The Lost Gate Read online

  “I put it back.”

  “So your backpack’s got nothing bad in it?” asked Eric.

  “I’m clean,” said Danny.

  “Then talk your way out of it and you won’t be on a wanted poster.”

  “I’ve never talked to a cop,” said Danny. “I’ll screw it up.”

  “These aren’t cops, they’re building security guys, and let’s get real about this, kid, you can talk a one-armed woman into knitting you a sweater.”

  Since Eric had just talked Danny into becoming a burglar, it seemed to Danny that it was Eric who could talk anybody into anything. But the security guards were yelling at them to stay right there, so there wasn’t a chance to argue the point.

  “Open that backpack,” shouted the guard as he approached. “And both of you turn out your pockets.”

  “Yes sir, right away sir,” said Eric.

  Danny unzipped all the openings on his backpack. As he did, it occurred to him that this was just like when the security guy at Wal-Mart accosted him. There weren’t any passersby to serve as witnesses, but the same idea should play—go way farther than what they asked for, and throw them completely off balance.

  So Danny pulled his shirt off over his head, stepped on the heels of his shoes to get out of them, then started pulling off his pants.

  “I said to turn out your pockets!” yelled the guard who was doing the yelling. “What are you doing!”

  The other one was smirking.

  “I’m letting you examine my clothes for yourself,” said Danny, “so I don’t have you putting your hands all over me.”

  “I don’t mind,” said Eric. “You can put your hands all over me.”

  Danny handed his pants and shirt to the one who yelled, and his shoes and socks to the other one. They both stood there holding them, looking like idiots because they had no plan for what to do with them. Then, on impulse, Danny turned his back to them, bent over, pulled down his tighty-whiteys, and spread his butt cheeks. Man it was cold.

  “Stand straight and pull your shorts up!” The yelling guard was practically screaming now.

  Danny complied.

  “I think he was mooning you, Barry,” said the guard holding the shoes.

  “I think he was mooning both of you,” said Eric helpfully.

  Danny was facing them now, his briefs pulled up. “I don’t know what you’re looking for, but I wanted to make sure you knew I didn’t have it.”

  “I ought to run you in for indecent exposure!” Barry shouted.

  “I think he was cooperating with an officer of the law,” said Eric. “I think our government-appointed attorney can make a case for your having overstepped your bounds in questioning a child.”

  Barry looked at Eric with murder in his eyes.

  “What are you looking for?” asked Danny.

  “A book,” said the one who wasn’t Barry.

  “I can’t fit a book up my rectum,” said Danny. “I don’t think anybody can.”

  “Nobody said you could!” yelled Barry.

  “Then why are you holding all my clothes?” asked Danny.

  Barry threw Danny’s clothes onto the ground and stalked away.

  The other guy handed Danny his shoes and socks. “You’re one funny smartmouth kid,” he said with a smile. “If you were my son, I’d be laughing the whole time I beat the crap out of you.” Then he turned and jogged to catch up with Barry.

  “That was extreme,” said Eric. “I couldn’t believe you mooned them from three feet away.”

  “It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.” Danny didn’t explain about what he’d done at Wal-Mart. Pranks weren’t as funny if people knew you’d done something too similar before.

  “Come on, let’s get out of here,” said Eric. “That one guy, Barry, he might be thinking about things he can fit up your butt.”

  “Excuse me while I put my clothes back on,” said Danny.

  “Hurry up,” said Eric. “You’re embarrassing me. Skinny little hairless legs covered with goosebumps, you’re like a Chihuahua. Or a Mexican hairless or whatever they call it. Ugliest dog I’ve ever seen, like looking at your grandfather naked.”

  Danny thought of Gyish or Zog starkers and he had to smile. Of course, if Zog brought down a bunch of hawks on your head, especially if one of them was his clant, there wouldn’t be much to grin about.

  It took the rest of the day to get a meeting with an Arab-looking guy in the back of a little corner grocery. The guy couldn’t take his eyes off Danny. “Come on,” the fence said. “He’s a kid.”

