Pretty Sly (21 page)

BY MY ESTIMATE
I had about five more minutes left in the café’s back office before the clock on the server’s goodwill gesture ran out and/or she became suspicious.

But I still had one number left to call.

I held the phone pressed close to my ear and listened to the echoing ring. Four times. The silences in between seemed to go on forever. Biting a corner of my lip, I made a little bargain with myself—if no one answered, I would turn myself in. If someone answered, I wouldn’t.

“Hello?” It was a girl’s voice, high-pitched but a little raspy and breathless, like maybe she’d just woken up or run some distance to get the call in time.

Okay, maybe I wouldn’t.

“Is this Rain?” I asked.

“This is she. Who is this?”

“This is . . .”
Should I use a code name?
I couldn’t come up with anything original. “Uh, this is Sly Fox. Tre
said you might be able to help.”

“Willa? Is that really you? Oh my God,” she said. “You’re here? I can’t believe it.”

“I’m here,” I said uncertainly. It was weird, how she was acting like she knew me. Like we were old friends.

“You’re in my town. Holy crap.” I could hear her smile. Then she cleared her throat, like she was trying to sound more official. “I’ve been waiting for your call. So where are you guys?”

“It’s just me,” I said, praying she wouldn’t ask me about Aidan over the phone. I couldn’t explain it now. Not without seriously losing it. “I’m at Celestial Coffee. In South Lake Tahoe?”

Gone was the professional voice again. “That’s my favorite place! They have the best lattes. You, at CC. How crazy is that?”

It didn’t seem all that crazy to me, certainly not any crazier than any of the other events of the day. I realized then that I knew nothing about Cherise’s cousin, and she sounded very young. This was our contact?

I tried to steer the conversation back to the matter at hand. “Listen, Rain, I need help.”

“Whatever you need! Do you need me to come get you?”

If you’re old enough to drive,
was what I thought.

“If that would be okay,” was what I said instead. “I could use somewhere to stay overnight.”

Forget the little bet I made with myself. I was pretty
sure I’d be turning myself in the following morning. But for now my main objective was to get somewhere safe and quiet, behind a closed door. A good night’s rest in a real bed. And then I could at least start to think straight.

“That’s no problem,” she said. “Be there in a few minutes. Wanna meet out front?”

“How will I know it’s you?” I asked, paranoid suddenly that I could be set up. What if this was some kind of trap?

“Don’t worry,” she said, giggling. “I’ll make sure you know. I’m going to send you a sign so it’ll be totally obvious.”

“Not too obvious, though, right?” I looked around me. “If it’s okay with you, I’ll wait here inside the café. I think I feel a little safer that way.”

“No problem. Totes magotes,” she said.

As I hung up I wondered how I was entrusting my fate to what sounded like a ten-year-old. For all I knew she was coming to pick me up on her dad’s snowmobile and I’d be staying in her backyard tree house. But what choice did I have?

I went back to my booth to wait. The couple in front of me had gone home. In fact, most of the people had left. It was now ten o’clock at night. I hoped Rain was really coming because it seemed like the café would be closing soon.

I stared into my empty coffee cup, stirring air, thinking about my mom. And Aidan. How the hell I got here.
And how the hell this was going to end.

Wallowing. I believe it’s called wallowing.

Ten minutes later, the front door opened with a jingle. I looked up, startled to see a familiar face framed by the entrance.

Cherise! And behind her was Tre.

What the . . . ?

Cherise raised an eyebrow of recognition when she saw me, her mass of russet curls bobbing as she crossed the room. So this was Rain’s sign.

I stood up and threw my arms around her, almost knocking her over. “What are you doing here?” I gasped in disbelief.

She did not, I noticed, return the hug. Not quite. It was more like she stood still and allowed me to do my embracing.

“Long story,” she muttered. “The bigger question is, what are
you
doing here?” She stood next to my table and I smelled her familiar perfume, a vanilla scent she bought from Jo Malone.

Tre opened his arms wide and I fell against his chest. He, at least, seemed happy to see me.

“I can’t—this is—you have no idea—I mean . . .” I could barely speak I was so flabbergasted.

