Sammy Keyes and the Kiss Goodbye (9 page)

“We on fire?” the manager growled without looking up.

“When’s the last time you’ve seen Sammy?”

Now
André looked up. And to his surprise, he found he was dealing with one of his more sane (and financially responsible) residents.

Ordinarily, Madame Nashira was a cool character. Draped in scarves and jingling with jewelry, she spoke of astral planes and cosmic coordinates, and there was nothing like her mysterious coo to make a man part with a few bucks for a palm reading.

But at the moment the coo was gone, and there was more than simple panic in her eyes.

There was full-blown fear.

“It’s been a couple of days,” André replied carefully. “Why?”

So Gina blurted out what she’d seen on the news, then cried, “Yesterday’s horoscope for Aries was ‘Avoid heights and stay close to home. Danger lurks in the shadows.’ ” Her eyes widened even farther. “Sammy’s an Aries!”

André was (to put it mildly) a skeptic when it came to Gina’s astral forecasts and fortune-telling. He considered it mumbo-jumbo. Bogus. A fool’s folly.

The word
stupid
also came to mind.

After all, Gina had once assured him that a woman was about to enter his life. She’d had a vision. One that included him and a woman who embodied “true heart and humor.”

And homemade lasagna.

“I could almost smell it,” she’d cooed. “The garlic? The oregano? My mouth was waterin’!”

Gina hadn’t charged him for relaying the vision, and it
was a good thing, too, because it had been six months and no woman of true heart
or
humor had entered his life. Nor had there been any signs of homemade lasagna—which was the part of Gina’s vision that had intrigued André the most.

So the horoscope would ordinarily not have rung any alarms in André’s mind, but the combination of the news, the horoscope, and the uncharacteristic concern in both Gina’s voice and her streetwise eyes caused the hotel manager to do more than just roll his cigar stub to one side of his mouth to facilitate better communication.

He actually removed it.

“What are you sayin’?” he asked the fortune-teller.

So Gina repeated everything she’d already said.

The upside to managing a run-down hotel is that you become familiar with local law enforcement. They’re in a lot. They get to know you. They learn not to blame you for your clientele, and begin to empathize with your plight.

After all, you don’t
own
the place. You just work there. And who would want to spend their days (and nights) in a place that smelled like rotten potatoes, squeezing rent out of derelicts and drunks?

So André was on a first-name basis with a number of people at the police station, and he managed (after several phone transfers) to confirm that the girl who’d been hurled from the fire escape of the Senior Highrise was, indeed, Samantha Keyes.

“It’s her,” he told Gina once he hung up. And while the fortune-teller whimpered and paced and cursed on one
side of the counter, André turned back to the phone and called Community Hospital from the other side.

Unfortunately, he knew no one at the hospital. ODs and stabbings funneled from the Heavenly had done nothing to build a rapport between the hotel manager and hospital personnel. If anything, the opposite was true.

So extracting information about Sammy’s condition was impossible.

There were rules.

And André wasn’t “family.”

“You don’t understand,” he tried to explain, because what was family, anyway?

A diva mom who was never there?

Or the people who loved the kid and all the trouble that came along with her?

Roadblocked, André finally slammed down the phone. And having no viable option, he did something that Gina, in all her years at the Heavenly, had never witnessed.

He locked up anything valuable (or remotely pawnable), grabbed his keys, and growled, “Let’s go.”

Once outside the hotel, they were stopped in their tracks by a muscle-bound man wearing tight black shorts, a yellow racerback tank, and bright blue wrestling boots. “Hey …!” the man called as he locked the door to Slammin’ Dave’s Pro Wrestling School. And that’s where the greeting stalled because, despite their having been neighbors for over a year, the school’s owner did not know the hotel manager’s name. What he
did
know was that his young friend Sammy hung out at the Heavenly (although
why, he’d never really understood), and that a rumor had flown through the wrestling school that she’d taken a bump that even a world-class wrestler would have trouble surviving. “Is it true?”

