Sammy Keyes and the Showdown in Sin City (11 page)

So I pull a little face and tell Candi, “Let’s just say you’re a lot prettier when you don’t hiss.”

Now, the truth is, Candi puts a lot of effort into trying to make herself look pretty. She’s a flashy dresser and isn’t afraid of makeup, but underneath all that makeup is a slightly droopy eye, and a sort of knotty chin. Not knotty like a big ol’ sailor rope or anything. More just knotty like a walnut.

Not a
huge
walnut.

More just a, you know,
junior
walnut.

Not that I’d ever
noticed
her knotty chin before—I’d actually never been this close to her before. The other times I’d seen her, I’d either ducked or run … or been sitting across the conference table from her in the school office having bigger things to worry about than droopy eyes and knotty chins.

Anyway, Candi’s head bobbles a little, and that’s the end of the hissing debate. She hurries back to the bedroom area saying, “Get ready, girls. We’ve got a destination!”

Well, since I’d only crammed the bare necessities into my backpack before I’d bolted out of the apartment, after a little water splashing, teeth scrubbing, and raking through the hair, I’m ready to go. And Heather actually doesn’t take too long, either. But Candi? She’s in that bathroom for what feels like an
hour
.

It feels that way partly because Heather and I are holed
up in our separate corners, avoiding each other, and partly because I’m really hungry and I can hear Heather in the bedroom munching on stuff. I know she’s not going to offer me any, but I don’t feel like I can go to the food court to get myself something to eat, because knowing Candi and Heather, they’d ditch me now that they had a plan.

Plus, I didn’t know what time Marissa and her mom would be leaving, and I sure didn’t want to run into them.

So finally I break down and ask, “Could I maybe have a little of that?”

“Could you maybe not talk to me?”

So I just sit there with my stomach grumbling, listening to Heather munch and crunch. Then things go quiet, and pretty soon I catch a whiff of cigarette smoke. So I spy around the divider, and sure enough, she’s smoking, keeping the end of the cigarette out a small slit in the window as she puffs from it, then blows smoke outside through the opening.

When she’s done, she flicks the butt out, then closes the window and sprays cologne around all over the place.

When Candi finally emerges from the bathroom, her face is all done up and she has high heels on. “Are you girls ready?”

“For like an
hour
,” Heather grumbles.

So we head out to the elevators and down to the first floor. I am starving, so real quick I duck into the little store by the water fountain and buy a box of Double Stuff Oreos and a carton of milk. Then I race to catch up to Heather and her mother because they’d just kept on walking.

I spot them about halfway across the lobby, and since
there was no way I was going to leave my stuff locked inside Heather’s hotel room when I don’t have a key, it’s really tempting to put down my skateboard and
ride
across the huge lobby, but catching up to them on foot is a piece of cake, so I don’t.

After we’ve crossed the lobby, Candi leads us down the escalator and through the little tunnel mall. But it isn’t until we’re outside and Candi pulls over to light up a cigarette that Heather notices I’m eating Oreos and swigging milk. “Why’d you want my food when you had your own?”

“Uh … I just now got these?”

“Yeah, right. Where?”

I feel like saying, I’d tell you but you told me not to talk to you, remember? But I figure why make things worse? So I say, “At that little store by the waterfall.”

“While we were walking?” She sneers at me. “Liar.”

“Heather!” Candi snaps. “Quit with the names.”

“Well, what would
you
call her? There’s no way she went into a store and bought cookies and milk without us knowing!”

Candi drags on her cigarette and eyes me like, Well?

So I tell her, “I was starving. I hustled.” And because she’s still eyeing me, I add, “You’re in heels. I’m in high-tops. It wasn’t hard.” Then I hold out the box of cookies to Heather. “Want one?”

“No!” Heather snaps. “Don’t even act like my friend, ’cause you’re not!”

I laugh. “It’s a cookie, Heather.”

But she’s right. It’s more than a cookie. I mean, how can you feud when you’re twisting apart Oreos?

It’d be like breaking bread with the enemy.

