by Meg Cabot
“Play bad,” he murmured again.
“Yeah,” I said again. “It’s easy. Just say to them, Yes, I had a gift. But then I lost it. Just like that.” I snapped my fingers.
Shane was still gazing down at his hands. May I add that those hands—those hands that had made that achingly sweet music—were not too clean? They were grimy with dirt and potato chip crumbs.
But Shane didn’t seem to care. “I had a gift,” he murmured. “But then I lost if.”
“That’s it,” I said. “You’re getting the hang of it.”
“I had a gift,” Shane said, looking up at me, his eyes bright. “But then I lost it.”
“Right,” I said. “It will, of course, be a blow to music-lovers everywhere. But I’m sure you’ll make a very excellent receiver.”
Shane’s look of appreciative wonder turned to one of disgust. “Lineman,” he said.
“I beg your pardon. Lineman.”
Shane continued to stare at me. “Jess,” he said. “Why did you come looking for me? I thought you hated me.”
“I do not hate you, Shane,” I said. “I wish you would stop picking on people who are smaller than you are, and I would appreciate it if you would stop calling me a lesbian. And I can guarantee, if you keep it up, someday someone is going to do something a lot worse to you than what Lionel did.”
Shane just stared at me some more.
“But I do not,” I concluded, “hate you. In fact, I decided on my way over here that I actually like you. You can be pretty funny, and I really do think you’ll be a good football player. I think you’d be good at anything you set your mind to being.”
He blinked at me, his chubby, freckled cheeks smudged with dirt and chocolate.
“Really?” he asked. “You really think that?”
“I do,” I said. “Although I also think you need to get a new haircut.”
He pulled on the back of his mullet and looked defensive. “I like my hair,” he said.
“You look like Rod Stewart,” I informed him.
“Who’s Rod Stewart?” he wanted to know.
But this seemed beyond even my descriptive ability at that particular moment. So I just said, “You know what? Never mind. Let’s just go back to the cabin. This place is giving me the major creeps.”
We turned back toward the way we’d come. Which was when I noticed something.
And that’s that we were not alone.
“Well, lookie what we have here,” said Clay Larsson.
C H A P T E R
16
I would just like to take this opportunity to say that I, for one, had not believed Special Agents Johnson and Smith when they’d announced that Mrs. Herzberg’s boyfriend was on some kind of killing rampage, and that I was his next intended victim. I think I was pretty much under the impression that they were just trying to scare me, to get me alone with them somewhere so that they could make their observations of me without interruption.
For instance, had I gone with them to the Holiday Inn, Special Agent Smith would have undoubtedly gotten up very early and then sat there, with pen poised on notepad, at my bedside, to see if I’d wake up babbling about where Shane was, thus proving that I had lied about having lost my telekinetic powers, or whatever.
That’s what a part of me had thought. I had never—unlike Rob—taken very seriously the idea that there might be a man unhappy enough with my recent behavior to want me, you know. Dead.
At least, I didn’t believe it until he was standing in front of me, with one of those long, security-guard-type flashlights in his hands… .
One of those flashlights that would actually make a really handy weapon. Like if you wanted to conk somebody over the head with it. Someone who, for example, had kicked you in the face earlier that day.
“Thought you’d seen the last of me, dincha, girlie?” Clay Larsson leered down at Shane and me. He was what you’d call a large man, though I couldn’t say much for his fashion sense. He looked no prettier now, in the glow of my flashlight, than he’d looked in broad daylight.
And he was even less appealing now that he had the imprint of the bottom of my Puma tattooed across the bridge of his nose. There were deep purple and yellow scars around his eyes—bruising from the nasal cartilage I’d crushed with my kick—and his nostrils were crusted over with blood.
These were, of course, the unavoidable consequences of being kicked in the face. I couldn’t really hold the contusions against him, fashion-wise. It was the razor stubble and the halitosis that he really could have done something about.
“Look,” I said, stepping in front of Shane. “Mr. Larsson, I can appreciate that you might be upset with me.”