André had heard tales from Sammy about Slammin’ Dave and his pro wrestling school, so although the two men had never spoken, André understood exactly what the wrestler was asking. “Looks like,” he said through his cigar stub. “We’re headin’ over to the hospital now.” And then, in a flash of camaraderie that only shared despair can produce, he asked, “Want a ride?”

Slammin’ Dave nodded. “Thanks, man.”

Then off they went.

Pedal to the metal.

Three odd and weathered ducks, praying for a way to rescue their town’s bravest (and dearest) duckling.

Like the blind calling out to the deaf for help, the six-pack of teens was getting nowhere fast. At the police station they were told that Sergeant Borsch had gone to the Highrise. At the Highrise they checked both the crime scene and the lobby and found no sign of him, or the manager.

“That’s weird,” Casey said. “I thought that Garnucci guy was always here.”

They stood around the quiet lobby for a minute, and finally Holly asked, “Well, where to now?”

Marissa shrugged. “Back to the police station?”

“Why don’t we just call?” Heather snapped, but since it was Heather asking and she was being bossy, Marissa, Holly, and Dot simply began walking toward the police station.

So Billy told Heather, “Come on, let’s just go,” and Casey added, “It’s on the way back to the hospital.”

But at the police station they were informed that, although Sergeant Borsch
had
been there a little while ago, he was gone again now.

“See?” Heather said as they left the station. “We should have called.”

The other girls couldn’t ignore the fact that she was right, but they did their best to do so anyway. “He’s probably at the hospital,” Holly said. “I’m heading back there.”

“Me, too,” Marissa said.

Heather, however, was getting fed up with the senselessness of the trek. “What are we
doing
? We should have just stayed at the hospital if this is all we’re doing!”

And although to Dot it
was
reminiscent of Pooh Bear and friends aimlessly circling the Hundred Acre Wood, she didn’t voice that comparison. Instead, she diplomatically suggested, “We didn’t know when we set out that we’d wind up back at the start. Sometimes you have to go nowhere to get somewhere.”

The others mentally scratched their heads at that comment, but Heather just came out and said,
“What?”

“You know what I mean,” Dot said, which elicited from Marissa and Holly a decisive “Of course we do!” and made Casey murmur to his sister, “Just walk.”

“But—”

“Just walk.”

So walk they did.

Until they entered the hospital’s front parking lot, where they all stopped dead in their tracks.

“Is that …?” Marissa said, pointing to a battered dirt bike with a sidecar. But with the red pennant flag sporting a big gold
J
, there was really no mistaking the vehicle.

“Justice Jack is
back
,” Billy squealed, and took off running toward the hospital.

“Oh, Officer Borsch is going to love this,” Marissa grumbled as they all hurried after Billy.

Marissa’s sarcasm wasn’t without cause. From his Golden Gloves of Justice to his Pellets of Pain … 
t
, Jack Wesley—known to his regional fans as the red-and-gold-spandex-clad Justice Jack—was one do-gooder that Sergeant Borsch had been happy to see relocate to a town far, far away.

Billy, on the other hand, had missed him. Having done a stint as the Deuce alongside the wannabe superhero, Billy had found an escape from the darker aspects of his life. Justice Jack had served as a mentor. Someone who held high ideals, expressed a courageous optimism, and could uncover a silver lining in even the most thunderous clouds.

Someone Billy embraced for being very much
not
like his father.

“Jack!” Billy cried as he charged into the ICU waiting room and spotted Jack Wesley in full regalia. “I thought you’d hung up the mask for good!”

“Some things in life are worth a reboot,” Jack boomed, stomping one of his thickly leathered (and heavily buckled) feet. “And capturing the culprit who did this despicable deed is just such a thing!”

“But … how’d you hear? I thought you’d moved to Reno!”

Jack didn’t want to let on that, although his training at the police academy in Reno was going fairly well, he still monitored law enforcement activities in Santa Martina because, let’s face it, change is hard, and hanging up the Golden Gloves of Justice and the red-and-gold bodysuit for a conservative blue uniform with a few staid patches
was even harder. (And don’t even bring up how he’d had to cut off his long hair.)

So he simply boomed, “It was a long trip, little shaver, but worth every mile!” as he punched his fists against the sides of his superhero-inspired utility belt.