So I take back the offer, and when Candi grinds the stub of her cigarette into the cement and tells me, “No food in my car,” I start double-stuffing
myself
, ’cause who knows when I’ll get the next chance to eat. Plus, all of a sudden I’m nervous. I mean, getting into Candi Acosta’s little red sports car is like hitching a ride on a flaming bullet.

What was I getting myself into?

It raced through my mind that I really ought to find some other way to get to the Marriage Bureau, but I didn’t know my way around at all, and from my little two-block walk last night, I had the hunch it would take me all day to get downtown.

I didn’t even know which direction downtown was.

So when we get to Candi’s car and Heather tilts the front seat forward, I crawl in back.

Then Candi fires up the motor and peels out, laying rubber and centrifuging us around turns as she tears out of the parking structure and onto the street.

I just kept quiet in the backseat while Heather tapped the screen of her mother’s phone and gave her mom directions. “No, stay on Tropicana! We have to get on Fifteen North.”

Not having a cell phone at all, I was having a really hard time not looking over the headrest at what she was doing with hers. And the truth is, I was jealous.

Really jealous.

And it didn’t take long for me being jealous over a cell phone to turn into reinforced anger at my mother. Pete was right—her life compared to mine was just
wrong
.

“Get back, loser. I don’t like you breathing down my neck.”

I guess at that moment I was mad enough at my mother that it didn’t register that I’d just been called a loser or, really, who I was sitting behind. Because out of my mouth comes a pathetic little “Sorry.”

“Heather!” Candi snaps. “The names are unnecessary.”

Heather snorts. “You’re right. I was stating the obvious.”

“Heather!”

For some reason this seems to put Heather in a righteously bad mood. She snarls and snaps directions at her mother, and when we get back off the freeway and Candi misses a turn, Heather cries, “That was Clark! Right there!” Then she grumbles, “Great. Now we have to go clear around the block.” And that’s when what’s
really
bothering her comes out. “I don’t know why we had to take her with us. Why is she even here? We know what to do. We don’t need her!”

Candi downshifts and roars through a yellow light. “Strength in numbers.”

“What?”

“Heather, you throwing another one of your tantrums is not going to convince your father of anything. Both of you being here might.”

“
Tantrums?
I can’t believe you just said that!” Heather shrieks. “And in front of
her
.”

“She’s not the one giving me a headache right now,” Candi mutters as she guns it down the street.

“What?”

Now, normally I would have been hanging on every word of this spat, but right then I notice C
LARK
C
OUNTY
D
ETENTION
C
ENTER
on the huge gray building that we’ve been circling, and out of my little window I see Marissa and her mom and dad getting into their rental car.

At first I can’t believe it’s them, and then I feel like I’m watching them in slo-mo, even though we’re zooming by. Marissa’s dad looks awful. His clothes are a mess, and he seems pretty green around the gills. Like any minute he’s going to bend over and barf. And while Mrs. McKenze’s
acting really uptight—a no-nonsense get-in-the-car-I-want
-out
-of-here kind of uptight—Marissa seems dazed, very pale and sort of stunned.

I want to call out to her. I want to bail out
for
her. But I’m a prisoner in the back of this blazing bullet and before you know it we’re half a block past them and Candi’s crying, “There it is!” and cutting across traffic and into a big, open, mostly empty parking lot.

So wait, I say to myself, the Marriage Bureau and the jail are on the same block? And at that moment I make a weird connection in my head.

A connection between Marissa and me and Heather.

And I guess it kind of knocks me upside the head, because out of my mouth pops, “Man, parents can really mess you up.”

“Shut up!” Heather practically spits, twisting around to face me. “Stay out of it!”

“Heather, what is wrong with you?” Candi says as she nose-dives to a halt in the wide open. “She was
agreeing
with you!”

“I don’t need her agreeing with me! And we shouldn’t even be talking about him in front of her! I hate her, you get that? And you hate her, too, remember?”

So I guess they’d been talking about Warren, but right then all I could think about was Marissa maybe spotting
us
. Like she didn’t have enough on her plate already? I sure didn’t want her worrying about me being so desperate that I’d teamed up with Candi and Heather!

I mean, talk about hell freezing over.

And since I didn’t know which direction the McKenzes
would be driving or how long it would take them to leave the area, I kind of dragged and fumbled and, you know,
delayed
getting out of the backseat.

