Clearly he’s not in the mood for repartee, witty or otherwise.
Sam hands over his ID right away, though he downplays his nerves to the point of aggression. Perfect.
I make a big production of rummaging in my purse, rolling my eyes, and popping my gum, which just proves how much my character is enjoying being carded.
The bouncer pores over our IDs while I flip my hair and Sam scowls. But eventually he hands them back to us, his grip just a touch too tight to make taking them back easy.
“Well, the boss tends to frown on property damage. Out—before I call security.”
No need to tell me twice. Especially if I’ve already got what I came for. So Sam and I are out and belted into his car in less time than it takes to fleece a celebutante.
“That was close,” Sam says, pulling out onto the highway.
“Not really,” I reply absently. “The IDs are solid, and taking apart a lamp isn’t worth prying guards out of their cozy jockey box.”
I settle into my seat, drawing the whole mess out in my mind like a blueprint. Dad missing, racetrack clue, gun, mob involvement, forgery, toy-land clue, meaningless key. Nothing seems connected. Sure, the mob might have some link to the racetrack—they often do. But without knowing which mob, I likely won’t be able to figure out the racetrack connection. Still, it might be worth looking into.
And what do the races have to do with toys? Or the mob, for that matter? Could “toys” be a euphemism for guns? Drugs? Strippers? What other “toys” do mafiosi covet?
Okay, forget the clues. Maybe I’m going at this from the wrong angle.
What kind of mob business requires sustained amounts of forgery? The occasional passport can be purchased from a vendor. Hiring a full-time forger, especially for the rates I’m sure my father charged, implies a larger initiative. But what? Drugs don’t require credentials. Just a customs official willing to look the other way.
Out of the contemplative silence, Sam swears softly.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Nothing. Just traffic.” He nods at the GPS display in his dashboard. “If we want to get back before we’re missed, we’ll have to take back roads.”
“You mean before you’re missed,” I say under my breath, gazing out the window.
Sam frowns but doesn’t argue. “We’ll find him, Julep,” he says.
I bite my lip to keep my doubts from spilling out. If there’s one thing a grifter knows, it’s that confidence is everything. I can’t afford to lose my own confidence, let alone Sam’s.
Another few minutes pass in silence as we travel down a road in the middle of exactly nowhere. Trees and fields rush by in a blur of green and brown. But then a flicker of something in the side mirror grabs my attention. It’s black, with two broad white stripes running down its hood.
“Sam,” I say, leaning forward for a better look in the mirror.
“What?”
“We’ve got company.”
“Probably thought he’d avoid the traffic, too.”
I shake my head. “I know this car.”
“What do you mean?” Sam’s eyes flick up to the rearview.
“I saw it the day”—I pause to recalibrate, deciding on the fly that telling him I saw it and its owner outside my window is not in my best interest—“the day my apartment was tossed. It was parked at the Ballou.”
Sam presses the gas pedal and the Volvo leaps forward a few feet. Whoever’s in the muscle car behind us speeds to catch up. Actually, he’s accelerating faster, pulling up closer, like he’s trying to kiss our bumper.
Sam shifts from eyeing the rearview to fiddling with the GPS. Swearing again, he hits the steering wheel.
“There’s nothing for miles. How’d he even know where to find us?”
“Must have followed us. Me, I mean,” I say. “How do we lose him?”
“We don’t. At least, not until we dump out onto a bigger road.”
Our pursuer pulls out to the side and forward, coming even with Sam’s rear fender, and then swerves suddenly into our lane, missing us by inches as Sam cuts the wheel to avoid the hit.
“What the hell is he doing?” Sam presses the pedal to the floor and takes a turn too fast for comfort. He shifts into fifth, splitting his attention between the asphalt ahead and the car behind. The Volvo devours the road with a whisper that is swallowed by the roar of the muscle car as it makes up the distance.
I grip the door handle in one hand and my seat belt in the other. I trust Sam not to kill us, but I can’t say the same for the car behind us. What does he want?
