Pretty Wanted (19 page)

“Ladies and gentlemen, please stand clear. Tram doors are now closing,” a woman’s voice announced from unseen speakers.

And then we were going up. I gulped. I’d always been afraid of heights. And this was just the tallest monument in the United States.

I. Can’t. Even.

The white double doors slid shut, and the tram lifted with a disconcerting creak as we mounted the curve of the Arch. Panic set in. This thing was not only super high up—it was also
old
. It had to have been built in the 1960s. You rarely saw cars from the 1960s on the road anymore, so how was I supposed to trust that this thing wasn’t going to snap on its chains? I chewed the inside of my cheek and tried not to think about it.

Through the windows we could see the hollow, skinny body of the building with its cables and girders and bolts and the endless staircase folding in on itself. The tram picked up speed, sounding almost like an airplane. Then it slowed down again as we approached the top.

The Arch swayed in the wind. I could actually feel us tipping ever so slightly. I grabbed Aidan’s hand and crunched it hard.

Assuming we survived this rickety death trap, what would we do when we got to the top? And where was Bailey? Would he be waiting for us outside? Maybe this plan wasn’t such a good one after all. I tried to close my eyes, but that was scarier because there were no boundaries—I felt like I was plummeting into nothingness.

The tram began to settle and the creepily calm woman’s voice chimed in again through the loudspeaker. “Welcome to the top of the Gateway Arch. Please be careful as you exit.”

Thank God.
The doors opened, and we, along with the rest of the passengers, stepped out into a narrow, low-ceilinged walkway. The lack of space above us was disorienting, like a fun house, and Tre had to bend at the waist so as not to hit his head. On either side of the room were views through recessed areas. In the darkness, you could still see the Mississippi, with its casino riverboats that looked little lit-up toys from this distance, the Old Courthouse with its dignified blue roof cap, and the cars passing on the highway as though they were tiny golden beads sliding on a string. Once again, I had to give St. Louis props. This was a really cool city. I mean, we were standing on the top of a freaking arch.

I had to remind myself.

The building swayed again and nausea swelled into my throat, obliterating all other thoughts. Rationally, I knew we weren’t going to fall. But I wasn’t necessarily feeling so rational.

We started to make our way through, Tre moving ahead of us past the people gathered in packs at the horizontal windows. Three little freckled kids running their fingers on the smeary glass. A couple of South American guys with backpacks and baseball caps. A young woman carrying a baby in a front sling. The last one gave me pause. Had my mom ever been here? Had she brought me? Something else I’d never know, another bit of information lost forever. But if we could just get away from Bailey, we could finally figure out what the hell happened to her.

“Excuse me,” Tre said as he nearly bumped into a senior citizen in white sneakers and a blue-flowered shirt, a large camera bag slung across her chest.

“Watch yourself,” she said, none too pleased.

“Maybe
you
should watch
your
self,” Aidan said.

“Don’t mind him,” Tre said, glaring at Aidan. “We’re sorry, ma’am.”

“Where are your parents? They should teach you some manners,” she huffed, taking her husband by the arm as they moved on.

“What’s your problem, man?” Tre asked Aidan.

“Nothing. I just don’t like old ladies telling me what to do.”

“Show some respect,” Tre said.

They launched into a spat as they walked, sniping and gesticulating to each other like two ruffled birds.

A young girl, maybe eight years old, stepped in front of me, holding a phone. “Can you take our picture?”

I looked around, and Tre and Aidan were well ahead of me, lost in their disagreement.

That’s when I caught sight of Bailey, pushing through the crowd. Our eyes locked. His narrowed. He was close, maybe thirty feet away.

So they hadn’t stopped him at all. But he couldn’t have been on the same car as us. We would have seen him. He must have been on the last one of the day. The bastard. How had he made it?

We were screwed again. Tre’s escape route was now a dead end. Literally.

“I’m sorry,” I said to the girl through clenched teeth. “I can’t right now.”

I leapt forward desperately pushing myself into the thicket of bodies.

“The exit tram will be leaving in one minute,” the woman’s voice announced.

