The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)

Manhandling Mendoza, Part 1

Previously: "The Gangland Play" 

Slowly, waddling along as quietly as you can on your haunches, you inch out of your ambush spot to crouch under the conference table. You shift the mask into your left hand and stretch out your right until it is bare inches from the other's ankle.

When he steps toward the stairs, you grab him.

Heels kick at the air as he stumbles and falls. You scramble out, and you've just time to see his expression of surprise before you slam the mask onto him.

George Mendoza seems to deflate beneath you.

Your breath scrapes and rattles; your heartbeat is bursting in your eardrums. You glance wildly around, but you have the basement to yourself. But the door is open, and daylight is streaming down the wooden steps.

There's only one place to hide the body until ... Well, until you decide what to do with it. You grab Mendoza by the feet and haul him under the conference table.

There's hardly room for the two of you under there, so you have to stretch out on the floor, sprawling halfway atop him with your face close to his. This gives you plenty of time to study him.

George Mendoza has the face of a baby. Chubby cheeks, pouty lips, an upturned nose. His eyes, which are open and staring, are the color of black coffee; his coarsely chopped hair is the color of dark chocolate. He has a doughy, paunchy belly. But there are muscles in his arms, and he has the strong legs of a soccer player. There's just a trace of dark fuzz—peach fuzz, if that—on his upper lip.

It was no part of your plan—yours or Sydney's—to get a mask of George Mendoza, let alone to impersonate or replace him with a duplicate. But replacing him is better than being caught down here by him and his friends. And someone who looks like George Mendoza should have little trouble getting close to David Kirkham any time he (or whoever is impersonating him) wants to.

But do you have time to substitute yourself for him? It will be ten minutes at least before the mask is done with him; another ten to outfit yourself in it. Are those assholes outside going to stand around for twenty minutes without noticing that Mendoza has gone off? How long until they notice the door to the basement is open, and come down to snoop around?

The minutes pass at an agonizing pace. A couple of times you think you hear Mendoza's name called out, and you perk up with a beating heart; a couple of times you clamber over him to peer up and out through the basement window to see how Sydney is doing. It's impossible to tell for sure, but she seems to be holding her own though still surrounded by a circle of toughs.

Once, you think you see a shadow in the open doorway. But no one comes down.

At last, the mask reappears on Mendoza's face. Carefully, you peel it off. You've got a bowl of the new goop already made up (using your own hair) and at hand, and with trembling fingers you paint the inside of Mendoza's mask with it.

But you've had time to think ahead, and instead of putting it on yourself, you put it back onto his face. It disappears, like a flat stone slipping without a ripple under the surface of a pond.

George Mendoza's eyes snap open, and he lifts his head.

"Quiet," you murmur at him. "Don't say anything. Don't move."

His eyes glitter and gleam, but he freezes. You let out a sigh of relief—first hurdle overcome; the duplicate is obeying you—but your voice shakes as you give him the orders you've been rehearsing in your head.

"Get up. Go outside, go back to the other guys. Close the door behind you. If they ask where you've been, tell them you were looking around downstairs, but there's nothing down here. Don't tell them about me. It was empty down here, there wasn't anything except junk down here. Tell them you looked around and that's all that happened."

You lick your lips. "Do you understand?"

"Sure," Mendoza croaks. But he looks and sounds doubtful.

"Go with them when they leave. But go home, get your car, and come back here. Understand?"

"Okay."

"Do you have to obey me?"

An expression of loathing crosses his face. "Yes," he says.

"Are you going to do what I say?"

"Yes."

"Good. Go on." You scramble back as he crawls from beneath the table. "Remember," you call out as he crosses to the stairs. "There's no one down here. Nothing happened down here."

He gives you a dark, sullen look, then mounts the stairs and goes outside, pulling the door closed after him.

Quaking all over, you crawl back under the table and into your hiding place, where you collapse in a nervous heap.

* * * * *

Mendoza's return must have set something off in the others, for you've not rested long before the sound of the door opening sets you jumping again. The stairs creak under footsteps. Then: "Will?" Sydney calls.

You bump your head as you scramble out. "Are they gone?"

"Yes. Thank God." She's halfway down the stairs and frowning as you emerge. "What were you doing, playing hide and seek with that guy?"

"Mendoza? Sort of."

"You should've kept out of sight! It was all I could do to keep anyone else from coming down here." She puts her hand on her hips and glowers at the wall behind you. "Well, that was a belly flop."

"Not totally. I got a mask onto Mendoza."

"What?" Her brow furrows. "The guy who came down here? You copied him?"

"Yeah. I turned him into one of those things. A pedi-whatits. Like your stepdad."

Her eyes pop. "You mean he's a—"

"Yeah."

"A minion?"

You hadn't thought of it that way, but you guess that's exactly what Mendoza is now. Mendoza the Minion. "Yeah, that's what I did. Hey, can we start calling them that now? Minion instead of pedi-whatever?"

An open-mouthed smile spreads over her face. "You can call him whatever you want, Will! Oh my God! You turned him into a minion and sent him back out? That's brilliant!"

You blush. "Yeah, and I told him to come back here after he shook his friends off," you add with a touch of pride. "I don't know when that'll be, but hopefully pretty soon. I figure we can use him to get to Kirkham, since— Hey!" Realization of what Sydney was going through finally punches its way through your swelling ego. "What happened out there? Are you okay?"

"I'm fine, Will." Sydney comes down the rest of the way and sags against an old bookcase. "What you managed down here makes up for it."

"Well, what did those guys do out there with you? For awhile it looked like they were going to, uh—" You gulp.

She waves her hands. "It's all good. It wasn't fun. Well, not until the end, and then I started enjoying it. Kind of."

"You what?"

"You just have to know how to bluff them, Will." Her chin goes up, and her smile turns smug. "Most guys like that have mommy issues, you know. You just have to talk to them in a firm tone, make them feel like they've forgotten their potty training, and then you can do whatever you want with them." She snickers. "Then I got kind of flirty at the end, sent them away feeling better about themselves than when they got here."

"You what?" you repeat.

"So that guy's a friend of David's?"

"Mendoza? Yeah. At least I guess he is, I always see him and—"

And that's when you catch what she just said.

She didn't call him Kirkham, which is what you and everyone else you know call him, what you think everyone calls him.

No, she just called him David.

"Terrific," she says. "So we can use him to get into David's house? I mean, David will let him in if we show up there with him?"

"I guess." The way she keeps calling him "David" is like a repeated poke in the eye. "But wait. Us? Go with him?"

"You know what I mean, Will. One of us will be that guy, and— Well, I guess you'll have to be him. I'll have to go out separately."

Now you feel like you're drowning. "You're planning on just showing up at Kirkham's house?"

"Don't shout, Will. What's wrong with that? We've been introduced now."

The small hairs on your back rise. "Isn't that going to seem kind of funny to him?"

"I told you, we've been introduced. Besides, he thinks he's now got a chance with me."

"How did he get that idea?" you shout.

To her credit, Sydney winces.

"So he tried getting pushy with me. Well, they all did, until I explained I wasn't going to be impressed with anyone who wasn't on his way to being an engineer or a microbiologist." She doesn't notice your flinch. "That shut most of them down," she continues, "but it turns out your friend David is taking some pretty hardcore math classes, and I told him that was actually kind of sexy. He thinks I meant it."

Next: "Manhandling Mendoza, Part 2" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 3)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)"