  “He just looks like a kid,” said Eric. “He’s really twenty-five, but he’s got, like, a glandular condition.”

  “I’m fourteen,” Danny lied. His real age was just too young, and nobody would believe fifteen until he got taller. “I didn’t know you had an age limit on who you’ll buy stuff from.”

  “Tell me what you’ve got,” said the fence.

  “We’ve got whatever you want,” said Eric. “Just tell us what you want that isn’t too big for us to carry down the street.”

  “You mean you haven’t even done it yet?”

  “Done what?” asked Eric. “We find stuff, that’s all. We’re lucky. People drop things, we find them. So you can imagine it’s not going to be any high-def big-screen television, you know? Too heavy for my cousin here to carry.”

  The fence made a dismissive gesture. “Put it on eBay. Put it on Craig’s List.”

  “Right,” said Eric. “Like we’ve got a website or email or a computer or even a camera to take a picture.”

  “Find one,” said the fence. “Now get the hell out of my store.”

  “Just one question,” said Eric. “Jewelry? Nice art pieces? Laptops and iPads? What?”

  “And don’t come back,” said the guy.

  “Laptops it is,” said Eric.

  The man stood up. He wasn’t much taller than Eric, but he was wearing a wife-beater and he seemed to be made of rope underneath his skin. “Anything you bring me, I’ll smash with a baseball bat. Starting with your head. Why aren’t you understanding me?”

  “We look forward to doing business with you,” said Eric. “Come on, cuz. I think it’s time for his next appointment.”

  Danny gladly followed Eric out of the back room into the grocery store.

  “I’m hungry,” said Danny, looking over some of the snack foods near the checkout counter.

  “Not here,” said Eric. “You want to get us killed?”

  Out on the street, Danny had to ask. “Is this how you usually do business?”

  “Are you kidding?” said Eric. “That went great.”

  “He threatened to kill you!”

  “Us. He was including you in the baseball bat thing.”

  “Only I won’t be there for him to hit me. What are we going to do now? Nobody told you about any other fence. Your friends aren’t really all that tied in with the DC underworld.”

  “Oh, he’s going to buy our stuff,” said Eric.

  Danny had to laugh. “I get it now. You con yourself.”

  “It’s no con,” said Eric. “He’s afraid we’re from the cops, wearing a wire, whatever. So he puts on a big show of throwing us out. But we bring the stuff around tonight, he’ll take it.”

  “No,” said Danny. “I’m pretty good at knowing when somebody’s sincere, and he really meant the part about us not coming back.”

  Eric shrugged. “Aw, well, you know. It’s easy to turn down stuff you haven’t seen. When we have the stuff, he’ll change his mind.”

  “Or he’ll change our minds. Into puddles on the sidewalk.”

  “Trust me,” said Eric.

  “And you’re the one who thought it was too risky to go through a gate.”

  “That’s why we’re such a great team,” said Eric. “We’re both completely stupid about different things.”

  Danny wasn’t sure about this “great team” thing. It seemed to him that Eric’s team had only one membe
r, and it wasn’t Danny. It was the way Eric looked at him with the exact intensity he used when he was talking up a mark. Believe me believe me believe me, his face said. Which by now Danny well knew was a sign that Eric wasn’t so much lying as simply in need of something from you. Trust me until I have from you the thing I want.

  Well, what Eric wanted from Danny was burglary without the hard bits. Entering without breaking. And Danny could do that.

  While Eric was in search of a fence, he wangled two different invitations to crash with friends. One of them had a roommate and they could only stay a night or two.

  The other, a guy named Ced who was about two years older than Eric, sounded like he was pimping the place where he lived. “It’s this great three-story townhouse in a decent part of town and Stone, the guy who owns it, he just likes the company, as long as you don’t back up the toilet or do boinky-boinky on the sofa. You can stay as long as you want, even keep stuff in the fridge. Run the dishwasher now and then. Do an errand if he asks, but he almost never asks. He, like, calls us his ‘staff’ or his ‘entourage’ but he’s cool.”