Tre gestured toward the door. “C’mon, mumble mouth. We should get going. The car’s just in the south lot.”

I followed them back out into the shopping area. As
in the café, people were clearing out. The village center, which had been so crowded an hour before, was now nearly empty and our footsteps echoed as we crossed the paved walkway.

Tre, with his long legs, naturally loped ahead of us and left me and Cherise a couple of paces behind. If I sort of half-closed my eyes, it was almost like old times, me and Cherise at a shopping mall—albeit this place wasn’t as ritzy as the ones we frequented in Paradise Valley. Also, Cherise was bundled up in a cute fuzzy blue scarf and mittens I’d never seen back in the desert climate of Arizona.

I snuck a glance at her and smiled.

Did the fact that she came to get me mean that she was ready to forgive me? It almost didn’t matter. She was here, wasn’t she? I felt like we would have a chance to start over, or at least move on from everything that had happened.

Until she looked at me sidelong. “Girl, you look like you’ve been hit with the tacky stick. And that
hair,
” she said, leaning in to take a lock in her hand.

“It’ll grow out,” I said. “Or maybe I’ll bleach it back when this is all over.”

“Let’s hope. You look like a low-rent Natalie Portman, after she goes cray-cray in
Black Swan.
”

Tre coughed, fisting his chest to stifle a laugh. “Damn.”

Okay then. She was still pissed at me. I was going to
have to take her abuse in stride.

“So how did you get here? I mean, what happened?” I asked Tre, sensing that he was more likely to give me a real answer than Cherise was.

“After that phone call, I knew you needed backup. So I called Cherise here and we decided to trek out to Tahoe. See if we could save your ass.”

“And you came.” I looked at Cherise hesitantly.

“He told me it was life-or-death. What was I going to do? Let you die out here?” She rolled her eyes.

“But what about your . . . law situation?” I asked Tre.

“I’m here strictly for support but I’m not getting more involved than that,” he said.

“But isn’t any kind of help ‘aiding and abetting’?” I recalled my civics class lessons from freshman year.

“Technically, yeah, I guess so. But I’m just talking about my own personal boundaries here,” Tre said. “So where’s Murph?”

“We had a fight,” I said, feeling my chest tighten.

He shook his head. “That’s what I was worried about.”

We stopped in front of a sage-green Prius parked at the end of the second row of cars.

“It’s
so
nice to meet you, finally,” Rain said, turning to shake my hand as I slid into the backseat. So she
was
old enough to drive. She looked only vaguely like Cherise. She was darker-skinned, with close-cropped hair, and she was wearing a hot pink puffer jacket that Cherise wouldn’t have been caught dead in. And she didn’t seem
to be drinking the same haterade as her cousin, either, because she was grinning widely. “You’re all anyone talks about at my school for the past week.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I really appreciate your coming to get me. You’re an angel.”

“Rain’s your biggest fan,” Tre said. The two of us got in the back, and Tre’s long legs were crunched up behind Cherise’s seat.

Rain faced forward as she switched on the car, and her smiling eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. “Hey, I’m just happy to help out the cause. It’s just so cool, what you’re doing. Stealing from rich people—showing them who’s boss.”

I wasn’t so sure anymore. I certainly wasn’t doing the same kind of work I’d been doing in Paradise Valley, and I wasn’t really showing anyone much of anything, except that I needed money and shelter to survive. What had I given back, really?

“Drive carefully, Rain,” Cherise hissed. “Keep your eyes on the road.”

I ducked down low, remembering there were police out there, there was FBI, and now there was the condo guy probably looking for me.

“So I still don’t understand exactly,” I said. “How did all of this happen?”

“You mean, how’d I get involved?” Rain asked. “You guys are huge. You know that, right?”

Tre turned to me. “We were worried you were going
to get caught. After we saw that you had a following going we thought it would be better to organize everyone and pool together to actually help. So we set up the official Sly Fox Facebook page.”

“You did that?” I was sincerely touched.

“We both did—me and Cherise.” He reached around the headrest and gave her shoulder a squeeze.

They did it together? Since when were these two friends? Before I’d left, they hadn’t had much interaction—but that was partly because Kellie disapproved of Tre’s criminal past and had attempted to make him a social pariah at Valley Prep. A pang of jealousy zinged through me. My friends were hanging out without me. Well, one of my friends and my ex-friend.

