“I stabbed him in the eye? That is gross.”
Ezekiel punched the trunk. “What did you do to my eye? It’s cold. I can’t open it.” He tried not to shout, but his panic was obvious.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have injected an EpiPen of adrenaline directly into the brain of the guy holding the gun,” Digby said.
The trunk opened and Ezekiel shoved the gun in my face. Tears streamed from the eye I’d stabbed.
Ezekiel grabbed the EpiPen but seeing it confused him even more. “What is this? What is this?”
Ezekiel pulled me out and threw me on the ground. Digby jumped him and almost got the gun, but Ezekiel wrestled it away. For a second, I thought he’d shoot us right there, but instead, he walked us toward the open cellar door.
“I asked around about you. You’re looking for your sister. Bet it’s making you nuts. Not knowing what happened to her. Sally. But I know what happened to her. Now you’ll never know and you’re about to disappear like she did.” Ezekiel pointed at the doorjamb and said, “Explosions this big, they never figure out how many bodies, never mind whose they were.”
Along the inside of the cellar door, the wads of yellow Semtex missing from the motel were wired to a black box. Before I could take in more detail, Ezekiel shut the door and left us in the basement’s total darkness. Then, ominously, we heard a beep, and a green light on the black box lit up.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“I guess if that door opened . . .” Digby said.
“Digby . . . I don’t wanna die,” I said.
“Take it easy, Princeton. No one’s dying.”
The comforting glow of a phone’s screen cut the darkness. Digby dialed.
“How . . . ?”
“I got it from his pocket before he threw us in here.”
“You just dialed a lot more numbers than 911.”
“There’s a bomb on the door. I’m not sitting on hold for fifteen minutes. I’m calling Cooper and Holloway,” he said. “Voicemail. I’m sending a text.”
I took a step and my feet slid out from under me. I fell but never hit the ground, because I landed against something on the way down.
“Princeton, you okay?”
Digby shone the light on what I’d fallen against: a chain-link fence sectioning off part of the basement and two bodies on the ground behind it. One was a heavyset man. The other was at first only faintly familiar until I recognized her dress. Old faithful. Her Minnie-Mouse-knows-what-Victoria’s-Secret-is dress.
“Mom!” I screamed.
“She’s not dead, Princeton.” Digby clapped his hand over my mouth. “Shut up and listen.”
Then I heard Mom snoring. She was draped over the man’s body. All around them were huge plastic drums, bales of clear plastic tubing, and crates filled with God knows what. More of that paraphernalia was lying around outside the cage.
“This is their lab,” Digby said.
“Did Ezekiel put them in there?” I said.
“Lock them up but leave us out here?” Digby said. “I’d bet he doesn’t know they’re here.”
It took a while for my eyes to make out the police uniform on the man lying under Mom.
“Isn’t that . . . Officer Cooper?”
“Meaning whoever put them there and took his phone got my text and knows we’re here.” Digby cursed. “Hide.”
Just then, the door between the house and the basement opened. Footsteps thumped down the stairs. Digby and I scurried off and were wedging ourselves behind giant plastic drums, when a bare bulb in the middle of the room came on. Then Digby, Zillah, and I stood blinking at each other in the light.
“Why am I not surprised to see you here?” Zillah said.
“But I’ll bet you’d be surprised to hear why we’re here. Ezekiel’s stealing from you. I mean, you are the Bananaman, right? He’s selling your stuff in the schools. That’s why the cops are on your back and you have to leave town,” Digby said.
“I do not know what you mean. We are leaving because this place is no longer suitable for my flock’s moral well-being.” But from the way Zillah’s face contorted, it was clear Digby had nailed it. “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and goodwill, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children.”
Inexplicably, Digby laughed. “Here’s a tip. When you set up in the next town, and you’re pretending to be a religious cult and you put in time with the clothes and the weird Amish shtick, make sure you quote the actual Bible and not some fake Quentin Tarantino voodoo.”
Zillah’s shoulders dropped. She was beat. “Smart kid. I never checked. But do you remember the rest?” She pulled out a huge gun. “And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.”
The gun clicked ominously. I remembered which part of Pulp Fiction she was quoting.
“Digby . . .” I said.
“You’re gonna fire a gun around explosive chemicals?” Digby threw the phone he was holding at the lone light bulb. The basement went black. I scrambled behind a plastic drum. Digby’s voice whispered from elsewhere in the basement, “Don’t miss.”
For a long time, nobody moved. Zillah swore, stubbed her toe, swore some more, and then stumbled up the stairway. “I’ll be back for you two later. You’re not going anywhere.” She slammed the door and turned the lock.
“Digby? Now what?” I said.
“I’m thinking,” he said.
“We have to get my mom out.”
“Shh . . . thinking,” he said. “If they cook here, they’ve gotta have an air vent . . .”
After crawling around, he found the phone he’d thrown and panned its light around the room.
“There.” The beam of light pointed at the mouth of a filtration unit at the top of one wall. “How are we getting Mom up that?” I said.
