Third glance: F-Type, two doors. This guy is loaded.
The deep hum of the sports car fades as it drives ahead, its rear lights blending into a dozen others at a traffic light.
I tell myself off for being paranoid. Nonetheless, I let my gaze follow the car’s progress as I cross the bridge over the freeway, unable to ignore my gut. Something twists inside, knotting up. A hunch.
Something about that car is all wrong. And the night is calm, too calm—eerie.
An SUV pulls off to the side of the road, hazards blinking. Then a truck. More hazard lights. Superstrange. I struggle to keep my eyes on the Jaguar as it shifts lanes a couple hundred yards ahead. It makes a turn and disappears, cutting my focus and redirecting my gaze to the dark sky ahead. I should have been watching this all along.
I freeze, my heart lurching at the sight.
I recall the weather alert on my phone that almost got me caught. Dust storm.
They weren’t kidding.
It stretches from the horizon up into the sky, a thick brown wall of dust illuminated by city lights. I’ve lived in Arizona for twelve years and seen plenty of dust storms, but this is unreal. One, two miles high? From northeast to south as far as I can see.
The hairs on my skin prickle one by one. This thing is incredible—huge. Like something from a different country, another time. Like I should seek refuge behind my camel and use my turban as a mask.
It billows inch by inch. Swallowing the city whole.
Something flicks up and hits my leg, a cricket that scurries away. I stand, my eyes glued. In awe. Then fear slithers in and clasps on, imbedding a respect for Mother Nature, which man is powerless against. Vulnerable.
And here I am.
I reach for my phone before remembering it’s gone. I want to get this on camera. Put it on YouTube. I feel it coming. Trees rustle in the distance. I watch the domino effect. Tree by tree, until the hot breeze whips past me. I hesitate. Glance back. I have time, but not much.
I turn around and start back over the bridge, kicking myself for not appeasing my growling stomach sooner. I could be biting into a cheeseburger instead of swallowing dust. Another gust of air hits me sideways, plucking the pricey fedo-whatever hat from my head and sending it flying across three empty lanes of road.
I look over my shoulder. The horizon shrinks before my eyes, drawing closer. Dust covers car after car on the freeway below. It’s coming quick.
I increase my pace, but the wind picks up faster. One car pulls to the side of the road ahead while others proceed slowly. At any rate, the road clears around me. Here I am, the only idiot pedestrian who’s stupid enough to screw the weather alert and start home on foot. Straight into what has to be the dust storm of the decade.
Wind whips around me, picking up debris. A plastic bag, a Styrofoam cup, and, of course, dust. More and more of it. A strange feeling settles over me and I brace myself. What I wouldn’t give for my camera.
It’s here.
I punch the crosswalk button as it encompasses me, a thick haze that blurs the sky, the mall, the road ahead. Everything within thirty, maybe forty feet. The signal switches from red hand to white stick figure. Not that I needed to wait for any cars. Looks like everyone besides me is playing it safe, pulling off the road or hunkering down at home.
A coughing fit erupts before I feel it coming. I pull the neck of my shirt over my nose and jog down the sidewalk, keeping my eyes peeled for the nearest building.
Trees twenty feet ahead blur into an orange haze. There and gone. Darkness closes in, so dense it’s almost palpable. Particles of dust cling to my skin, creeping through my shirt and up my nose. I cough. Throw a wild glance around, recognizing this for what it is: zero visibility.
Apprehension claws its way in and I stop running. Can’t see where I’m going. I shield my eyes but too late. Bits of dust lodge under my eyelids, jabbing my eyes. Stinging.
My shirt thrashes around, my shorts flapping against my legs as the wind threatens my foothold. I widen my stance and wait it out, my heart making its presence known as I stare at the inside of my shirt. Hammering. Pounding. A rush of blood through my ears harmonizes with a deep rumble approaching from behind. A familiar sound. A rich, chilling purr.
The Jaguar.
I whirl around, barely see it coming.
