I bent over and slipped through, then turned, lifting back the sharp metal edges of the opening for Cal.
And then we were both inside.
The moon wasn’t full, and the sky was typical Florida hazy, but the glow was still enough to light our way, especially when our eyes got used to the darkness.
The wheels of Cal’s chair made a whirring sound on the pavement as we approached the silent, hulking building. An overloaded Dumpster sat near the doors, as if someone had started cleaning the place out, but then just given up and walked away.
“You ever go to the movies here?” I asked as we approached, mostly in an attempt to pretend this was just another normal evening out.
“Not in years,” Cal answered. “It was too dangerous to come here, even after they hired security guards to walk you out to your car.”
“Give me your phone,” I ordered. There was some kind of lock on the huge plate-glass doors, but I couldn’t see it clearly enough.
Cal turned on his flashlight app before he handed it to me.
He knew that I’d left my cell-phone-slash-tracking-device on my bedside table, next to the convincingly Skylar-shaped lump of pillows I’d placed beneath the covers of my bed. In case my mom peeked in to check on me, I’d also left my pink boom box on its white-noise setting, so she wouldn’t hear me not breathing.
Still, if Mom discovered I was gone, I was going to be grounded until I graduated from college.
I shone the light on the doors, and although heavy chains were wrapped around each of the door handles, the chains didn’t seem to be locking anything together. I gave the door a push, but it didn’t give.
“I don’t get it,” I said, annoyed, as I gave Cal his phone back and tried the other doors with both hands. They didn’t budge either. “Why would Motorcycle Girl tell me to meet her here if she knew it was going to be locked?”
From the darkness next to that Dumpster, a voice rang out clearly. “You gotta pull, not push.”
I’ll admit it. I screamed.
Calvin probably wouldn’t admit it, but he screamed too, as he aimed his flashlight app at the Dumpster like the light was some kind of protective ray.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Did I frighten you?” The motorcycle girl—Dana—stepped out from the shadows and into the flashlight’s glow, still wearing those steel-toed boots. “I thought I told you to come alone.” She glared at Calvin as she scratched a gruff hand through the spikes of her platinum-blond hair.
I heard a faint click behind Dana and then an orange glow the size of my fingernail floated lazily in the darkness.
“You did,” I said. “But I don’t drive, so I couldn’t have gotten here without Calvin. Calvin, this is Dana.” I looked at her challengingly, despite the fact that my knees felt a little wobbly. “So who’s your friend?”
“Forgive me,” Dana said, sounding anything but sorry. “I’m being rude. My friend here”—she pointed behind her at the orange glow—“is Milo.”
The glow became more prominent, and then a boy about Dana’s age came into view behind her. His hair hung low and shaggy in his eyes, and he kept one hand stuffed into his jeans pocket, the other up to his mouth as he took a long drag on a cigarette.
“Ew,” I said automatically, watching the smoke waft up toward the sky.
Dana turned back to Calvin. “Now that we’re all properly introduced, I need you to scoot, Scoot. Go wait in the car like a good boy.”
Cal looked at me, and I laughed a little even though nothing about this was funny. “Forgive me,” I replied, “but just because you ride a motorcycle and have a bunch of crazy tattoos doesn’t mean you get to call the shots. His name’s Calvin, and he’s not going anywhere, unless you want me to leave too.”
With her chin tucked down, Dana glared at me. Her ice-colored eyes glinted through a thick shroud of dark eyelashes. Her blond hair stood out white, like a halo against the garish light from Calvin’s phone. Behind her, Milo sucked on his cigarette. They were both silent.
I glared back at Dana, and the silence was tedious. I could hear the tick-tick of my watch as the second hand moved across its face.
And then, just as suddenly, Dana tilted her head up and let her mouth spread into a toothy grin. “Well, well, well,” she said, leaning back to tap the side of Milo’s shoulder with her hand, “the girl really has got some sass. I like it.”
