The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [41]
“Hey, hon.” A woman’s voice. She was planted on a chair behind a counter, reading a magazine. She sat there so motionless that his eyes had swept right over her, detecting no life in that vicinity. “What’cha got there?” she asked him. Dark helmet hair and fat. Jabba the Hutt, wearing red plastic jewelry. Sucking on a lollipop.
Otis told her that he was trying to find radioactive things for a school science project. He could have just asked her if she had any old clocks, but he didn’t want her help, because that would mean more conversation and interference on her part.
“Nothing radioactive in here, hon,” she said. She pulled the red lollipop from her mouth and shook it at him. “Better not be.”
“Mind if I look?”
“Just be careful with that thing. Don’t go breaking any of my valuable merchandise.” The lollipop went back into her mouth.
“I won’t break anything,” he said. She might’ve been kidding about the valuable merchandise, but he had a hard time telling if people were kidding. He just hoped she wasn’t going to keep asking him questions, because if she did, he’d have to move on to his final location—Sister Sandy’s. Or was it Miss Sandy’s?
He swept his Geiger counter over a box of dolls with china heads, then over a shelf of Happy Meal toys—might be a clock or watch hidden anywhere—moving steadily toward the back of the room and away from Jabba the Hutt.
“There’s an article about the Red Hills Horse Trials in here,” Jabba announced. “You go to that?”
Otis told her that he didn’t go, not volunteering that Ava went every year. He didn’t want to give Jabba any information she might use as a net to trap him into talking to her.
“Who’d want to gallop a horse over these gigantic fences?” she asked. “Sheesh. Even after Christopher Reeve they do it. You could break your fool neck.”
Otis hated it when people made pronouncements like this, because he never knew if they expected a reply or not. He opted for not speaking. The light on his Geiger counter was just flipping on occasionally. So far no clocks at all. He kept moving, like a shark. Sharks probably had radioactive stuff in their stomachs, because they’d eat anything. Funny how he was terrified of sharks but not of radioactivity.
By this time he was at the back of the room and he noticed another room to his left, a whole room next to this one, a room where there wouldn’t be any Jabbas watching over him.
He moved into the other room, waving his wand over dressers, coffee tables, souvenir ashtrays, raggedy couch pillows, and stacked flowered tablecloths. He bent down and stuck the wand back into a corner where there were some iron piggy banks.
“Well, if it ain’t the spaceman.”
Otis, startled, backed into a brass floor lamp and steadied it before it fell.
Rusty, the goth girl who lived in his neighborhood, the minister’s daughter, was sitting in an old yellow lounge chair with a stack of comic books in her lap, a can of Coke resting on the arm of the chair.
Otis hoped she wouldn’t spill the Coke. He worried about things like drinks spilling. “What are you doing here?” Otis said. Rusty was the last person in the world he’d thought would hang out at Grandma’s Attic.
Rusty took a big swallow of her Coke and belched. “This is my grandma’s shop.”
“Your grandma is the Grandma?”
“So they say.” She took another sip of Coke and then flung the empty can into the room behind her. It hit something and rolled a ways.
“Pick up whatever that was!” Jabba yelled from the next room, but Rusty didn’t budge.
“I’m perusing these comic books while I wait for Royce,” Rusty told Otis. “You know Royce, right?”
Otis did know Royce. Royce and Rusty were a scary couple, pale, skinny, dyed black hair, permanent smirks on their faces. They walked