Tires squeal. My heart hurdles into my throat. I leap into action, bolt to get out of the way, but too late. My gut sinks as part of my brain comprehends/accepts what’s happening. The drug deal. The recording. It has to be.
I hadn’t lost them.
Headlights blind me in the instant before the bumper rams into me—my leg.
Muscles, a bone.
A shattering pain.
A bottled-up scream.
I hit the hood, my shoulder ramming the windshield before the car brakes and sends me flying in the other direction. Thrown several feet ahead until I slam into the ground, the asphalt scraping off the side of my face before my skull meets something hard and unforgiving.
And everything goes black.
Buh boom, buh boom.
A splitting pain, a longing to slip back under. Let everything go dark again. Push it all away.
Buh boom, buh boom.
My heart thrusts with a force that takes me by surprise. Telling me something I don’t understand. It beats on, won’t let me embrace the darkness, a deep-rooted fear trapping me between layers of consciousness. Dirt digs into my flesh.
Dirt?
Pain stabs me from all angles. Sounds drift in. Wind. Lots of it. I’m outside. A car door pops open and slams shut. Two car doors. A hand grips my shoulder and I know this is it, that something I need to remember.
A deep rumble echoes, shaking the ground. Shaking me. Adrenaline flares. Thunder? Dirt, darkness, thunder, and pain unlike I’ve ever had before; if I’m dead, surely this is hell.
“Is he dead?” a bottomless voice asks.
The hand turns me over, sending shoots of pain radiating outward. A sound shakes my core; a groan. Me?
I pry my eyelids open briefly, glimpsing a silhouette through my lashes: a man. Come to help?
“That’s him all right,” the same voice says. Distant. He’s farther away.
The guy at my side says nothing. Two hands rove over my chest, pat down my sides. It hurts. A lot.
My leg, my leg, I want to yell. He must see it. My shin—it burns. Can’t think of much else.
What happened to me?
Dread weaves in as I realize what this guy is doing. Searching under my arms where I have no injuries. Searching my pockets. Going for my wallet? No, he skips right over my wallet. He pulls something else from my pocket, pausing.
“He must have taken these at the mall,” one of them says. “With her.”
I force my eyes open, anger simmering. Dark hair, square jaw, and those eyes. So light, so piercing, they’re not even blue.
His fist crashes into the bones around my eye.
My head whirls in confusion. My heart responds to panic, slamming against my rib cage.
What’s going on?
Why?
Some composed part of my mind realizes he didn’t want me to see him. A foot wedges under my shoulder and kicks me back over, rocks digging into open flesh as I hit the ground. Warm liquid oozes from my face. Instinct kicks in and I pry my eyelids open. I tuck my chin down, dirt lodging in my scraped flesh as I look for the car, the license plate.
Hot air blows against my ear. “Where is it?”
A voice so warm yet so chilling. I doubt I’ll ever shake the memory of this.
“Your phone,” the other guy says, his tone urgent, angry. “Did you take pictures back there? Were you recording us?”
Nothing they say makes sense. Pictures? Recording?
I blow out an excruciating breath of air, lungs aching. Feeling like I’m about to retch, I try to focus on the car. I search for the license plate, but it’s too blurry.
“Who did you send it to?” the chilling
voice at my side asks. “Did you take a picture?”
His tone is so unnervingly persuasive, I want to give him an answer. But I have none. What picture? What recording? I weave through the pain, reaching for something, anything. Some kind of recollection.
I hear a voice saying the same thing over and over.
“I d’n know. I don’t know.”
Me—I’m the one speaking. My voice is hoarse, barely there.
“Yo, Ian, maybe he really doesn’t remember,” the other guy whispers, a hopeful lilt to his deep voice. “He’s been knocked retarded.”
Ian. The dark hair, the piercing eyes.
“What’s your phone number?” Ian asks, his cool voice devoid of emotion. A challenge.
I part my lips, but nothing comes. No numbers. Not that I would tell him, but I can’t remember a single digit, which isn’t like me. If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s numbers.
I twist my head at great cost, cement scraping what remains of the skin on my cheek as I spot the license.
Arizona plate. SNT . . .
