Minders

CHAPTER 14

When Ford opened his eyes he was on a bed in a low-ceilinged room with powder-blue walls. He was lying on his side, staring at a radiator with something taped above it. He squinted, trying to see it, but couldn’t make it out.

Are you sure you should be this calm? Sadie asked him. You were just kidnapped and drugged. Don’t you think maybe a little panic or—

Ford sat up, making the horizon heave in front of his eyes, and Sadie experienced his nausea as hers.

Deep stasis might be a touch less fantastic in this context.

He took a breath to settle his stomach and leaned toward the radiator. Sadie saw a five-dollar bill hanging on the wall. Someone had doodled over Abe Lincoln’s portrait to make him look like Bigfoot and written “#41 of 120” as though it were a limited-edition work of art.

When Ford saw it, his heart began to pound, and Sadie sensed an emotional composite made up of gooey warmth that felt like friendship, cinnamon hope, and a dash of anger. His mind filled with sounds, not the windy ones from shallow stasis but a whole school playground of noises. Semitranslucent circles organized themselves into a bubbly picture of a young James, wearing a striped sweater and sitting at a pink plastic picnic table. Hand flat on the surface, covering something, saying, “Are you sure you’re ready to know the truth about Abe Lincoln?” and then triumphantly revealing Bigfoot.

The image fizzled now, the sounds bubbled away, and Ford, sitting on the edge of the bed, roared, “Where are you?”

Whatever Ford had been drugged with made everything in his head a little carbonated, and his voice sounded fizzy. Combined with the complex cocktail nature of the emotional experience in deep stasis, Sadie was having trouble getting a clear grasp of his state of mind.

A black kitten came and stood next to the door and stared up at Ford. “Go get someone,” he said to it, but it didn’t move.

“She’s deaf but I’m not, so would you mind not shouting, Citizen Ford?” The guy who had spoken was about the same height as Ford, but skinny instead of muscular, with broad shoulders. He slouched into the room almost apologetically, like someone who didn’t spend a lot of time around other people. His brown hair was carefully parted and trimmed. He wore a goldenrod cowboy shirt with pearl snaps and blue forget-me-nots embroidered over the pockets, a thin leather bolo tie with a gold buffalo-dollar clasp, khaki jeans, and brown cowboy boots that looked handmade. He carried a beige cowboy hat in his hand, since the ceiling was too low for him to wear it.

Hot anger, warm friendship, hard grief, and the bleachy scent of betrayal crowded each other for space in Ford’s mind. “If my head wasn’t aching I’d punch you, Bucky.”

“Sweet as ever,” Bucky said.

“What the hell?” Ford’s head was a shooting gallery of emotions, a different one flipping up every half second. “I don’t understand. You’re here? How long? And what’s with the enemy agent tactics?”

Bucky looked uncomfortable, his eyes staring beyond Ford. “Not much to say about that, Citizen F.” Sadie caught a glimpse of the bearded, wild-eyed Bucky from Ford’s memory, sitting across the table at a diner, picking invisible bugs from himself and looking over his shoulder. “I take my privacy very seriously. Why don’t we just start from scratch?”

Ford’s mind was going nuts: bleach, anger, grief, happiness, anger, but Sadie noticed the cinnamon scent she thought was hope surfacing more and more, as though Ford wanted to forgive Bucky but he just wasn’t sure how. “James was here. He drew the Bigfoot for you.”

“Incorrect,” Bucky said. “James made the Bigfoot, that’s true, and Bigfoot is here, but it doesn’t follow that James was here. Bigfoot is a good-luck charm. For safe keeping.”

“But—”

“Talk and walk,” Bucky said, heading out the door. “Places to see, wonders to learn, Citizen.”

Ford struggled to his feet and followed him into the next room, but he was almost knocked back again by what he saw.

It was a big space with light-colored walls, EvergreenLawn Superturf covering the ground, and filled with at least fifty miniature-golf sculptures. Some were set up for putting while others waited along the edge like an army ready to be called up. A couch, a coffee table, and a hot plate completed the furnishings.

Ford lost track of his anger as soon as he walked in. Sadie watched him trying to match each sculpture to a miniature-golf course he knew, eliciting cloudburst showers of memories of games with James, Willy, Linc, and Bucky.

His eye zeroed in on a dinosaur near the back of the room. “You got Daisy?” he said, skirting a castle and a UFO to reach it.

Bucky bit his finger and nodded.

