The Sweet Dead Life (23 page)

I peered around the BMW's fender. Dr. Renfroe straightened. He glanced behind him nervously, but didn't seem to spot the Merc. I held my breath and withdrew my head. The Merc idled, exhaust fumes billowing up my nose.

Any second now I was going to break into a coughing fit. Amber peeked over the Honda. When she sighed, I knew Renfroe had entered the Galleria.

She glared down at me. "If you're coming, then c'mon. We don't want to lose him." She slapped the Merc's trunk like she was hitting the rear end of a horse. "Go!" she shouted in my brother's general direction. "Text me when you're inside."

Amber took off at a race walk, her pointy-toed boots slapping the concrete. I chased, my Converse soles a lame squeak in comparison.

"Don't you just know?" I hollered.

She gave me the stink eye over her shoulder. "Know what?"

"Know where Renfroe is. Where he's going. Like with Casey. You know where he is all the time--"

"You're kidding, right?" she spat. She pushed through the doors into the brightly lit mall. Christmas assailed us: silver and white snowflakes, a display of ginormous gold ornaments, red and green "50% OFF!" banners, a grouping of life-sized nutcrackers, all in a backdrop of glittering store windows and faux marble flooring. I felt woozy. Amber picked up the pace. I spotted Renfroe's curly dark hair ahead of us, near the Starbucks kiosk.

"Don't let him see you," she whispered.

Casey better get in here pretty quick. Otherwise Detective

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Bossy and I were going to end up throwing down in front of Armani.

Dr. Renfroe moved briskly into the vast atrium, past the giant Christmas tree in the middle toward the bank of elevators at the far end. He pressed the up button. I heard Amber's cell buzz in her pocket. Casey.

"Ten to one he's headed upstairs in the Financial Center," she told my brother. "We're right behind him."

I tapped her on the shoulder. "Shouldn't we--"

"Wait," Amber snapped, not bothering to let me finish.

I returned that stink eye. But I waited.

Renfroe stepped into an elevator. The door closed. Amber crept closer, gesturing for me to follow. She raised a finger to her lips and pointed towards the upper levels with her other hand: six levels that ringed the atrium and the big, fat, too-tall Christmas tree smack in the middle. I squinted in the glare of the skylight.

"Fifth floor, if I'm right," she whispered. "Wait for it."

Was she listening for something? Because all I could hear was a bunch of eager-beaver Christmas shoppers with way too much time and money on their hands. That, and the faint muzak strains of "Jingle Bell Rock" echoing from every direction. I tried to follow her eyes, counting upwards.

All at once, she grabbed my hand. She dragged me to the elevator bank.

When the door opened, Amber whipped her EMT badge from her back pocket. "Out!" she demanded of the crowd inside.

There was a slight murmur. It was holiday time, and the way I figured it, people were already irritable with the need to pretend that they were happy.

Plus Amber was dressed in

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jeans and a low-cut shirt. She didn't look like an EMT. This had to be confusing.

"You really authorized?" asked a tall guy in a business suit and cowboy boots.

"Do I need to call someone?" Amber asked him right back.

Everybody hustled out, double-time.

Amber jabbed the 5 button and the doors slid shut. Up we went. One. Two.

Three. Four ... The doors slid open. Quieter up here, except for one loud shouting voice. My blood ran cold. I knew that voice. We stepped out. On the other side of our ring, across the vast empty expanse of the atrium, Renfroe was shouting at two men.

Two very familiar men.

One was tall and thin, with a shaved bald head. Manny, of Manny's Tex Mex: the last place my father had been seen alive, five years ago. The other guy was shorter and muscular, with hairy arms sticking out of his short sleeved shirt. I didn't know his name. It didn't matter. He'd waited on me. Or tried.

He'd been royally pissed that I was part of a party of four who'd only ordered for one--that crucial
one
being Zeke, Bryce's friend, the Zeke who never forgot a face or a fact.

