He put his hand on the locker next to me and leaned in. “Not after the way you kissed me last night,” he whispered.
The heat blossomed in my cheeks. Surely he wasn’t considering kissing me right here in the hall? That would be highly inappropriate and at the same time freaking amazing.
“Any news on that schmucky Sammy dude?” he asked.
“Ha, no.” I smiled. “He hasn’t returned any of my e-mails or phone messages. You?”
“Nah, but he’ll call. Don’t worry.” Liam gently touched my face. I really hoped no one was watching me melt right now. “Come on, let’s get something to eat.”
Every day Liam and I ate lunch at school (enduring Alana’s spectrum of looks from disdain to disappointment), and every night we patrolled the Hollywood hotspots looking for Sammy and his missile-sized camera. But the schmuck was good at what he did. He was a ghost—just like Mr. D. S., the even bigger schmuck behind all this madness. And I was the haunted.
I didn’t like being on the defensive all the time. I had to find a way to regain control of my life. Except I couldn’t figure out how.
Until nearly two weeks later on Halloween, when the ghost finally called.
CHAPTER 16
The Pier was crowded for a Friday afternoon in late October. Unseasonably warm weather and the Halloween spirit buzzed in the air.
As I people watched, ghouls and phantoms roamed the beach. Some dude wearing nothing but skate shoes, board shorts, and a Captain Jack Sparrow wig played Bob Marley tunes on his guitar below me. Another kid, wearing one of those white masks from the movie Scream, casually rode his beach cruiser down the boardwalk. The souvenir shop in the middle of the Pier even had a huge grim reaper–shaped kite flapping around in the breeze.
The real ghost—schmucky Sammy—could be anywhere, watching me, taking aim to shoot me from afar. He had a camera lens for all occasions. Sammy had said to come alone, so I made sure I scheduled our little rendezvous for when Liam had a football game an hour away and would be gone all afternoon and night.
Liam and I had been together every other possible minute of the day for two weeks. I tried to act like it wasn’t necessary, but he stuck by my side—which may or may not have had something to do with all the kissing. It seemed like whenever we had the chance, we’d lose ourselves in each other: at the beach, in my room, at the back of the library.
Shaking the images from my mind, I looked down on the beach for distraction. And what do you know—Jell-O-Shot Taylor and her still nameless sidekick lay tanning in their matching hot-pink string bikinis. I felt a larger than usual amount of spite rise up within me. Not only had Taylor most likely taken the upper hand in the valedictorian race, but she was embracing the seemingly carefree life that I’d never have again. She had a friend to hang out with, time to lie in the sun, and a future full of normalcy. If ending up incredibly successful and somewhat famous on the Real Housewives of Orange County is “normal.” Better than ending up on Cops, though.
Taylor said something, and her friend’s high-pitched laugh floated on the breeze all the way over to slap me in the face. Alana and I used to be like that—happy, silly, naive. I had no idea what she thought happened that night, or what she’d remembered since, but as far as I knew, she hadn’t told a soul about being drugged, bound, and left for dead on a cliff.
I’d tried to call her. I texted her about twenty-five thousand times, with gentle questions like, “What’s up?” or “Wanna hang?” or “Need chocolate?” I told myself she just needed more time. She’d been mad at me before and had gotten over it. After all, we were besties. It said so on the chain necklaces we got in junior high.
“Well, well, well, if it’s not the infamous Ruby Rose.” A thick and greasy voice sludged down my ear. Was he talking with his mouth full of food?
I turned to find an equally repulsive visual. Oily face, shiny bald head, and the unshaven jowls of a chipmunk about to hibernate. He took the last bite of the burrito in his hand and threw the yellow wrapper toward the garbage can about ten feet away. He missed.
I looked down at him in disgust—I mean I literally looked down at him because he was so short.
“Thanks for coming,” I said, swallowing some pride.
“I brought what you asked for,” he said, swallowing down the food and opening his jacket to expose a flat manila envelope tucked into his pants. What did he think this was, some kind of drug deal? The thought of touching that envelope made me want to take a shower in hand sanitizer.
“Can I see them?” I wished he’d just hand them to me.
“Let’s discuss the terms of this deal first.”
“What’s to discuss? You said you’d help me.”
“For a price.” He stared at me like I was an idiot. “You didn’t think this was free, did you?”
“Fine, how much dirty money do you want?” I stared back like he was clearly the idiot.
“I’m not talking money.” He looked at all the girls in bikinis and licked his lips.
“If you think I’m gonna…” I trailed off, incapable of even forming words so vile.
“Relax, that’s not what I meant.” He patted his camera. “I meant some exclusives. I get some pictures of you doing interesting things, and you get pictures of a black van doing uninteresting things. By the way, do you think this black van has something to do with you blowing LeMarq’s brains out?”
“What do you mean interesting?” I said through clenched teeth.
“You know—you in a bikini doing Tai Chi, you scantily clad in the arms of your hot new boyfriend,” he said through a smile so big the pigeons were likely to crap on it. Then he dropped the smile. “Or a tip the next time a shooting goes down.”
I hadn’t given this snake enough credit. He saw a pattern and knew it would happen again. Maybe he knew it already had.
I nodded reluctantly. “We can work something out,” I said, careful not to agree to anything specific.
He handed me the sweaty envelope, and I quickly took it.
“I knew your dad, you know.” He took off his sunglasses and cleaned them with his dirty shirt. “Long time ago. He was a good guy.”
“How would you know him?” I asked, seriously confused by how this lowlife could know a legend like my dad.
“He helped me out on a research paper I did in grad school. This was a few years back, before he became Sergeant, before I…got into this.” He put his glasses back over his squinting eyes, like he was suddenly ashamed of himself. “I used to be a real journalist.”
“That’s hard to believe,” I muttered. “So why’d you join the dark side?”
“Money,” he said flatly. “Grad school ain’t cheap.”
And apparently, it’s ineffective at teaching proper grammar. “What did my dad help you with?” I asked.
“Rooting out some interesting cops,” he said with raised eyebrows, like I was supposed to know what that meant.
“OK,” I said, raising my eyebrows in return.
“He made a few enemies back then, but I wasn’t one of them. He scratched my back and I scratched his.” He made another incomprehensible facial gesture. He thought we were speaking in some kind of code and I knew the subtext. But I didn’t.
“They won’t tell me anything,” I burst out, knowing I was changing the subject. “They say my dad died in an ambush, blown up by explosives. But they have no idea who or why. Do you have any more back-scratching buddies left in SWAT?”
He dropped all the wise-guy pretenses. “Sure I do.”