of commercial buildings. His bike bounced over a portion of downed chain-link fence and up a cracked asphalt driveway to the front entrance of a large brick factory. It had what looked like a chimney on one side and appeared to be about seven stories tall, but peering through the open door Sadie saw it was empty inside from the floor to the roof except for rusted machine parts, some decaying wood pallets, and broken bottles. The sign propped next to the door read DETROIT WIRE CO.

Ford left his bike and walked around the building to a set of fire escape stairs along the far wall. He climbed them all the way to the top and stepped off onto the roof.

It seemed like they could see for miles all around. The river was a ribbon glittering between buildings in one direction, the traffic on the highway looked like the links in a metal watchband in another, and beyond that the suburbs extended like a rolling green carpet. That’s where I live, she thought to herself.

Suddenly she was flooded with panic. All at once she realized how high up they were, how close to the edge. Her throat got tight, making it hard to breathe, and her heart raced. The edge is right there. She squeezed her eyes shut, but she couldn’t escape the voice in her head, her voice, cool, logical. One step and you could be over, one step and it would all be over, so easy, just one—

Ford tipped his head back, spread his arms, and gave a loud Tarzan-of-the-apes call. It echoed through the empty landscape back to him, reverberating through him, through her.

You’re safe, she breathed. Safe, here with Ford.

And then he turned and headed across the roof directly toward the little shed with the DANGER DO NOT ENTER! sign.