Sammy Keyes and the Search for Snake Eyes (10 page)

“He's got a snake tattoo with dice eyes on his arm and he was wearing South West colors. Do you know who I'm talking about?”

More blank stares.

“Well, she seemed really afraid of him, but she's got a South West scar, too, so I don't know what to think.”

The Gangster Girls' eyes shift back and forth, and then they start muttering stuff to each other, partly in English, partly in Spanish. And Brown Lips and Camo Butt are being really quiet, but then the third girl says, “It's gotta be her, Puffy—who else?”

Camo Butt gets right in the third girl's face and points at me, saying, “You think this snow bunny's got no ears? She ain't down with us! What are you thinking!”

The third girl kind of cowers back, but Brown Lips steps up and says, “Stall it out, Puffy.”

Puffy-butt doesn't calm down, though. She stays right in the Quiet One's face, saying, “You gotta learn to watch your mouth,
chola
, or that
vato loco
's gonna bust a cap in
you
.” She glances at Marissa and me and hisses, “What if they're trying to mess us over, huh? Then what?”

“We're … we're not trying to mess you over,” I tell her. “We're just trying to find her so we can—you know—
return
something.”

“Oh yeah,” says Camo Butt with her hands on her hips. “What?”

Now my brain is screaming, Don't tell her. Don't tell
her! But really, I'm confused. I mean, what's left to lose? Pepe's mother's missing and no one's got any idea who she is or where she is, and Officer Borsch is never going to be able to find her from my description.

But Pepe's mother's face flashes through my mind. She hadn't wanted Snake Eyes to know—not at any cost. So I say, “Something… valuable.” Then I add real fast, “To
her
, anyway.”

“Well,” says Camo Butt, “we're not missin' none of our homegirls, so we can't do nothin' for you.”

She turns to Brown Lips and mutters what sounds like, “Let's go check the palace,” then they all shuffle off across Morrison.

Very slowly, Marissa lets out a deep breath, one that I think she'd been holding the whole time we'd been talking to them. Then she whispers, “I don't want to go to high school.”

“What?”

“Ever. I swear, I thought junior high was scary, but this is over the top. Can you imagine being on campus with
them
?”

“Seems kinda like dealing with Heather Acosta to me. Only those guys were nicer.”

“
Nicer?
Sammy, that Puffy girl was like Heather times ten! Did you see that little wrist action of hers? Any minute I was expecting her to slice you up with a switchblade!”

We headed up Morrison, along the high school grass toward Broadway. And we were just about
at
Broadway when I got an idea. “Marissa?”

She looks at me. “Oh, no. What.”

“Well, I was thinking.”

“I knew it. I'm never going to get home tonight, am I? I'm never going to get to pitch in the Sluggers' Cup tournament because you've got some harebrained scheme that's gonna get me sliced and diced and left for dead, am I right? Why don't I just step out in traffic now and get it over with?”

I laughed at her. “Ma
ris
sa!”

“Well? Am I right? What do you want to do? Go
back
through gang territory?”

“No! I just want to go to the library.”

“The … library?” “Yeah. The high school library. Do you think it's open?”

“This late? I don't know,
may
be. Why do you want to go there?”

“I've got an idea, that's all. It won't take long—come on.”

“But Sammy…”

“Look, I checked out the fields with you, and we wouldn't be doing this at all if you hadn't decided to take that wonderful shortcut through Tigertown.”

“All right,” she grumbled. “All right!”

So we ran across the grass and onto the high school campus and asked the first person we saw where the library was. “Right over there,” he said, pointing.

“Is it open?” I asked him.

“Yeah.”

“Thanks!” I said, running toward the library.

“Wow,” Marissa whispered, pushing her bike beside me. “He was cute!”

I laughed. “You're never going here, remember?”