“Sorry, Princeton. We’ll have to come back for her.” Then, before I could argue, he said, “If we stay, we all die. We’ll come back for her, I promise.”
We half dragged and half rolled a barrel across the basement and under the air duct.
“This probably leads outside.” Digby climbed up the barrel. “Whole neighborhood’s been inhaling the fumes of them cooking meth, but everyone assumed it was those girls cleaning.”
“What if that vent gets narrower and we get stuck?” I said.
“Beats getting shot,” he said.
“Seriously, stop trying to make me feel better.”
“Just come up and don’t make any noise.”
And so I followed him up the rabbit hole.
It was funny where my mind went while I crawled in the dark, going up a smooth inclined tube not much wider than my body, running from not one but two psychos who’d happily take a break from killing each other to kill me.
To distract myself, I registered details like how cold the metal felt under my knees. How the taps on my shoes clacked against the duct’s sides. But I also wondered if when Henry said I looked nice, he meant he thought I looked nice. I mean, he said it twice. I was there in that duct but also somewhere else. Being split like that was a huge relief. Kind of like my mind was reassuring me, Yeah, we’re gonna live. And we’re gonna still want to date Henry.
Meanwhile, Digby was doing his best to prove that wrong.
“Turn left,” I said when we came to a fork in the duct. Inexplicably, Digby turned right. “The cold air’s coming from the left.”
“Listen,” he said.
A little girl was sobbing.
“Digby, we gotta get out of here,” I said. “No side trips.”
I tried
to grab his pant leg, but he took off. I followed him until we got to a spinning duct booster fan. It was a miniature of an action movie cliché. I heard a thwack when Digby tried to stop the spinning blades.
“Ow! That’s sharp.” He sucked on his injured fingers. “Hey, pass your shoe.”
“What? Use your shoe.”
“I need your metal tap do-hickeys. These fan blades would rip right through my shoes.”
And because I didn’t want to waste more time arguing, I gave him my shoe. Moments later, I heard the spinning fan blades chew it up.
“Like that,” he said.
“Great,” I said.
“Pass me your other shoe.”
“I should probably warn you now—I only brought two of these.”
“Yeah, ha-ha . . . ever heard of a learning curve?”
“Sure, same time I heard of trying to outrun killers while barefoot in an air vent.”
“Just pass me your shoe. It’s not like you’ll run any faster with one shoe than none.”
It was a good point.
This time, he caught a blade with the metal tap and pushed until with a metallic clunk and the smell of burning rubber, it stopped spinning. Digby pushed the fan off its mounts and we crawled toward the sounds of girls talking. I came across my mangled shoes on the way.
Digby pushed off the vent cover and we shimmied into the room. There were eight girls ranging in age from about five to eight years old. One very young one cried while other girls comforted her.
“Who are you?” one little girl said.
“Zillah sent me to check on you,” Digby said.
“I don’t believe you. No one who really knows Amber calls her Zillah,” the little girl said. She seemed to be the eldest and the self-designated spokesperson.
“Well, that’s one of the things I’m here to check. If you were remembering to use her code name . . . code-name Zillah. She also wanted me to check your arms,” Digby said.
“Our arms?” she said.
“She wants me to put stickers on you for tonight’s trip,” Digby said.
“What for?” she said.
Digby produced Post-its from his pocket. “To help us keep track of you.”
She pulled up her right sleeve and let Digby stick a Post-it on her arm.
“There,” Digby said.
She frowned at Digby. “Post-its? Gimme a break. Would you have believed that when you were eight?”
“What’s your name?” Digby said.
“Eve,” she said.
“Nice to meet you, Eve,” Digby said.
Eve pointed at me. “You live next door. Amber put your mom in the basement. Because she and the policeman were peeking in through the window. I saw the whole thing.”
“I know. I was just in the basement,” I said.
“Amber’s not really religious, you know,” Eve said. “Are you gonna put her in jail?”
“You want us to?” Digby said.
“She belongs in jail. She does lots of bad stuff. I know they’re bad because I saw it on Hawaii Five-O,” Eve said. “Plus, she slapped Maddie for crying for her mom.”
“Where are your moms?” Digby said.
“All over. Amber watches us when our parents are traveling for work. Hers is in Philadelphia. Maddie’s mom was in Chicago. Amber says she’s our mom while we’re here,” Eve said. “But she’s nothing like a mom.”
By then, Digby had checked all their arms. “Are there any other little girls in the house?”
“They left yesterday,” Eve said.
“What are you looking for?” I said. “Why are you putting Post-its on their arms?”
“My sister had a birthmark on her arm.”
Of course, that made no sense since all these girls were way too young to be his sister, but I got it. He needed to look.
To Eve, Digby said, “We need to get Zoe’s mom out before Amber sees we’re gone. Can you get us to the basement without anyone seeing?”
“Even Ezekiel? Ezekiel has keys to the whole house,” Eve said.
“Especially Ezekiel,” I said.
“Yes, I can,” Eve said.
“But I want you all to come with us, okay?” Digby said. “You can come back later, but it’s safer for you outside the house right now.”