It was at this point that Billy noticed the hair. On a regular long-haired Joe, it would have been the first thing anyone would notice, but with Jack it took a few minutes to process past the black mask and Roman centurion helmet. And Billy was about to exclaim, “Dude, you cut your hair!” only in that brief period of processing it also occurred to him that they were on camera. Although set up in a side room, a large news camera was pointed directly at them, and the red light was definitely on.

“Cut!” Zelda Quinn instructed her cameraman because Billy was now glowering in her direction. And then three other individuals charged into the waiting room, completely pulling the reporter’s focus away from Justice Jack and the glowering teen.

First there was a woman whose hair was ratted and shellacked to unbelievable heights. She was flowing with silk (and synthetic) scarves and wearing lots of dangling, jangling jewelry (all costume, save one silver-plated watch).

Right behind her was a man wearing ridiculously tight shorts, sky-blue wrestling boots, and a tank top that barely covered his bulging chest. And following
him
was a stout man with greased-back hair and a cigar stub clamped between his teeth, looking for all the world like he’d just stepped off the set of a 1930s gangster movie.

And when the trio all skidded to a halt and gasped,
“What’s the news on Sammy?” Zelda Quinn knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she had hit the mother lode. Whoever this girl was (besides the daughter of a legendary rock star, of course) and whatever she’d been doing on the fire escape of the Senior Highrise, there was a story here.

A big, big story.

Full of weird, weird people.

It was a reporter’s dream!

But she had to be careful. Unobtrusive. To get permission to be there at all, she’d had to plead her case to a hospital administrator, citing a desire to rally the community and capture a (maybe) kid killer. Still, it was only after making a host of confining promises (which included stringent stipulations involving patients’ privacy and not disturbing other people in the waiting room) that she’d been allowed to stay.

So Zelda Quinn was surrounded by lines that could not be crossed, but she was not one to be contained by lines. She’d learned long ago that subject footage coupled with her own voice-overs made for a more efficient use of airtime anyway. She could get to the point succinctly, without the notorious time-chewing
um
’s or
you know
’s typical of interviewees.

Yes, she knew how to work around the constraints imposed by the hospital, and from the way the oddball adults were now in animated conversation with what were clearly the Hurled Girl’s friends, Zelda Quinn gathered her resolve.

It was time to mingle!

“Rolling?” she asked her cameraman under her breath.

“You said cut,” he said back.

“Well, roll!” she said through her teeth. “And keep on rolling!” Then she stepped over the line (invisible though it was) and entered the fray. “Excuse me,” she said, and when the oddball adults and six-pack of teens fell silent, she told them, “I want to help.”

Good newscasters convince you they care. With attentive head bobbing and sympathetic eye contact, they pull a story along, ostensibly siding with their subject until a certain comfort level is reached and they are able to skillfully extract disquieting nuggets of emotion or controversial statements. Ideally, both.

Novice subjects allow this to happen. (In other words, they get worked.) An experienced subject, on the other hand (like, say, a politician), is always on point, rarely derailed, and gives (in the eyes of journalists and viewers alike) miserable interviews.

Of all the people in the conglomeration of oddball adults and teens, the only one not at least somewhat mesmerized by Zelda Quinn and her conjured sincerity was Holly. And after a minute or so of feigned tolerance, she slipped away, unnoticed, and made her way to Room 411.

Holly was relieved to get to Sammy’s room undeterred, but as she went inside, she was practically knocked over by an orderly on his way out.

“Oh, excuse me!” Holly gasped.

“That’s okay!” the orderly said as he maneuvered around her.

“How is she?” Holly called after him, but he was already gone.

And then she saw Sammy’s bed and panic engulfed her.

Two nuns and a priest were standing over the bed, praying.

“No!” Holly cried, sure that they were giving last rites.

“Don’t be alarmed,” one of the nuns said. And that’s when Holly noticed that the other nun had a big black cane and that this threesome was none other than Sisters Mary Margaret and Josephine and the bumbling Brother Phil. She hadn’t seen them in over a year, but they’d served her many times at the soup kitchen. Back when she’d been living on the streets.