Wild Sky 2 (11 page)

Yeah. That’s how inside my own head I was.

But again, all I got back was more nothing.

I was starting to worry about more than just my love life or impending lack thereof.

“Cow eyeballs or roach juice?” Calvin prompted me.

I set my phone on my lap, next to the binoculars. He’d been hitting me with Would You Rather questions all day.
Would you rather go on a stakeout or stick needles in your eyes?
was one I’d gotten more than once—and right now I wasn’t in the mood. “Focus. Please. And PS, you’re disgusting.”

Calvin sighed mightily without moving a muscle. “I was trying
not
to focus on dying from terminal boredom. And PS, thanks for the compliment.”

I matched Cal’s mighty sigh and changed the subject entirely. “So when exactly were you going to tell me that you were tracking down Morgan-the-Wonder-G-T?”

He
still
didn’t lift his head. “So Milo kinda sucks at keeping secrets, huh? One touch, and you instantly know everything.” He made a rusty sound that might’ve been considered laughter among the undead. “That must be weird.”

“That’s not the way it works,” I said, but then just shook my head. I didn’t want to talk about Milo, even though I could think of little else.

Meanwhile, Calvin was waiting for me to continue. Or maybe he wasn’t waiting. Maybe he’d just given up on anything ever happening. His eyes
were
starting to glaze over.

“Milo told me,” I told Calvin, nudging him so that he’d snap to it and listen, “with his words,
intentionally
, that you’d gotten an email from someone that you think might be Morgan. The G-T girl who can get inside Sasha’s head and help her, while also finding out what she knows about Dana’s sister.”

“Yeah, I dunno,” Cal said listlessly. “For someone who’s supposed to be like the second coming of Jesus with her super-telepathy, Morgan’s kinda mercenary.”

“Mercenary, as in…?”

“She charges for her services,” Cal informed me. “Two fifty for a consultation, a grand for what she calls an
intervention
. That’s what she would do with Sasha. And? The consultation is required before she’ll do the intervention. And she’s apparently scoping us out during the so-called consultation.
She
decides,
after
she takes our two hundred and fifty dollars, if she can be bothered to do the intervention.”

“That’s kind of…” I couldn’t find the word.

“Bullshit?” Cal provided it for me. “Not just kind of. Absolutely.”

“Does Dana know?” I asked as nothing continued to move in or around Rochelle’s beach house.

“I told her this morning, when you and Milo were…” He made those obnoxious smooching sounds that I’d come to hate.

I socked him in the shoulder, more because Milo
hadn’t
kissed me in a smoochy way. It had been more like a kiss for Great-Aunt Matilda.

“Ow!” Cal still didn’t sit up. He just turned slightly and made a sad face at me.

“Milo and I were eating breakfast,” I told Cal. “With Garrett.”

My use of the G-word triggered even more pain than that pseudo-punch, and Cal’s sad face turned tragic. “Why, oh why did Dana take
him
on her errands instead of me?”

“Probably because she didn’t want to leave me alone with him,” I suggested. “Which I appreciate. Also? I’m pretty sure whatever she’s up to, she’s paying for it with Garrett’s credit card.”

“Do you think they had lunch?” Cal moaned. “Someplace nice? Someplace delicious? Someplace where they’ll get something to go, and bring it, here, for us to eat—and whatever you do, don’t say no. Lie if you have to, but for the love of God, don’t say no…”

“Yes, I think she’ll bring us lunch,” I obediently told him, although I had no clue if Dana would give us as much as a second thought. “So what did she say when you told her?” I added, “About Morgan?”

“She was pissed, and it got noisy,” Cal said, perking up a little because Dana’s creative use of f-bombs always delighted him. “She thinks Morgan isn’t real.”

“We pay two hundred and fifty dollars for a face-to-face, so Morgan can choose to
not
do the intervention with Sasha?” I asked. “Do
we
still think Morgan is real?”

“Our only other option is to let
you
try to surf around inside Sasha’s head,” Cal pointed out.

“So we need to find two hundred and fifty dollars,” I concluded because we both knew that was a no-go, and we soon fell back into silence. It was possible that Calvin dozed off.

I alternated between looking at nothing through those binoculars, and watching my phone not ring.

Where
was
Milo, anyway?

And oh, yeah. Jilly. The girl who was missing. Where was she? Once we found her, we’d have Garrett out of our hair and this current awfulness could go back to normal.

