by Tim Tharp
CHAPTER 18
It was ten till ten by the time the contest wrapped up—time for us loser non-Gangland members to scurry out of there. Nash thanked us for giving him his victory, and even Rowan congratulated us. Brett gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek. I don’t know if it was the kiss or the shampoo smell from her hair, but I felt a little light-headed when she pulled away.
As we made our way to the door, Tres came up and shook all of our hands, though when he spoke, he looked only at me. “I’m glad you’re doing so much to help with Ashton,” he said. “You seem pretty determined.” That earlier weird expression on his face had been replaced by his trademark shyness. Which was a relief. I was afraid I offended him by bringing up his sister’s situation in my rap.
“I am determined,” I told him, but I didn’t say why. A rich kid probably couldn’t understand how important reaching for a little extra mojo was to a guy like me.
At the door, Nash shook my hand. “Glad you made it out tonight,” he said. “You were awesome up there onstage, but I knew you would be. Too bad you have to leave, but those are the rules. We’ll have to do it again, though.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’d love to.”
On our way to Audrey’s car, we passed quite a few people heading the other direction. That made sense—probably the best part of the night at Gangland was just getting ready to crank up. But something else didn’t make sense. Two of the people we passed were Huy and Tommy from the Vietnamese pool hall. They grinned and waved. I stopped and watched them, and sure enough they got in the door.
“That’s weird,” I said. “How do those guys rate getting to go in while we got kicked out?”
Audrey and Randy agreed that it was weird, but they didn’t think it was any of our business. We’d done our time in Gangland, and they were ready to head home. I wasn’t about to let it go that quickly, though.
“Come on,” I said. “I have an idea.”
We snuck around to the far side of the building, the side away from the street. There were several windows set high in the wall, all sealed and coated with black paint, just like the windows on the other side.
“What do you think you can do back here?” Randy asked.
“Give me a second.”
As I studied the windows, it occurred to me I might be able to scratch a little peephole into the black paint and maybe cop a view of what kind of shenanigans went on inside after ten o’clock. The problem? The windows were too high to reach—without help, that is.
I had Audrey and Randy make stirrups with their hands so they could boost me up a couple of feet. Unfortunately, this didn’t work so well—me being the heaviest one in the group—and I ended up crashing down on my butt in the gravel. There was nothing to do but change course—Randy and I lifted Audrey up while she scratched at the black paint with her car key.
“Can you see anything yet?” I whispered.
“Not yet. This paint’s pretty thick.”
“Well, hurry up,” Randy said. “You’re not exactly a feather, you know.”
“Hey, I think I can see a little light starting to come through,” she said, but as she leaned forward to get a better look, Randy’s grip loosened, and we almost dropped her.
“Look out,” she said. “Are you trying to break my neck or something?”
Just then, a voice boomed behind us. “What are you kids doing back here?”
That was it. Randy lost his grip altogether, and as Audrey started to topple over I lost my balance trying to hold on to her, and we all three crashed onto the gravel.
Sitting there, the gravel dust puffing up around us, we looked up to see a very wide, almost-square man in a dark suit glaring down. His gray hair was thinning on top, and he had a big, bushy swooping cowboy mustache.
“Get up from there,” he growled. “And let me see your IDs.” He wasn’t as tall as me, but his gut was bigger.
I pulled my ID out of my wallet and handed it to him, but Audrey wasn’t so ready to comply. “Hold on a minute,” she said. “Are you the police?”
“Never mind who I am.” He studied my ID, then returned it. “What are you doing back here?”
The idea crossed my mind that Nash and Rowan hired him to do security for Gangland.
“We were just in there,” Randy said. “We’re practically members of the place.”
“Shut up, Randy,” Audrey snapped. “We don’t have to talk to him.”
“Practically members, huh?” the man said. “Then maybe you don’t mind if we go around to the door and ask them about that.”
“That won’t be necessary,” I said, not wanting Nash or Rowan to know we were snooping around. “We were just getting ready to leave and got curious about what was going on in there, that’s all.”
“That’s all, is it?” Mr. Mustache said. “How well do you know Rowan Adams?”
“We know he’s a douche,” Randy said.
The bushy mustache raised a notch, and I suspected its owner was smiling underneath it. Maybe he didn’t like Rowan either. “Let me give you some advice,” he said. “You should steer clear of this place. There’s an investigation going on, and it’s not something you want to get caught up in.”
“An investigation?” I said. “You mean into Ashton Browning’s disappearance?”
“What do you know about that?” Mr. Mustache was serious again.
“Just what we saw on the news,” Audrey told him.
“Well, that’s none of your business,” Mr. Mustache said. “You got that? None of your business.”
“Yeah, we got it.” I didn’t see any reason to get into an argument at this point.
“All right, then. You three get on your way. And I don’t want to see you skulking around anymore.”
“We were just leaving anyway,” I said.
As we walked away, I glanced back over my shoulder to see he was still standing there watching us.
“That was creepy,” Audrey said. “What do you think that guy’s deal is?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if we run into him again somewhere down the Ashton Browning trail.”
