Magic Dude Page 5
Angela folded her arms and sneered while the cameraman kept his gun trained on Tyler’s face.
“Answer me, dammit,” Tyler shouted. He jolted his hand, so a bolt of light shot out from the stone and hit the fake news crew until they glowed pink. “Tell me who sent you. Tell the truth!”
“Alejandro sent us.” The crew spoke in unison, faces contorting as they struggled to hold back their words and failed.
“Who is he? How did he know where to find me?”
“He’s your uncle,” Angela said, the others following suit a split second later, like a bebop trio jamming on the same line. “He looked up your address in your credit record.”
“I don’t have an uncle.”
Tyler straightened up to his full height again, his arm weakening until he lowered it to his side. A rising sense of puzzlement swamped him until the ground underneath his body started to feel unsteady. Nothing was solid. Everything he’d ever trusted was up for grabs.
“I don’t have any family.”
“Hey, dude,” the cameraman said. “I don’t know what to tell you. It is what it is. Now, give us the stone, and we’ll go. You don’t want to hold onto that thing, it’s nothing but trouble.”
For all that he’d tried to pry the damned thing out of his hand a few minutes ago, Tyler felt a burning desire to keep it close. Because he liked its power? Or just because these people were scum who would hit a small girl just because she pulled a large gun on them?
“You can go. I’m not giving you anything.” Tyler waved his hands at them in a shooing gesture, and they backed away, all in step like soldiers on reverse parade.
“If we don’t bring the stone back to Alejandro, he’ll kill us,” Angela said. The expression on her face was pleading, even as her feet obeyed his command and withdrew.
“Sucks to be you,” Tyler said. He walked over to help Wilma up from the ground. She was still stunned from the blow, enough so that she let him lift up the hair on the back of her neck to examine it for damage. By the time he escorted her back to the office, the fake news crew was back in their van, speeding away.
“If this is what’s happening after a day, then it’s probably better you get rid of the damn thing at the next opportunity.”
Wilma held an ice pack to her neck where the sound operator had struck her with the fat end of the boom mike. A large bruise was blossoming into a rainbow of color where the pole had hit the hardest. Tyler’s stomach knotted with guilt every time he caught its shadow from the corner of his eye.
“I’m not giving this power to anybody without knowing they’ll use it for good,” Tyler said. Noble visions ran through his head, then disappeared as he looked at his fridge, full of beers he couldn’t drink. “Or at least, save the harm until they’re out of view.”
“They must have some kind of tracking device on the stone itself,” Gary said. “Them finding out you had it and then tracing you here doesn’t make sense, otherwise.”
Gary’s skin was bright red in the spaces where the rough hairs didn’t cover too thickly. It looked like he’d tried to scrub himself clean of his new outer layer that morning. Tyler felt a mixture of shame and bile rushing up his throat, and he hung his head forward for a second, swallowing rapidly.
When he recovered, he looked Gary in the eye. “First things, first. I need to work out how to get you and Wilma back to normal. Second, I need to figure out how to use this damn thing and where it should go.”
“Sounds like one and the same thing to me,” Wilma said. She’d been relatively quiet since being hit. As though the boom mike had knocked out her usual spark along with driving her to her knees. “Any ideas on how to do that?”
“We could look for more information on the gunmen from yesterday,” Tyler suggested. He paused, frowning down at the stone in his hand. “It’s the only link that we have. Pity I froze them solid.”
“You froze Gary solid last night, too.”
Gary expression changed to shock as he checked from Wilma to Tyler and back again. “I don’t remember that.”
“It was after you started changing,” Tyler said. “I didn’t know what else to do but Wilma’s right. When I told you to start up again, you were right as rain.”
“As right as a warthog,” Wilma said and snickered. Perhaps that spark was lighting up again. “Where did you put those buggers?”
“In the dumpster behind the barbecue.” Tyler scratched the back of his neck and stood up. “I’ll go fetch them.”
