Chapter 7
“BANG BANG!” The little boy jumped out from behind the planter directly in front of Andy and mimed a gun with his fingers.
“I got you, policeman!” he proclaimed proudly.
“That’s right,” Andy said with a smile. “You sure did.”
He took three more steps before the incident sank in. There was a time, not too many months ago, when anyone of any size who jumped out and pointed something at him would have sent him diving for cover with his gun out. After a month at the mall, all he had done was smile when that kid surprised him.
He smiled. Losing my edge. But he had also lost the gut-ache that had been his near-constant companion, and he hadn’t had a nightmare in at least a week. He still kept his service revolver loaded at home, but he wasn’t as fanatic about having it in easy reach all the time. He didn’t even take it into the bathroom with him, he realized.
Andy stopped next to a bank of elevators and looked down on the bright, clean world spread out below him. He almost laughed for simple joy. This job was very good for him.
“Ooooh.”
Andy looked around at the frustrated moan. A woman was trying to get a cardboard box off the elevator, and the bottom was trying to fall out of the box. She had braced her back against the open elevator door and was holding the bottom in the carton with a raised knee. But she couldn’t shift her hands to get under the box, and the door was butting her mindlessly as it tried to close.
“Need some help, ma’am?” Andy put his arm under the box and gently lifted it off her knee.
He was rewarded with a brilliant smile and a flash of gratitude in big brown eyes. “Oh, thank you. Here, set it on the bench and let me fix it.”
The woman was small, a little over five feet, with glossy black hair cut short around her head. Her skin was clear olive, and her eyes were large and dark. Her eyes were her best feature, Andy decided. Either that or her compact figure. It sure wasn’t the way she was dressed.
She was wearing “sensible” shoes with thick rubber soles, a print dress and a knitted purple shawl draped over her shoulders. Topping off the outfit was a pair of fluorescent purple plastic earrings and a truly ugly amethyst and silver brooch that secured the shawl.
The woman looked up, caught him looking and stared back.
Andy flushed. “Excuse me, ma’am. I didn’t mean to stare.”
“Never be embarrassed,” she said as she rummaged in an oversized purse slung over one shoulder. “It keeps you from growing.” She pulled out a piece of brightly colored ribbon and slipped it under the box. “My grandmother always told me to keep a piece of string handy. But I like ribbon better than string.” She looked up and smiled at him. She had a wonderful smile, Andy thought, full of life and a little mischievous. “It’s more colorful, don’t you think?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“But you were looking at the way I’m dressed, weren’t you? It’s because I have strong psychic powers,” she explained deadpan. “People with strong psychic powers develop their own distinctive style.”
Andy looked hard at her, but the woman was serious.
“That’s interesting, ma’am.”
“The name is Judy. Judy Cohen.”
“I’m Andy . . .”
“Westlin,” she finished. “You’re a new guard.”
“Did your psychic powers tell you that?”
“No, the merchants’ newsletter. They ran your picture in the last issue.” She looked him over. “I also know you have strong psychic powers, although you don’t realize it yet.”
“Uh, was that in the merchants’ newsletter too?”
“No, that’s in your aura.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Oh, stop calling me ‘ma’am’. It makes me feel like I’m your grandmother or something.”
“Yes, ma’ . . . Judy.”
She smiled. “That’s better.” She stood up and hefted the carton.
“Would you like me to carry that for you?” Andy asked.
“Oh, no, thank you. I don’t have far to go with it. I run Bellbookand over in the North Bazaar.”
“Bellbookand?”
“Candle,” she supplied. “It’s the Bellbookand Candle Shop. You know, candles, oils, herbs, that sort of thing.” Then she smiled again. “Stop by some time.”
Andy smiled back. “I’ll do that, Judy.”
###
Timmy Gonzales was bored.
His mother had left him in his stroller next to the South Court fountain while she ducked into the Coffee Tree to pick up some custom-roasted Blue Kona. The aisles in the shop were too narrow to maneuver the stroller comfortably, and she could see him out the front of the shop.