Milo nodded somberly. I watched him finally take the butt of his cigarette out of his mouth and drop it on the ground. He squashed out the few remaining wisps of smoke with his boot.
“What do you know about Sasha?” I asked.
Dana didn’t answer. Instead, she nodded at Calvin, again keeping her eyes on me. “Does he know about you?” she asked. “Have you shown him yet?”
My pulse quickened, but I kept my voice calm. “Know about what?”
Calvin looked up at me. “Dude,” he whispered, “how does she know about that thing you did with your radio?
Dana nodded. “Thanks, Cal,” she said. “You just answered my question. Can I call you Cal, by the way?”
Cal opened his mouth to answer, but Dana interrupted him. “I guess you can stick around, Cal. Come on, let’s get inside, away from these damn mosquitoes.”
And suddenly the words she’d said back at the Sav’A’Buck made sense. Kinda the way one G-T can recognize another. I realized that Dana knew I was a Greater-Than because she was one too.
And just like that, I remembered her hurling that sharp-edged box of soup at Calvin, back at the grocery store. My brain played the memory in weirdly accurate slow motion, and in my mind’s eye, I saw her toss her apple into the air—and make it hang there—the same way I’d done with my hairbrush and the radio in my room.
My eyes hadn’t believed it at the time—and she’d really only defied gravity for a few short seconds before she’d released the apple from her telekinetic control, letting it drop back into her hand.
Here and now, my heart was in my throat, and I couldn’t speak as Dana turned and pulled open the doors to the abandoned mall. Milo flicked hair out of his eyes, took an old-fashioned flashlight from his pocket, clicked it on, and followed. But he held the door open for the two of us.
I looked at Cal and he looked at me. I desperately wanted answers, and not just to my questions about Sasha. I knew he didn’t want to go with them, but when I held out my hand, he took it.
And together we followed Dana and Milo inside the mall.
—
The graffiti in the cineplex’s former lobby was really pretty amazing.
Milo caught me looking up at it and shone his flashlight along the decorated walls so I could see it better.
There were nicknames and messages so stylized that I couldn’t decipher most of them, the letters and numbers in a beautiful rainbow of colors.
Dana was still leading the way—to a doorway marked theater six—when Calvin asked, “Are we really safe in here? I mean, if a guard comes—”
“Budget cuts have the security team doing a five-second drive-by, way out on the main road,” Dana informed us.
This entrance was way around the back.
“And the serial killer zombies…?” Cal was making a joke. Partly. “Have budget cuts kept them away too?”
We followed Dana into the former movie theater. I could see from Milo’s flashlight that someone had taken the screen off the wall and removed the rows of seats. Little metal bumps—places where those seats had been attached—dotted the slanting floor. And more graffiti decorated the walls and even the ceiling.
“Feel free to wait in the car,” Dana told Cal as her buddy Milo put his flashlight on the ground, positioning it so that the light shone upward. Dana sat down beside it, and it dramatically illuminated her face. She motioned to me. “Sit.”
I looked down at the dusty floor, and she laughed.
“Oh, come on,” she exclaimed. “Really? I guess I was right the first time, Sunshine. You are a little diva.”
I scowled and plopped down without any further hesitation. She wasn’t going to call me a diva. “Tell me about Sasha,” I demanded.
Dana laughed again, pulling something from her pocket as she glanced up at Milo. “Part diva, part pit bull.”
I looked up at Milo too and saw that he was leaning back, one of his heels resting against the nearby wall. He’d taken a cigarette from behind his ear and was patting his pockets—for a lighter, I presumed.
“Ew,” I said. “Seriously, could you not light that?”
He froze as he looked at me.
“Not only is it disgusting, but it’s dangerous for Calvin.” I pointed to Cal, who’d wheeled his chair between me and Dana. She’d started eating sunflower seeds and spitting out the shells. They landed, each with a click, on the slanted theater floor. “He has a stent in his heart from his accident, and it makes him really sensitive to secondhand smoke.”
Cal shook his head—both at me and at Dana, who’d offered him some of her sunflower seeds. “Nah, Sky. It’s cool.”
