Night Sky

by Suzanne Brockmann

It was so ridiculous that I had to laugh. And as he glanced up at me again, his eyes smiling, I knew he’d done it to get me breathing again. “Yes, please,” I said. “I need to talk to Detective Hughes. I have some information about the Sasha Rodriguez case.”

  “I’m Detective Hughes,” Calvin contributed in a very stupid-sounding, deep, booming voice. “Have you come to tell me all of the many places where Edmund Rodriguez touched you inappropriately?”

  I laughed again, and because Milo was looking at me questioningly—even as his thumbs raced across Calvin’s phone’s keyboard, I said, “When he interviewed me, almost all of the detective’s questions were about inappropriate touching—”

  “Stay in character,” Dana barked.

  So I said, “Actually, no, Detective, but I do have information that I thought was important. I remember seeing an, um, older woman with gray hair near Sasha’s house. And a…friend—a little boy I know—said he saw the same woman in a white van—”

  “He’s probably walking away from you right about now,” Dana interjected. “Because he’s got four million other, more important things to do.”

  “I’m sorry, Detective,” I said quickly, “but can you tell me if it’s true…? The news I heard online at…” I looked at Milo.

  “Citizen Detective dot com,” he provided.

  I repeated the website URL, adding, “There was an anonymous post that said an S-and-M dog collar—in Sasha’s size—was found in the truck, covered in her blood.” Just saying that out loud made me feel sick to my stomach.

  “You’ll have to watch him closely for his reaction,” Dana advised. “And don’t be afraid to add the violins. Tell him how much you loved the girl, how important it is that you know the truth, how you’ve been having nightmares—”

  “I will,” I said.

  “You’re going to be great,” Milo said quietly as he handed Calvin back his phone.

  “You want me to go in with you?” Calvin asked me.

  “You can’t,” Dana said. “Really, Scoot, I know you want to, and God knows I want you to go in there with her too, but…” She looked at me somberly. “You have a better shot of getting real information if you go in on your own. Trust me on that.”

  I did trust her, and with a deep breath, I reached for the door handle.

  “Dammit,” Dana hissed, and I turned around quickly to look back at her. She was making a face, her eyes squeezed tightly shut. “Dammit!”

  “What’s the problem?” Calvin also glanced at Dana in his rearview mirror.

  Now Dana was shaking her head and breathing hard. “Something’s wrong.”

  Milo looked curious too, but he didn’t ask Dana what she meant. He waited patiently for her to elaborate. While he did that, he also turned to gaze at me.

  “Something’s really wrong. Everyone be quiet!” Dana demanded, even though none of us had spoken again. She scrunched up her face and leaned forward, rocking a little in her seat. Finally, she opened her eyes. “Shit! This isn’t going to work.”

  “How do you know that?” Cal asked.

  “I just…it’s like back in Harrisburg when I knew that little boy had information. I can’t do this on cue,” she said, clutching her forehead, “but when it happens, it’s always accurate. We’re wasting our time.”

  “If Skylar goes inside, will she be in danger?” Milo asked as he reached into his pocket and pulled out his packet of gum.

  Dana didn’t hesitate. “No. There’s no danger. Just…I don’t really know what I’m feeling here—it’s very strange. I think…the detective isn’t here. Or something.” She shook her head again.

  “Always accurate, huh?” Calvin said. “Or something…?”

  “You should go in,” Dana said to me, ignoring Calvin. “At least find out when he’ll…be back…?”

  My heart was pounding again. “Can I please have a piece of that?” I asked Milo, knowing his answer would probably be no, but I was now completely freaked out and didn’t want to go inside the police station with seriously bad fear-breath.

  “Not unless you want a dose of nicotine,” Dana said as she yanked the gum packet from Milo’s hands. She handed it over to me.

  It was something called Smok’B’Gon—a type of gum specifically used to “aid in smoking cessation.”

  Milo had quit smoking? I looked up at him questioningly.

  The edge of his lips curved up into an almost imperceptible smile. But his eyes were uncertain, like he was embarrassed or nervous.