CHAPTER 19
Writing the next installment of my series on Ashton wasn’t easy. Sure, I had my suspicions about Rowan Adams, Mr. and Mrs. Browning, the girls who Ashton unfriended, and those scary neighborhoods where Ashton delivered meals—plus there was the connection between the North Side Monarchs and Hector—but what could I say about any of that? All I really had were hunches, and you can’t start putting people’s names in newspaper articles based on hunches. Well, I guess you can—you see it all the time in the media these days—but the so-called newspeople who do that have some deep pockets behind them. Me, I’d probably get sued out of existence.
Then there was also the problem of writing about Gangland and the O-Town Elites and North Side Monarchs. For sheer reader interest it was a hard topic to beat. I’d come out looking like a star just for having been to a cool place like Gangland. But I wasn’t sure how it tied in with Ashton. Or Hector. Plus, I couldn’t break my promise to Nash. He’d been a good guy to me, and besides, as a journalist, I had the obligation to protect my sources. How could I get anyone else to talk to me if I didn’t do that?
So I decided to focus completely on showing who Ashton Browning really was. I described her blond hair and her perfect nose and most of all her blue eyes. I wrote about how broken up her brother was about her disappearance and how her friends didn’t always understand her charity work but admired her anyway. By the end I felt like I’d written a love letter to her.
I almost deleted the whole thing. I mean, how much crap would I catch if the kids at school knew I was falling in love with a rich missing girl from Hollister? But in the end I had to keep it pretty much like it was. I wanted people to care for her like I did. To see she was more than just a picture in the paper or a future candidate for a true-crime show on network TV.
And what do you know? When we got together after s
chool to work on the next issue of the paper, Ms. Jansen said my piece was one of the best articles anyone had turned in that week. She thought it didn’t really work as hard news, but it was a perfect human-interest piece to follow up my last article. Now, she said, I needed to dig into some of my leads and find a new slant for my next article on the case. I felt pretty good about that, like I’d made the right choice after all when I quit the grocery-store job. Things were really looking up for my investigative-journalism career.
I recruited Audrey to head to Topper’s with me after school to discuss what my next move would be. On the way in, I said hello to Rockin’ Rhonda, and she started singing her “Mr. Mojo” song at me. At least it was a better nickname than Body Bag.
To shake things up, I ordered the mushroom and Swiss burger. It’s not as good as my usual, but having too much of the same thing all the time can kill the effect. We discussed staking out Rowan Adams’s house or even the Brownings’, but that sounded boring. Plus, you could probably get into some heavy trouble that way. Two teenagers sitting around a rich North Side neighborhood in a five-year-old Ford Focus? That’s bound to draw some unwanted attention. Especially since neighborhoods like that are known to have their own special police forces.
Then I had the perfect idea. We could check into FOKC, the charity Ashton delivered meals for. It’d be easy. We’d just go down to their headquarters and pretend we wanted to get involved, say we wanted to do the same route Ashton usually delivered to. We were her friends, we’d tell them, and we knew Ashton would want to make sure her people were taken care of until she could come back and do it herself. Not that I actually wanted to deliver any meals. I just wanted a good excuse to find out who she delivered them to. It was an idea worthy of the Andromeda Man himself.
“How about we go Friday afternoon after school?” I suggested.
Audrey frowned. “Friday? I don’t think I can do it Friday.”
“Why not? What else could you possibly have going on?”
She didn’t like that. “What?” she said. “You don’t think I could have something going on? You think you’re my only friend? I could have a date or something.”
“Yeah, right. You could have a date. And I’m marrying Princess Leia.”
“Hey, I could have a date.”
“Well, do you?”
She looked away, then back. “I’m not sure exactly. It’s just that Trix asked me if I wanted to get together this Friday for coffee.”
“You’re kidding. That’s great. Why didn’t you tell me?” I made a point to sound supportive even though the truth was I hadn’t scratched Trix off my suspect list yet.
Audrey fiddled with one of her French fries for a moment.
“The thing is, I don’t know if I really want to go. There’s, like, a catch to it.”
“Look, if you really like this girl, you shouldn’t worry about some little catch.”
“But it’s kind of a weird catch.”
“What is it?”
“Well, uh, she kind of said she wants you to come along too.”
“Me?”
“Yeah.”
This was awkward to say the least. It was just possible Trix was actually interested in me and not Audrey. But I’d already told Audrey—and myself—any kind of romantic deal between me and Trix was strictly taboo, so I had to walk a thin line here.
“You know what?” I said. “I’ll bet she’s not sure you’re gay, so she didn’t want to ask you out on an actual date. If I’m there, she can get to know you better without things getting weird, you know? It’s the old ‘Let’s be friends so we can segue into a relationship’ strategy.”
“You really think so?”
“I’d say there’s about a seventy-five percent possibility.”
“So you’ll come?”
“If you think I ought to.”
“Yeah, I think you ought to.”
“Okay. On one condition—we convince Trix to go to FOKC headquarters with us.”
Audrey mulled on that for a moment. “That might work,” she said finally. “That just might work.”
