The Hunted, page 14
‘What’ll I do, Deet?’
‘Get a job, kid. Same as the rest of us.’
‘What can I do?’
But Deet just shrugged. ‘If you’d have the PP, you could go on being a kid forever. You’d always have the money then.’
‘But I don’t want to be a kid forever.’
‘Then you have to grow up and face the world, kid. If I get you in with the Hartingers, you’ve got a head start. They’re old. They may be on Anti-Ageing, but even they won’t live forever. Who’re they going to leave all their stuff to? Might be you. Get them to like you – a little more each day. Get them to love you, kid, make with the cute stuff and the winning ways while you’re still a kid enough to do it. Then they’ll keep you, even when you grow. See, it’s like cats and kittens, kid. Everyone loves a kitten, but not everyone likes a cat. Or sheep and lambs. Lambs are cute and pretty, but a sheep – nah.’
‘You mean they might not keep me when I get big?’
Tarrin looked down at his barely touched meal. The prospect of growing up seemed daunting. What would he do? Deet hadn’t shown him how to do anything, apart from be a child. Who would help him? Where could he turn?
Maybe the Hartingers might not be so bad after all. They seemed good, gentle, kind, rich and generous. Maybe he could make a life there.
It might not be so bad to be a cat.
‘It’s you I’m thinking of, kid, that’s what you’ve always got to remember,’ Deet said. ‘Don’t you want those fries?’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘Got to eat something, kid, keep your strength up.’
‘I’m not hungry tonight, Deet.’
Deet ate the fries for him.
‘Deet . . .’
‘Yeah?’
‘What’ll you do?’
‘Me do?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘When I’m gone.’ As far as Tarrin could see, if Deet wasn’t renting him out to people, he’d be without an occupation.
‘Oh, I’ll get by, kid.’
‘But what?’
Deet grinned. ‘Oh, I’ll think of something.’
Maybe he’d win another kid in a card game.
Then Deet hunched forwards in his seat, made sure they couldn’t be overheard, and he got all confidential.
‘Look, kid,’ he grinned, ‘I can’t tell you no more than I’m telling you, because if you know more than’s good for you, you might accidentally spill the beans. But you take it from me that Deet’s looking out for you, and if you go to the Hartingers’, kid, don’t be surprised at what happens – OK?’
‘But what, Deet? What will happen?’
‘I can’t tell you, kid. If you don’t have the open can of beans you can’t go spilling them, so it’s best I don’t give them to you. But you just remember that your uncle Deet’s looking out for you. You got that? Your uncle Deet’s looking out for you. And even when you think he’s forgotten you, well, he won’t have. I’ll be looking out for you, kid, whatever happens. And even when I’m not there, I’ll still be there. You get me, kid? You get me?’
Tarrin didn’t, but he nodded and said, ‘Sure, Deet, right,’ just to get him to stop talking.
Deet wiped his hands on a paper napkin and said they should go. They returned to the hotel and Tarrin did some studying while Deet took a shower and changed his clothes.
He came into Tarrin’s room to announce that he was going out for a while. It was the usual bedtime story.
‘Keep the door locked, kid, and don’t answer to anyone knocking, not even if it’s the maid, saying she’s come to turn the beds down and put a chocolate on the pillow.’
‘OK, Deet.’
‘Got to mind out for those Kiddernappers, kid. Don’t want the Kiddernappers to get you.’
‘No, Deet.’
‘That’s right. You listen to your uncle Deet. Now don’t stay up all night studying.’
‘No, Deet.’
‘That’s right. Studying’s OK, but you can do too much of it.’
Deet went out, carefully closing the door behind him. Tarrin heard his footsteps receding along the corridor.
Tarrin ran a bath and lay in the hot, soapy water, looking up at the ceiling. He wondered how much Deet was selling him for, how much the Hartingers would be paying if they decided they wanted him after all. He could imagine the haggling and the bargaining and Deet starting off by demanding some outrageous price, way beyond his market value, and the Hartingers coolly declining and making a more reasonable and sensible offer.
Tarrin felt he was still worth a lot though. He’d bet anything on that. He grinned to himself, strangely pleased.
It almost made him feel wanted.
Deal
Kinane parked the car and looked around. It was a rich street of rich houses, all with security lights and surveillance cameras, with alarms linked to the police station, or to some security patrol, and more than likely all with double- or triple-locked doors, fastened shut with mortices and deadlocks.
It didn’t look like the right sort of place really, not for somebody who stayed in the Rapid Link Motel, who rented a kid out for a living and went under the name of Deet.
Kinane checked the coordinates again, which the scanner had given him. Well, this was where Deet had been standing when he’d answered his call, somewhere around here, give or take. The Sat-Sys scanner was normally accurate to within five metres.
Must have been loaning him out again, Kinane thought. He squinted out of the window and wondered which of the houses it might have been.
Maybe he ought to try ringing, get another fix on him. But it was risky, hanging up and arousing suspicion again. A man like that would know all the tricks. He wouldn’t want to lose his livelihood. He’d know straight away that someone was trying to get a position on him and he’d buy himself a new mobe in no time.