We had to make it across the Arch to the other side in order to get out of here, to get back down. Aidan’s and Tre’s heads were barely visible over the crowd. They didn’t even know Bailey had gotten up here. If I got left behind, Bailey would grab me, probably take me back to his house, or his headquarters, or whatever it was. Question me about the money, maybe torture me until I gave him some answers.

And then what? Kill me?

“Aidan!” I yelled, panicked, as they receded farther. “Tre!”

I imagined bullets in our heads, our bodies dumped somewhere like a junkyard or the bottom of a lake. The queasiness I’d been feeling gathered into something stronger, a violent urge to throw up. I tried to breathe in through my nose. We’d come close to death before, I reminded myself. And we’d won.

I twisted onward, bumping into chests and backs and not caring. Where were they? It was too slow, to get through all the knots of people rushing for the tram. I was losing valuable time.

The air came through my lungs in limited gasps. I had to find them. We needed to get out of here.

Finally, Tre’s blue jacket came into view, a little patch of it.

I reached out for his sleeve, grasping it with the very tips of my fingers, and he turned around, startled.

I didn’t bother to whisper. “He’s HERE.”

“Oh crap,” Aidan said. “Oh sweet crap.”

“C’mon,” Tre said, pulling me in front of him, guiding me with his hands on my back.

We were almost to the tram when a man in a park ranger uniform held out his arms.

“We’re full. You’ll have to wait for the next one.”

We watched in horror as the doors slid shut in front of us, coldly and with finality. As if they couldn’t care less that our lives were hanging in the balance.

I let myself look back again. There he was with his big, dumb, unshaven face, bullying his way closer. Now he was smiling—he knew we were in reach. If only we had really ruined things for him back at the casino; if only that guard had realized what was going on.

We couldn’t wait for the next tram, not unless we wanted to face off with Bailey, so we pivoted away, looking for another exit, or somewhere to at least hide and wait him out.

In the corner was a smudgy door marked
EMERGENCY
with a red-and-white sign. Without hesitation, Aidan slammed his shoulder into it, and the alarm sounded as it opened, a bleating low-pitched honk.

Stairs. We ran down them, zigzagging, trying to ignore the sound of the alarm, the flashing strobe of the lights. Aidan and Tre jumped the bottom few of every flight and I tried to do the same.

Suddenly, I remembered the overhead voice in the tram telling us that there were in fact a thousand steps here. Now that we were going down them, I believed it. They wound around and around in a never-ending spiral. No wonder they weren’t open to tourists. You’d have to be insane to choose this route over the tram. Either insane or running for your life.

After a while, my brain dulled to blankness. Every bit of mental energy was spent on trying to descend as quickly as possible, trying to follow Aidan’s and Tre’s rhythm, trying not to break my neck.

Step step step step jump turn step step step step jump turn.

All the while the alarm blared around us.

By the time we got to the bottom, we were thoroughly dizzy, weaving a little as we went through another door back out in the darkness. No stopping now. We had to get as far away from the Arch as possible. Away from Bailey.

The three of us ran furiously, ran maniacally for blocks. I kept hearing the alarm in my head, like a deafening, overplayed song. The streetlights were on but everything was closing down, all the stores locked up.

We needed a destination. Another place to hide. Back in the Painted Hills we’d hid in a cave. We needed the city equivalent of that. And soon. I was losing steam.

I stopped in front of a bus stop and bent over, breathing hard. “You guys, I can’t—”

“You have to,” Aidan said, pulling me along. “You have to force yourself. I’m not letting you stop.”

“There,” Tre gasped, pointing. Up ahead was a stadium.
EDWARD JONES DOME
, it said. “We just need to make it there.”

I forced myself. When we got to the sidewalk in front, Tre stopped a couple of scalpers.

“What are we doing?” Aidan asked. “You’re not serious, are you?”

Tre reached into his wallet and handed one of the men a wad of twenties for three tickets.

“Deadly, son. This buys us some time. And shelter.”

“I had no idea you were a Rams fan,” Aidan joked as we went through the turnstiles and were swallowed up in hollowed space of the concourse.

“I’m not,” Tre said. “But they’re playing the Bears and I hate the Bears.”

