Dragonfly by Jaxn Hill
Chapter Seven
We started down the street again, and a funny looking little guy came following us. He was so small, he looked like a kid, but when you saw his face, he was a grown man. He had bright red hair, not like Maggie’s auburn curls — he was a real carrot top. I recognized him from the night before. He’d been talking to Torstein under the tent, and I noticed he’d taken a few handfuls of sunflower seeds.
He didn’t know it, but he was caught. Torstein’s Irresistible Charm had taken over. It was intoxicating what happened when you were drawn to Torstein. You felt accepted, welcomed, loved, wanted. Everything else you used to think life was about, it didn’t seem to matter anymore. It had happened to this funny looking little guy.
“Hey, can I come with you?” he said.
“Sure,” I said. “But we’re walking to the city.”
“Great, I live in the city,” he said. “Listen, who is this guy, Torstein?”
Torstein was sort of two-stepping along at the head of the group, and I guess it looked like some kind of parade because we were all dressed more or less alike.
“He’s just our friend,” my brother said.
“Yeah, yeah,” the funny looking little guy said. “But why do you guys follow him? And why are you all dressed alike?”
I started laughing. “We don’t follow him — he just wanted to go to the shore, so we all went. And the clothes ... we just got them yesterday on a lark.”
We did sort of follow him, but he hadn’t really gone anywhere before, not out of the neighborhood where we’d met him. This 20-mile walk from the coast, we were really seeing the world.
The funny looking little guy said, “Don’t you have anything better to do?”
Well, it was a good question, wasn’t it? But no, I didn’t have anything better to do. My brother and I didn’t have the fish market to run anymore. Peter, my brother, was quite a bit older than me. He was married, but not so you could notice, and both his kids were in school. I was a single guy. But really, what could be a better thing to do than watch and see what Torstein would to next?
Still, the question kind of annoyed me, and I snapped back at the funny looking little guy, “Don’t you?!”
“Sure, sure,” he said. “I got my job to do, but last night, talking wit’ your friend, I dunno. I got to wondering if my job was that great, anyway.”
“What do you do?” my brother asked him.
“I work for Nikolai, back in the city, you know? I get information for him. Listen, just telling you this, I could get in a lot of trouble, OK? But you gotta tell your boy to watch his back. Nikolai didn’t like losing Bruiser and having to train somebody else to do the collections.”
“He send you to spy on Torstein?” my brother asked.
“Sure, yeah, but ... like I say now I’m not so sure I want to. Maybe I can just stay with you guys and Bruiser.”
He seemed sincere, but if Nikolai were already sore that we’d taken Bruiser from him, what would he think if we took the funny looking little guy, too? He seemed to sense what I was thinking because he said, “Don’t worry, I’m nobody to Nikolai. If I don’t report, he’ll just send someone else. He won’t mind losing me like he minded about Bruiser.” He walked along with us in silence for a few moments, then:
“I wouldn’t have been able to tell him much anyway. My whole report would have been that your boy wanders around giving sunflower seeds to people and rubbing elbows with other maniacs like the Dunker. That’s not much of a threat to someone like Nikolai.”
