Mask Market

version of the same story: Some young kid, a reservation Indian out in Minnesota, had walked into the local high school with a shotgun, a pistol, and a bulletproof vest. He killed a bunch of people at random—a security guard, a teacher, and a lot of students—before he took himself out.

The kid had been “troubled.” I guess that’s the new word for a born-to-lose with a father who committed suicide, a mother who was severely brain-damaged, raised by a grandmother who constantly called him a “human mistake” when she wasn’t beating him. The kid became a Nazi—in his own mind, anyway. He preached racial purity to anyone who would listen—no one ever did, but he was used to that—and posted endless shrieks to his personal blog, too. At school, he wore black clothes and eyeliner, as if to make sure nobody ever forgot he was an outcast.

Producers spun their Rolodexes, and the lucky winners got to be on television, “analyzing” what happened. None of them went near the truth. I knew that truth. The kid was a member of a bigger tribe than you could ever find on a reservation. My tribe. The Children of the Secret. We know.

The experts droned on about “communication” and “reaching out” and “peer rejection.” But this kid hadn’t flown under the radar. Everyone around him knew he was buried in despair. They probably figured they knew the outcome, too—the suicide rate on reservations is right up there with the alcoholism level.

That kid was just another of the invisible ones—bullied, beaten, and belittled every day of his marginalized life. If anyone had the slightest idea that he might be a danger to someone other than himself, they would have unleashed a snowstorm of “services.”

Suicide, well, kids do that kind of thing. Homicide—now, that’s serious.

Every high school in America has them, the invisible ones. They all silent-scream the same warning: If you won’t see us, you’ll never see us coming.

But nobody ever starts the analysis until after the autopsy.

One of the cell phones trilled. I looked at the label on its holster:

Ralph P. Compton. I’d only given that number to…

“Compton,” I answered, in a brisk, businessman’s voice.

“Mr. Compton? My name is Sophia…Sophia Ginsberg. You were at my house looking for—”

“Oh, I remember you,” I said, my tone of voice telling her she’d made a reverberating impression.

“Well, you’ll be glad I called, in any event. I did speak to the broker, and I got an address for Mr. Preston. I don’t know if it’s still a good one, of course. But it was certainly good at the time we bought the house.”

“That’s great,” I said. “Let me just grab a pen….”

“Oh, I can give it to you tomorrow,” she said, quickly. “I’m going to be in the city, and I thought you might like to buy me lunch.”

“It would be my pleasure.”

“Oh, good! I didn’t want to come off as too—”

“I would have called you anyway,” I told her. She took the lie like a deep-tissue massage. I gave her the address of a midtown bistro where I knew Michelle could get me treated right, even on short notice.

“I don’t see where she gets her attitude from, after what you did for—”

“Let it go, honey,” I told Michelle, gently. Knowing she wouldn’t. Ever.

“You don’t need to know the reason to feel the season,” the Prof said. “Wish the weather was better, but…”

“I could be a Bible man again,” Clarence volunteered. He had a door-to-door routine down pat, came across as a bright, sincere young man on a mission to spread the Word.

“Wrong neighborhood,” I vetoed.

The Prof walked out of the room without ceremony. Came back with a chilled can of Red Bull and a small bottle of blueberry juice. Michelle poured the two together over a tall glass of shaved ice, sipped it delicately. My sister had a new personal drink every week, but the Prof and Clarence never strayed from their Red Stripe. I went with pineapple juice and seltzer.

We all sat in silence for a few minutes.

“Charlie’s a night man,” I said, finally. “How about I just pick a day, around noon, okay? I walk up to his front door and ring the bell, ask for Mr. Siegel?”

“I don’t like it,” the little man said. “What if he’s not home? What if his wife—got to have one, if he’s been there that long, I’m thinking—says he’s a traveling salesman, been on the road for months? He don’t come to the door himself, in person, we’re not making him pay to see our hole card, see?”

“It would be the same thing if I went there,” Michelle said. “It’s all chance, all luck.”

“Couldn’t you reach out for him, Burke?” Clarence asked.

“Anyone ever asked to meet with that motherfucker, he’d take off like a hellhound was on his trail,” the Prof said. “That’s not the way Charlie works it. He knows where to find you; you don’t never know where to find him.”

“That’s the truth,” I agreed.

“Next time he has a job for you, we follow him to his home?”

“That play won’t pay, son,” the Prof told Clarence. “One, could be months—years—before Charlie calls Burke again. Two, odds are, he don’t go home when a meet is over. Strike three, no way to shadow a man like Charlie Jones. Takes more than skill to do something like that; you got to have powers.”

The Prof and I shared a look. Wesley had powers. He was as relentless as obsession itself, a remorseless land shark. Not a great white, or a mako—no, Wesley was a bull shark, the deadliest of them all. A bull shark can work the deep ocean or shallow fresh water. It can take prey even in knee-high depths. And it’s the only shark with a memory.

It hit me then, why Wesley was the consummate shadow. He was one of the Invisibles. And nobody had ever seen him coming.

“Could we ask the Dragon Lady?” Clarence said, hopefully.

“To do what?” Michelle said, a slight tinge of sharpness in her voice.

“Hack the Con Ed records,” I answered for him. “Or Brooklyn Union Gas. Charlie probably never makes a call from that house, but he has to have the utilities turned on.”

“So, if this ‘Benny Siegel’ guy is still there…”

“Yeah. It won’t pin him down, but it might tell us if we’re wasting our time.”

“Or we could ask the Mole,” Michelle said.

“Ask him what?” said Clarence, retaliating.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, in a “don’t be dumb” tone. “He’s only the most brilliant scientific genius in the whole world, that’s all. If anyone can figure out how to—”

“We can take a ride out and see him,” I offered. Quickly, before the fuse burned down to the TNT.

No point in telling the Mole we were coming. He’s got a phone, but he never answers it if he’s working, and he’s just about always working.

Michelle fumed at me all the way. She’d been building her mood from the moment I told her we didn’t have time to stop at her place to let her change outfits, and hadn’t let up since. I ignored her—easy enough, since she was putting so much effort into ignoring me.

I slid one of my custom CDs into the slot, and let the music drift over us, tugging at the buried blossoms. Chuck Willis, “Don’t Deceive Me.” Johnny Shines swearing “My Love Can’t Hide.” Sonny Boy’s “Cross My Heart.” Timothea’s “I’m Still Standing.” Champion Jack’s version of “Goin’ Down Slow,” the one he called “Failing Health Blues.” By the time the CD got to the lush black velvet of Charles Brown’s “Early in the Morning,” my baby sister was back to herself.

“That young boy”—she meant Clarence, who was a long way from that now but, being younger than her, had to be a teenager, at most—“just wanted an excuse to see that woman,” she said, smiling now.

“The Dragon Lady? She’s married.”

Michelle’s the only woman I ever knew who can make a snort sound feminine.

“Fine,” is all I had in response.

“Burke, you know Mole will come up with something.”

“It’s not that, girl. No one respects the Mole’s stuff more than me. I was just thinking of something Wolfe told