But then, if he had a customer here, and if the customer was a rich one, he might come back.
‘Yeah. He’ll be back.’
Kinane said it out loud. Sometimes he talked to himself just to hear another human voice. He’d spent far too many years alone now and beyond asking for a coffee, reserving a hotel room, or stopping at a petrol station to buy some fuel and a newspaper, he barely spoke to anyone.
‘Yeah. He’ll be back all right. Just a matter of waiting.’
Which he was good at.
Kinane sank down in the seat a little and turned off the car’s sidelights. He knew he couldn’t stay there too long; if anyone saw him, they’d get suspicious, and would want to know why he was sitting there in this rich street in his travel-weary car. He knew it was unlikely that the kid would reappear that night, but he just wanted a rest for a while. He’d take five minutes, then he’d go off and find a cheap room somewhere; he’d come back in the morning to keep an eye on the place.
Wonder how much he’s worth, he thought?
He did a quick calculation. The kid had to be worth a good million, million and a half, maybe even two if he didn’t grow too quickly.
Two million.
At that price somebody else had to be after him too. Kinane couldn’t be the only one.
He tilted the rear-view mirror and looked back along the street. A car was approaching, driving slowly, on sidelights only.
No, he couldn’t be the only one – not at two million.
The car drew up beside him. The driver glanced briefly in Kinane’s direction as he passed, maybe curious as to why he was parked there and sitting in the dark.
Flies to the honeypot. Bees to the flower. There’d be others, sure as God made the little green apples, and the red ones too.
The car drove on, came to the end of the street and turned off to the left. The driver had looked harmless enough, but so what? A Kiddernapper could be anyone.
Yes. Might be a woman, even, the competition.
This one, for example.
He looked ahead. Coming towards him was a woman walking a Pekinese, which she had on a retractable lead. She was well dressed, affluent, respectable. She looked like she meant no harm to anyone. But she gazed around her as she walked too, keeping her eyes on the windows of the houses, looking in wherever they hadn’t yet drawn the curtains. Was she just being curious, or neighbourly, or . . .
Looking for something?
A rocking horse in the window? A high chair? A toy left on display? A doll sitting on the sill? Some stickers fastened to the glass? A child’s painting, resting on the mantelpiece? A photograph, hanging on the wall?
Maybe she wasn’t just a woman walking a dog. Maybe she was a Kiddernapper, looking for clues, for evidence of occupation, for traces of a child.
She walked on, the click of her shoe heels disappearing into the night.
Kinane looked at the large, imposing house directly across the street from him, wondering if it was the one. If so, it was going to be a hell of a place to break into, Kinane thought. How do you get into somewhere like that? More importantly, how do you get out of there with a kid in your arms, especially an uncooperative one who didn’t want to go? A live kicking and biting one? Screaming too, if you’d let him.
No. You’d have to use the chloro for a job like that. Even then it wouldn’t be easy. Be better if you could just talk him into going with you. Tell him there was a green and happy land somewhere and you were going to lead him to it, and all he had to do was to trust you and to take your hand or follow your trail.
Fat chance.
What kid was going to leave the comfort of a house like that to go walking around the night with a stranger?
Maybe you could snatch him in the street. Coming out of the door, going back in. Or lure him out, maybe.
Yeah. Yeah.
The kitten. It had worked before, might work again. Come along with the kitten, leave it outside, get the kid to hear it mewing, out the kid comes.
He goes to pick the kitten up, you pick him up. He’s in the boot of the car before he knows it, and poor little kitty goes on mew, mew, mewing, and doesn’t stop till somebody comes running out and shouts:
‘Where’s the boy gone?!’
Yeah. The kitten might work. It was crude, it was basic, it was not subtle, but you didn’t want to turn your nose up at it. It could still work. It was always new to somebody. There was one born every minute – or there had been, once.
Kinane grinned a thin and mirthless smile, thinking that there weren’t many innocents left. People sure got wily with their long, long lives and more devious with every year. Yes, the rich got richer and the crooks got more crooked. The longer you did something, generally speaking, the better at it you got. A 150-year-old burglar, still in possession of his health, faculties and memory, was some burglar.
But then, a 150-year-old detective was some policeman, too. So perhaps it all evened out.
In the end.
Whenever that might be.
Rare, precious and innocent were the world’s children.
‘Childhood is a rare and precious thing, you know,’ so Kinane’s old teacher had said once. Little did she know. She hadn’t known the half of it. And yet, how right she had been.
Kinane glanced in the mirror again, this time to look at himself. His skin was lined and showing signs of age. Nothing above the normal maybe, but he’d been getting one or two curious looks.
‘Hey, man, not taking the Anti-Ageing yet? It’ll stop you getting older, but it won’t bring your looks back. Better take it soon, before you end up looking like a piece of leather.’
People looked at you, not rudely exactly, at least not yet, but they thought you were strange if you let yourself get too wrinkled before taking your Anti-Ageing pills.
In fact old, lined faces were as rare as the really young ones. And nobody much liked the look of them.
‘Oh gross! Disgusting! Will you take a look at that!’