It might interest you to know that, at this point, my heart wasn’t beating fast or anything. I mean, I guess I was scared, but usually, in situations like this, I don’t tend to realize it until the whole thing is over. Then, if I’m still conscious, I usually throw up, or whatever.
“But you have to understand”—as I spoke, I was backing up, pushing Shane slowly toward one of the other tunnels that branched out from the cavern we were in—“I was only doing my job. I mean, you have a job, right?”
Looking at him, of course, I couldn’t think what kind of moron might have hired him for any job. I mean, who would willingly employ anybody who gave so little thought to his personal grooming and hygiene? Look at his shirt, for Pete’s sake: it was stained. Stained with what I really hoped was chili or barbecue sauce. It was certainly red, whatever it was.
But whatever: Clearly, a complete lack of adequate forethought had gone into Clay’s ensemble, and I, for one, considered it a crying shame, since he was not, technically, an unattractive man. Maybe not a Hottie, but certainly Do-able, if you got him cleaned up.
“I mean, people call me up,” I said, continuing to back up, “and they say their kid is missing or whatever, and I, well, what am I supposed to do? I mean, I have to go and get the kid. That’s my job. What happened today was, I was just doing my job. You’re not really going to hold that against me now, are you?”
He was moving slowly toward me, the beam from his flashlight trained on my face. This made it kind of hard for me to see what he was doing, other than inexorably coming at me. I had to shield my eyes with one hand, while, with the other, I kept pushing Shane back.
“You made Darla cry,” Clay Larsson said in his deep, really quite menacing voice.
Darla? Who the heck was Darla?
Then it hit me.
“Yes,” I said. “Well, I’m sure Mrs. Herzberg was quite upset.” I wanted to point out to him that I had it on pretty good authority that he, in fact, had probably made Keely’s mother cry a lot more often than I had—throwing bottles at people tends to do that—but I felt at this juncture in our conversation, it might not be the wisest thing to bring up.
“But the fact is,” I said instead, “you two shouldn’t have taken Keely away from her father. The court awarded him custody for a reason, and you didn’t have any right to—”
“And”—Clay didn’t seem to have heard my pretty speech—“you broke my nose.”
“Well,” I said. “Yes. I did do that. And you know, I’m really sorry about it. But you did have hold of my leg, remember? And you wouldn’t let go of it, and I guess, well, I got scared. You aren’t going to hold a grudge against me for that, are you?”
Evidently, he had every intention of doing so, since he said, “When I’m through with you, girlie, you’re gonna have a new definition for scared.”
Definition. Wow. A four-syllable word. I was impressed.
“Now, Mr. Larsson,” I said. “Let’s not do anything you might regret. I think you should know, this place is crawling with Feds… .”
“I saw ‘em.” I couldn’t see his expression because of the light shining in my eyes, but I could hear his tone. It was mildly ironic. “Runnin’ toward that burning van. Right before I saw you and your friends outside.” He seemed to be grinning. “I was glad when I
saw you were the one who went in.”
“Oh, yeah?” I didn’t know what else to say. Keep him talking, was all I could think to do. Maybe Ruth or one of the boys would hear him, and run for help… .
That is, if we weren’t too deep underground for them to hear us.
“I like caves,” Clay Larsson informed me. “This is a real nice one. Lots of different ways in. But only one way out … for you, anyway.”
I did not like the sound of that.
“Now, Mr. Larsson,” I said. “Let’s talk this over, okay? I—”
“Couldn’t have picked a better place for what I got planned if you’d tried,” Clay Larsson finished for me.
“Oh,” I said, gulping. My throat, which had been having a tendency lately, I noticed, to run a little on the dry side, felt like the Sahara. Oh, yeah, and remember how I said my heart wasn’t beating fast?
Well, it was. Fast and hard.
“Um,” I said. “Okay.” I tried to remember what I’d learned in counselor training about conflict resolution. “So what I hear you saying, Mr. Larsson, is that you are unhappy with the way I took Keely from you—”
“And kicked me in the face.”
