Agent Freeman (The Model Spy Prequel)

Chapter 3

It was a little after seven in the morning when I finally shuffled out of my apartment. Yawning, I hit the button for the elevator and waited for it to creak up to my floor. I could hear it groaning and rumbling floors below, like it too was waking up. I adjusted my backpack and double-checked my pocket for my CIA badge, which would ensure me a private plane out of JFK to LAX.

When the elevator finally arrived, I pulled open the gate lazily and dragged myself inside.

"Yo! Hold the gate!"

I recognized the voice before I saw the short body round the corner and run towards the elevator. I resisted the urge to groan and slam the gate shut, but Charlie Laurence's face was flushed and panic-stricken as he got closer. He was flapping his arms violently and the crisp, white dress shirt his mother made him wear everyday was pulled halfway out of his black pants.

"Thanks, man," he wheezed as he crammed himself into the small elevator next to me. "I'll never make it across the city by eight." He began pulling the rest of his dress shirt out of his pants. Then he started unbuttoning it as the elevator shakily descended.

If I hadn't known my next door neighbor Charlie for over a year, I may have been slightly alarmed that the five foot tall young man with a pink baby-face was undressing himself in the elevator. But this had become nearly a daily occurrence. I reached over and helped him pull his arm out of his sleeve.

Sighing, he swung his backpack off of his back and unzipped it. He balled the shirt and shoved it in his bag before pulling out a New York Yankees jersey and pulling it on over his undershirt.

"That woman will be the death of me," he grunted.

That woman was his mother, Dr. Laurence. Coincidentally, his father was also named Dr. Laurence. His mom was the medical type of doctor. His dad was more of the scholarly sort of doctor, cracking numbers and codes for Wall Street. The Doctors kept a tight leash on their only son, sending him to some private school for boys on the Upper East Side and dressing him in little vests and sweaters and crisp, white dress shirts.

They wanted him to be an accountant, he complained nearly every day in the elevator. But Charlie had other plans...

"So I've been working on this thing," he started as the elevator inched towards the ground floor. "It's this pen that uses invisible ink. It's mad sick, dude."

"And how's that working for you..." I swallowed hard before I forced the next word out of my mouth, "dude?"

Charlie looked bashfully down at his hands, covered in black and blue stains. "I don't have the formula down yet. But I will!" he added triumphantly.

Charlie wanted to be an inventor. His backpack was filled with blueprints scribbled on notebook paper and napkins and pieces of trash he sought to repurpose into something new. It wasn't uncommon for Charlie to come home from school with his pockets weighed down by broken watches and discarded cell phones that he would then try to work into one of his plans.

"There's this other thing that I'm working on in the meantime," he continued.

I stared at the elevator doors, urging them to open, but they remained unmoving, trapping me. "Oh," I tried to sound interested. "What is it?"

"Aww, man," he laughed. "I shouldn't even be telling you. You might rat me out or something. You know, to the cops or the government." He punched me in the arm.

The doors finally opened with a ding but I stood there, staring at Charlie, who was grinning goofily in his baseball jersey.

"Do I have to be worried about you?" His case was not a case that I wanted to get involved in.