“I don’t know,” I keep saying, a pathetic confession. It’s the truth.
SNT1039
I will it into memory. The numbers are easy; it’s the letters I’ll forget. A drop of moisture hits my cheek.
SNT for scent or spent or . . . saint.
Irony of the century. I remember my initial thought about these freaks, how I took them for good guys stopping to help.
I glimpse the frame around the license plate, black with white letters in caps. ACKLEN MOTOR GROUP.
Rain sprinkles down, hitting the back of my neck.
“Yo, Damian, should we finish him off?” the other guy asks.
In that instant everything stops. My thoughts, my heartbeat—even the pain.
Damian, the guy at my side—Ian for short?—stands up. “And have homicide charges following us? Nah; the kid doesn’t remember a thing.”
I try to recall the letters and numbers of the plate, but they’re already gone.
“His lucky day,” one of them says.
Then something smashes into my head—a shoe—and I embrace the darkness at last.
I’m swimming. No, I’m walking. Through rain. Or perhaps I’m running; I can’t tell. It’s a dream, that much I’m aware of, but I’m too tired to pull myself out of it. And this feels so real, like it really happened before. And then I realize it did.
It was raining outside—pouring—one of the few days each year when storm clouds actually gather above Scottsdale, AZ, and let loose. A monsoon. Rain came down in buckets, angry pellets of water hitting the dry ground like bullets. I ran up the stairs—seventeen of them, taken two at a time—with the excitement of a reckless seven-year-old high on sugar and focused on a mission. No time to waste.
“Jimmy,” I panted after barging through his door.
Jimmy whirled around, a scrawny six-year-old with curly hair and more energy than a live wire.
Jimmy.
Paper, glue, scissors, and gold glitter covered the floor at the base of his bed. His hands were flying in a frenzy of creative invention. Even then, at only six years old, Jimmy was the artist in the family.
“One minute,” he shouted, scrambling to scrape up what glitter he could from the carpet and apply it to his project.
“Jimmy, now!” I grabbed him by the arm. “The rain will be gone soon. It’s our only chance to get the bad guys.”
Jimmy resisted my pull as he pressed the last bit of glitter onto his paper cutouts. “Done! Here, put this on.”
He held up two glittery gold badges. FBI. US Department of Justice. Jimmy had outdone himself this time. They looked like Dad’s badge. Plus glitter.
“Come on, Jimmy. Glitter?”
“It’s all Mom had!”
“Oh, well,” I said, ripping off a strip of clear duct tape and strapping the badge to my belt loop. This was why I kept Jimmy around. He made me look official, and besides, a good special agent never leaves his right-hand man behind. “Let’s go.”
We scrambled down the stairs with Nerf guns and dashed out the front door, flying past the crickets and lizards scurrying toward the porch for refuge.
“Fan out,” Jimmy called above the pelting rain. “Trust your instincts.”
One of Dad’s lines and one of Jimmy’s favorites—trust your instincts . Bad guys were always easier to catch during a storm. I don’t know why. Our instincts told us so, I guess. At least it was more exciting that way. And anytime a monsoon or other storm hit, Special Agents Cody and Jimmy Rush would rise to the call of duty, strap on our badges and guns with pride, and run out into the rain to answer the demands of justice.
A dream—that’s all this is. Yet I feel as though I could open my eyes and Jimmy would be there, sitting on his bedroom floor as though he’d never left.
CHAPTER 6
Cody
The fissure of light between my eyelids is too bright. My head throbs. Sounds flutter in: some beeping, distant voices, a cupboard closing. Shoes squeak on tile. I let each noise drift around and settle in, a small corner of my mind trying to catch up.
Where’s Jimmy?
Gone.
The force of it nails me down, not that I was going anywhere fast. But it hurts. Kills all over again. My brain wants to stop, to block out the light and dive under, back to that darkness where there is no pain.
So much pain.
He’s gone.
Nothing new. Jimmy’s been gone for a long time. But I feel it all in full again.