“By yourself, Superman?”
“Yeah.” Tyler blushed at the memory of their shared trouble the night before. “Gary came up with a cool solution to the problem that we had.”
He walked out of the trailer as Gary explained his stroke of genius while Wilma glowered. When he turned the edge of Gary’s site, Tyler increased his walk to a run. A cloud of dust followed along behind a truck, speeding up as it exited the property. A rubbish truck. Tyler waved his arms as he sprinted behind it, screaming at the men to stop.
A man hanging off the back gave him a friendly wave as it accelerated out of the gate and onto the main road. Tyler clapped his hands to the top of his head and stared open-mouthed in disbelief. How often did the damn thing get cleared? Once a month, if that. What the hell were the odds?
Tyler turned and jogged over to the dumpster in case the truck hadn’t managed to do the job it was hired for. His brilliant stroke of luck continued. The empty bin greeted him with a vacant smile. All the men, gone. The only trace they’d ever been there was a belt buckle caught in a rusty pocket under the edge of the lid. He rushed back to his trailer, anxiety propelling him to ever-higher speed.
“Where does the rubbish company empty its stuff out?” Tyler asked, bursting back into his trailer.
Wilma stared at him with a frown while Gary used the pause in their conversation to take advantage and swig from his beer. When he put the bottle back down on the table, he contributed, “Eh?”
“The trash company. The one that empties the dumpster. Where does it go to after this?”
It was Wilma that caught on first. “Oh, shit.” She stood up, peering at the fading calendar on Tyler’s wall. Apart from the naked lady looking over her shoulder, the rest of it was useless. The year along the bottom read 2008. “It’s the fourth, is it?”
“Oh, no. What am I going to do now?” Tyler’s legs gave out under him, and he collapsed onto the kitchen chair.
Gary leaned across to give him a reassuring pat. “Don’t worry, dude. I’m sure that any moment, you’ll have another group intent on assaulting you and stealing the stone. You can just ask them.”
“No,” Tyler said. “I need to get the ones who’ve visited already. They came straight on the heels of the guy who threw the stone to me. If anyone is going to know how and why this happened to me, it’s them.”
“Fair point.” Wilma stood up and walked out the door. “I’ll go give their head office a ring,” she called back over her shoulder.
Tyler and Gary stared at each other across the table for a moment, then they both got to their feet.
“No way some head office goon is handing out information to someone who sounds like a ten-year-old girl.” Gary popped his empty bottle into Tyler’s trash.
“Please, put it outside,” Tyler said. “I don’t mind you making sure it doesn’t go to waste, but I don’t want to smell it the rest of the day.”
“Fair point.” Gary hooked it back out and clapped Tyler on his shoulder. “On the bright side, your luck can only go up now, right?”
Tyler swallowed hard, unsure of how he felt about accepting motivation from a human warthog.
It turned out the rubbish went to a landfill, and what it did there was rot. Tyler could smell the fulsome odor a good five miles out from their destination, and that was with the wind going the right way.
“What if they’ve found them already?” Gary asked in the back seat. His attempt at bucking up Tyler’s mood appeared to have sapped all his own. Nothing but worry.
“They won’t have found them,” Tyler said with far more assurance than was coursing through his veins. “They’ll just dump it out in one load and drive the truck away. It’s not like they have any reason to sort through it.”
“Five bodies, though.” If Gary kept making such good points, he’d convince Tyler to turn the car around. “Hard to miss five bodies.”
“They missed them when they picked them up, didn’t they?” Wilma’s logic struck again. Tyler wished that both of them would just shut up.
“Stay in the car,” he ordered when they drew level with the gate and office. The dump was meant to be a public facility, but Tyler had no desire to pay just to be told that he had the wrong place. Instead of screaming as the truck departed, he could have used that time to take down the plate number. Without that, the owners of the company could only guess the tip to which they’d gone.
“Hey.” Tyler waved to the girl seated behind the window.