Ford shook his head. “I went the next day to get her.”

“I broke in the night they put the locks on.” Bucky had moved to the far end of the room where the couch and hot plate were, and started pacing.

“I should have known it was you.” Ford patted the dinosaur. “I’m glad she went to a good home.”

Bucky paused in his pacing to take something white from a bowl at the end of the room and put it in his pocket. “Did you find the present I left for you at the old bottling plant? Nice sign, by the way. Although no one with half a marble would believe that had been a wire factory.”

Maybe people with more than half a marble have better things to do than know how wire factories are supposed to look, Sadie pointed out.

“I thought it was you.” Sadie felt the warm flush of Ford’s vindication, followed by a hint of anger. “Why, though? Sort of out of the blue. I haven’t heard from you in two years.”

Bucky frowned. He picked up something red from a second bowl and put it in his other pocket. “You’d been papering half the desks in City Center trying to get your hands on that file. I thought I’d help.”

“How’d you get it?”

Bucky waved that away. “I also thought that once you saw it, read it, and learned how James really died, you would stop asking questions. You’ve been irritating a lot of people, Citizen Ford. I did it to shut you up. But that didn’t work, so I’ve resorted to an alternate plan.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in backup plans,” Ford said.

“I said alternate. And generally I avoid interfering with people as stubborn as you, so backup plans aren’t necessary.”

“I don’t need any interference,” Ford said, his anger rising, “not after two years.” There was something else mixed with the anger, Sadie sensed. Something subtle and gritty.

Bucky took a breath. “You think I abandoned you. I didn’t, Citizen F. Believe me when I say if I could be friends with anyone, it would be with you. But I have work, projects, that make that impossible.” He was pacing around as he spoke, not in straight lines but curvy eddies, as though his discomfort and frustration kept pulling him back.

The sense of grittiness inside Ford grew more pronounced, as though a wave of anger had churned old pebbles from the bottom of his emotional ocean. Sadie felt them grinding together while Ford took in the miniature-golf collection. “Yeah, I see how crucial your work is.”

“Everyone is entitled to company.” Bucky stopped pacing. His hands fell to his sides, and he stood looking forlorn but also determined. “I want to help you, Citizen Ford, but I can’t, I can’t, if you won’t move on.” His long fingers curved into fists of frustration.

Sadie saw images of Bucky flashing through Ford’s mind: showing up at their house at three in the morning with a pillow and asking to spend the night, at the park all day watching men play chess and winning the state chess championship the next year, refusing to leave his jail cell after serving his two days for stripping off all his clothes and running raving through a restaurant screaming that aliens were burrowing into his skin.

Ford packed his anger away, but a hint of gravel stayed. “I’m guessing you wouldn’t do this unless you thought I really needed your help.”

Bucky nodded and resumed pacing and biting the edge of his thumb. He said, “Have you heard of the Pharmacist?”

Dots spun into the alley outside Plum’s club. “I’ve heard the name, but I don’t know anything about him. Who is he?”

Bucky made wispy gestures with his hands. “Vapor. Smoke. Nobody.”

Ford sank onto the edge of the couch. “I heard Linc beat someone up, saying he was working for the Pharmacist. That doesn’t sound like nobody to me.”

“People do things they don’t want to do when they lose their minds,” Bucky said. “Fact of life.”

“You think Linc is out of his mind? Like, crazy?”

“Oh, yes.” Bucky nodded. “The Pharmacist does that to people—one look, and they lose their heads completely.” He stopped to take another white object from the bowl.

“Who is the Pharmacist?”

Bucky shrugged, “All-seeing, all-knowing invisible entity who governs hearts and minds, controls the power of good and evil, life and death, et cetera, et cetera.”

It reminded Sadie of the boogeyman Curtis had talked about when she’d run into him after her debriefing. When he’d almost kiss—

Stay focused.

Ford asked, “You mean like a criminal mastermind? Why isn’t Serenity Services after this guy?”

“By all means, go tell Serenity Services about a bad seed no one’s ever seen who controls most of the population of City Center,” Bucky admonished. “They’ll listen politely and then explain the Pharmacist is simply a figment of the collective imagination. That no one like that could possibly exist. And then—”

Sadie heard the low buzzing of Ford’s exasperation. “So the Pharmacist isn’t real?”