For a while, Timmy had watched in three-year-old fascination as the people streamed by, a mass of shapes and bright colors. That was all right for five minutes or so, but now it was just boring.
He fidgeted in his stroller, banged on the edge and screwed up his face and whimpered experimentally. But no one paid him any attention. He squirmed some more, twisting left and right so violently that the stroller rocked. But it was a top-of-the-line model and well up to containing a rambunctious toddler.
As he twisted, he caught sight of the fountain behind him. Fretfulness forgotten, he turned to stare at this new wonder.
The water arced high into the air, catching bits of rainbow where the sun coming through the dome caught it. It splashed off the bronze and concrete and streamed down to splash again in the basin at the bottom. Behind the fountain, another stream of water emerged from the artificial rock face and cascaded down into the same pool.
As Timmy moved his head, the bits of rainbow coalesced into a shining, brilliantly colored arc. Timmy laughed and reached out for it, but it seemed to recede from his chubby grasp.
He leaned forward in his stroller, then he lunged against it to push it closer to the pretty colors. In the Coffee Tree, Mrs. Gonzales waited impatiently for the clerk to finish with the customer ahead of her. Her back was to the fountain.
Timmy writhed in the seat until he got one leg free. Then he grasped the sides, pulled his other leg out and stood up on the cloth of the stroller seat. Once more, he leaned out toward the rainbow and once more it eluded him. Firmly and deliberately, Timmy Gonzales began to walk toward the source of color, one teetering step at a time.
Mrs. Gonzales came out of the Coffee Tree in a guilty hurry. She had been longer than she had intended, and she was half-afraid Timmy had gotten into something.
Because the stroller was turned around facing away from the store, she didn’t see it was empty until she got right up to it. She gasped and cold fear clutched at her.
“Oh my God!” She swiveled frantically, seeking a glimpse of her son. “Timmy!”
She turned in nearly a complete circle before she happened to look up. There was Timmy, happily playing in the rainbow mist. Thirty feet in the air.
Mrs. Gonzales did what any normal mother would do. She screamed. The bag of coffee fell from her hands and split open, coffee beans skittering over the tiled floor.
His mother’s screams frightened Timmy, so he screamed back. He also grabbed for the nearest solid object, the top of the bronze fountain. That put him right in the line of fire for the fountain nozzles, so Timmy got drenched. That frightened him even more and he screamed even louder, which upset Mrs. Gonzales even more and she screamed louder still. All around them people froze and looked up, their armor of inattention pierced by the noise.
LaVonne Sanders was just rounding the corner into South Court when the screaming duet started. Even so, she had to shoulder her way through the suddenly stationary crowd to get to the fountain.
Mrs. Gonzales was nearly hyperventilating by the time LaVonne reached her. “My baby. My baby. My baby,” she gasped over and over. Up above them, Timmy’s screams reached a new level and developed a modulation like an air-raid siren.
Without taking her eyes off the boy, LaVonne gently pried Mrs. Gonzales’ arm off and reached for her radio.
“Base, we got a kid stuck on the fountain in South Court. Get some people up here with ropes and ladders. Over.”
“He’ll fall,” Mrs. Gonzales babbled in LaVonne’s ear. “He’ll fall and hurt himself, and ooh, God, I was just in there for a minute and he was in his stroller and I just . . .”
LaVonne tried to move her ear away from the frantic mother. “Base, say again.”
“. . . and you’ve got to get him down and he’s . . .”
“Take it easy, ma’am,” LaVonne said over the din of falling water, screaming child and babbling mother. “We’ll get him down in no time. Base?”
But there was no answer, and LaVonne wasn’t sure she could have made it out through the racket anyway. Presumably, the security center was getting Maintenance out with the equipment to get the kid down. Meanwhile, she had her choice of standing here and listening to Mrs. Gonzales or trying to do something. The choice was obvious.
Moving to the base of the fountain, she unlocked the pump control panel and hit the emergency cutoff. Instantly, the arching sprays drooped and died. Next she took off her oxfords and socks, rolled up her pants and waded into the pool.
