Fights started breaking out.
I leaped off the stage, hurdling a group of men. I landed on one, rolled off him, kept moving. The sea of humanity behind me provided a wall. Buddy Ray and the bouncers were trying to get through to me. I turned and looked for an exit.
Nothing.
Buddy Ray and the bouncers were getting closer. I was cornered again.
“Psst, this way.”
I spotted the fire-engine-red hair first. It was Candy. She had ducked under a table. I got down on my hands and knees and started crawling toward her.
Someone grabbed my ankle.
I didn’t bother to look. I kicked out with my foot, mulelike, and somehow I pulled away. I crawled faster, following Candy on all fours. She opened a half door, like an escape hatch, and slid through it. Again I followed her. She was already up on the other side. She helped me to my feet.
“This way.”
We were in a blue room with tons of throw pillows on the floor and a small round stage with a pole in the center. I heard a noise behind us and started for the nearest door. Candy put her hand out to stop me.
“Don’t,” she said with a shudder. “That leads to the dungeon. You don’t ever want to go down there.”
She didn’t have to tell me twice. I had no interest in visiting the dungeon, thank you very much. I signaled for her to lead the way. We hurried to the other side of the room and pushed against a heavy metal fire door.
I was outside!
Candy grabbed my arm. “You don’t work for Antoine, do you?”
“No,” I said. I held up my phone. “I’m trying to find this girl.”
Candy gasped. There was no doubt-she recognized Ashley.
“You know her,” I said.
“Ashley,” Candy said. “She was so special, so smart. She was my only friend here.”
Was?
“Where is she?” I asked.
“She’s gone,” Candy said in the saddest of voices. “Once you get into Antoine’s van, you’re gone forever.”
There was a commotion coming from the other side of the door. Buddy Ray and the bouncers weren’t far away.
“Run!” Candy said.
“Wait. What do you mean, she’s gone?”
“No time.”
“I have to know.”
Candy put her hands on my chest, grabbing my shirt. “Antoine LeMaire got her months ago. The White Death. There’s nothing you can do for Ashley. She’s gone, just like the others. All you can do now is save yourself.”
I shook my head. “She goes to my high school. She was fine last week.”
Candy looked puzzled, but now there was more noise coming closer. “Run!” she shouted, pushing me away as she ran down the alley. “Just run and don’t come back!”
I took off in the other direction, toward the street, running hard and fast.
I didn’t stop until I was back at the bus station, back on the 164 heading home.
chapter 16
UNCLE MYRON WASN’T HOME.
That was fine with me. I looked at my hands. They were still shaking. I had no idea what to do. I couldn’t tell him-what would I say? See, I sneaked into this go-go bar with a fake ID, and then, well, the bouncer and some guy named Buddy Ray assaulted me… Right, sure. Who’d buy that? I didn’t have a mark on me. Buddy Ray and the big bouncer would probably both swear that they threw me out when they realized that my ID was fake.
No, that wasn’t the answer.
Candy’s words kept echoing in my head. There’s nothing you can do for Ashley. She’s gone, just like the others.
I had no idea what she meant by that. Or by the fact that Antoine LeMaire “got her months ago. The White Death.” Ashley had been in school. She had smiled and laughed and been so wonderfully shy and-and hadn’t Candy said that Ashley was her only friend?
What was going on?
One thing was clear. Ashley had secrets. Candy did indeed know her. Worse-a lot worse-so did Buddy Ray.
So now what?
I didn’t know. What had I really learned here? Not much. The answer, it seemed, still came down to Antoine LeMaire. I had to find him. But that raised a few questions. Most obvious: How? I didn’t think it best to go back to the Plan B. Maybe I could hang around and run some kind of surveillance, but really, was that going to work? And that led to my second question: When I find Antoine-the White Death?-then what do I do?
I started boiling water for pasta, my mind still trying to take it all in. Something played at the edges-something I couldn’t quite see yet. But it was there. I sat by myself at the kitchen table. My stomach still hurt from that punch. It would be sore tomorrow.
That niggling in the back of my brain picked up steam. I got the laptop and booted it up. I wanted to take another look at my buddy Antoine LeMaire at Ashley’s locker. I watched the tape. Antoine opens the locker, looks inside, sees it’s empty, gets upset. I watched the tape again. Then I realized what was bothering me.
The locker was already empty.
Antoine had hoped to find something inside the locker-but whatever it was, it was already gone. That probably meant that Ashley herself had cleared it out. I wondered when. And more than that, I wondered if I could see that moment, if I could see exactly when she had last been in the school. If she had cleared out her locker, it goes to figure that she’d planned to run-that she hadn’t met up with foul play or the White Death or whatever other horrible thing could happen to a girl who had some connection to the Plan B Go-Go Lounge.
It stood to reason that Ashley had emptied out the locker and was on the run.
Or did it?
I called Spoon. He picked up on the first ring. I expected him to open up with one of his crazy non sequiturs. But he surprised me.
“Did you find Antoine?” Spoon asked.
“What?”
“You must think Ema and I are morons. A basketball game? Please.”
I had to smile at that. “I didn’t find him.”
“So what happened?”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow. In the meantime I have a favor.” I told him what I wanted-my theory on Ashley’s last visit to the locker being important.
“Hmm,” Spoon said, “we don’t know when Ashley was last at the locker.”
“No.”
“And it could have been during the school day.”
“Could have been.”
He considered that. “I guess we could hit speed reverse and see if we can come up with something. Assuming I can get into the security files again.”
“Do you mind?”
“I’m all about the danger.”
Spoon hung up. Three minutes later, Ema called me. “Have you eaten yet?” she asked me.
“I’m boiling water now.”
“Do you know Baumgart’s?”
I did. It was Uncle Myron’s favorite restaurant. “I do.”
“Meet me there.”
There was something funny in her voice, something I hadn’t heard before. “I didn’t find Antoine.”
“Spoon told me. But that’s not what I want to talk to you about.”
“What’s up?”
“I did some research on that tombstone.”
“And?”
“And something is really wrong here, Mickey.”
Half a century ago, Baumgart’s was a Jewish deli and old-fashioned soda fountain-the kind of place where Dad might order a pastrami on rye while the kids sat at the Formica counter and twirled on stools while waiting for a root beer float. Sometime in the 1980s, a gourmet Chinese chef bought the place. Rather than alienate his base, he simply added to it. He kept all the Jewish deli and soda fountain touches and then added nouvelle Chinese to the menu. It made for an intriguing hybrid. Since then, three more Baumgart’s had opened up in various New Jersey locales.
Ema sat in a corner booth nursing a chocolate milk shake. I sat with her and ordered one too. The waitress asked whether we wanted something to eat. We both nodded. Ema ordered the peanut noodles, Myron’s favorite, and something called sizzle duck crepe. I went with Kung Pao chicken.