The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)

Covering Tracks

Previously: "Fast Work and Fast Talk" 

"I'll be back for practice at the latest," you tell Frank. "I still need to look around the outside of this place. There might be a spider hole or something where the stuff's hid."

"Well, be careful, Joe. I don't like it that you went out there alone. This guy we're dealing with—"

"Pfft! I'm too quick for him to catch me." Famous last words, Joe, you tell yourself as you close the connection. You pull on that sleeveless t-shirt and saunter out into the living room.

Gordon is standing there, a wondering expression on his face. "Well, don't you look big and stupid," you tell him. "What's on your mind, or whatever passes for it?"

"I guess I'm a little confused, boss."

He looks it. You cock your head, weighing the technicalities of what you need to do with him. He has Dane's memories and personality, but he also will have memories of catching Joe Durras with a brain band and making a mask of him. Can you erase those memories? You wish you had the time now to make a very close study of the Personae. Would it be enough to simply tell him what to say, if questioned?

"Sit down," you order, and Gordon docilely drops onto the arm of the sofa. "Close your eyes. Listen close. Think back to when we got here. We drove up and parked in front of the trailer. What happened next?"

"We came inside—"

"Go back. Tell me everything."

"We got out. We walked— We went through the gate. We walked up the sidewalk. You were whistling. We went up the steps and you knocked. You waggled your eyebrows at me—"

* * * * *

Bit by bit you walk him him through the morning's events. Each time he comes to something that you don't want him to tell anyone, you tell him to forget that it happened, and you tell him that he remembers something else happening instead. It's a very long and exacting process.

But will it work? There's nothing to do but test him.

So when you are done, and after you have told him to lie on the couch and to sleep, and have carried the box of loot out to the truck and come back in ...

"Hey!" you shout as the door slams behind you. "You awake?"

Gordon shoots up with a very confused look on his face. "Were you napping?" you ask.

"No, I—"

"What have you been doing all this time?"

"Since when, boss?"

"Since we got here. Since I picked the lock and we came inside," you explain, slowly enunciating each word. "What have you been doing since?"

"Nothing," he replies in bewilderment. "Just waiting here for you to get done with whatever."

"You been out here all this time?" You chuck your chin at the hallway leading to Dane's bedroom. "You take a look back there?"

"Huh? No, I—"

"You haven't been helping me look around, doing stuff?"

"Doing what, boss?" He sounds utterly confused. "You asked me to sit out here and— Well, I looked around a little, to see if there were any, you know, loose joints rolling around."

That was one of the details you invented for him to remember. "Find any?"

"No."

"But you haven't been back in your bedroom?"

"No! You told me to stay out, told me to sit still and keep my hands to myself!"

"Just making sure. Well, this is a bust." You glance around with your hands on your hips. "Tell you what, though. You don't really wanna go back to school, do you? Didn't think so. I'll tell— It was Shep Tsosie who's been giving you rides. You told me that." You give him a hard look, and he nods with dawning recognition. "I'll tell Shep to come pick you up. Just hang out here till then. Maybe the other Dane Matthias will show up, and you two can catch up."

"Oh God!" Gordon pales. "That'd be too weird!"

* * * * *

So you leave him at Dane's trailer and drive back to where Frank and Joe Durras live. It's a squat little house in the "student ghetto" south of the college. The yard is verdant but weedy, in keeping with the yards around it, which are also festooned with abandoned couches and the occasional motorcycle. You let yourself in, hide the cardboard box in the closet of the bedroom where Joe sleeps, but from it extract a single brain band. With a tuneful whistle on your lips, this you take into the dining nook, where a laptop sits on a spindly table. Next to it are a couple of spiral binders, a few school books, and a stack of paper. You knock over a plastic cup filled with pencils and erasers and a small plastic ruler, and into that mess you slip the brain band. Resting there it looks like another ruler, and it will be easy to pick up and palm.

Then you return to the bedroom, take the Summa Personae from the box, set the alarm on your phone, and plop onto the bed. After smiling over the faces that decorate the end papers, you turn to the preface and begin to read.