The bronze sculpture was wet and slick and not really designed for climbing, but it was irregular enough that there were a lot of good handholds. Gingerly, she grabbed a couple of protrusions and began to climb.
Having someone stuck on the mall structure wasn’t common but it wasn’t exactly unknown either. The maintenance crew had a regular drill for getting people, usually teenagers, out of places where they weren’t supposed to be. LaVonne was about eight feet up when the first maintenance men arrived carrying an extension ladder.
Two of the crew waded into the fountain to extend the ladder next to LaVonne. She waited until they had it fully extended and stepped across onto the firmer footing. But Timmy was nearly thirty feet in the air and it was only a twenty-five-foot ladder. Above her the child continued to wail.
The guard climbed quickly nearly to the top then gingerly up the last two or three rungs. She was standing on the very top rung and Timmy was still a little above her and to one side. She briefly considered moving the ladder to the side so it would be directly under Timmy, but that would mean climbing all the way down to the ground.
“Okay, kid,” LaVonne said, teetering on the top step of the ladder and trying to sound reassuring. “Come to me.”
To Timmy, LaVonne didn’t sound at all reassuring. He clung tighter to the fountain and kept screaming for his mommy. LaVonne leaned out further, nearly lost her balance and recovered by bracing herself against the fountain.
She got her hands on Timmy’s waist. “Come on, lad.” But Timmy only clung tighter. Shifting her grip, LaVonne pried Timmy’s right arm loose from the fountain. Then she reached for the left arm to pry it loose as well. Timmy promptly grabbed the fountain with his right arm.
Swearing under her breath, LaVonne pried Timmy’s right arm off the fountain again, this time trying to put it over her shoulder. Timmy, with a child’s instinct to cling, promptly grabbed at her. His hand went into her face. His tiny fingers missed her eyes, but his tiny fingernails raked tiny furrows in the guard’s cheek before the tiny hand fastened on LaVonne’s nose.
Gently, she pried Timmy’s fingers out of her nostrils and guided his hand around to her shoulder. The boy grabbed the epaulet of her uniform in a death grip. Then she reached for Timmy’s other hand.
Timmy’s other hand came more easily this time, and the boy twisted to lock his arm around LaVonne’s neck. As he twisted he let go of the fountain with his legs and tried to wrap them around the guard’s chest. The motion was so sudden that the shift in weight nearly threw LaVonne off-balance, and for a breathtaking instant, and to the gasps of the crowd below, they teetered on the top rung of the ladder.
Gently, very gently, LaVonne stepped down off the top rung of the ladder. One more step and she was able to get a hand on the ladder rail. With a still-crying Timmy obscuring her vision, she felt her way down the ladder, one rung at a time. The crowd applauded all the way down.
LaVonne stepped off the ladder into the fountain, and Mrs. Gonzales came sloshing up to reclaim her son. Timmy nearly put his thumb in LaVonne’s eye untangling his grip. Now that the show was over the crowd melted away.
“How the hell did the kid get up there?” LaVonne demanded as she stepped out of the fountain.
Mrs. Gonzales started scolding Timmy in Spanish, as she always did when he did something bad in public. She spared LaVonne a glance. “I don’t know.” Then she went back to chastising Timmy in the utterly mistaken notion that no one around them would know she was bawling him out. Timmy was sufficiently upset by the experience to take the scolding in wide-eyed silence.
“He flew,” one of the kids in the crowd piped up.
“What?”
“He flew,” the kid repeated. “You asked how he got up there and I, like, told you.”
LaVonne threw him a disgusted glance.
“No, like, really. He just flew up there and was, like, hanging in the air when his mother came out. She, like, totally freaked, you know, and that scared the kid.”
LaVonne looked at Mrs. Gonzales, but she was too busy getting Timmy back in the stroller to say anything.
“I’m telling you, the kid flew,” the kid repeated again. But LaVonne obviously wasn’t listening.
The kid saw it was hopeless, so he shrugged and turned away.
###
Yvonne Kelly compressed her lips into a thin line. This had not been one of her better ideas.