“—and then a few days later your body will turn up in some scenic spot. The Pharmacist prefers not to be a topic of conversation.” Bucky stopped and cocked his head to one side, listening, then resumed his pacing. “That’s the perfection of it. An idea so far-fetched it can’t be true. Only it is.” Bucky’s eyes had taken on a strange, excited sheen. “And I’ll give you this for free. Whoever denies the Pharmacist’s existence the most, you can bet they’re part of the smoke screen.”

Genius, Sadie thought. Every denial is proof of existence.

Ford said, “So since Serenity Services would deny his existence, they must be in on it.”

Bucky tapped his head and nodded wisely.

Sadie saw a bunch of dots jump from one place to another in Ford’s mind, from the memory of Linc and Willy in the alley backward to Kansas at the Castle. Ford said, “Does anyone call him Mr. P?”

Bucky looked surprised by Ford’s question. “Yes, although it’s a misnomer. Where’d you hear about Mr. P?”

“Willy’s girlfriend. She asked me if I work for Mr. P too.”

“Oh, dear, Citizen F. Not good. That ‘too’ is not good at all.” Bucky resumed pacing and biting his thumb. “It’s mainly the Pharmacist’s inner circle that uses that name.”

Sadie felt Ford watching Bucky, waiting for any of the clues his mind usually gave him that someone was lying, but all he got was white noise. None of his normal systems for assessing people were working. “So the Pharmacist controls Serenity Services. And all he has to do is look at someone and they go crazy? How does that work if no one’s ever seen him?”

“No one knows they’ve seen him. That’s why I prefer to stay where the Pharmacist can’t see me.”

“Is that what you’re doing here? Hiding from the Pharmacist?”

“Hiding? Maybe. Needed somewhere quiet, somewhere I could be alone with my thoughts. Otherwise they have a tendency to—” He made a spinning gesture with his fingers. He put another white thing in his pocket. “I’m trying to keep you from losing your head too.”

Ford pointed to the two bowls. “What are you counting?”

“These?” Bucky looked surprised. “The white beans are white vans. Suspicious, but not always troubling. The red beans are Royal Pizza delivery trucks, of course.”

Oh boy, Sadie thought.

“Where? How can you tell when they go by?”

Bucky pointed to the back wall of the room, where Ford saw a long jumpy image of upside-down tires on the street running near the ceiling, like a moving wallpaper border. Ford used the same puzzle solving from the tree house to come up with an explanation. “Pinhole camera,” he said. “You’ve got a few at street level, and you’re projecting the images down here.”

Unexpected, Sadie thought. Clever. But not reason for the surge of credibility she sensed Ford felt toward Bucky.

“Exactly. Lets me keep track of the enemy without being seen.”

“Pizza vans are the enemy?”

Who do they battle? Sadie wondered. Vietnamese delivery? Pizzilla vs. Pho-Fighter? She knew that Ford was clutching the idea Bucky was mostly sane, but it seemed wise to preserve a healthy skepticism.

“Royal pizza vans.” Bucky’s eyes latched on to Ford, and he said, “When is a pizza not a pizza?”

“When it’s a Royal,” Ford answered, reciting what Sadie could tell must be a ubiquitous slogan for a well-known pizza chain, but one she’d never heard of in her neighborhood.

Bucky grinned happily. “Genius. Says it straight out, in plain sight.”

“Says what?”

“When is a pizza not a pizza,” Bucky repeated slowly. “You ever had a Royal Pizza delivered?”

Ford shook his head, and Sadie was caught off guard by a flame of anger. It was explained when he said, “Too expensive.”

“Ever seen anyone get a Royal Pizza delivered?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it.”

“Start thinking about it.” Bucky shook the red beans in his hand. “Can’t tell if they’re circling or there’s just an action going on nearby.” He puffed up his cheeks, then exhaled. “Come on, let me show you around. I don’t get a lot of visitors.”

Ford followed Bucky into a corridor. “You think those pizza trucks are fakes?” A layer of gooeyness had begun to creep over Ford’s thoughts, and based on his tone Sadie decided it meant increasing doubt. Good for you!

“Of course they’re fakes,” Bucky declared.

Sadie sensed both Ford’s frustration and concern for Bucky intensifying. “Why would someone want fake pizza trucks?”

“Your tone right there, Citizen Winter. That ‘Come on, be real, man’ tone.” Bucky put his hands up and waggled his fingers like he was performing a Broadway dance routine. “That’s how they get away with it. A plan so convoluted and unlikely that anyone who believes in it must be insane.”