She was chewing gum. Given the overwhelming stench that probably gave her pummeled senses something else to focus on. The girl waved back and gestured back to his car.
“Eh?” Tyler held his hand up to his ear.
The girl rolled her eyes and then shoved up the window, bending down to shout through the gap. “You need to weigh your car on the scales over there”—she pointed to a large platform with a ticket machine parked next to it—“then take the ticket. On your route out, it weighs you again and charges you for the difference.”
“We’re not dropping off rubbish,” Tyler said. “We need to find something that was taken out of our dumpster back at the trailer park. The owner of the rubbish company said his guys probably dumped it out here.”
“You what?”
Tyler ran through his story again, summarizing to get to the point quicker. “Our dumpster was emptied by mistake. The guys brought the rubbish here.”
“I don’t—” She frowned and stopped speaking. After a moment she gave a shrug. “What?”
“We want to sort through the garbage you’ve got in there. We don’t want to drop anything off.”
The girl shook her head, spitting the gum into a tissue and twisting the top to seal it in before tossing it into a small rubbish bin on her desk. She pulled out another strip, peeling off the foil while keeping her eyes glued to Tyler.
“You want entry to the dump, you have to go on the weighing machine. If you’re not dumping anything, then it won’t charge you nothing on the way out.”
She tossed Tyler a final look to emphasize that she thought he was learning challenged, then slammed down the window. When Tyler waved again, she gave him the finger. On both hands.
“Rude girl,” Wilma said as he got back in the car. “I think I like her.”
“She doesn’t seem to care that we want to take garbage out.”
“Why would she?” Gary asked. “The more we take out, the more of the new stuff they can fit in.”
The machine spat out a ticket and Tyler placed it in the drinks holder. As he drove further around the winding road, piles of rubbish heaped higher on either side.
At the central area for dumping, there was a vast expanse of concrete surrounding a large pit. Along the edge of the lot, opposite the hole, were walls segmenting different reusables. Bricks, rocks, wood, and sawdust stacked high in their separate rooms.
Trucks were backed up to the pit, and as they watched, one lifted its back up on slow hydraulics and opened the back door. The load fell down into the hole, landing with a thump that vibrated up through the car like a mini earthquake. While the truck got itself together and drove away, a giant digger flattened out the new load down in the pit.
“Well, if it’s down in there. we’re fucked.”
“Thanks, Wilma,” Gary said. “If you see anything else obvious lying about, feel free to point it out.”
“Will do, honeybunch.”
Tyler got out of the car and walked over to inspect the pit more closely. Down in the hole were a vibrant mixture of household and business waste—the green stuff dumped in a different area around the back.
“Sir, you’re not allowed to be on foot in this area,” a man called, revving his truck, so the engine hummed like a caged tiger. “Just back your car up to the edge.”
When Tyler cast him a worried look, the man misinterpreted it.
“Don’t worry,” he reassured Tyler. “There’s steel bars to stop you driving off the edge.”
“We need to find some rubbish from a dumpster,” Tyler said, walking over, so he didn’t need to shout. “We’re from down at the trailer park, and something got collected this morning which we’d put into the trash on a lark. If I can’t get it back, there’ll be hell to pay.”
“Rodney’s Rubbish Removals? Are they the ones?”
Tyler looked back over at his car. “Hey, Wilma. Rodney’s Rubbish Removals?” She gave him a thumbs-up, and he turned back to the truck driver. “You know them?”
The man pointed at the signage on the side of his vehicle. It took Tyler a second, then he nodded. “You picked up from our trailer park today?”
“Yep. Sure did.” Then, when Tyler’s face broke into a wide smile, he added, “But I can’t have you sorting through the trash I’ve got on board without some sort of consent.”
Tyler frowned. “What do you mean? It’s trash, isn’t it? What permission do I need?”
“If the owners chucked out something valuable and you pick it out, and they call later, that’ll look really bad for me.”