“Right, and kicked you in the face. I hear you saying that you are somewhat dissatisfied with this turn of events—”
“You hear that correctly,” Clay Larsson assured me.
“And what I would like to say to you”—I tried to keep my voice pleasant, like they’d said to in counselor training, but it was hard on account of how hard I was shaking—“is that this disagreement seems to be between you and me. Shane here really had nothing to do with it. So if it’s all right with you, maybe Shane could just slip on out—”
“And run for those Fed friends of yours?” Clay Larsson’s tone was as disgusted as mine had been pleasant. “Yeah. Right. No witnesses.”
I swallowed hard. Behind me, I could feel Shane’s breath, hot and fast, on the back of my arm. He was clinging to the belt loops of my jeans, strangely silent, for him. I wouldn’t have minded a reassuring belch, but none seemed forthcoming. Under the circumstances, I regretted the crack I’d made about his hair.
Could I stall long enough to get Shane into a position so he could make it through one of those tunnels and escape? The opening I’d followed him through was way too narrow for Clay Larsson to fit into. If I could just distract him long enough …
“This isn’t,” I pointed out, “the way to go about ensuring that Mrs. Herzberg gets visitation rights, you know. I mean, a court of law would probably look askance at her sharing a household with a guy who had, um, attempted murder.”
Clay Larsson asked, “Who said anything about attempted?”
And suddenly, the light that had been in my eyes danced crazily against the ceiling as Clay Larsson lifted the flashlight, with the intention, I supposed, of bringing it down on my head.
I screamed, “Run!” to Shane, who wasted no time doing so. He popped through the narrow tunnel behind us quicker than anybody in Alice in Wonderland had ever plunged down a rabbit hole. One minute he was there, and the next he was gone.
It seemed to me like following him would be pretty smart… .
But first I had to deal with this heavy flashlight coming at me.
Being small has its compensations. One of them is that I’m fast. Also, I can compress myself into spaces otherwise unfit for human occupation. In this case, I ducked behind this stalactite/stalagmite combo that had made a sort of calcite pillar to one side of the hole Shane had slipped through. As a result, Clay Larsson’s flashlight connected solidly with the rock formation, instead of with my head.
There was an explosion of stone shards, and Clay Larsson said a very bad word. The calcite formation split in half, the stalactite plunging from the ceiling like an icicle off the gutter. It fell to the floor with a clatter.
As for me, well, I kept going.
Only along the way, somehow, I dropped my flashlight.
Considering what happened next, this might have been for the best. Clay, seeing the bright white beam, swung his own flashlight—with enough force for it to make a whistling noise as it sailed through the air—in the direction he thought I was standing. There was another loud clatter, this one from his heavy metal flashlight as it connected with the cavern wall.
He hadn’t been kidding about the attempted murder thing. If that had been my head, I thought, with a touch of queasiness, I’d have a handy space near my brain stem right about now to keep loose change.
“Nice trick,” Clay grunted, as he squatted down to retrieve my flashlight. “Only now you can’t see to get out of here, can you, girlie?”
Good point. On the other hand, I could see what mattered most, and that was him.
And, more to the purpose, he couldn’t see me. I figured I’d better press that advantage while I still had it.
The question was, how? I figured I had several options. I could simply stay where I was, until the inevitable moment I was once again caught in the sweeping arc of his flashlight … and now he had two flashlights, so make that two sweeping arcs.
My second option was to attempt to follow, as quickly as I could, Shane down his rabbit hole. The only problem with this plan was that any rock I happened to kick loose on my way there would give me away. Could I really outcrawl a guy that size? I didn’t think so.
My third alternative was the one I liked the least, but which seemed to be the one I was stuck with. So long as the guy had me to worry about, he wasn’t going to mess with Shane. The longer I could keep him from trying to go after the kid, the better Shane’s chances of somehow escaping.