Because something seems too crazy to be true, it must be true, Sadie paraphrased. What would it be like to be in a mind like Bucky’s? What did conspiracy theories look like when they were taking shape?

Sadie noticed the lines of Bucky’s face thicken slightly in Ford’s vision and his features become more pronounced. Like a caricature, she thought, and wondered if it was because Ford could no longer take him seriously. “Who are they, Bucky?” he asked, following Bucky through a hidden door and up a set of stairs. Sadie sensed the air was cooler now, and she smelled a combination of mustiness and bushes. “Who controls the pizza trucks?”

“Take your pick. Eenie meenie minie moe,” Bucky recited as they stepped into a high-ceilinged space painted black. He kept going, and Ford realized they were on a stage.

Bucky moved to the center of it and waved Ford over. “Come see the view.” When Ford joined him Bucky draped an arm over his shoulder and said, “Nice to have company. It’s been a while.”

Sadie felt Ford stiffen, but she also heard a tiny chime inside of him that seemed to be the response to the call of Bucky’s loneliness. The two of them stood in the middle of the stage, gazing out in silence.

What had once been the theater was now rows of green velvet chairs overgrown with bushes. The roof was gone, and the tops of the walls were uneven, some sprouting green grass, giving the space the feeling of a pastoral dreamscape. For a moment Ford’s mind was wholly absorbed with its strange beauty, and Sadie was treated to the double magic of the space and Ford’s appreciation for it. A mass of green dots, hundreds of shades, blanketed the theater in his mind, clustering like fireflies around a bush at dusk, becoming a shimmering record of the theater. He was archiving the image, Sadie realized. She was watching him actively commit it to his memory.

Beautiful, she breathed.

“Beautiful,” Ford said. Her arms prickled, and she realized he was so moved he had goose bumps. That had never happened in shallow stasis. “Where are we?”

“My playhouse,” Bucky said. “Don’t tell me you don’t recognize it. You, Ford Winter, who knows every building worth knowing in Detroit from the past hundred years?” He chuckled to himself.

Sadie heard a drumbeat in Ford’s mind like a summons into battle. He studied the seats, the stage, the few patches of plaster you could still see on the walls. “I give up,” he said.

Bucky said, “You’ll figure it out when you need to.” Then he let out a long exhale and put his face directly in Ford’s. His breath smelled like jelly beans. “Listen to me close, because this is important. ‘Get the tiger by the toe, when he hollers let him go.’ Going head to head with a tiger, you’re always going to get mauled.”

Sadie felt the gravelly sensation in Ford’s mind again now, like someone pan-sifting rocks for gold. Sadness. Ford blinked. “What are you talking about, Bucky?”

Bucky stepped away, his eyes looking everywhere except at Ford: the sky, the ceiling, the theater. He jammed his hands in his pockets and rattled the beans around while he talked. “Your damn brother who always had to be a damn knight slaying the damn monster, of course. Swashbuckling into the tiger’s den, stealing his treasures, planning to ambush him. No matter what I said, he didn’t listen.” He walked to the edge of the stage then back to the center, counting the steps under his breath as he spoke. “I put that file in your office so that you’d read it and be content—six, no, seven, damn, start over.” He was getting increasingly agitated, pacing faster, losing count. “Stop rattling cages. Stop asking questions. Stop—three, no, five, START OVER.” He paused in the middle of the stage and faced Ford. “That’s what your brother would have wanted. Tried to do at least that.” He shrugged. “Guess I owe you an apology.”

Ford was like someone who keeps coughing to clear his throat but can’t quite get it, groping for knowledge just out of reach. “For what?

“I was trying to trick you into giving up.” Bucky put up a hand. “The Serenity Services file is legit. Real deal. Case closed. Only it’s also wrong. James didn’t use drugs. James was murdered. And they’ll kill you too if you don’t stop asking questions. James did what he did, however idiotic, to save you. There’s no way he’d want you following in his footsteps, Citizen Ford.”

“James was murdered,” Ford repeated. James was murdered. His mind became still and flat, and for a moment that thought was the only thing inside of it.

Then Sadie watched as an avalanche of questions and furies and memories swept in chaotically. He didn’t know how to feel, she sensed, what to think, what to ask. He should be glad, he told himself, he hadn’t been wrong about his brother, everything he believed wasn’t a lie. Plum had said it too, but Plum could say anything. Bucky—who is at least 50 percent crazy, Sadie put in—seemed sure.