“Sam, pull over.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“I can talk us out of this.”
“No, Julep. Not even you can talk us out of this.”
He downshifts to fourth to take another hairpin turn at forty miles an hour. The Volvo rocks on its wheels, centrifugal force giving us a temporary pass.
“We can’t keep racing him, Sam. Sooner or later, he’ll run us—”
This time when the black car swerves at the Volvo’s fender, it connects. The Volvo fishtails, its tires screeching as they lose purchase, and we skid into the passenger’s-side ditch.
THE MAN IN BLACK
My muscles tense in anticipation of the impact. Sam manages to haul the wheel to the center enough to keep the car moving forward along the ditch a few yards, slowing our momentum before we come to a stop. No crash. No air bag deployment, though the seat belt has left a nice welt on the side of my neck.
And then for some reason I’m not scared anymore. I’m enraged. I fly out the door, hell-bent on chasing the Chevelle on foot if necessary. I tune out Sam’s protests. I am ready to kill, or at least permanently maim.
Turns out I don’t have that far to run; the Chevelle has pulled over a few yards down the road from us. The driver’s-side door swings open on creaky hinges. I register the black boots and coat first as the person I caught watching me steps out of the car.
I start toward him, my fists tight and not a stitch of a plan in my head.
He tried to kill me. He tried to kill Sam.
But then I’m yanked backward by a grip on my arm strong enough to leave bruises.
“Julep, stop!” Sam yells at me. “You don’t know what he wants. He could have a gun!”
“Let me go!” I tug at his hand.
“Not until you come to your senses,” Sam says calmly, his lips next to my ear. “Stay still.”
I shiver with anger, but I listen. He releases his grip, and I cross my arms. It’s then that I notice the gun my dad gave me in Sam’s other hand.
“How—?”
“Not now,” he says.
“I thought you said it wasn’t loaded,” I say.
“He doesn’t know that.”
I concede the point. Sam’s plan is as good a plan as any, because he’s right. I can’t talk our way out of this, especially without knowing the mark. If I knew something, anything, about him, I could use it to our advantage. But I’ve never even seen him up close, let alone heard him speak, let alone had a conversation with him. I could just as easily say the exact wrong thing as the exact right.
“That’s far enough,” Sam says, raising the gun. His voice is steadier than I’d have thought it would be, given the situation. “What do you want?”
The man in black stops, assessing Sam without fear. He looks unruffled, disinterested, like standing in the sights of a loaded gun is a regular occurrence.
I strain for a closer look at his face, though he’s still far enough away to make distinction difficult. Man is perhaps a misnomer. He can’t be much older than Sam and I, if he’s older at all. He’s maybe nineteen at most. His hair is light enough to look almost gray at this distance, but it’s actually blond, cut jaggedly just above his ears.
“If you want to live, stop looking.”
My mouth drops open. “He” is definitely a “she.” With an Eastern European accent. Which raises a whole slew of questions. Includi
ng Why won’t she come closer so I can punch her in the throat? I can’t believe she ran us into a ditch for this.
“That’s it? That’s all you have to say to me? Where is my father?”
“I deliver the message. Stay away.” Her voice is a blizzard—soft, cold, deadly but dispassionate, as if she’s just the messenger and the letter she’s handing me is the actual threat.
She turns back to her car and I notice a gun tucked into a shoulder holster under her open coat. Her bearing, stance, and expression identify her as a professional mob enforcer, despite her age. But she hasn’t drawn on us, which in itself is promising. If I can just get her to give something away.
“Wait! Just tell me who has him, who I can talk to. Please.” Tell me he’s alive.
She gives me a forbidding look over her shoulder and slips into the driver’s seat. Skidding tires, a splatter of mud and gravel, and the Chevelle is gone.
Sam touches my shoulder, and I realize I’ve been standing staring after her for too long. I lean into him and he closes his arms around me. He doesn’t say anything, because he knows there’s nothing he can say that is both true and something I want to hear.