  As far as Danny and Eric were concerned, the operative words were “stay as long as you want.” The place was about six blocks east of the Library of Congress and two blocks west of Lincoln Park. Danny had no idea what would make a part of town indecent, but decent was pretty nice, especially for a boy from a Virginia farm. The houses all butted up against each other, with short stairways coming up from the sidewalk. Under the stairs there were usually walkout cellars or a ground floor. Lots of fences and gates, but low ones, mostly, that you could vault over if you felt like it. People walking dogs in the gathering darkness. Or coming home from work. Or heading out for the evening.

  “Three blocks from a Metro station,” said Eric. “Not bad.”

  “We’re not dressed right for this neighborhood,” said Danny.

  Eric held up fingers to enumerate why Danny was too dumb to live. “A. We’re kids. We’re dressed like kids. It’s a uniform, and we’re wearing it. B. We don’t have to look right in this neighborhood. This is the neighborhood where we’re gonna live. We have to be dressed right for the neighborhood where we’re going to find expensive stuff just lying around. That’s the neighborhood where it matters that we don’t have any cops stopping us to find out what we’re doing there.”

  “So are we dressed right for that neighborhood?” asked Danny.

  “Are you already forgetting number A?” asked Eric. “We’re kids.”

  Danny muttered, “A isn’t a number,” and Eric gave him a shove toward the street. Danny stumbled on the curb and nearly fell but then Eric was there helping him so he didn’t lose his balance after all. And Eric was laughing.

  Eric might be completely selfish, but it’s not like Danny didn’t have cousins just like that. And none of the cousins was ever playful with him, not anymore.

  “So where is that wonderful neighborhood?” asked Danny.

  “I don’t know yet,” said Eric.

  “I thought you knew DC.”

  “I know the parts where you beg and the parts where you get drugs, to put it plainly. Those parts, there’s nothing to steal. Or there’s a lot to steal but if you do somebody hunts you down and kills you extra dead.”

  Danny grinned, thinking it was a joke. “ ‘Extra dead’?”

  Eric wasn’t laughing when he said, “They cut parts off you before they kill you, so the people who find the body will tell the story and other people will think twice before stealing from them.”

  So there were people in the world worse than Danny’s family. He sort of knew that—he got plenty of news from the internet and history in class. But he didn’t think of them as living and working in a place like Washington DC.

  They got to the address Ced had given them. It was freshly painted and had a profusion of flowers in pots, window boxes, and in the tiny patch of ground that served for a garden. In the dead of winter, everything was in bloom. The smell of them got into Danny’s nose and he stood there reveling in it, wondering for a moment if it was possible their host—Stone?—was a Seedservant or some other kind of plantmage. But that was too improbable—that the first place he found to stay in DC happened to be in the house of a member of some other Family.

  Ced had told them to just walk in, but that seemed to bother Eric. He stood outside for a moment and then knocked and rang the bell. They could both hear a bustle of activity inside and then, finally, someone came to the door. It was a woman—no, a girl of about sixteen—wearing a man’s oversized white button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and quite possibly nothing else, which Danny found distracting. He couldn’t take his eyes off her, yet felt he had to look almost anywhere else.

  The girl looked them up and down. Then she called over her shoulder, “It’s nobody, just somebody crashing with his little brother.”

  “Can we come in?” asked Eric.

  She gave him a look of such compassionate scorn that Danny blushed for him.

  “I think that’s a yes,” said Danny.

  “Are girls all born with the ability to rip your balls off with a look?” murmured Eric. Then he led the way inside.

  Ced was walking into the messy living room, looking pissed off. “I told you to just walk in, morons. Anybody rings the bell, we assume it’s the law. I was this close to flushing my stash.”

  “I thought we weren’t supposed to stop up the toilets,” said Eric.

  “Oh, you’re funny,” muttered Ced.

  “Are you going to introduce your little friends?” asked the girl.

  “They stopped being my friends when they rang the doorbell.”

  Danny stuck out his hand. “I’m Danny.”

  “How old are you?” asked the girl. “Twelve?”

  “Thirteen,” said Danny.