“Just
leave
it,” Heather says as I’m pretending my skateboard’s stuck, and when I pull it out anyway, she mutters, “You are such a dork.”

“Look,” I tell her. “You want to get rid of me as soon as possible after we find them, right?”

“You got that right!”

“So see? I’m just being optimistic.”

“Girls, come on!” Candi says, clicking along in her high heels.

“Stop calling us girls!” Heather snaps.

Candi tosses a look over her shoulder. “You’d rather I called you boys?”

I laugh out loud because coming from Candi it seemed really funny. And for the first time ever Candi grins at me.

Heather catches up to her mother and cries, “That was not funny! None of this is funny!”

I felt like I’d moved from being a prisoner to being someone tossed in the middle of a battleground. Why couldn’t we just get the job done and
be
done? Why all this sniping and tension and fighting?

With Heather there were always battles, but after all this time I still had no idea what had actually started our war. Heather had just hated me from day one.

Something about my shoes.

And for the past year and a half we’d moved from battle to battle to battle, but … why?

We’re at the Marriage Bureau now, and Candi is just
reaching for the door when her phone goes off. We stop and look at Heather, who’s still holding it, and Heather gives herself away by glancing at me before she steps aside to answer it. “Hello?”

Candi abandons the door and follows Heather, so I follow, too, and when Heather says, “Yup, it’s me,” I call out, “No, it’s not!”

Heather hunches over like she’s trying to protect the phone from my voice and says, “No … no … yes.” Then she lets out a little curse and hands me the phone.

“Hey, it’s me,” I say into it.

“I’m too tired to play this game, but in case you’re another imposter, here we go again: ‘In the Ghetto.’ ”

“No.”

“ ‘Don’t Cry Daddy.’ ”

“No.”

“ ‘Peace in the Valley.’ ”

“I wish … but no.”

“ ‘Amazing Grace.’ ”

“Definitely not.”

“ ‘Love Me Tender.’ ”

“Bingo.”

He lets out a heavy sigh. “I just got a call. There’s been a sighting.”

“There
has
?”

“Uh-huh. Inside the Miracle Mile Shops. They’re at Oyster Annie’s having lunch.”

“Oyster Annie’s?” I was picturing a girl in a big rubber hat and boots. It sounded like the last place on earth my mother would go.

“Yeah. Now go catch her, would you? The King needs his beauty rest.”

“Thank you!”

I click off, and once again I’m so excited that I forget who I’m working with. “There’s been a sighting!”

“There
has
?” Candi asks all bug-eyed, and even Heather perks up.

“Do you know where the Miracle Mile Shops are?”

“Yes!” Candi says. “It’s a giant mall on the Strip.”

“Well, let’s go!” I tell them. “They’re at Oyster Annie’s.”

“Oyster Annie’s?” they say with disgust.

I laugh. “It’s a restaurant.”

Candi squints at me. “Warren doesn’t eat
oysters
.”

And I’m so excited that we’ve got a real lead that I joke back with “Probably my mother’s bad influence?” which makes Candi roll her eyes, but a little grin does actually break through.

But heading back to the car, I start thinking that I really
can’t
picture my mom eating oysters. Or going anywhere … oystery. And then I start worrying that maybe it’s a false sighting. Maybe we should stay and stake out the Marriage Bureau. Or maybe we should split up, with one of us waiting here and the others going to the mall.

But … who would go where?

Not an easy thing to figure out when you factor in the possibility of being backstabbed—something Heather’s a master at.

But before I know it, we’re back in the car, and we’re zooming down a street, blasting past giant billboards about bail bonds and half-price lawyers.

“Look at all these stupid wedding chapels,” Heather grumbles after we’ve gone a few blocks. And she’s right—every other building is a wedding chapel. And since I’m kinda leaning forward again so I can see better, it’s easy for her to turn and tell me, “Getting married here is cheap. And tacky.”

“And legally binding,” Candi says, stepping on the gas.

I just sit there for a minute, and finally I say, “What I don’t get—”

“Don’t talk to us, you get
that
?” Heather snaps, turning all the way around in her seat.