“It’s not cool,” I insisted. Because of the damage done to his heart when the gas line to his house exploded, Calvin was going to be lucky if he lived to age forty, a fact that I didn’t let myself think about very often. But I was determined that, with my help, he’d be a statistical anomaly and die while skydiving at age ninety-five.
“I was thoughtless,” Milo said quietly. His voice was soft, with a gentle Southern twang. He snapped his unlit cigarette in half before putting it into his shirt pocket.
And before I could turn back to Dana to ask her again about Sasha, she said, “Before we get into the weeds, I need to know if you’ve told anyone besides Scooter here about your abilities.”
“No.” I shook my head as I looked back at her.
She looked…like a Greater-Than. Her hair, her eyes, her face. Even her clothes. She wore ripped skinny jeans tucked into those clunky black boots. Her shirt was white and tight against her muscles. Beneath, the black of her bra bled through the thin material. For a second, I thought about my own bra—how I had so little up top that I didn’t even need to wear one. This girl was all curves and sex appeal, and I felt gangly and angular in comparison.
Yeah, if anyone here was something called a “Greater-Than,” it was Dana, and not me.
“Today on the beach,” she said, holding my gaze, “with Jock Itch.”
Cal snickered at the nickname she’d given Garrett.
“Did he figure it out?” Dana asked me. “The reason why you run so fast?”
So running fast was one of my G-T abilities. I swallowed hard and shook my head. “No. He’s clueless.”
Calvin backed me up. “Garrett’s douche-tastically self-centered,” he said, then turned to frown at me. “Were you really not bullshitting me? I mean, how fast can you run?”
Dana answered for me. “Fast.” She glanced again at Milo—who was still looking at me. “Well, that’s good, at least. Keep it that way. No show-and-tell games at school or at a party. No more sharing cool tricks with ‘special’ friends.” She made air quotes around “special” as she glanced at Cal.
“And while you’re at it? Stay away from hospitals. Your personal boutique doctor might not give a damn about your unusual brain-wave patterns, but any large-scale medical facility will pop an eyebrow. As soon as you’re tagged as different, the bad guys will know it, and before you can blink, you’ll be dead. Your secret needs to be secret. Even Mommy can’t know. Am I clear?”
I nodded. Unusual brain-wave patterns? “But…—”
“No buts. End of discussion. Keep your mouth closed, your running to a jog, and your inanimate objects on the ground.”
Calvin giggled.
Dana glared at him, and Calvin stopped giggling.
“I have questions,” I told Dana, “about the whole…unusual-brain-wave-patterns thing, but—”
She knew what I wanted. “Sasha first.”
“Yeah.” I nodded.
She carefully folded up her sunflower-seed package and put it back in her pocket as she said, “Police say her daddy killed—”
I cut her off. “He didn’t. That’s bullshit! Edmund would never hurt Sasha.”
Dana smiled at that. I glanced up. Milo was smiling at me too.
“Why is that funny?” I asked.
“It’s not,” Dana said. “Funny. We’re just glad you think that.” She reached out a foot and kicked Calvin’s wheel. “You’re not convinced, though, are you, Scoot?”
“The evidence—” Calvin started.
“Is exactly the same as the so-called evidence that showed up when another little girl vanished, years ago, in Alabama,” Dana said. “The two cases are virtually identical, and in both of them, the murdered girl’s father is being framed.”
Yes! That made sense to me. That I believed—that Edmund was being framed.
“But you said it yourself at the Sav’A’Buck,” Calvin argued. “Little girls disappear all the time. It sucks and it’s horrible, but it happens more often than most people think.”
Dana shook her head. Her lips were pursed, like she was angry but didn’t want to show it. I was surprised. Dana didn’t seem to have a problem exhibiting anger. But she was holding something back. I could tell. “You’re right, Boyfriend,” she replied. “Girls do go missing, and it is horrible. But you’re wrong about this. These two cases are connected.” She looked again at Milo.