We thwonked through the library turnstile and headed straight for the librarian's desk. Right away I knew the man reading a newspaper behind the counter was not a librarian, or if he was, he wasn't a very good one. First off, he wasn't old enough. I mean, to be a good librarian, you need to be, well, old enough to know about books. Lots of books. And he also had this look about him—not like he was shy a few pages, more like there were whole chapters he hadn't bothered to read.

Then the clincher—this guy wasn't reading the front page, or the obituaries, or even the funnies. He was soaking up the sports page.

I said, “Hey, Coach, where do they keep the year-books?”

He glanced at me, and for a split second I could see him trying to place me, but then he just flashed a smile and hitched a thumb behind him. “Back there.” He turned around a little. “On that last shelf.”

“Thanks!”

On our way over, Marissa whispers, “You think Pepe's mom went to school here?”

“Yeah, I do. But I'm also looking for those Gangster Girls. I want to know their real names.” I pulled the previous year's book off the shelf. “Start with juniors and work back through sophomores—that would make them seniors or juniors this year. They can't be any younger than that, right?”

“They looked pretty old to me.”

I pulled down a book from the year before for myself. “I'll go through this one.”

Two minutes later, Marissa had a hit. “Here's one!”

It was the quiet girl. Real name: Sonja Ibarra. And she looked positively sweet in the picture. Happy eyes, friendly smile.

I pulled my school binder out of my backpack and wrote down her name. “Is that the juniors section?”

“Yeah.”

“So she's a senior this year.” “Right.”

I took Marissa's book and flipped to the index. “Ibarra … Ibarra … here it is! Sonja Ibarra, pages fiftyone, ninety-three, and one eighty-two.” I jotted down the numbers and started digging though the book. “Fifty-one. That's her mug shot. Ninety-three. Here we go.” It was a spread of candids, some dress-up, some from rallies. “You see her?”

“Yeah! Right there!” Marissa planted her finger under Sonja's face and whispered, “And look who's right beside her!”

It was Puffy, the Camo-butt Queen.

We flew through the captions, reading names. “Margie Hernandez!” we said together, then looked at each other and whispered,
“Margie?”

I jotted it down and said, “Let's finish with Sonja first.”

Marissa flipped over to page 182. “Softball?” she said.

“You're kidding.”

“No, look! She played varsity last year.”

I studied the picture. “Wow. What position?”

We both started skimming the article and captions, but Marissa found it first. “‘Returners Sonja Ibarra and Christy Spry had the corners covered, with Sonja on third and Christy on first.’” She looked at me and said, “She played third base.”

While I jotted this down, Marissa flipped to the index and found two pages on Sonja's homegirl Margie. “There's only one other on her—page one ten.”

The page was another collage of candids, this time under the heading Friends. I spotted Miss Puffy right away. And two days ago I wouldn't have paid any attention to her hands, but now they jumped right out at me. In the picture, they were casually pulled back to her sides, but the fingers stretched and spazzed into the same shapes I'd seen her make on the street. This time, though, I could tell what those hands were doing. “Look,” I said as I pointed it out to Marissa. “That's an S and that's a W.”

Marissa whispers, “They're flashing gang signs? In a
year
book?”

“I guess so.”

“Hey, look!” she says. “Right there. Isn't that the other girl?”

Sure enough, there she was, brown lips and all, way in the back, flashing her sign. I muttered through the caption, “ ‘Friends in need are friends indeed; from left to right, friends for life …’ She's the fourth one over?”

“Right.”

“That would be …Gizelle Menendez.”

I wrote it down while Marissa flipped back to the index. “Just her mug on fifty-four.”

So we'd found them. Puffy the Camo Butt was Margie Hernandez. Brown Lips was Gizelle Menendez. And the Quiet One was Sonja Ibarra. All seniors at Santa Martina High. “Okay!” I said. “We've got the Gangster Girls. Now to find Pepe's mom.”

“We don't even know that she went to school here.”

“But her scar tells us she lived in the neighborhood, right?”

“I guess.” She hesitated, then said, “How old do you think she is?”

