Sammy Keyes and the Showdown in Sin City (14 page)

“You sure?”

I thought about my reward money, shrinking fast in my pocket. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

“I’m on it!” he says, and gets off the phone.

Heather’s got a sharp eye on me. “How can you just throw a hundred dollars around like that? You always act like you’re broke with your stupid peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and tacky torn-up jeans.”

Candi hisses, “Heather!”

“Well, she does! I told you it’s all just a big act!” Then she zooms in on her mother and says, “And stop hissing!”

Normally I would have explained about the reward money, but since Casey and I had worked
together
to get it and I knew Candi knew about his share, I’d be getting Casey in a whole lot of hot water if I said anything.

So instead I just say, “Think what you want, Heather, but I promise you, you haven’t got a clue about my life. I’m just trying to get the job done.” Then I turn to Candi and ask, “So are we going back to the Marriage Bureau?”

She looks at her watch. “It’s already almost
four
? How late are they open?”

I shrug, but Heather gets online with her phone and says, “Midnight.”

“Midnight?” Candi gasps. “Even on Saturdays?”

“Yup.”

Candi blinks at her. “I don’t want to stake out the Marriage Bureau until midnight!” But no one seems to have a better idea, so finally she says, “Okay, but first I’ve got to find the ladies’ room.”

“Me, too,” Heather says.

So off we go in search of a bathroom, only as we’re reading the overhead signs, I notice one that says
CHAPEL
with an arrow. “Hey!” I say, pointing to the sign. “Do you want to go look?” Then something hits me. “What if they’re staying
here
? What if they’re staying here and this is the chapel they’re going to get married in! I mean, they were just strolling around the mall, right? Which is easy when you’re staying in the resort that’s connected to it, right? So what if they were just killing time until their wedding?”

We wind up going to the chapel, and even though it’s locked up tight, we can peek inside, and I’m kinda shocked to see that the chapel is really
nice
.

Classy, even.

“Wow,” I say, sort of to myself, “I actually
could
see Lady Lana getting married here.”

“Lady Lana?” Heather asks.

I give a little shrug. “My nickname for my diva mother.”

“You really don’t like her, do you?” Candi asks.

I think about that a minute—about how the last time I
saw her, at Officer Borsch’s wedding, I loved her to pieces for what she’d done to help Casey and me clear up an awful misunderstanding … but how quickly that had been overshadowed again by all the old hurt. And now that she’d delivered this new, hard slap in the face, sneaking off to marry my boyfriend’s father without bothering to tell me, well, she was definitely back to being Lady Lana.

I sigh. “It’s complicated.”

Candi laughs. “Isn’t it always?” Then she goes back to looking inside the chapel, even though we’ve seen all we need to see. And she
keeps
looking—just sort of gazing down the aisle—until finally I ask, “So what’s next? Do you want to see if they’re registered at the hotel?”

She sighs, then turns her back on the chapel. “What’s next is the bathroom.”

So we track down a bathroom, and I wait outside while the two of them go in to take care of business. Partly that’s because I don’t really need to use it, and partly that’s because the girls’ bathroom at school also holds stressful memories for me.

Let’s just say you can’t trust Heather to stay out of your stall.

Anyway, ten minutes later, I’m still waiting.

Fifteen minutes, still waiting.

And I’m thinking they’re in there fixing their makeup or sneaking a smoke or just, you know,
stuck
, so I wait some more.

But finally I’m like, Come
on
. So I go inside, and guess what?

They’re nowhere.

I check every stall, and then when I go into the vanity area, I discover that there’s a second door—one that exits around the corner from where I’d been standing.

At first I can’t believe that they’re gone, so I check outside both doors and through the whole bathroom again, but they
are
gone, and really, there’s only one way to explain it.

I’ve been ditched.

At first I couldn’t believe it. And then I
still
couldn’t believe it.

And then I got mad.

At Heather.

At her mother.

But mostly at me.

How could I have let Heather ditch me?