The Volvo is tilted at a significant angle and sunk in about four inches of mud. The likelihood isn’t good that we’ll be able to get it out ourselves.
“I’ll push first,” I say, and move around to the back of the car. Sam takes the driver’s seat without arguing.
Ten minutes later, covered in mud, I switch places with Sam. The car only settles deeper into the ditch. We try for another five minutes before Sam gives up and joins me, climbing into the passenger’s seat.
“You going to call your parents?” I ask.
“And admit we cut school? No way. Besides, my mom gets one whiff of a crazed lunatic running us off the road and some serious questions are going to get asked.”
“Good point. Triple-A?”
“Then they’ll find out for sure. You really want me grounded right now?”
“They’ll find out when your dad sees the damage,” I say.
“I’ll tell him it’s in the shop, making a funny noise or something, and pay for the body work with cash.”
“I can pay for it,” I say, hating the idea of forking over thousands of dollars I can’t afford to spend but hating the idea of Sam paying even more.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Julep. It’s like a month’s allowance for me.”
“Whatever. I don’t want to argue about it now. We still have to get home.”
I let my head fall back against the seat and look up at the ceiling, which remains annoyingly mute on the subject of rescue.
“There’s one person we can call,” I say, pulling my phone out of my pocket and giving Sam a sort of guilty look.
Sam returns it with a questioning look before catching on. “Aw, come on.”
“Have you got a better idea?”
Silence falls as he tries and fails to come up with an alternative solution. “Fine,” he says, and I press the appropriate sequence of buttons. “But just because you trust this guy doesn’t mean I do.”
“Shhh.” I put my phone up to my ear.
The other end of the line picks up. “Tyler?” I say, gazing out at the darkening sky. “I need your help.”
“With what?” he asks. “How’d the racetrack go?”
“Well, the racetrack went fine, but we hit a snag on the way home.”
“Sam’s Volvo break down?” His tone is straightforward, but playful automotive mockery is implied.
“Not exactly.” And what follows is a perfunctory but mostly accurate portrayal of the events of the past half hour.
When I’m finished, there’s a weighty silence on the other end of the line.
“Tyler?”
“Let me talk to Sam.”
I hand the phone to Sam, who heaves a sigh as he puts it up to his ear.
“Yeah?” Sam says, and then immediately yanks the phone away from his head. I can hear yelling coming from the phone, but I can’t hear what’s actually being said. I make a grab for it but Sam fends me off while putting it back to his ear, his jaw clenching. He doesn’t say anything for a while—he just listens. At one point, he glances at me with an assessing look and mumbles something in the affirmative. Then more silent listening.
A few minutes later, he gives Tyler our location according to his GPS and the nearest mile marker and then signs off, handing me back my phone.
“What did he say?”
“His dad owns a towing company, which is not surprising since his dad owns half the city. He’s sending a truck for us.”
“That’s good,” I say, wincing at the thought of tow rates from the middle of effing nowhere. “But what was he yelling about?”
Sam slouches in his seat. “He was chewing me out for taking the back roads in the first place, with your being stalked and everything. And he’s right. It was a stupid thing to do.”
“Oh, come on. I’d have done the exact same thing if I’d been driving.”
“Well, then he’d have yelled at you. But as it happens, I got the reaming, and rightfully so.”
I pull Sam’s jacket from the backseat and try to wipe some of the mud off my chest with it. My eyes catch on my dad’s gun lying innocently on the dash.
“When did you take it?”
“The night you showed it to me,” he says without apology.
“Why didn’t you just ask me?”
“I was afraid you’d say no, that you’d be worried about me getting caught and arrested for carrying around a possibly unregistered, definitely concealed weapon.”
“Oh,” I say in a small voice. That hadn’t even occurred to me. I pick up the gun, which feels even more like a viper now than it did the first time I held it.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what I found?” He takes the gun and turns the handle toward me to give me a closer look. “I took it home thinking that if it was registered I could find out to who, and that might give us somewhere to start. Of course, it wasn’t registered. But as I was cleaning it, I noticed two things.”
