But I'd never seen any bootleg that was better than the original.
"Not exactly bootlegs, Hunter. I mean, it's saying right up front what it's not."
"True. I guess a bootlegger wouldn't do that."
"But who would do something like that? What's the point of a non-bootleg bootleg?"
"I don't know," I said. "They're so good. Like the perfect shoe the client never made."
Jen shook her head. "But Mandy called us here. Does she work for anyone besides the client?"
"No. She's exclusive." I frowned. "Maybe this really is their shoe. Maybe they have this master plan of rebranding as the opposite of themselves. Or maybe these are supposed to look like bootlegs when they're not. And after these get too popular, which they will, the client will absorb the backlash and become cool again. Maybe they're ironic bootlegs."
Confused? Trust me, it was making my head hurt, and it's my job to think this way.
"That's so insane," Jen said. "Or pure genius. Or something."
"Something really cool."
"So where's Mandy?"
"Oh, yeah." Mandy was still missing. What did that mean?
Jen and I sat there, sharing a moment of befuddlement, contemplation, and the thirsty pleasure of simply looking.
Then I heard a noise somewhere in the darkness behind us.
I tugged my eyes away from the shoe, looked up at Jen. She'd heard it too.
Glancing into the dark, I realized that my night vision had been wiped out by staring at the sunlit shoe. I was blinded but guessed that whoever was down there with us could see perfectly.
"Oh, shit," I said.
With a soft rustle of paper Jen picked up the shoes and quickly laced them together. She draped them around her neck.
I stood up and realized that one foot had gone to sleep. Not surprising. I could have happily died of starvation, staring at those shoes.
Little lights danced at the corners of my vision, rods and cones trying frantically to get back online and help me see again. A shape moved in the blackness between us and the stairs, someone big and graceful. Absolutely silent.
"Hello?" I said, my voice cracking in manly fashion.
The figure stopped moving and faded back into the dark. For a moment I was convinced it had been a hallucination.
Then Jen made her move.
She kicked one of the pieces of chained plywood, opening the gap wide for a blinding second, the sunlight streaming in behind me. It revealed a big guy with a shaved head—intimidating but less terrifying than the phantom I had imagined—covering his eyes against the glare.
"Run!" Jen shouted, and I bolted forward just in time for the tower of falling shoe boxes, her next brilliant move, to miss me. Mostly. They scattered into my path, and my own suddenly unspeakably lame shoes crunched into their virgin cardboard in a way that caused me pain. (Antoine had always taught me to prize the original box as highly as the shoe.) But I managed to get past the guy, arriving at the stairs just behind Jen.
We ran upward, pounding the steps. Jen slowly pulled away from me, and I heard our pursuer coming up behind. I ran blindly, clawing at the dirty stairs with my hands to pull myself up faster, bouncing off the walls as the flights turned in a slow clockwise circle, my twisted ankle throbbing with every step.
After four stories I was panting, and he was close enough that I could tell he wasn't breathing hard at all.
Fingers grasped at my ankle on the last flight but slipped off, the grip not firm enough to bring me down.
I burst out into the sun, blinked away the blinding light, and faced the six-foot climb between me and the next roof. Jen was already standing atop it, and I wondered if her rising-sun laces gave her special powers of running and jumping.
"Hunter, duck!" she yelled.
I did.
The coolest shoes in the world passed over my head, tied into orbit around each other, spinning like a bola. I heard a grunt and a thump as they wrapped themselves around my pursuer's feet and brought him down, as heavy as a sack of doorknobs.
If it hadn't happened so fast, I'm sure I would have said, "Don't save me. Save the shoes!"
But instead I scrambled up the wall and saw Jen already pulling on the cage door of the next building.
"It's locked!" she cried, running farther down the block, disappearing as she jumped down to a lower roof. I followed in a limping run.
Three buildings later we found an open roof door and made it down to the street and into a cab.
Which is when I realized I had dropped my phone somewhere back in the darkness.
Chapter 7
"MY PHONE!"
The usual panic reaction: as if electrocuted, my body stiffened in the back of the cab, hands plunging farther into my pockets, down to the domain of lint and pennies.
But the marvelous Finnish phone didn't magically reappear down there in the fluff. It was gone.
"You dropped it?"
"Yeah." I remembered scrambling in the dark, using my hands to claw myself up the stairs. I'd never put it back into my pocket.
"Damn. I was hoping you got a picture of that guy."
I looked at Jen in disbelief. "Not quite. I was more focused on the running away."
"Well, sure. The running away was a priority." She grinned. "The running away was cool."
My face may have indicated disagreement.
"Come on, Hunter. You don't mind a little running, do you?"
"I don't mind running, Jen. I do mind running for my life. Next time we break into some place, let's just—"
"What? Take a vote first?"
I took a deep breath, letting the sway of the taxi calm me.
"Let's just not." Then another groan. "I had a picture of the shoes."
"Damn," she agreed.
We were silent for a moment, thinking of that perfect balance of understated style, slow-burning desirability, and coffee-spitting, jaw-dropping eye candy that was the shoes.
"They can't be as good as we remember," I said.
"Nice try. They were."
"Crap." I checked my pockets again. Still empty. "No phone, no shoes, no Mandy. This is a total disaster."
"Not quite, Hunter."
Jen held up what looked like my phone, except it was the wrong color.
Of course. It was Mandy's. She had the same model as I did (but with the red translucent clip-on cover). She was a fierce Early Adopter, and, like me, she used the phone for business. Just the day before, I'd phoned her my picture of Jen's shoelaces.
"Well, that's something."
Jen nodded. There's a lot you can find out from someone's phone.
She began to poke her way through the menu, squinting at the glowing screen. The little beeps gave me a creepy feeling, like going through someone's pockets.
"Shouldn't we call the police or something?"
"And tell them what?" Jen said. "That Mandy missed an appointment? Don't you watch cop shows? She's an adult. She can't be a missing person for twenty-four hours."
"But we found her phone. Isn't that suspicious?"
"Maybe she dropped it."
"But what about the guy who chased us? What about the shoes?"
"Yeah, we could tell the cops about that. About how we broke into an abandoned building and saw the world's most amazing shoes. And then a crazy bald guy appeared, and we ran away. That story should do wonders for our credibility."
I was silent for a moment, out of arguments but still not comfortable. "Jen, Mandy's my friend."