So here I was, staring at Manny, Hairy-Armed Waiter, and Dr. Renfroe, hollering at each other in front of some office at the top of the Galleria.

Amber punched the key pad of her cell. "Where the hell are you?" she muttered tightly.

I assumed she'd called Casey. When she didn't say anything else, I assumed he hadn't answered. With one eye on Renfroe and the others, I watched as she switched to texting.

5 th floor
she typed.

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She shoved the phone back into her pocket. Then she started cussing to herself in a decidedly non-holy being fashion. The colorful language was directed mostly at my brother. I didn't catch the specifics, though. Being here felt a lot like the car accident, when the Prius was tumbling and all I could think was that I couldn't think at all.

"Hey! Amber! Jenna!" Casey's voice poked into my ears from somewhere below. He shouted louder. "Hey! I'm here!"

I turned to the Renfroe gang.

My heart froze. Casey stood directly below them--on floor four, not floor five.

He waved at us across the open air of the atrium, clutching a Bath and Body gift bag in his hand. My brain did some quick mental gymnastics.

This much was obvious: Casey had no clue that Dr. Renfroe, Manny, and Hairy-Armed Waiter were standing on the floor above him. Additionally, he had stopped to shop. I began to seethe. I was not the only teenage girl who enjoyed the skin-smoothing product line at Bath and Body. (You'd be a moron not to. Mags gave me one of their vanilla lotions as a birthday gift last year. She knew I couldn't afford it. I was a boot-wearing girl, but that didn't mean I wasn't concerned with proper skin care.) No, I'd be willing to gamble that Lanie Phelps did, too. Not that I was the gambling kind. In short: Casey was late to our hot pursuit of Dr. Renfroe because he had stopped to Christmas or date (or both) shop for his possibly no longer ex-girlfriend.

Which meant he just possibly might have indulged in a smidgen of cannabis to calm himself.

Why else would he be waving at us like an idiot? At least he was
here
.

Maybe someday Ryan Sloboda would stop in the middle of a life and death crisis to buy me a present. It could happen. I decided to cut my brother some slack. Although I

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did briefly ponder why he could calm me down with a touch, but needed a quick toke to do the same for himself. Habit, probably.

Hairy-Armed Waiter leaned far over the railing. "Hey!" he shouted down to Casey.

Dr. Renfroe and Manny stepped up beside him. They spotted Amber and me at the same time.

"Stop!" Amber shouted. "Stay right there!"

I almost laughed at what happened next. It didn't seem real in the least.

Hairy Arms whipped a pistol out of the back of his jeans. From where I was standing, maybe thirty yards across, it looked like a plastic water gun. Then he aimed at us. I heard the whizzing even before I heard the firecracker pop.

Plaster from the wall behind us fluffed out like a little perfume spray.

Amber slammed me to the floor and flopped on top of me. I bit my tongue.

There was blood in my mouth.

"He's shooting at us?" I gasped.

"Just shut up and stay still," Amber grunted, shielding me with her body.

I peeked through the railing. Casey had vanished. Dr. Renfroe was now wrestling with Hairy Arms. Manny was trying to pull them apart. With a violent yank, Renfroe pulled the gun from the waiter's hands. But the gun kept sailing up in midair, free now from all three of them. It bounced on the railing and then over into the empty air of the atrium. I cringed, praying it wouldn't hit some poor shopper on the head. There was a faint metallic smack as it hit the ground floor.

Seconds later, a rumble of people started shouting from below.

"We have to get out of here," Amber whispered.

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I nodded.

We stood up, only to find ourselves facing a very sweaty Renfroe, Manny, and Hairy-Armed Waiter, sprinting around the circular balcony straight towards us. Amber glanced at me. She looked as scared as I felt. For the first time since I'd met her, I understood chaos theory. Shit happens. You deal with it.

"If you want to kill us, fine!" I heard myself shout. "But just tell me why."

At that, Renfroe stopped in his tracks. Hairy-Armed Waiter spun around and glared at him. Manny kept his beady eyes pinned to us, his scrawny lungs heaving.