“Which are?”
“The first is that it’s been fired. Probably a lot. There’s wear on the side, and the feed ramp’s polished smooth from use.”
“Well, peachy,” I say. “But I guess that’s to be expected, it being a gun and all.”
Sam taps at a spot just to the left of the grip. “There’s also some kind of inscription—initials, I think.”
I nudge his finger out of the way.
“Not your dad’s, though. Which kind of threw me.”
PER A.N.M., LA MIA FATA TURCHINA
A.N.M. Alessandra Nereza Moretti.
“That’s because this isn’t my dad’s gun,” I say as the bottom drops out of my stomach. “It’s my mom’s.”
THE DEAN
“How’s the Volvo?” I ask as Sam joins me at our usual table in the dining hall. It appears he’s bypassed the chicken Parm and gone straight for the Tater Tots, Jell-O, cheddar biscuits, and chocolate milk. And yet nothing’s filling out that quarter-zip pullover but his shoulders. Sometimes I hate boys.
“Resting comfortably at Levi’s Auto Body.” Sam steals one of my fries as he sits across from me.
“And your dad?”
“Barely even looked up from his tablet long enough to acknowledge he’d heard me.” Sam shrugs as if this doesn’t bother him. But I’ve seen the way he looks at my dad—which is hilarious, because my dad is about as far from perfect as it is possible to be in the parent department. I think Sam just wants somebody to show up.
“Did Levi say how much it would set me back?” I say, taking a bolstering sip from what I’m starting to call my Barista Mike Special. It’s not as bad as it sounds. Okay, it’s a work in progress.
“Are we really going to do this?” he asks, putting down the Tater Tot he was about to pop in his mouth.
“We could skip to the end, where I hand you the cash,” I say.
“You�
�re impossible,” he says. “Why can’t you just let me—”
“That’s not how this works.” I cut him off because I’m as tired of this well-worn disagreement as he is. Besides, I have something else to talk about before the show starts. “So, my email’s blowing up with requests for fake IDs. I need an online form where people can input the info they want to go on their IDs.”
Actually, the words blowing up are not quite adequate to describe the response. I’m well beyond the St. Aggie’s criminal element now. Even past the thrill-seeking crowd. I’m into the straight-up straitlaced population. Plus all their friends and cousins and Dobermans twice removed. Last time I checked, I had forty new emails. That’s a lot of lamination. If it keeps up, I’m going to have to draft Sam into the fine art of forgery.
“Word travels fast,” he says.
“Made the Kessel Run in less than ten parsecs.”
Sam gives me a look of long suffering. “Twelve parsecs. The quote is ‘twelve parsecs.’ ”
“Yeah, but word made it in ten.”
Instead of a jibe at my nonexistent nerd cred, he responds with a conflicted frown and an uncertain silence.
“What’s up?”
“Julep, I was wondering … That is, I, uh …”
Sam rubs his ear. He does that a lot when he’s thinking through a problem. It’s so quintessentially Sam that I get a certain feeling when I see him do it. It’s similar to the feeling of setting up a con I can really sink my teeth into.
“Spit it out, Sam.”
“Are we going to the formal or what?” he says in a rush.
“Why? Did somebody ask you?” I’m distracted by Heather as she comes storming into the cafeteria, looking for blood. “You can go if you want, Sam.”
“That’s not what I—”
“Shhh,” I say, gesturing at Heather.
Sam sighs and turns in his chair to watch. I scan the crowd, but as predicted, none of the faculty is present. They tend to avoid the dining hall when possible.
“There’s Murphy,” Sam says.
Sam’s worked a minor miracle on Murphy. He still looks like a nerd, but now with artfully mussed hair, new glasses just this side of hipster, and clothes that actually fit.
Trust Me, I'm Lying Page 7