But if she was still my ex-friend, then why was she helping me? Was something more going on between these two? And why did that idea bother me?

“No one knows about your mom besides us, though. I hope you don’t mind that I told Cherise,” Tre added. “Anyway, we opened up a Kickstarter account. That money I wired you today? That actually came from your fans.”

“Fans,” I repeated, blinking and shaking my head, trying to wrap my brain around everything they were saying.

“Well, fans, likers, whatever you want to call them— you have five hundred and sixty-two thousand of those people. Did you know that?”

My mouth dropped open as I stared at Tre.

The number was incomprehensible. This whole thing had gone beyond the beyond.

“Everyone loves an underdog,” he said.

Rain turned off on a dirt road leading into the woods. “We’re actually not far now,” she said. “My parents live, like, in the middle of nowhere. It’s so boring out here.”

“It’s pretty, though,” I said. Just then, I would have traded lives with Rain in half a millisecond.

I looked out my window at the shadowy mass of snowy trees, not unlike the woods Aidan and I had run through just a few hours earlier. For all I knew they could’ve been the same ones.

She turned on her wipers to swish away falling ice. “And I’m so sick of snow. Can it just be summer already?”

Two lights emerged from the darkness. The form of a pickup truck became clearer as it approached from the opposite direction. The vehicle slowed down and I locked eyes with the driver through the glass, a thick-necked man with a few days’ growth of beard, and a flannel shirt. . . .

Oh my God.

My body trembled as I remembered the mug shot and list of offenses.

Is that Chet?

I covered my face and slunk lower in my seat. But it was already too late. The man, whoever he was, had seen me. I was sure of it. He would turn around and then
come after us. He would kill me, too.

“Y’okay there?” Tre asked.

“I saw something,” I murmured. “Someone bad.”

Tre craned his neck to watch the receding truck through the back window. “‘We Plumb 4 U,’” he recited. “That’s what has you freaked out? Is your sink backed up or something?”

I turned around to look. I saw the vanity plate Tre was talking about. It was indeed a plumber’s truck. And it was driving steadily onward, not turning around to tail us as I’d imagined.

Okay, fine, maybe I had been hallucinating.

“But—” I looked back again, just to be sure.

“Doesn’t seem too threatening to me. Man, this trip has really done a number on you, hasn’t it?”

“It hasn’t been a Carnival Cruise, no,” I said, facing forward again.

Cherise turned around. “So you need to tell us. What exactly happened to your right-hand man, Murphy?”

“We sort of parted ways,” I said, in the understatement of the century.

She frowned. “But why? Did he go home? Where’s he now?”

“I don’t know where he went,” I admitted. “All I know is we had a fight, and he got off the shuttle bus at Celestial Village. I tried to look for him. But he was just . . . gone.”

“Well, we need to track him down,” Cherise said.
“Before he gets caught. Does he even realize how close the cops are?”

“That’s the thing. I think he’s probably going to turn himself in. He was sick of running. And, I guess, he didn’t really think we could find my mom. That’s what we were fighting about. That, and other stuff,” I mumbled.

“But you guys have come so far,” Rain said, furrows appearing on her tiny brow. “How can he turn back now?”

I shrugged. “He wanted to go home.”

“I don’t buy it,” Cherise added. “Aidan’s your classic trust-fund rebel. Dude lives for trouble.”

She had no idea what we’d been through, did she?

“Actually,” I admitted sheepishly, “I’m thinking of doing the same thing. Going to the FBI tomorrow morning.”

“FBI?” Cherise’s curls sprang violently as she snapped her head around. “Uh-uh. We’re not letting you do that. After Tre and I came all this way to help you? You have to keep going.”

She
wanted
me to keep going? Back in Paradise Valley she’d told me in so many words what she thought of my lawbreaking. Now she was condoning it? I leaned against my seat and let my head drop against it. “They’re going to get us sooner or later. And Aidan was right. We haven’t been able to find my mom yet, so what makes us think we’ll be able to get to her now?”

“And what makes you think this is a good time to give up?” Cherise shot back.