* * * * *

"Hey Dumbass!"

You push the sopping hair from your eyes and turn as Ryan Shuler, Luke Bennett, and Jonas Martin—naked as you—come swaggering into the gym shower. Frank, under the next shower head over, turns to watch with a hooded look as they make a semicircle around you. "Where'd you say you were third period?" Martin asks over the hiss of the shower spray. There's a fell light in his eye.

"You asked me that at the start of practice." You put your head back under the water and rub the lather out. "Were you deaf or'd I just use words too big for you understand?"

"Say it again."

"Okay. I was up in your mommy's gyny." You squint at the others. "She was eating Shuler's mom out while Bennett's mom was waiting her turn with me." You shake the water from your hair.

The three ballplayers glower, then step toward you. Before anything can happen, though, a shirtless Steve Patterson pokes his head around the corner. "Everything okay in here?" he barks.

"Sure thing!" you shout as the others glare at you with twitching jaw muscles. "The guys here just want a closer look at my pecker! They're used to playing with each other's, and can't believe the size of the one I got!"

Bennett stabs you in the shoulder with a stiff forefinger. "Outside. Fifteen minutes."

"You got it!" You grab your nutsack and start soaping it.

They turn and go. "Joe," Frank says in a low voice, then turns his back as Patterson walks up. You are of average height, so Patterson looms over you.

"You wanna play it the hard way, play it the hard way, Dumbass," he tells you.

You grin back. "Thanks! Maybe I'll win a prize!"

"And maybe you won't like the prize you win. Listen, I only care what you do on the court, but if that mouth of yours starts causing issues—"

"I know," you assure him with a sigh. "I'll do better. I don't wanna cause you any trouble. Because," you add as Patterson, with a small, glacial smile, starts to retreat, "I don't want you to have to cut those three dipshits from the team just because they can't get along with me."

His eyes freeze and that smile vanishes. But he withdraws without further word.

"You wanna fight those guys," Frank says as he rinses himself off, "you're gonna do it alone. I'm not even gonna stay and watch."

"I can take 'em."

"There's three of them."

"They're not gonna rush me. They'd be pussies to."

"Put it off till tomorrow, Joe. We got stuff to do this afternoon."

He shuts off the water and leaves, almost bumping into Will Prescott who, strutting like a bantam rooster, comes in and turns on the shower next to yours. You can't resist talking to him.

"So they got problems with me 'cos I'm too good," you tell him. "What's their beef with you, man?" you ask, for many of the guys were hassling him at practice. He says something inaudible, and you shut off your shower. "Whadju say?"

"I said, get in line to bite me."

"Ooo! I'll have to remember that one!" You goose him in the small of his back as you swagger out. "Shoot me a text when it's my turn to suck you off!" You flash him a cocky grin, but he only glowers back.

* * * * *

Bennett and his friends have enough honor that they don't rush you at once. But even though you put Martin down fast, you're not as fast enough, and he numbs the side of your face with a hard punch to your left cheek. But after he's rolling on the ground, grimacing and whimpering, you turn a bright, hard grin on his friends, and they back away.

"You're gonna have a shiner, Joe," Frank says as you hop into the truck to join him. "How'd that happen?"

"Sucker punch."

"And you were slow on the court this afternoon."

"I don't want to look too good. Same reason I let 'em hit me."

He gives you a slow, thoughtful look before turning the engine over.

It makes your heart beat hard. Frank and Joe Durras are not regular fellas. They've got magic powers—prodigies, they call them—and if you had Joe's prodigies Luke Bennett wouldn't have even been able to graze you. But as your lunchtime perusal of the Personae confirmed, what Joe Durras and his brother have is something the masks can't copy.

With luck, you'll be able to turn Frank into a pedisequos like "Gordon" and "Dane" and "Lindsay Cho." But you won't be able to fool the other members of their esoteric Order if they come looking, which they will, one way or another.

Next: "Den of the Body Thief" 

*
"Table of Contents (Vol. 2)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)"