After the End(20)

I push a little further. “Once I find the person you’re talking about, where do we go to find my father?”

“South . . . southeast. A place that is the exact opposite of here,” Frankie says, and an image forms in my mind of a barren landscape with cactus and strange rock formations.

He’s given me more than I was hoping for. “Thank you,” I say.

“One more thing,” the man says, and I can feel our link weakening and see the watery haze start to return to his eyes. “When you find the one who will accompany you, don’t let him use his cell phone.”

“What’s a cell phone?” I ask, releasing his hand and letting our connection break. He leans his head back against the wall and begins chuckling.

“Thank you for helping me,” I say, and fishing in my bag, pull out a few bills and place them carefully in his hat.

He picks up the money and looks up at me, surprised. “Hey, missy, that’s way too much,” he says as I walk away.

“It’s not, believe me,” I say, and set out to find a place to sleep for the night.



UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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





18


MILES




I’VE BEEN WANDERING FOR HOURS WITH NO LUCK, feeling like the biggest fool on earth. I want to give up, but remember the look on my father’s face when he said I needed to prove myself to him. That’ll never happen in the mail room. I’ve got to find this girl.

I try to think like a detective would. If you’re new to a city, you most likely go to touristy areas. I walk up a road with several restaurant terraces and sit down on a street bench to watch the people passing by.

At least I got out of the house for the weekend. When I told Mrs. Kirby I would be fine on my own, she actually sounded relieved. And I answered Dad’s Is everything okay? text this morning with: Just watching TV in my jail cell. Don’t worry, I’m fine.

I finally get up and begin following signs for Pike Place Market, the one spot in Seattle that I’ve actually heard of. Across the street a rowdy crowd sits at tables outside a sports bar. I doubt this girl will be in that group. I sigh. This is worse than finding a needle in a haystack.

“Hey, Starry Eyes, baby! Come back, I was just kidding!” someone yells.

I’m suddenly on high alert, my eyes scanning the crowd across the street. I home in on a group of college-age guys wearing identical Greek letter T-shirts and drinking pints of beer. It was one of them who shouted “starry eyes.” But walking away from them is what looks like a small-built boy with a kind of fuzzy crew cut.

Wait, no. It’s a girl.

I jog across the street toward the frat boys, watching as the girl stops at another table, leans in, and talks with them.

“Hey, what’d that girl ask you for?” I ask the first table.

One of the guys looks me up and down and then, satisfied that my button-down and jeans meet his dress code or something, says, “You don’t want her, man. She’s crazy.”

“You’ve got that right,” the guy next to him says, and laughing, they lift their mugs to clink in agreement.

“What do you mean, crazy?” I ask.

“Chick’s been showing up every night, wandering around asking everyone their name,” another guy says. He shakes his head and wipes the foam off his mouth with the back of his hand.

“And what about that creepy star-shaped contact lens?” the first guy says. “Weird, right?”

Star-shaped contact lens? Excitement rises in my chest. I walk away from their table. “You’re welcome!” one of the frat boys calls after me, and his friends laugh.

The girl is watching something across the street, and I turn to see what she’s looking at. My heart stops in my chest. It’s two of Dad’s security guards from work, and they’re staring straight at her.

A car speeds by, forcing them to wait before they jog across the road. I look back at the girl, but she’s gone, and Dad’s guards are looking around like Where’d she go?

I take a quick right onto the next road, and then I see the girl dart out of an alleyway a block away. She moves so smooth and fast it looks like she’s gliding.

I spend the next hour trailing her around town while I run over Dad’s description in my mind: starburst eye, long black hair, probably traveling with two huskies. Looks like she lost the dogs and the hairdo sometime during the last week, but according to the frat boys, she kept the weird contact lens. She doesn’t seem like an “industrial spy” who everyone’s dying to get his hands on. She looks more like a lost little boy.