"I had to," Renfroe choked out. He wiped his dripping, pale face with the back of his hand. A vein throbbed in his forehead. "They made me. Manny found out that your dad was still alive. He--"

"Shut up, Stuart," Manny barked.

"Oh God," Renfroe croaked. "I was trying to help. I was trying to help." He shot a furtive stare at Amber and me, then bolted for the balcony's edge.

Only when he grabbed the railing did I realize what he was about to do.

The rest seemed to happen in slow motion. I lunged for his ankles. The momentum of his jump pulled me over with him.

"Jenna!" I heard Casey scream from somewhere below.

Stuart Renfroe and I somersaulted through the air.

The Christmas tree spun below us, the skylight spun above us: a dazzling spiral. We'd left the balcony far behind. My stomach shrunk as we plunged. I squeezed my eyes shut. Weirdly, I felt something not unlike that peaceful feeling that I'd felt whenever Casey or Amber had touched or held me for 209

a while.
So this is it
. The only thing I regretted was my next thought, which concerned Mr. Collins and his Aggie theories.

"Don't worry, Jenna,"
he would say.
"You haven't lost. You've just run out of
time."

210

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What happened next was, in fact, a real-life miracle.

Of course, the possibility of miracles probably increases if you're already hanging out with angels.

I'd rather not think too hard about all that right now. Back to what happened: Much later that night, after we found out why Renfroe had done it (which I'll get to in a minute), Casey and I sat cross-legged on his floor, the laptop between us. The You-Tube videos were already starting to go viral. From one angle or another, all of them showed a record crowd of Christmas shoppers at the Houston Galleria, thrilled and mesmerized by an unannounced show of two daredevil indoor stunt-people with wing-shaped parachutes and angel costumes.

"I don't freaking believe it," Casey said with a chuckle. "Let's watch that last one again."

I rested my hand on my brother's shoulder. "Casey," I said. "Are you--?"

"Shh," he whispered. He threw his arm around my

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shoulder and squeezed me against him. "Just one more time."

Casey started the video again. I watched, remembering, or trying to remember from my perspective. This particular clip had spliced together two different views, one of me and Renfroe hurtling over the balcony, the other of Casey leaping after us even before his wings unfurled. I could see why spectators bought the story that he was an indoor sky diver. How else could they explain that he'd been free-falling and then suddenly soared through the air over a giant Christmas tree?

The video switched back to my side of the Galleria. By the time Casey's wings had popped out and open, Amber had leaped over the edge, too. So there it was: Amber, wings spread wide, glowing like a thousand candles, swooping after Dr. Renfroe, who had managed to wrestle his ankles from my grip. She scooped him up and rose so gracefully that even this close to the screen, I couldn't see her wings flap. She set Dr. Renfroe in front of the security guards, now swooping (wingless) in on Hairy-Armed Waiter and Manny.

Renfroe's face was glowing hot red now. The audio on this clip wasn't the best, but I could hear him start spouting his confession. The same stuff he eventually wrote out for the cops once they hauled his sorry ass to jail.

Of course, I didn't remember any of this. All I remembered was hurtling through the air, then lying in Casey's arms as he laid me down. I was certain I must have been dead, because I could see his enormous, beautiful wings flapping.

Now, watching it play out on video, I saw how Casey dropped Lanie's package, the Bath and Body bag all wrapped up tight with pretty red ribbon and a card dangling from it. He just dove. It vanished in an instant as the camera followed

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us. If he hadn't stopped to buy it, maybe he wouldn't have been there when I needed him.

"Jesus H. Christ," my brother whispered for the millionth time, reaching over to press replay. I sniffed the tiniest bit of weed on his otherwise fresh-as-a-daisy breath. "What the hell did you think you were doing, Jenna?"

"Saving the day," I whispered back. "Just like you."

I bit my lip, not wanting to ask the natural next question, given what Amber had told us about wings and A-words. (Was I ready to say angels yet?