“I’ve got the owner here,” Tyler said. He hooked his thumb over his shoulder, then bit his bottom lip. “I’ve got the owner’s daughter here, I mean. She’s the one who owns the stuff that we threw in the dumpster for a prank. It’s just some polystyrene statues. She needs them for school.” Tyler leaned forward, closer. “It seemed like an excellent idea once we’d had a few, but now we’ve been chasing after them all morning. It would sure be great if you could help us out.”
The man looked back over to Wilma’s car, where she sat in her natural expression of repose, her lip pouting out in a giant sulk. “The owner’s daughter, you say?”
“Yeah. Do you know Wilma senior? Her kid looks just like her, don’t you think?”
“Guess so.” The man continued to study the vehicle like it was an employment exam paper, then finally gave a shrug.
“I suppose, it’s no skin off my nose. I can always say that I dumped it out and whatever happens after that, ain’t my business.”
“Phew.” Tyler gave an exaggerated sigh, wiping the imaginary sweat from his brow. “You’ve done me a solid there, man.”
The driver laughed and shook his head. “Believe me. You won’t think that when you’re done.”
# # #
If the stink from the open garbage pit was bad, the stench that floated out when Tyler jumped into the back of the rubbish truck was worse. The smell was so thick that it crept up inside his nostrils, pushing for a way in. He clamped his nose but then had to breathe through his mouth—a hard task when he was trying not to retch.
Gary walked over, fielding curious stares with his usual aplomb—he growled and showed his teeth if anybody got too fixated. “Hand ‘em down to me when you’re done,” he called up. Tyler gave him the thumbs up, saw a piece of sodden tissue clinging to his hand, and shook it off with a squeal better suited to Wilma.
“I told you,” the driver said with satisfaction. He gave Gary the hairy eyeball, then pulled out a cigarette.
Tyler had given them up years before but suddenly wished he could have one. Surrounding his head in a cloud of tar-laden smoke would suit him just fine right now.
Instead, he dug his hands deeper
into the pile, searching for the familiar shape of a shoulder, head, or leg.
He found them near the rear of the truck, underneath a mess of waste—from a restaurant judging from the moldy packaging. Tyler closed his eyes as though that would stop the noxious odor assaulting his nostrils, and stuck his hand down deep.
The slime that greeted him oozed between his fingers and slicked all the hairs of his arm back like they were living in a disco movie. Once again, his fingertips touched up against something human-shaped. Tyler stretched his fingers wide, hearing a slurp as the refuse moved to accommodate him. He slid his hand around a limb and pulled hard. Up came one of the gunmen, Tyler’s hand gripping his wrist.
Tyler gave the figure a brief brush-off, then looked over the side of the truck. “You ready?”
Gary nodded and held up his arms, his mouth screwing up in distaste as the trash-soaked body landed in them. While he trotted back to the car, Wilma waiting at the open boot, Tyler went in again.
The stink, which seemed to have retreated briefly through familiarity, resurged at full-strength as Tyler’s fingers burst through the edge of a plastic bag. Now the smell didn’t just attack his nostrils, he could feel it worming into his mouth, filling the space there before venturing further down his throat.
Just don’t breathe at all, his brain suggested. A great idea.
The next figure to emerge came up foot first. While waiting for Gary to jog back, Tyler leaned against the edge of the truck, his forehead coated in sweat.
“Two down,” Gary said with good cheer, while the rubbish truck driver grinned at Tyler’s discomfort.
The job done, Tyler clambered down to the ground and tried not to think of a shower. They still had the drive back to the trailer park to face before he could reasonably look forward to that.
“Glad I could help,” the driver said as Tyler nodded to him. One occasion when to stick out his hand for a shake would have been ruder than to withhold.
“Roll the windows down,” Wilma said, holding her nose as Tyler got into the driver’s seat. “And to think I was worried that I hadn’t time to shower this morning.”