  “That’s so awesome,” I said, beaming. “Good job!”

  Milo actually blushed. It was unbelievably charming. He turned and looked out of the window, his grin widening.

  “All right, Sunshine.” Dana yanked the gum packet back. “It’s showtime, ready or not. Do your thing.”

  —

  The smell was what hit me first.

  As soon as I stepped into the station, my nose burned. Stale booze, cigarettes, and…garlic. Yes, garlic and onions. And burnt coffee. And the old, familiar fish-of-fear smell. It was pretty disgusting. And sad. The large open lobby smelled desperately sad.

  I bucked up and shook off the urge to gag. I needed to pull myself together if I was going to get this done.

  The entire place was dingy and hot. A tired ceiling fan revolved drunkenly overhead. Printers beeped. Cheap-looking cubicles divided the room into cluttered sections. Some people looked up at me from their gargantuan pile of paperwork. Others didn’t bother.

  A counter stretched across, separating visitors from the main part of the room, and even though individual lanes were roped off with signs overhead labeled Information, Processing, and Cashier, only one woman was there. She sat at an unmarked part of the counter, in front of a computer where she typed furiously. She was enormously heavy, with a furrowed brow and chin-length dyed-red hair that had started to turn gray at the roots. Her mouth was open slightly as she worked, and she breathed heavily, as if just the exertion of moving her fingers across the keyboard was too much for her.

  As I approached, I read the little plaque on her desk. It was engraved with the words: Desk Sergeant Olga Moran.

  I stood there for a moment, but she didn’t look up from her computer screen.

  “Excuse me,” I tried, but then jumped back, startled at what sounded like the woman kicking the counter, rapid-fire, with both feet. Ba-dah, ba-dah, ba-dah, ba-dah, ba-dah, bahm! And yet she still hadn’t looked up at me. Nor broken a sweat. It was beyond weird, and I stifled the urge to laugh as I pictured her wearing tap shoes and rushing to dance class after work.

  I couldn’t see what she was wearing on her feet because the counter was solid, all the way down to the rather disgustingly grimy tile floor.

  And instead of falling onto that floor in hysterical laughter, I spoke even louder. “Excuse me. Um, I’m here to speak to the detective who interviewed me last week at my school…?”

  The desk sergeant finally turned her giant head and gave me an apathetic stare. Her hot-dog-like fingers slipped off the keyboard as she leaned back, placed a pensive hand on her chin, and gathered the energy necessary to speak. “Case number?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What’s the case number?” Her voice was a monotone, and I realized that instead of looking at me, her eyes were focused somewhere on the back wall, over my head.

  “I…there was never a case number given to me.” I stood up on my toes, hoping for eye contact. “Like I said, a detective came to me and asked me questions. I’m here because I have information that I believe will help solve the case?” I knew I had to stop phrasing my sentences in questions and start sounding more absolute, or I’d never get to talk to Hughes.

  “If you want to talk to a detective about a case, you need to know the case number,” the woman droned. She opened a pack of cough drops and stuffed one into her mouth before immediately crac
king the candy with her teeth and resuming her typing.

  A rush of menthol filled my nostrils, and combined with the other terrible smells in the room, it made me need to sit down. But there were no seats on this side of the counter, so I lifted my chin and tried to breathe through my mouth.

  “And I told you,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm, “that I didn’t get a case number. Detective Hughes didn’t give me one when he conducted the interview.” There. I’d managed to make that a statement.

  Sergeant Moran stopped typing. Something I’d said had finally caught her attention, because this time when she lifted her head from her computer screen, she actually looked at me. Her beady eyes were like two question marks as her lips formed the shape of a Cheerio. She worked the cough drop around in her mouth. “Hughes?” she repeated.

  “Yeah. He came to my school—Coconut Key Academy—last week to ask me about the missing little girl. Sasha Rodriguez. Do I really need a case number to talk to him again? I’ll be quick.”