Muscles ache, my arms reduced to dead weights at my sides. A burning sensation runs from my shoulder down into my elbow. Skin on fire. I try to swallow but can’t. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. Every nerve along the side of my face throbs. Pulses. And my leg.
“He’s waking up again!”
I recognize the voice: my mom.
I start to say her name, but my lips are pasty, stuck together.
“He’s trying to say something,” Mom says.
“Probably the same three questions again. Round five,” another voice says: Rachel.
My lips part. “Wh-wh—”
“What happened?” Rachel fills in, exactly what I was about to ask.
Mom shushes her. “Rachel, be nice.”
“Let him talk,” a deep voice resonates. Dad.
I try to see him, want to tell him something. Blinding shafts of light flood in as I open my eyelids, and something scrapes my eyes. Almost like I have sand wedged in there.
“Dad,” I say. He leans over and offers a reassuring smile. I take in his blond hair and blue eyes and my own smile spreads. Safe. The feeling surrounds me and I hold on to it. Shaken up. Scared even.
“I—” The rest of whatever I was about to say flies away. Here and then gone. Or did I even know what I wanted to tell him in the first place?
Lizzy’s face pops up, inches away. “Hey, Cody!”
I wince, my head aching with every sound.
I’m in a hospital; that much I can tell. I scour my memory, starting at the present and scaling back. Lizzy’s face, Dad, Rachel’s and Mom’s voices, the splitting pain, the bright light, running in the rain with Jimmy—a dream—and then . . . nothing.
My head throbs as I throw a glance around the room. “What happened?”
Rachel’s eyes roll upward and then settle on my mom.
Mom pats my hand. “Oh, here we go again. Honey, you were hit by a car.”
“What?” I say, blown away. “In the Vette?”
“The Corvette is fine,” Dad says and heaves a deep breath. “You were walking when the car hit you. In a dust storm.”
I take it they’ve explained this to me before. But this is news to me.
“A dust storm?”
“Mm-hm.”
“When?”
“Last night,” Dad says.
I take a deep breath myself and let it out, my shoulder pinching with pain, my head aching anew, my leg hurting the worst of all. I
take in the sight: the splint around my shin. My swollen leg.
“Ah, shiz.”
“Cody!” Mom exclaims, never one for foul language.
“He said shiz, Mom.” Rachel comes to my defense.
My heart rate flips into high gear as all I can think of is basketball.
“When will it be better, Dad—my leg?”
I reach for my face to assess the damage but think better of it. Feels like I got the tar beat out of me in a fistfight. For now, it’s the least of my worries. My leg.
Dad still hasn’t replied, which can’t be a good thing.
It all crashes in, pushes me back down. My leg. Basketball. The team I left at Desert Mountain. Everything I’ve worked for. How did this happen?
“He needs more pain meds,” Mom says on her way out the door. “I’ll get the nurse.”
I’m all light and dizzy, like I’ve been pumped full with meds already. For all I care, they can medicate me into oblivion. Knock me out so I won’t have to face reality.
A doctor arrives, a guy in scrubs with a stethoscope around his neck. Doc has a warm smile and a wrinkly forehead, like he’s analyzed one too many charts in his day. He looks smart, and that’s good, I guess. Still, I wish I wasn’t here.
He asks how I am. I understate by saying I’ve been better.
I try to pull pieces of my memory back into place. Senior year. New school. New team. The Reebok Classic Breakout camp. “How’s my leg?” I ask.
Doc sits down. “We ran a number of X-rays and found a small fracture in your left fibula. You were lucky; an isolated fibula fracture in a pedestrian versus car accident is rare. Typically, both the tibia and fibula are broken and require surgery. In your case, we’re dealing with a nondisplaced fracture, so you won’t need surgery.”
“Good,” I say. “When can I walk on it?”
“You’ll need a cast for up to six weeks.”
My heart plummets.
Doc seems to sense this. “But you’re young. There’s a chance you’ll recover quicker. I’ve seen casts for these types of fractures come off as soon as four weeks.”
I think about the breakout camp in July, my best shot at getting a scholarship.
Between Now & Never Page 6