  “Ma-CHEWER,” she said. “Got any hair on your chest?”

  Danny wasn’t even sure what she was asking. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “Or anywhere?” she insisted.

  “Lighten up,” said Eric. “He’s a kid.”

  “Said the old man. Who are you?” she asked.

  “I’m Eric. Do you have a name?”

  “What’s today?” she asked.

  “Thursday,” answered Ced from the floor, where he was rolling a cigarette. Danny had a pretty good guess what kind of cigarette.

  “Then my name is Lana,” said the girl.

  “And if today had been Wednesday?” asked Eric.

  “I would have unzipped your pants instead of talking,” she said. “On Wednesdays I’m such a slut.”

  “I’m glad we caught you on Nun Thursday,” said Eric.

  “That’s your best shot?” Lana asked, again with the look of scorn.

  “I have snappier comebacks, but I don’t just give those away,” said Eric.

  “Yeah? You have to grind them up and mix them with applesauce before anybody will swallow them?”

  “Look,” said Eric to Ced. “We don’t just need a place to crash, we need some advice. Is Mr. Stone in?”

  Lana gave one whoop, which apparently passed for a complete laugh.

  “Not Mister Stone,” said Ced. “Just Stone. It’s his first name. Maybe his only name.”

  “It’s a translation,” said Lana. “Of the unpronounceable name his parents gave him in their native language.”

  At the mention of languages, Danny perked up. “What language?” he asked.

  “Amazian,” she said. “Amazon? No, that’s the online bookstore. Umbilical?”

  “She doesn’t know.” Ced handed the joint to her.

  “Not now,” said Lana.

  Ced shrugged and kept the joint, though he didn’t light it.

  “Why do you want Stone’s advice?” asked Lana.

  “I figured he’s lived in DC for a while, he could steer us to a neighborhood where we’re likely to find small expensive things lying around where guys like me and Danny here can find them.”

  “
You don’t have to ask Stone,” said Lana. “Where are you from? Everybody knows you’re looking for Georgetown.”

  “I thought that was a college,” said Eric.

  “University,” said Lana. “It’s also a ritzy neighborhood. Or you could go out to Chevy Chase, Maryland. Basically, go west, and the incomes go up. I assume you expect to find these expensive things lying around inside people’s houses?”

  “I think we’d have better luck there,” said Eric.

  Danny was appalled that Eric was just telling their business to strangers. How did he know that none of these people would tell the cops?

  “Your little friend thinks you shouldn’t be talking about your criminal conspiracies,” said Lana.

  Eric looked at Danny. “He’s still not completely into it,” he said. “But he can’t help it—he’s so good at it that he just can’t stop. Talent is destiny.”

  “Good at what, exactly?” asked Lana.

  “Getting into locked places,” said Eric.

  “How does he do it?” she asked.

  “I make a wish,” said Danny. He knelt on the floor and started looking through magazines on the coffee table. Anything to distract Eric. It didn’t work, though.

  “It’s magic, all right,” said Eric. “He doesn’t touch the doors or windows. He doesn’t leave footprints or fingerprints. He just appears inside the house.”

  Danny hated this. “Eric, come on, stop it.”

  “Don’t get so upset, or she’s going to start believing you can do magic,” said Eric.

  “Oh, I believe it,” said Lana. “He has the look of magic about him.” Suddenly she was off the sofa and kneeling in front of him. She was so close he could feel her breath on his face and he felt like she was a quarter of an inch from pushing her chest against his. He wanted to turn back to the coffee table but if he did, then he’d bump into her, and that might look like he was making some kind of pass at her.

  “Come on, Danny,” she said. She put her hands on his shoulders. “Do some magic for me.”

  “Leave him alone, Lana, he’s a kid,” warned Ced.

  “Jailbait? He’s jailbait?” asked Lana. She brought her face very close to Danny’s and locked her arms around his waist. Now her breasts were pressed against him and her breath was right in his nose and mouth and her lips were brushing his as she talked. “Jailbait boy, why aren’t you kissing me yet?”