I hoped it would work too, but I also couldn’t help wondering if maybe Trix had some sinister ulterior motive for wanting to get together, a motive that had nothing to do with liking either one of us.
CHAPTER 20
On Friday afternoon, we met Trix in a coffee shop on her side of town, an upscale place with men and women in suits chatting or working on their laptops. As for Trix, she was wearing the exact same thing she wore the day we met her. Or the exact same look, I should say. She explained that she had a closet full of identical outfits. “When you find a look that’s you,” she said, “you might as well stick with it.”
The coffees all had weird names, but I figured anything with the word mocha in the title couldn’t be all bad, and it wasn’t. Finding a place to sit was not a problem—the place was loaded with comfy chairs and little sofas gathered around coffee tables. I headed to one of the chairs, catching Audrey’s eye and nodding toward the two-seater sofa so she’d have a chance to sit next to Trix. Unfortunately, another chair was left open and Trix sat there.
So far she seemed perfectly cool and all, but I had to consider the possibility that could just be an act to hide the fact she was the psychopath who killed her little friend in California. Maybe her dad even knew she was a psychopath and that’s why he moved her to Oklahoma City. And this may sound paranoid, but sitting there, I even imagined a derringer tucked into her little black purse. Weirder things happen on Andromeda Man every week.
At first we traded some awkward small talk, but sooner or later the subject of Ashton Browning was bound to come up, and it did.
“So I guess you’re still working on your articles about Ashton,” Trix said after taking a sip of her cappuccino. “Word is you even showed up at one of those stupid Gangland parties.”
“You know about that place?” I said. “I thought it was supposed to be secret.”
“Everyone at Hollister knows about it,” she said. “It’s just that the people I hang with don’t really care about it.”
“We don’t care about it either,” Audrey said. “We just thought it’d be a good chance to get more of a feel for the crowd Ashton ran with. Or at least used to run with.”
“I hope you didn’t get the idea that just because I go to Hollister, I’m anything like Rowan Adams and Brett Seagreaves.”
“We never thought that,” Audrey assured her, although Trix didn’t seem like the kind of person who needed much reassuring.
“Brett was all right,” I said. “But Rowan’s definitely on my suspect list.”
Trix laughed. “Rowan? You know, as much as I’d like to see him get into trouble and bring his ego down in flames, I just don’t see him being involved with anything that would actually take real balls to pull off. No, my guess is that nobody at Hollister had anything to do with Ashton missing.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because probably some perv stalker grabbed her. Someone she never even knew.”
So I’m like, “Is that what you think really happened to your friend’s sister in California?”
But Audrey goes, “Dylan, don’t bring that up. She probably doesn’t want to talk about it.”
“That’s all right,” Trix said. “Actually, Dylan’s right. I met that pool guy they arrested for it. I just couldn’t see him doing something like that. He was kind of dumb, but he was sweet. As far as I’m concerned, it was probably just some random guy. That’s the way the world is, you know? It doesn’t always make sense. It’s just a bunch of randomness whirling around.”
“Wow,” Audrey said. “That’s pretty deep.” She looked so love struck I couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for her. I’d been there before with Jennifer Roberts in ninth grade, to no avail.
“Well,” I said, “we’re not just looking at Hollister kids. We have some other leads too.” I went on to explain about Ashton’s charity work and how it took her to so
me pretty sleazalacious neighborhoods. “In fact, after coffee, we’re planning on heading to FOKC headquarters to see if we can find out exactly where Ashton used to deliver meals. You want to come with?”
Trix’s eyes brightened. “That sounds like an adventure,” she said. “And I love adventures.”
CHAPTER 21
For the drive to FOKC headquarters, we took Trix’s sweet silver BMW. It wasn’t as luxurious as Nash’s Lexus, but it had its own kind of flair. I hated to be wishy-washy, but I had to seriously consider whether I was actually more of a BMW man after all. There was no doubt something like this would look tasty sitting in a parking spot in front of school next year. I wondered if they made them in red.
I rode in the backseat while Audrey sat up front with Trix. Mostly they chatted while I kept my mouth shut. They actually had quite a bit in common—musical artists, taste in fashion, books. Trix was even impressed that Audrey wanted to be a high-art-style photographer. She wished she could be an artist, but so far she hadn’t found something she was that good at. I was glad they were getting along. You never want to see your friends put their hearts out there just to get trampled on.
We finally found the building we were looking for a couple blocks west of the bus station and not too far from the homeless shelter. The BMW definitely stood out in the middle of these dilapidated surroundings. If Ashton had to deliver meals in a neighborhood even worse than this, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go there.
Inside, the place wasn’t so bad. They’d fixed it up to look cheery and hopeful. Earlier in the week, I’d contacted FOKC and set up a time to come in and talk about delivering meals to the disadvantaged or whatever they go by these days. Nobody was there to greet us, though. I called out a hello, and shortly a woman in a pastel-blue pantsuit appeared from a hallway. At first she looked confused to see us, but when I explained about our appointment, her face burst into a sunny smile.