  The sergeant closed a manila folder and leaned forward, weaving her fingers together as she placed her large forearms on top of the counter. The exertion made sweat trickle from her temple down to where her earlobe connected to her jaw. She shook her head, and the bead of sweat plopped onto her arm. “Little girl, you can’t talk to Detective Hughes—whether you have a case number or not.” She cleared her throat. “Nobody can talk to him anymore. I hate to break it to you, but Hughes? He’s dead.”

  Ba-dah, ba-dah, ba-dah, ba-dah, ba-dah, bahm!

  She was kicking the counter again, and it was so bizarre that as I took a swift step backward, I nearly tripped over my own two feet. When I caught myself, I realized that, clearly, I hadn’t heard her correctly.

  I mean, for a second there, I actually thought this woman had told me that the detective I’d seen last week was dead.

  “His funeral was this morning,” Sergeant Moran announced, and I realized I’d heard her quite well the first time.

  And yet I couldn’t stop myself from repeating, “Dead?”

  “Heart failure,” she intoned, and for a moment, I actually saw something human in her eyes. She had liked Hughes.

  I exhaled. “I’m really sorry to hear that.”

  “We all are. He was a good detective.” Ba-dah, ba-dah, ba-dah, ba-dah, ba-dah, bahm! “Carrots! Stop that! Right now!”

  She’d barked that directly in my face—and I had no idea how to respond. Was it some kind of weird nickname she’d assigned me because I had red hair? Except I wasn’t making that banging sound, so I couldn’t stop.

  But then she awkwardly bent over and directed her words beneath the counter, speaking in baby talk that would’ve made me crack up if I wasn’t so stunned by the news of Hughes’s death. “Is my widdle puddy-tat hungry? Does my widdle Cawwots want din-din?”

  As I watched, Sergeant Moran put a can of cat food and an opener on the counter, the exertion of reaching for those items causing her to wheeze.

  I sniffed the air, suddenly aware of more than just the odors of menthol, fish, and garlic.

  It was faint, but unmistakable. The sewage smell was back.

  I coughed into my elbow as a ringing started in my ears. I tried to breathe shallowly, but that didn’t help. The sewage smell was getting worse and worse by the second.

  “Anyway,” the woman continued, grunting with each turn of the crank as she opened the can of cat food, “if you really feel like waiting, I can page Detective Sparks. He’s in charge of delinquent files, and—”

  “No!” I said, remembering even in my shocked state that Dana had said not to discuss the case with anyone else.

  She looked at me with her head cocked, as if observing a rare specimen.

  And then it hit me like a freight train.

  Like ten freight trains, bound for my nose.

  The sewage smell. It was back, and it was nasty. I looked wildly around the room. But the apparition of the old lady from Sasha’s room hadn’t just drifted in the door. In fact, there was no one else in that front area of the building—just me, Olga, and Carrots—Ba-dah, ba-dah, ba-dah, ba-dah, ba-dah, bahm!—who must’ve been scratching to get free, which made his or her crate rattle against the base of the counter.

  Meanwhile, the sewage smell was getting worse. It completely drowned out the desperate sadness of the room, filling it instead with…terror.

  And evil. An awful, corrosive, insidious evil.

  I gagged. And I looked for a trash can to puke into.

  But there wasn’t one in sight. Without another word to the desk sergeant, I staggered out of the station, bursting through the doors and back around the corner of the building into the parking lot.

  Where, for the second time in two days, I puked my guts out onto asphalt.

  My eyes watered and my throat burned and my hands did too, and I realized that I’d dropped onto my hands and knees—and the blacktop was hot. I was also vaguely aware of the sound of Milo and Dana getting out of Calvin’s car, of the two of them arguing after Dana’s voice demanded, “What happened in there, Bubble Gum?”

  “She can’t answer your questions. She’s a little busy right now.” Milo sounded more annoyed than I’d ever heard him.

  Dana: “But I need to know—”

  Milo: “You need to back off. Give her a break. Come on, get back in the car before you start sympathy-vomiting. Let me handle this.”

  When he spoke again, his voice was closer. “Sky, are you okay? How can I help you?”