“Would you rather,” Cal mumbled, “have all your food smell like poop or everything you drink smell like urine?”

I had no answer. Both choices were too awful. The question was a true lose/lose.

And I realized then, with Milo acting so weirdly distant, and with Dana so frustrated and angry over our lack of leads in our search for her sister, I wasn’t at all convinced that the
normal
we’d return to wouldn’t be equally awful, too.

————

Milo’s burner phone had died.

That’s why he hadn’t called.

He finally came back, roaring up the street on Dana’s motorcycle, dust flying behind him as he approached, like some blockbuster movie hero.

Again, he didn’t reach for me or kiss me hello after he pushed his bike into the reeds and then climbed into the backseat of Cal’s car.

Of course, that might’ve been because I greeted him with a somewhat strident “Where have you been? Are you all right? Why didn’t you call?”

“I apologize,” he said as he handed his burner cell over to Cal, who was our unofficial tech expert. “When I left this morning, I had ninety percent battery and three hundred minutes left. But the first time I tried to call you, it was already dead. I’m so sorry, Sky. I didn’t want to leave Rochelle.”

Calvin handed the phone back to Milo. “It’s dead, Jim. Looks like a case of POS-itis. You’re gonna have to get a new one. Maybe go for a little
less
of a piece of shit this time?”

I exhaled hard. “Well, where’s Rochelle right now? Do we have time to—”

Milo was already shaking his head no. “She stopped at the farm stand down by the public beach,” he reported. “She’ll be here soon.”

So much for ringing her doorbell or peeking in the windows.

“We need to duck when we see her coming,” Milo continued. He met my eyes. “I don’t want her near you. She’s definitely a Destiny addict. Her day was full trophy-spouse—tanning, facial, yoga—which isn’t all that different from lots of people here on Coconut Key, I know. But Garrett wasn’t kidding when he said that she’s mean. The way she treats other people…” He shook his head. “She’s a user.”

Cal and I were well aware that Destiny addicts quickly lost their humanity and empathy.

“She does have at least one friend though,” Milo continued. “Someone she met for lunch over at Harbor Locke.”

Harbor Locke was where the
really
rich people lived in Coconut Key—not just your average multimillion or billionaire, but full-on trillionaires.

“This woman could’ve been Rochelle’s clone,” Milo told us.

“So…another D-user,” Cal concluded.

“That would be my guess,” Milo said. “They had lunch there, at the club. It was all air kisses and hugs when Rochelle finally left. Happy-sounding
See you laters
.”

“Did you get a name?” Cal asked.

“No, but the lunch took a full hour,” Milo reported. “If it’s something Rochelle does regularly…”

Then we’d have an hour to get inside her house—an hour that we
could’ve
used today. “When you get the new phone,” I told Milo, “please also get a backup.”

He smiled tightly. “I will.”

“What was next in Rochelle’s Very Important Day?” Calvin asked. “Maybe a stop at the local curling club or perchance a little horse dancing?”

Milo laughed. “No, but the next place she went was interesting,” he told us, but then cut himself off to say, “Get down. Now.”

Rochelle’s car was approaching, and we all scrunched way down in our seats so Cal’s car would look empty if she happened to notice it there.

But she pulled into her driveway without stopping, and I inched back up so I could watch as the automatic garage door opened. The car pulled inside, and the door went back down almost immediately.

I reached for the binoculars, hoping that she’d go into the kitchen, maybe open the sliders to allow the fresh ocean breeze into the house. It wasn’t as cold today, so that was a real shot. Truth was, I was dying to get a look at her.

“Next place Rochelle went was…” Cal prompted Milo.

“A pawn shop near Harrisburg,” Milo told us.

“What?” Cal said as I said, “Seriously?”

“Yes,” Milo said. “She walked in wearing a lot of jewelry and walked out without it—carrying a thick envelope filled with cash.”

“Why is she pawning her bling?” Cal asked. “If she has access to Garrett’s dad’s credit card…?”

“But she can’t use his card to buy drugs—at least not anymore,” I said. “So she uses the card to buy jewelry, which she then pawns for cash to buy Destiny.
Boom!
”

Milo nodded. “In theory, yes. That’s what I was expecting. But then it got weird. After the pawn shop, Rochelle headed back across town for a…uh…” Milo held his hands out and pretended to paint his thumbnail with an imaginary brush.