I guess I underestimated her. Or overestimated Candi. Of all things.

But there I was.

In Las Vegas.

Ditched.

I tried to keep the panic out of my brain, but that was kinda hard, seeing how I was all by myself in a huge city full of gamblers and drunks and strippers.

Think, I told myself.
Think
. Where could they be?

We’d talked about seeing if my mom and Warren had checked into the resort’s hotel, so I ran, following signs through the casino and into the lobby.

The Ditchy Duo was nowhere.

So there I am, looking around, wondering why in the
world they ditched their only connection to new information, when all of a sudden it hits me.

Pete must’ve called while they were in the bathroom.

He must’ve called and they must’ve made a lucky guess and gotten a tip.

Just like that, I go from panicked to ticked off. And even though Heather and her mother could have been anywhere inside the Planet Hollywood complex or back inside the Miracle Mile Shops, what comes screeching into my brain is
Get to the car
. And yeah, maybe I should have found a pay phone and called Pete instead, but I’d already wasted a bunch of time and I didn’t want Heather and Candi to get away. I mean, it was one thing to get ditched because they hated me. It was another to get ditched because they’d stolen my tip!

And the way I saw it, even if the tip was for somewhere inside the Miracle Mile or Planet Hollywood, eventually they’d go back to the car. And if they were leaving now, I’d never catch them once they drove away.

I had to get to the car!

Besides, it was something I could
do
. Something better than panicking about being all alone in a huge city with gamblers and drunks and strippers.

So I charge back through the casino and out to the Miracle Mile Shops, and even though I know Candi’s feet are hurting her, those Acosta females are
determined
. I could just picture Candi hobbling along at lightning speed with popping blisters and oozing shoes while Heather’s barking at her to hurry up.

And the more I play it through in my head, the more I realize that even if I run, I’ll never catch them. They might have blistered feet and smokers’ lungs, but they also have a
huge
head start.

But then I realize—I don’t have to run.

I can ride!

I hop on my skateboard, knowing that mall security will kick me out … but I’m going out anyway, so who cares?

Besides, they’ll have to catch me first!

There are shoppers everywhere, but I push along going, “Excuse me! Emergency! Coming through! Emergency!” and just like that, people are scampering out of my way. Pretty soon I’m picking up speed, weaving around planters and baby strollers, calling, “Sorry, emergency!” to people I startle and just flying down the shiny esplanade. And before any mall cop can shout, Stop that skater! I’m zipping out the doors that lead to the parking structure.

Now I can
really
power down, and I tear over to the elevator. But while I’m jabbing at the UP button, waiting for the doors to open, I hear something that makes me freeze.

Squealing tires.

Now, okay. Candi Acosta isn’t the only crazy driver on the road. And maybe she isn’t the one making a mad dash to escape, but somewhere on the echoey levels of the parking garage someone is definitely in a hurry to get out of there, and if it
is
Candi Acosta, there’s only one thing for me to do.

Cut her off at the pass!

So I get back on my board and charge for the exit. And
since there’s no guardrail or anything stopping cars from going in or out, I just hide behind a post near the exit ramp and try to catch my breath.

The squealing keeps going for another minute, and then there’s a streak of red on my right.

As the car gets closer, I can see that it’s definitely Candi and Heather. The windows are down and they’ve got one last turn to get into the exit ramp and out of the parking structure.

But the exit’s a single lane, and I’m not going to let them out!

I step onto the ramp to block it, but when Candi sees me, she does something I wasn’t expecting.

She starts to turn
away
from the ramp.

Like she’s going to find another way out!

But all of a sudden Heather grabs the wheel and I can hear her screech, “She’ll move!” and in a flash the car is veering right at me.

Candi’s face looks totally panicked, and who knows what’s wrong with her brake foot, but the car is not slowing down. And even though Heather’s gambling with my
life
, she’s right—I jump out of the way in the nick of time.