At her cue, he pushed himself off the wall and removed something from his inside jacket pocket. It was an old-fashioned manila envelope.
“What’s that?” Calvin asked.
Milo leaned down to hand it to me, looking me in the eyes.
I opened the envelope. Cal moved forward a little and leaned over to peer down at its contents as I angled it slightly to catch the light.
It contained news articles from the Internet. A lot of them. They were old enough so that the cheap paper they’d been printed on had turned soft and yellow at the edges. I wondered if Milo’s nasty cigarette smoke had contributed to their decay.
The headlines were all variations on the same theme.
Montgomery resident in custody for murder of seven-year-old daughter
Alabama Man Charged with Girl’s Murder
I skimmed the top article. It was about a little girl named Lacey Zannino who had disappeared from her bedroom in the middle of the night. It mentioned her father, Ryan, and how he had disappeared the same evening that Lacey had gone missing.
The second paragraph was even more startling.
Police found Ryan Zannino’s truck on the west side of Montgomery, thirty-five miles from his residence. Crime-scene investigators have determined that the bed of the truck contained large amounts of the victim’s blood—enough for police to arrest Zannino for Lacey’s murder without recovering the little girl’s body.
I looked up, and Dana nodded knowingly. “Do you know if the police found anything else in Sasha’s dad’s truck? Besides the blood?” she asked.
Calvin pointed to the printouts, and I handed the entire packet to him. He leaned closer to the beam of the flashlight so he could read the rest of the article.
“Yeah,” I said. “But I don’t know what, exactly. Something made them think…awful things. But there was a truck, and it had Sasha’s blood in it. Although I don’t understand, if there’s not a body, how they know—absolutely—that she’s…” I had to clear my throat. “Dead.”
“It’s math, Sky,” Calvin told me quietly as he flipped through the clippings. “The human body contains a set amount of blood. If you lose too much of it, you die. There’s an expression called bleeding out.”
I cut him off. “I know what that means. I just… I feel like I would know it i
f Sasha was dead and…”
“Reality’s a bitch,” Dana said flatly. “Answer me this—did Sasha’s dad work nights?”
“He was a security guard,” I replied, nodding.
“Yup,” Dana said. “So was Ryan Zannino. And have they found Sasha’s dad yet?”
I shook my head. “No.”
Milo crossed his arms over his chest. “If history repeats, he’ll turn up soon,” he said. “And he’ll go straight into solitary confinement.”
“Not if we find him first,” Dana vowed.
Calvin shook his head. “Wait, wait, wait.” His voice was tinged with irritation. He’d sifted through the articles and now pointed to one. “This says the Zannino dude was found guilty. They put him on death row years ago, for crying out loud. He’s been in prison ever since.” He looked up. “So how do you figure that he has anything to do with Sasha’s murder?”
Dana gave Cal an impatient look. “You’re not listening, Sidekick,” she said. “I’m not saying that. I’m saying Sasha’s dad is being framed, exactly the same way and probably by the same people who framed Ryan Zannino for Lacey’s murder.”
Dana was right. The similarities between the two crimes were remarkable. “Have you gone to the police—” I started to say.
She cut me off. “The cops and I aren’t exactly on friendly terms.”
Okay. “Then maybe I should—”
“You really need to start paying attention too, Bubble Gum. Last thing you want to do is attract the attention of the people who took Sasha and Lacey. You do that, and Cal’s gonna be wandering around Coconut Key searching for you.”
I was definitely missing something here, and not because I wasn’t paying attention. “Why would they come after me?” I asked. “And I’m still not clear on why anyone would want to kidnap and kill these little girls.”
Dana sat down again on the dusty floor as she smiled tightly. “Because they both had something extremely valuable.”
I still didn’t understand, and when Dana rolled her eyes, I felt stupid and incredibly less-than.
Dana leaned toward me. “Those girls were Greater-Thans too. Only they were too little to keep it a secret, and the wrong people found out.”
Night Sky Page 12