He still wasn’t really looking at me, and I sensed, even through his joke, that he was angry. “Tre, let me explain what happened today.”

“I told you. I don’t need to know. Let’s just go, okay?”

I followed, still dizzy, still traumatized. Now sweaty, I was shivering cold. As I reached my hands into my pocket I felt the note. After all of that, I’d almost forgotten about it.

“Wait, you guys.” I stopped and took the paper out. It was a lined page with handwriting.

       
Crow and broadbill spied

       
the lark. The nest has fallen.

       
But nestling fledges.

Incomprehensible. It reminded me of the pages I’d seen in my mom’s book. Why were they exchanging poetry? Neither one seemed the type.

“What does the note say?” Aidan asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s a poem of some sort.”

Aidan grabbed it out of my hand. “Well, it’s a haiku. Five syllables, then seven syllables, then five syllables. Yeah, this must be some kind of a code.”

After all that? All the risks that we took? This is what they exchanged? Some random note in a language we couldn’t decipher. What was I supposed to do with this?

I was heavy with disappointment and something worse. Because it was clear now. Granger knowing those guys meant he was a criminal, too. I raced through the other possibilities I’d been trying out in my head before, but they no longer worked. There was no theory to explain this. There was only one truth and it rose up on my tongue, stark and undeniable as blood, but I couldn’t say it out loud.

“We’ll figure it out,” Aidan said, trying to comfort me. “Every code can be cracked.”

“Well, we do know one thing,” I said. “If they’re exchanging notes in this code, then the connection between those guys and Granger probably goes way back.”

Back to when my mom was still alive. Was she the one who made up the code? She was a poet, after all.

Tre nodded and pointed to a clothing shop. “Look, we can figure out the code later. I’m gonna go in there and get us some new gear, so we can blend into the crowd. You guys wanna wait it out here?”

“We’ll stand by this hot-dog guy,” Aidan said. “Then we can find our seats.”

“Just don’t bounce again, okay?” Tre said, and I heard the bite in his tone.

“We won’t,” I promised.

Aidan and I stood and watched what we could see of the game from where we were. The second quarter was coming to a close, and the Rams were up by seven. With three seconds left, the Bears had the ball, but they weren’t able to do anything with it. Now it was halftime. People were getting up out of their seats and coming up to the hot-dog stand. Others went to get in line for the bathroom.

A golf cart came down the concourse, with a security guy behind the wheel. He was talking into a radio and peering around, like he was looking for something. Just what we needed.

“Crap,” Aidan said as he nudged us closer toward the entrance of the stands, so we’d be out of security sight lines.

We heard the footsteps slapping behind us. Were they off the carts now? I turned, shaken, only to see a fuzzy goatlike creature in a blue football jersey and white pants. He was running headfirst, or should I say, horns-first, and right in our direction.

“It’s Rampage,” Aidan called over his shoulder as the blue thing was up on us. He knew I was a sports idiot. “The mascot.”

Before we knew what we were doing, Rampage was circling around us. He’d grabbed Aidan’s hat and was tossing it back and forth, inviting a game of Monkey in the Middle. Aidan’s face was now exposed. We froze, stunned and terrified.

Rampage threw Aidan’s hat to another man in the stands. And now it was gone forever.

“Willa, look around,” Aidan said through gritted teeth. I looked.

Everyone was staring at us. Well, we were in the middle of the freaking stadium, being harassed by a man in a big furry suit. But that wasn’t even the worst of it, apparently.

The worst was what Aidan pointed out next. “We’re on the FanCam.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

FOURTEEN

SUSPENDED OVER THE
goalposts, our faces were magnified two hundred times in full high definition LED color—on not one, but two JumboTrons. I gasped. Everyone and their mother could see us.

We moved as fast as we could, running back to the concourse as the crowd simultaneously cheered and booed. I could’ve sworn I heard some teenage boys chanting “Sly Fox,” but maybe that was in my imagination.

Tre was there already, holding a plastic bag full of jerseys and hats, his face scrawled with disgust. “A couple people blinked. Wanna go back and make sure all forty thousand of them peeped the view?”