True, D. Wally, Bookpusher, encouraged its managers to hold author signings. Being in a major mall in Southern California, Yvonne was able to do more signings than most and that got her store more bonus points in the quarterly competition for Outstanding D. Wally’s Outlet.
This Saturday she’d outdone herself. She had gotten not one, but two authors to come in and sign. She had even moved the dump of The Cute Cat Diet Book out of the front of the store to make room.
So now on one side of the store, Andrea Lome was signing Shopping For Ecstasy: Why Shopping Is Better Than Sex. On the other side, Laura Dahlmers was signing Get Control of Your Life: The Twelve-Step Method for Beating Shopping Dependency.
Actually, there weren’t that many customers, and the two spent most of their time glaring at each other.
I’ve got to start reading the books before I set up these signings, Yvonne thought to herself, or at least the titles.
Satisfied that her authors weren’t at the hair-pulling stage yet, Yvonne retreated deeper into the store. A little more than a third of the way back, she stopped in front of one of the chest-high sections of shelves and frowned.
“Peter, I thought I told you to reshelve this section,” Yvonne said.
“I did,” the thin young man with the thick glasses protested. “I had everything straightened out when I left last night.”
“Well, they’re out of place now. What if we got inspected by CSP? We’d lose bonus points for not following the SDR.”
Peter looked blank. When he swallowed, his protuberant Adam’s apple made his tie bob up and down and he looked like a lizard which had just eaten a bug.
“Corporate Standards and Practices and the Standard Display Plan,” Yvonne said, as if explaining something to a small child. “Honestly, Peter, don’t you remember anything from your orientation?”
“Not all of it,” Peter mumbled.
“Well you should spend some time reviewing the procedures instead of reading books,” Yvonne told him.
Peter, who thought working in a bookstore was the closest thing to heaven, just blinked. “Someone keeps coming through and messing them up,” he said defensively. “And it’s always the same ones too.”
The words sent a chill down Yvonne’s spine.
“Is it the same person?” she asked sharply.
“I don’t think so. I’ve been watching, and I haven’t seen anyone messing with the books. I haven’t even seen the same people in those sections in the last couple of days.”
Yvonne thought hard. It wasn’t unknown for people to rearrange books. Occasionally, it was an author trying to get more precious display space for his or her work. Sometimes it was a joke, like the person who kept moving How to Make Love Last Forever from the Relationships section over to Fantasy. More often it was someone who was offended by the content, like the people who kept hiding The Joy of Gay Sex or Standing Up for Smokers’ Rights.
But sometimes it was an organized campaign. Fundamentalists or black militants or Neo-Nazis or someone would go around moving, hiding or even damaging books they disliked at stores all over the country. D. Wally’s policy called for the manager who noticed any such consistent movement of books to upload a special form with the daily report. That way headquarters could formulate a policy and get it into the monthly planning cycle as quickly as possible.
“Perhaps you’d better show me.”
The science and technology books were on one row of shelves. Facing them across the aisle were the new age titles. According to the latest issue of “D. Wally’s Book Report,” the company newsletter, focus groups had shown the juxtaposition increased sales of the new-age titles because new-age book buyers felt reassured by the proximity to accepted sciences. The article also included a small box on dealing with complaints from outraged buyers of technical and scientific books. The box pointed out studies had shown the people who were likely to complain weren’t good D. Wally’s customers anyway. They almost never bought books on the Weekly Hot List or the high-margin items like calendars and furry animals with suction-cup feet.
“There,” Peter pointed. Yvonne didn’t need her copy of the weekly SDP to see the stock was out of order. There were several gaps where books had obviously been removed from the shelves.
“It’s been the same for three days running,” Peter told her. “They take some of the books from New Age and put them under Nature and Ecology.”
They stepped around the aisle-end dumps of Love Your Planet to Pieces and Earth: Love It or Leave It.
“See? Down here on the shelves with birds and animals. Lore of the Unicorn, Dragons, Kingdom of the Fairies, Guide to the Little Folk. It’s always the same books.”
“Is that all they do?”
Peter thought a minute. “Well, no. They take the books on advanced physics and its relation to eastern mysticism and put them over in Humor.”