  I shook my head as I threw up again, and it was hideous. I wasn’t able to keep myself from crying—I was a bodily liquids fountain. In fact, snot was also pouring out of my nose. And yet Milo was reaching for me anyway, moving into splatter range.

  “Oh my God, don’t touch me, don’t touch me!” I moaned, and he immediately backed away. Of course, like an idiot, I felt the need to immediately apologize. “I’m so sorry,” I sobbed. “I just have to…get it all out of my system. This happened yesterday, and then I was fine.”

  “I just wish you would let me help you,” Milo said. “You’re so much like Dana—always thinking you have to go through crap like this alone.” He raised his voice. “Calvin, you got any water in the car?”

  “Sorry, I don’t,” I heard Calvin call back to him.

  Milo sighed. “Well, okay,” he said. “Sky, I’ll be right back.”

  “Milo! Don’t you dare!” I heard Dana shout from the car, and when I lifted my head, I saw him disappear around the corner of the building. He was going into the police station.

  I was already starting to feel a little better. By the time Milo came back, carrying a couple of bottles of water that he’d gotten out of a machine in the lobby, I’d pushed myself away from the puddle of puke and was leaning against the side of the building. I was digging through my purse, looking for a tissue, but of course, I couldn’t find any.

  Except then Milo was there, crouching down beside me. He took off his over-shirt, and then he pulled off his tank top, and I laughed in surprise at the sudden display of smooth, tan muscles—six pack included. Had I really thought, at one point, that Milo was skinny?

  He was not.

  As I watched, he opened one of the bottles of water and doused his tank top with it, then offered it to me, so I could use it to wipe my face.

  The kindness in his eyes made me tear up a little again. “Thank you,” I whispered as I took it.

  It was cool and soft, and it smelled like vanilla. And I was getting puke and snot all over it.

  “You okay?” he asked me as he slipped his arms back into his over-shirt. He picked up the bottle of water, opening it and holding it out to me. “Better just rinse and spit until you’re certain the fireworks are over.”

  I laughed at fireworks. “They’re over,” I told him, but I did as he suggested, just to be safe.

 
He, meanwhile, had taken his tank top back as if he wasn’t grossed out, and was using the other bottle of water to rinse it. He gave the shirt back to me, and I used it to wipe my face again.

  “I smelled it again,” I told him. “The evil.”

  He nodded. “I figured.” He sighed as he looked at me. “Dana’s got a lot of questions for you, but if you need to take another minute—”

  “No,” I said, taking another sip of the water, this time letting it slide down my throat. “I’m…back.” I pushed myself to my feet as Milo hovered nearby, ready to catch me if it looked like I was going to fall.

  “You want to make a bet,” he told me, “that the first thing Dana’s gonna say when we get back into the car is Milo, you effing idiot.” He smiled at my confusion as we headed for the car. “I’ll let her explain.”

  —

  “Milo, you effing idiot!” Dana said, only she used the real f-word. But then she turned to glare at me as I slid into the front seat alongside Calvin. “Do you have any idea how dangerous it was for him to go into the police station like that?”

  “I needed water,” Milo said evenly.

  “Drive! Get us out of here!” Dana ordered Calvin, and he pulled out of the police station parking lot.

  “I do know,” I answered Dana. “Without a NID card—”

  “Miles doesn’t just not have a NID,” she told me. “There’s an outstanding warrant for his arrest.”

  That was news to Cal and me, and we exchanged a wide-eyed glance that Dana, of course, made note of.

  “Yeah, don’t get your panties in a twist,” she said. “The charges were theft, but the money was his, and the so-called victim was our allegedly loving foster father, who’d just locked me in the closet for two days with no food or water.” She turned back to Milo. “You could’ve been pinged by their face-recognition software! If they’d ID’d you, you could have put all of us in danger!”

  “I kept my head down. No one even noticed I was there,” Milo told her.

  “That you know of,” Dana pointed out, heavy on the attitude.

  “No one’s following us,” he countered calmly. “It’s over, so let’s move on.”