He remembered the voices, the opinions of the spectators looking at the photographs in the Museum of Age and Childhood. He’d gone there once to kill an afternoon. There were photographs from long ago, of grandmothers and grandfathers, with faces like dried, cracked mud. Their lines were deep, their eyes were milky, their necks were shrivelled and their skin sagging.
But now people died with the same faces that they had had maybe one hundred and sixty years before. Over a century and a half of time and experience had gone by, and not left a single mark on them.
That was what the Anti-Ageing pills did – they stole the paint from the tip of the brush, the graphite from the pencil – time went on moving over the paper, but made not a single mark. The canvas and the parchment remained blank.
Personally, Kinane preferred to see people’s faces decorated – that is with a little make-up on them, the kind of make-up that only time could apply.
A police car cruised along the street. Kinane slid further down into his seat, disappearing from sight, before sliding back up again to watch the patrol vehicle turn the corner.
Time to go maybe.
He started the engine and put the car into drive.
It was a long time to pay day, in this line of work. He could go months and years without finding what he was looking for and obtaining what he wanted.
But then, when you considered that a baby taken from a pram could bring you a cool, icy, six million, it was worth learning the art of patience, and the art of perseverance, and the arts of watching and waiting.
Even the art of going quietly away.
And the art of coming back.
Deet must have returned some time in the early morning. Tarrin hadn’t heard him come back, but he heard him now as he woke in his bed, for the sound of Deet’s snoring came drifting through from the other room.
Tarrin got up, tiptoed to the interconnecting door and quietly closed it. He didn’t want to think about the Hartingers any more, so he went and put the television on low and watched the children’s cartoons. There were hardly any children left to watch them, but the television companies went on putting out repeats regardless. Adults watched them instead – in the same way that adults could be seen playing on the swings in the park or making themselves sick and dizzy on the roundabout, spinning recklessly round, sometimes even flying off and hurting themselves, scraping their elbows and knees.
When I was a child,
I spake as a child,
I understood as a child, I thought as a child:
but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
Well, that may have been true once, back in those Gideon Bible days, but it was true no longer.
Deet woke about an hour later. He stumbled into Tarrin’s room, in need of a shave, a shower and a change of vest.
‘Just freshen up and I’ll be with you, kid,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll get some breakfast.’
He went back to his own room and Tarrin heard the shower run. When Deet reappeared he looked and smelt a little better. There was the scent of antiperspirant, aftershave and toothpaste, all mingling into one minty pine-tree odour.
‘OK. Let’s find a spoon, kid,’ Deet said, leading the way out to the street.
He meant a greasy-spoon, a workmen’s cafe of some kind, where they heaped the rashers of bacon up high, and where they still served a full fried breakfast, with sausage and eggs and fried potatoes and mushrooms and great mugs of tea.
‘This’ll do.’
They went inside the first place they found. Deet asked Tarrin what he wanted. He asked for eggs and beans. The Hartingers were still knocking on the door of his thoughts, but he wouldn’t let them in.
‘Am I working today, Deet?’ he asked.
Deet gave him a sly look. ‘Ain’t arranged nothing yet, kid,’ he said.
‘Oh?’
Deet usually had something fixed up pretty quick.
‘I thought we’d just wait and see for a day,’ Deet said. Then he winked. ‘The Hartingers,’ he said, ‘see if they take the bait.’
Tarrin ate his eggs and beans and drank his orange juice.
‘You know, Deet,’ he began, ‘if you’d saved the money I’d made, instead of spending it all—’
‘You don’t know nothing about finance, kid,’ Deet snapped.
‘No, I was only going to say—’
‘Well, you don’t need to.’
‘That we could be quite well off by now, Deet, and have a place of our own, you know, like our own house, a real home, and be like a family . . .’
‘You’ve got family. I’m your family, ain’t I?’
Tarrin could see he was getting angry and knew he should let the subject drop, but he went on, just the same.
‘I only meant, Deet, that it would make more sense to save some. Because, as you say, I won’t be a kid forever, and then what?’
‘You leave all that to me, kid,’ Deet snarled. ‘And button your lip.’
Tarrin turned away to look out of the window. The capital seemed much like any other city to him, there was just more of it, that was all – though maybe that did make a difference to the way the people in it acted – they seemed to talk faster, move quicker, be more impatient, in more of a hurry.
‘Hey, look, Deet.’ He pointed across the street. There was a billboard of unlit neon lights, the kind of thing that would come alive at night but which was dead and dreary during the day.
‘Well, what do you know! Miss Virginia Two Shoes has got a rival.’
It was a club. Underneath the black neon tubes was a poster printed in fluorescent inks on a luminous background.
Miss Davina ‘Bo-Bo’ Peep, the poster read. The cutest thing on two legs. And there was a photograph of the prettiest girl you had ever seen, prettier even than Miss Virginia Two Shoes, all dressed up in ribbons and bows.
‘Forty if she’s a day, kid,’ Deet said. ‘Been playing the circuit for years.’
Tarrin stared at the picture. It seemed impossible to believe that the girl in the photo could be forty years old. She looked so sweet, so pretty, so young.
‘She’s had the PP, Deet?’
