Beyond Recognition

61

Ben heard the back door of his own house slam shut and immediately lifted his head to the open window of the crude tree house. Jack Santori was still under arrest, as far as he knew, so who the hell …? The kitchen light came on and, a few seconds later, the living room light.

To avoid any chance of being seen, Ben had been crashed out in his sleeping bag on the tree house floor, basically waiting for tomorrow to come. He would return to Emily and present his plan: They should run away together. No more police. No more Jack Santori. A new beginning. He was too excited by the idea to sleep, so instead he just lay in the dark, listening to the neighborhood, biding his time. And then the back door. Ben recognized that his own curiosity was what had gotten him into all this trouble. It kind of took control of him. Possessed him. He fought the urge to find out who was in his house, reminding himself over and over again that when the sun rose the following morning he was free. All he had to do was cool his jets until then. Sit tight.

A light went on in his bedroom.

He needed a better look. He just had to know what was going on.

He slipped out of the bag but waited before leaving the tree house, because headlights from 31st and 32nd caught the tops of the trees that grew on the western edge of Frink Park, and Ben didn’t want to take any chance of his being seen. He still had control of that burning curiosity that boiled away inside him. He didn’t want to be too impetuous.

The whitewash of the headlights receded, and Ben crept out onto the main limb, determined to climb higher where he might see down into his own bedroom.

The noise of the city hummed around him, the droning whine of tires, the distant rolling thunder of jets landing and taking off, the moan of ferry horns out on the water. He started up the tree.

Some car doors shut not far away, but he couldn’t make out the direction. When a beam of white light spread through the treetops Ben paused briefly, waiting for them to reach him and pass.

That was when he saw the man perched in a nearby tree.

If he had been in better control, he might not have gasped the way he did, but he lacked any such control, and his release of air brought him to the man’s attention. The guy was right at the same height, maybe thirty feet off the ground. He was three trees away, braced comfortably in the first main crotch.

Ben recognized him immediately. He wore a sweatshirt pulled up on his head, though he had ditched the sunglasses since the time Ben had seen him at the airport.

Another boy Ben’s age might have panicked and frozen in that tree, but Ben had Jack Santori to thank for his ability to move, and move quickly. The headlights swept past. The darkness washed the man out of the tree, and Ben out of his.

Ben moved faster than his legs had ever moved before. He swung like a monkey, one limb to the next, down, down, down. Faster and then faster still. As his eyes readjusted from the headlights, he glanced left and saw the other guy was descending too. And making better time.

Ben moved quickly, but the guy in the sweatshirt was superhuman the way he could climb. He was already halfway down his tree, checking on Ben the entire way.

It wasn’t going to be a social call. He had that same look Jack Santori had on a bad night. He intended to get up close to Ben, the way Jack did. To hurt him. To stop him from telling anyone-which was exactly what Ben had in mind.

Down … down … down….

Ben understood in another flash of headlights that he wasn’t going to win this race. And losers paid, as Santori was fond of saying. The guy had only a couple of limbs to go; Ben had fifteen feet.

The decision was not so much conscious thought as an act of survival. Had he reasoned, he would have understood the drop was too great, even given the soft damp earth below. He would not have gone with his instincts but instead would have descended further before jumping. But something propelled him off that limb, threw him right off it, into an open-armed jump, that began with a scream and ended with the solid impact of both legs striking the ground.

He hit hard, but no bones broke; he knew this instantly. And had his glass eye not popped out with the contact before he fully crashed and rolled through the wet leaves, his nose smashed, he might never have thought of what came next. But he had played this game too many times not to think of it, had scared the frost out of a dozen of Jack Santori’s playmates. He played dead.

He held his breath, popped both eyes wide open, and made no attempt to wipe the trickle of blood that oozed from his nose. Holding his breath was the hardest, but also the most important to the performance. To fool the girls his chest could not move at all.

The man from the tree was already down by the time Ben hit, and he ran to get a look at the boy. He cut through the dense underbrush and reached Ben’s silent body just as Daphne’s voice cut through the woods, calling, “Ben? Ben?”

The man glanced hotly in the direction of the voice, bent over, and looked directly into Ben’s face, wincing as he saw the pulpy red flesh of the open hollow eye socket. He tested Ben with the toe of his running shoe, checking for life. The trick to playing dead was just that: Gross them out with the bad eye, and they never looked at much else.

The two locked eye-to-eye, Ben getting a perfectly clear look at the man, who saw a fallen boy, dead of a broken neck.

The faceless man with eyes like a Halloween pumpkin-carved and artificial-hurried off through the woods as the back door banged shut: Daphne giving up.

Ben waited, hearing the man work back through the woods and up toward the small park, waited as he heard the distinctive sound of a bike chain, the pedals backing up.

As much as Ben tried to convince himself to leave it alone, he couldn’t; his system was charged with a small victory, his curiosity pumping like a drug. He sat up, the image of the man a silhouette through the woods as he pedaled away.

Wiping his bloody nose on his sleeve, Ben hurried to the shed behind his house. His bike was there. He had to do it. He had to follow the guy.

He did it for Emily-he told himself-and their chance for a future. He did it to help Daphne. But the truth of the matter was far more simple: He did it to erase the guilt of his earlier crime of climbing into that truck, of taking the money. To be a hero. This was his chance; he knew it instinctively. He would not let the opportunity pass him by.

He jumped onto the bike and went speeding out his driveway, leaving his glass eye far behind and the weight of his past right there along with it.