And so it was, with great regret, that I made a sound to distract Clay, luring him toward where I hid, and away from Shane.
What I had not counted on was Clay Larsson being smart enough—and let’s face it, sober enough—to fake me out. Which was exactly what he did. I’d thrown a pebble one way, thinking he’d follow the sound, and immediately darted in the opposite direction… .
Only to find, to my great surprise, that Mr. Larsson had whipped around and, fast as a cat, blocked my path.
I threw on the brakes, of course, but it was too late.
Next thing I knew, he’d tackled me.
As I went flying through the air, narrowly missing several stalactites, I had time to reflect that really, Professor Le Blanc was right: I had been lazy, never learning to read music. And I swore to myself that if I got out of Wolf Cave alive, I would dedicate the rest of my life to combating musical illiteracy.
I hit the floor of the cave with considerable force, but it was Clay Larsson’s heavy body, slamming into mine, that drove all the wind from me. It also convinced me that moving again would probably be excessively painful—quite possibly even fatal, due to the massive internal injuries I was pretty sure I’d just incurred. As I lay there, dazed from the blow—which felt as if it had broken every bone in my body—I had time to wonder if they would ever find our skeletal remains, or if Shane and I would just be left to rot in Wolf Cave until the next camper, some other Paul Huck wannabe, stumbled across us.
This was a depressing thought. Because, you know, there were a lot of things I’d wanted to do that I’d never gotten a chance to. Buy my own Harley. Get a mermaid tattoo. Go to prom with Rob Wilkins (I know it’s geeky, but I don’t care: I think he’d look hot in a tux). That kind of stuff.
And now I was never going to get to.
So when Clay Larsson went, “Nightie-night, girlie,” and raised his steel flashlight high in the air, I was more or less resigned to my death. Dying, I felt, would actually be a relief, as it would make the mind-numbing pain I felt in every inch of my body go away.
But then something happened that didn’t make any sense at all. There was a thud, accompanied by a sickening, crunching noise—which I, as a veteran fistfighter, knew only too well was the sound of breaking bone—and then Clay Larsson’s heavy body came slamming into mine again… .
Only this time, it appeared
to be because the man was unconscious.
Suddenly recovering my mobility, I reached for his flashlight, which had fallen harmlessly to one side of my head, and shined it in the direction from which I’d heard the thudding sound… .
And there stood Shane, holding on to one end of the stalactite that had broken off from the cave ceiling, which he had clearly just swung, baseball-bat style, at Clay Larsson’s head… .
And hit it out of the park.
Shane, looking down at Clay’s limp, still form sprawled across my legs, dropped the stalactite, then glanced toward me.
I went, “Way to go, slugger.”
Shane burst into tears.
C H A P T E R
17
“Well,” I said. “What was I supposed to think? I mean, after that whole don’t-call-me thing.”
Rob, sounding—as usual—half-amused and half-disgusted with me, said, “I knew what you were after, Mastriani. You wanted to get rid of me so you could ditch the Feds and go after the little guy.”
Shane—who was tucked into the bed beside mine in the Camp Wawasee infirmary, a thermometer in his mouth—made a noise that I suppose was meant to signal his objection to being called a little guy.
“Sorry,” Rob said. “I meant little dude.”
“Thank you,” Shane said sarcastically.
“No talking,” the nurse admonished him.
“And you were okay with that?” I asked Rob. “I mean, letting me ditch the Feds, and you, in order to go after Shane?”
I suppose it was kind of weird, the two of us working out our recent relationship difficulties while the camp nurse fussed over me and Shane. But what else were we supposed to talk about? My recent brush with death? The expressions Ruth, Scott, and Dave had worn when Shane and I, bruised and battered, crawled out of Wolf Cave and asked them to call the police? The look on Rob’s face when he’d roared up a minute or so later and heard what had happened in his absence?
“Of course I wasn’t okay with that.” Rob paused while the nurse butted in to take my pulse. Seemingly pleased by the steadiness of its beat, she moved away to do the same to Shane.