Candi still could stop, but she doesn’t. Once I’m out of the way, she gets the car back on track and goes flying out of the parking structure and onto the street. And I do chase after them, but when they disappear around a corner, I know it’s over. I mean, there’s no way I’m going to be able to catch them, let alone follow them.

So I just stand there panting, and after a minute
everything that has happened comes crashing down and I feel like I’ve been slammed into a wall.

I’m just beat up.

Beat up and tired.

It’s already dusky, and I have no idea what my next step should be. What I want more than anything is to collapse. My legs and arms are lead, and my heart is just
sagging
inside me, and for some reason finding my mother doesn’t seem that important. I’m more worried about being on the streets of Las Vegas by myself with the sun going down and no place to stay.

It crosses my mind that I can go back to the MGM and wait outside Heather’s door, but they’d nearly run me over just now trying to get rid of me, and once they’d found what they were looking for, there was no guarantee they’d spend another night there. And even if they did, I was pretty sure they wouldn’t let me crash on their couch.

It’s strange—I’d been in more dangerous situations before, but I hadn’t felt
down
like this before. And as I’m riding along, I’m trying to put my finger on
why
I’m feeling so down. I mean, so Heather ditched me—so what? It’s not like she was my friend or anything. And it’s not like her knowing where my mom was and me not knowing was some big catastrophe. So she’d get there with Candi and mess up the wedding without me. So what? As long as
someone
put a monkey wrench in it, what did I care? I could corner Lady Lana about my dad … somewhere else.

But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to
reason my way out of feeling bad. It might not make
sense
to feel this way, but I still did. And what was weird was that the feeling
was
familiar.

A sort of déjà vu gut punch.

And that’s when I realized that it was the same feeling I’d had when I first understood that my mother wasn’t coming home. The feeling that someone’s pulled out of your life and left you in a cloud of dust on the side of the road.

Being with Marissa and her mother and then Heather and Candi had distracted me from my fight with Grams. But now that was hitting me hard, too. Grams had gone along with my mother, my mother had left me behind, and there was nobody else in my family.

I was on the side of the road, totally abandoned. I kept riding along, but I was having trouble breathing. My lungs felt pinched, my throat felt choked, and my eyes were stinging with tears. And all of a sudden, more than finding my mother or knowing who my father was or patching things up with Grams, what I wanted was to talk to Casey.

Casey.

Just the thought of him made me feel rescued. Not damsel-in-distress rescued—he was more like a light in the darkness. Someone who would help me find my way through all of this.

But as I headed down Las Vegas Boulevard looking for a pay phone to call him, I passed by a lady selling heart balloons and flowers, and another thought slugged me in the gut.

It was Valentine’s Day!

I’d been so wrapped up in what I was doing that I hadn’t even thought about how I was supposed to meet Casey at our secret spot for a picnic … and it was already dinnertime!

I told myself not to panic. I told myself he must’ve called Grams. Yes. He must’ve called Grams and found out that I was in Las Vegas.

But what if he hadn’t?

What if he’d gone to the graveyard and I hadn’t shown up and then he couldn’t get a hold of Grams and … and …!

I felt so selfish and stupid. I mean, it’s not like I’m in the habit of calling him anywhere but the high school pay phone, especially since his mother confiscated his cell phone. But the minute I knew his mother and sister were in Las Vegas, I should have called his house! I’d called half the wedding chapels in town and couldn’t take a minute to call him?

Suddenly I was frantic to find a pay phone. I hurried down the Strip with my eyes peeled, asking random strangers if they knew where one was.

No one did.

One guy even said, “They still have those?”

And I was feeling so desperate that I wound up asking a skinny woman sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk with an accordion in her lap if she knew.

She looked up at me and her eyes seemed kind of wasted, but she pointed down the street and said, “There’s one in the liquor store.”

I just stared at her a minute, not knowing whether to believe her.

“Well, there is,” she says, and starts playing some screechy notes on her accordion. And since there’s a scarf with a sorry scattering of coins in front of her, I dig up two dollars, toss them in, and tell her, “Thanks!”