“What about the boys?” I said.
“They’re packing up the shed,” Eve said.
“So they’re out of the house?” When Eve nodded, Digby said, “Okay, now can you show us how to get to the basement?”
It didn’t feel great entrusting our lives to a little girl, but off we went down the hall.
How we weren’t busted by all the creaking floorboards, I don’t know. On the way down, I saw us in the mirror by the stairs: Digby, me, and the train of little girls. We looked like Peter Pan and Wendy leading out the Lost Boys. Then I saw my skirt of scraggly feathers and realized I was less Wendy and more tumble-dried Tinker Bell.
When we reached the landing, I knew why we hadn’t been discovered. Angry shouting came from the sitting room beside the front door.
Eve pointed at a door near the base of the stairs. “The basement.”
“Okay,” Digby said. “We’ll go back to the second floor and get you out the window there.”
On the second floor, Digby helped the girls climb onto a tree outside. Soon, the branches were covered in kids swinging down to the ground.
After they were all safe, Digby said, “Last chance, Princeton. You really want your mom back?”
“Shut up.”
“Because this’d be a great opportunity to get rid of her . . .”
“Just hurry.”
We crept back downstairs. The shouting was still in full force. The slide bolt across the basement door was fastened with an intimidating padlock. Digby took out a black roll-up pouch that unfurled to reveal a weird collection of doodads.
“We need the right-sized shims.” He thumbed through tab-shaped cutouts made from Coke cans. He inserted two shims where the shackle entered the lock and jiggled them until it unlocked with a click. “The Internet’s a fascinating place.”
I followed him down the basement stairs.
When we were halfway down, Mom yelled in a scared, high-pitched voice, “Zillah, you crazy bitch, let me out of here!”
“Mom, it’s me,” I said.
“Zoe?” she said.
“Yeah. Digby’s here too,” I said.
“You kids get out of here. That crazy Zillah is—”
“We know, Mom.”
“And Mike’s here. Officer Cooper,” she said.
“We know, Mom.”
Digby rummaged around, found a length of pipe, and used it to pry the padlock open.
The three of us wrestled Cooper’s unconscious body to the stairs. Mom and Digby took one arm each and I ended up with the legs. Cooper went up the stairs facedown, Superman style.
“Hey, Princeton, you figure it out yet?” Digby said.
“Huh?” I said.
“What your mom’s doing with Cooper,” Digby said.
Of course I knew. Somewhere, deep in my jumbled mind, I’d cataloged the pumpkin seeds in the trash, Mom’s sudden and profound vegetarianism, and her giving up drugstore makeup because of animal cruelty. But this was the first time these facts had presented themselves to be added up. I dropped Cooper’s feet.
Digby and Mom lunged forward so Cooper wouldn’t slide down the stairs.
“Nice timing, kid,” Mom said.
“You’d rather she realized it after we get out this door?” Digby said.
“Honey, I tried to tell you, but you said—”
“Let’s talk later, Mom,” I said.
“I mean, it isn’t like I’m dating one of your teachers or anything. I turned down that truant o
fficer at your school . . .” Mom said.
“These teddy bear types really like you,” Digby said.
“Ew,” I said.
“Okay, ladies. Now that everyone knows everything . . . to be continued? You know, after all us good guys are safely away from the bomb?” Digby said.
“Did you say ‘bomb’?” Mom said.
“Let’s just do this.” I picked up Cooper’s feet and we continued out of the basement. I didn’t feel that bad when, at the top of the stairs, I was slow in turning and Cooper’s side scraped (painfully, I’m sure) across the doorjamb.
The argument in the living room got louder as we crept up the stairs. Ezekiel was begging Zillah not to shoot him. The urgency in his voice was infectious and hustled us along. Finally, we were back at the window.
Mom and I silently contemplated the task of getting an unconscious 250-pound man down a tree.
“You first, then I pass him to you?” I said.
“Right.” Mom didn’t sound confident, but she climbed onto the branch anyway, braced herself, and held out her arms.
Digby and I passed Cooper over and I climbed onto the limb. It was an ugly ride down, but after one close call where a branch that caught him in a nut shot was the only thing that prevented him doing a twenty-foot pile-driver straight to the ground, I think he should be grateful just to be alive.
Once we got Cooper down, I realized the reason it had been so difficult was that Digby hadn’t been helping us. I’d assumed Digby was right behind us the whole time, but he was still in the house. And I knew why. Ezekiel’s taunt before he locked us in the basement. I couldn’t blame Digby for wanting to know what Ezekiel knew about Sally.
“Mom, call the police. Tell them to bring the bomb squad. Tell ’em to bring everybody,” I said.
“Where are you going?” Mom grabbed my arm.
“Just go, Mom. Don’t worry. I’ll be right there.”
“Are you crazy? You’re coming with me.”
“Mom, just go. Call 911 or we’ll all die. I’m just gonna wait here to make sure I see if anyone leaves.” When Mom didn’t move, I shoved her and said, “The sooner you call the cops . . .”
Trouble is a Friend of Mine Page 23