“Who did it?” Ford managed to stammer.

Bucky leaned back on the heels of his boots. “Short answer is, he killed himself by needing to play the action hero. Longer answer is, the Pharmacist did, because James more or less dared him to.” He put his hands on Ford’s shoulders and shook him, fading in and out from normal to caricature in Ford’s eyes. “Do you understand now?”

“Why did he dare the Pharmacist?”

“Going to set everyone free.” Bucky laughed, a strange high laugh. “I tried to warn him, but he wouldn’t listen. I tried and tried. Now I’m warning you. If you don’t stop what you’re doing and start asking all the wrong questions, you’re going to end up with an overdose of lead like your brother. So cut it out.”

The inside of Ford’s mind felt like it was doing cartwheels, as though it was performing distracting tricks to keep him from having to acknowledge that the crazy but trustworthy Bucky of the past might simply be crazy. “All the wrong questions? Which are those?”

“Any but the ones you’re thinking of asking. Who-what-where-why-when, kiss those goodbye. They’ll get you nowhere or get you killed.”

“What’s left?” Ford asked, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides.

Bucky smiled happily. “That will be part of your adventure! Although you only need one. The right wrong question, asked enough times, could shake things up and make something fall out.”

Ford’s thoughts became all about wanting to punch something, as if that would quell the confusion he was feeling.

You’re better than that, Sadie heard herself telling him. And I’m going to find a way to make you understand that.

While being ruthless, she reminded herself.

Breathing hard, Ford said, “The right wrong question. And that would be?”

“The one that makes people wrongly give the right answer. The one they don’t mean to give you.” Bucky snapped as though he’d just remembered something. “Also, you need to stop avoiding the Roaches’ visits. In fact, you should embrace them.”

Ford’s mind transmitted the faintest scent of bleach, and Sadie felt him tense. “How did you know I’ve been avoiding their visits?”

Bucky ignored that, pacing the stage with his hands in his pockets. “Dress up for the Roaches, Citizen Ford. Entertain them, smile your biggest smile. Welcome them into your home. They’re your allies. It’s when they stop coming around you should be worried. It means they don’t need to watch—”

He broke off abruptly, pulling both hands from his pockets. There were nine white beans in one and five red in the other. He looked from them to Ford and whispered, “You’re four years younger than James, right? Eighteen?”

“No, nineteen,” Ford whispered back.

“Show me your ID,” Bucky said. When it took Ford a moment to get his wallet out of his pants, Bucky tapped his foot impatiently. “Come on, come on.”

Bucky jammed the beans into his pockets and took the ID. A few seconds later he was shoving it back at Ford like it was scalding him.

“Bucky, what are you—”

He grabbed Ford by the shoulders. “Forget all about me. I mean it. Never think of me again. Do not keep me in mind. Everything I’ve said sounds nuts because it is nuts.” He put his arms in the air, opened his eyes wide, and let his tongue loll out. “Invisible overlords! Tiger toes! Coming for you, ooga booga.”

Ford took a step backward. “Are you okay?”

“Scary pizza,” Bucky said, flicking his fingers.

“Um, Buck—” Ford said, taking another step backward.

Bucky stomped once, and the floor beneath Ford dropped away.

The fall was short and went straight into a large black canvas bag.

Ford’s mind registered Damn, and then, How long is this going to take?

You seem very calm, Sadie said to him. Does this kind of thing happen to you a lot?

Bucky’s voice came from outside the bag. “Comfy in there, Ford?”

Ford, more frustrated and confused than angry, said, “Trapdoor?”

“Yep. Rigged for large animals in magic acts.”

“Hence the fur in my mouth.” Ford cleared his throat. “Why, Bucky? We’re on the same side.”

“No such thing as sides where the Pharmacist is concerned,” Bucky said. “Don’t trust anyone, Citizen Ford, not even me.”

“If you let me out I’ll leave here and never come back, I promise,” Ford said. Although I might strangle you first, he added to himself.

Bucky laughed. “Cheers, Citizen F, very thoughtful. The problem is, I need to get you out of here, but I don’t want you to know where here is. So this is my offer: If you are a pain in the ass I will drop you on your head until you pass out. Otherwise, we can be pals. Which way do you want to do it?”

What charming friends you have, Mr. Winter, Sadie thought.

“Pals.” Ford coughed, and Sadie was surprised to feel a suppressed but unmistakable ripple of laughter from him.