“I don't know… twenty?”

“So she would have graduated two years ago?” “Maybe three?”

Marissa closed her book. “So she probably wouldn't be in this book. And I'm not going to be much help—I don't even know what she looks like.”

“Okay, look. You can go if you want to, but I've got to try.”

“No, I'll stay, but —”

“Hey, would you call Grams for me? Tell her I'll be home as soon as I can?”

“Sure. I ought to check in, too, just in case Mom's actually home on time.”

So while she was off tracking down a phone, I began scouring the books. I started with a yearbook that was
two years old, and I made myself focus on every picture. By the time I'd made it through the seniors, juniors, and sophomores in the first book, Marissa was back.

She slides in next to me and says, “Your grams says thanks for the message. She was starting to get worried. She also says be careful when you come home—she's got to talk to you about Mrs. Wedgewood.”

“Uh-oh. Wonder if she fell off the toilet again.”

“What?”

So while I went through more pages, I explained to her about Mrs. Wedgewood and having to stand out on the fire-escape landing while the paramedics hoisted her up.

“Tell me you're joking.”

I flipped a page. “Nope. Beats Mrs. Graybill, though. Any day of the week.”

Marissa looks at what I'm doing and says, “These are freshmen here? Why not just go to the next book? Their pictures get bigger, don't they?”

She was right. The freshmen mug shots were tiny, even smaller than the sophomores. It wasn't until the juniors section that the pictures were a decent size. So I pulled down a book two years older and started all over again. And when I didn't find her in
that
one, Marissa says, “Well, maybe she didn't go here. Or maybe she's older than twenty.”

It was beginning to feel like my morning at the police station, looking through page after page of mug shots. Not as bad, though, because almost every picture had someone smiling instead of glaring.

But still, after the next book, I'd about given up. And I was kind of mad about it, too, because in my gut I just
knew
she had to be in one of these books.
Some
where. And as I'm putting the yearbook I'd just gone through away, Marissa says, “Maybe she's younger than she looks. Ever think of that?”

“Well, how young could she be?”

Marissa shrugs, “How should I know? If you look through this book, you've covered the last four years. You've already gone back, what—four books? That's eight years, right? Is she older than twenty-two?”

“I don't know—I'm terrible at ages!”

Just then, from over by the librarian's desk, we hear the coach guy call, “We're out of here in ten! Start cleaning up!”

“Rats!” I grabbed the book Marissa had and pushed through the pages to the beginning of the seniors section. As fast as I could, I looked at every single picture. Then I looked at the juniors. Then the sophomores. And finally I'm down to the freshmen section, just waiting for Coach to blow the whistle, when all of a sudden I spot her. “Marissa!”

“What?”

I put my finger on the page. “That's her!”

Marissa looks real close and says, “Lena Moreno. She looks nice! And she's very pretty. Are you sure that's her?”

“I'm positive. But Marissa … this is last year's book and she was a
freshman
.” I look at her and whisper, “That means she's only…”

Marissa's head bobs up and down as she says, “About sixteen.”

I blinked at the picture, not quite believing it. I checked the year on the spine, the section in the book, but there was just no getting around it.

Pepe's mother was only a few years older than we were.

I was still having trouble believing what we'd figured out about Pepe's mom as I waved good-bye to Marissa at the police station. I mean, after the one night I'd spent with Pepe, there was no way I could see raising a baby. Not now, not in three or four years, not even in
ten
years. Talk to me when I'm thirty—maybe I'll be ready to never sleep again and to live my life in spit-up, changing diapers and mixing formula, but for now I've seen enough of babies to know that they're not cute little coochie-cooey dolls. Demanding little demons, that's what they are. And I plan to stay miles away for a long, long time.

Anyway, I went inside the police station, figuring I'd have to track Officer Borsch down via courtesy phone seeing how it was after five o'clock. But the counter's roll-up window was still rolled up, and there behind the counter was Debra the Dodo.