“Mani-pedi?” I helped him out.

“That!” Milo exclaimed. “It was at a place called Beauty-holic Spa.”

I listened intently, clutching the binoculars as I scanned the house again. So far Rochelle hadn’t opened any of the doors to the deck.

“Before Rochelle went into the spa, after she parked in the lot out front—and first of all, there was a spot right near the door, but she didn’t take it, which was odd, because earlier she nearly got into a knife fight with a woman over a prime parking spot,” Milo told us. “This time, she parked way at the edge of the lot, and then she got out of her car and looked around. Hard. I had to duck behind an SUV, but she didn’t see me. She pulls that envelope out of her bag—”

“The cash from the pawn shop?” Cal asked.

“Yes,” Milo said. “And she’s chewing gum, but she takes it out of her mouth, all of it, and puts it onto the envelope, and then sticks the envelope up inside the front tire well of her car and goes into the spa.”

Cal scrunched his eyebrows together. “I was absent from school the day we studied Drug Deals 101, but what you just described sounds a lot like illegal activity to me.” He shrugged. “I mean, cue the drug dealer, and…action!”

“Good guess,” Milo said as he looked from Cal to me. “A few minutes later, a man pulls into the lot and parks next to her car. Mid-forties. Short, dark hair. Dark sunglasses. Dark suit. Nice suit. Nice car, too. Everything about him screamed money. He sat there for about ten minutes, checking to see if anyone was watching.”

“Which you were,” I pointed out with a mix of disbelief and irritation. “And you were worried about me, sitting here staking out a whole bunch of
nothing
?”

“There was a bus stop right across the street,” Milo defended himself, “and Dana’s e-reader was in the bike’s storage compartment, so I pretended to read. Luckily the bus didn’t come.”

I stared at him, aghast. He was so casual about the fact that he’d been in serious danger.

“I’m a normie, Skylar,” he reminded me quietly. “No one wants
my
blood.”

“Yeah, but they might kill you for being a witness to a felony,” I countered.

“That’s not gonna happen,” he said so absolutely that I almost believed him. Almost.

Calvin interrupted. “So our Man-in-Black, did he take the cash and leave the drugs? The suspense is killing me. Or maybe that’s starvation I’m feeling—it’s all starting to blur… Come closer, my children. I can’t see your faces…”

Milo was still watching me, and I shrugged a
whatever
that I didn’t really feel. And I’m pretty sure, even without our connection, that he knew that.

He cleared his throat again and told us, “He took the cash. But then he just drove away. No drugs left behind. No nothing.”

That was not the conclusion that Calvin and I expected. And I understood now why Milo was perplexed. Rochelle had made only half of a drug deal. It didn’t make sense.

“Are you sure?” I asked cautiously, not wanting to imply that Milo might’ve missed seeing the—what was it called in all those gangland movies I’d seen? The
drop
.

Calvin was less delicate. “Maybe you missed it, Miles. Maybe you blinked when he dropped the vial on the ground next to her car. Maybe—”

“I don’t think so.” Milo was pretty convinced.

“Check your math,” Calvin suggested. “Use Sky’s creepy telepathy thing to let her scan your memory. Maybe she’ll see something you missed.”

Milo looked at me, and I looked at him, and his
uh-oh
was nearly audible.

Cal didn’t hear it though, and he had another question. “So did he rob her, then? Was Rochelle upset when she came back out? Like, did she start searching her tire well, or screaming, or…”

Milo shook his head. “She didn’t even look. She came out of the spa focused on her phone, checking texts or whatever. She went straight to the car, got in, and drove away. I’d guess the guy who took the money texted her some kind of
got it
message.”

I realized what Milo was saying. “Wait, you didn’t follow the man in black? Wasn’t he kind of a major lead? I mean, we know where to find Rochelle.” I gestured at the giant house.

But Milo shook his head. “My job was to stick with Rochelle,” he told me. “Without my phone working, I had to make sure I could get back here in time to warn you that she was returning.”

Because apparently keeping me safe trumped everything. I hid my frustration by pretending to look through the binoculars at the house, but inwardly I seethed. And worried. What was
up
with Milo…? That unspoken
uh-oh
was freaking me out. Why didn’t he want to touch me? What was he hiding?