“He has a point,” I said.
“And who’s going to believe that we just found it?” Spoon continued, raising both arms in the air excitedly. “Suppose they think we’re the drug dealers. I’ve already got a rep, you know. They’ll send me to the big house.”
“The big house?” Ema repeated.
“The slammer, the joint, the pen, up the river, juvie, the clink-”
“Okay, Spoon,” I said.
“We can’t tell anyone we found this,” Spoon insisted. “Don’t you see? Imagine a tasty morsel like me in a prison.”
“Relax,” I said. “No one is going to prison.”
“And suppose they do believe us?” Spoon continued. “Suppose we tell the truth and they believe us and it all traces back to Rachel. How is she going to explain this?”
Silence. Even Ema knew that he was making sense.
“We need to think,” I said.
“Quickly,” Spoon added.
“We can’t just let it go either,” Ema said. “We know what happened now. Rachel’s mom goes on a rant about how evil her father is. Rachel investigates. She finds this bag. She hides it and contacts the Abeona Shelter, right?”
I nodded, remembering my conversation with Shaved Head. He had thought that maybe Rachel had given me the package. She hadn’t. I wondered why Rachel hadn’t told me about it, but now I understood. Her mother was killed over this package. Rachel herself was shot. If she told me where it was, well, she’d be putting me in danger too.
“Meanwhile,” Ema continued, “Rachel’s dad or those bad guys are wondering what happened to the bag. They figured out that Rachel must have taken it…”
“No,” I said. “They probably figured that Rachel’s mom had taken it.”
“Right. So they went after her, and, well, we know what happened next.”
“She ended up dead.”
Spoon said, “We gotta go. Let’s just put the bag back in the locker and try to think it out.”
“That won’t work either,” I said. “The lock is broken. We can’t leave it in an unlocked locker.”
“So what do we do?” Ema asked.
“You give it to us.”
I spun toward the rough voice. The two men I spotted in the souped-up car at Rachel’s house were there. Both men were carrying guns. Scarface, the one Detective Waters had warned me about, said, “Nobody move. Put your hands up.”
“But if we’re not supposed to move,” Spoon began, “how can we put our hands up?”
Scarface pointed his gun at Spoon’s chest. “You being a smart mouth with me?”
“No, no, it’s okay,” I said in the calmest voice I could muster. “We’re all doing exactly what you tell us. You’re in charge here.”
“Bet your butt I’m in charge,” Scarface said, turning his attention back to me. “Now take off those stupid masks.”
Spoon: “But if we’re not supposed to move-”
“Spoon,” I interrupted. I shook my head at him to shut him up. We all took off our masks and dropped them on the floor.
Scarface pocketed his gun, but his partner was still at the ready. The partner was a huge guy. He wore his sunglasses indoors in the dark and sported the blankest expression I had ever seen on his face. He looked like a bored, cold killer, like he would just as soon shoot us as not, no biggie. I didn’t know what to do or say, so for now, I just stayed silent.
Scarface walked over to the gym bag. He bent down and looked inside.
“It all there?” Sunglasses asked.
“Seems to be,” Scarface said. He stood and grinned at me. “Thanks for finding our stuff for us, Mickey.”
“How do you know my name?” I asked.
“Simple really. We figured that either Rachel or Mommy stole our little package from Daddy. So we got a hold of her cell phone records. Seems she called you right before the big bang-bang, so we figured, hey, maybe you, her boyfriend, helped her hide it. So we started following you. Easy-peasy, right?”
The baby talk, to put it mildly, was unnerving.
“Right,” I said. “You got your stuff. You can go now.”
Scarface grinned at Sunglasses. The corner of Sunglasses’s lips twitched. I didn’t like that twitch.
Scarface zippered the bag back up. “When we followed you to that burned-up old house, well, for a second I thought maybe she hid the stuff there and it got burned up. That would have been very, very bad.”
“But that wasn’t the case,” I said, trying to stand a little taller. “Your stuff was here the whole time. Now it’s yours again.”
“Yep,” Scarface said. “I see that. Only one problem.”
I swallowed. The small stone of fear in my chest started expanding, making it hard to breathe. “What’s that?”
“You guys. I mean, you saw our faces.”
“We won’t say a word,” Ema said.
Scarface turned his attention to her now. As he moved closer to Ema, I tried to slip between them, but he stopped me with a glare. I didn’t like the look in his eyes. They were cruel eyes, the kind that enjoyed hurting others-the kind, I realized with mounting horror, that would never listen to reason.
“You expect me to just trust you, sweet cheeks?” Scarface asked. His face was mere inches away from Ema’s now. She looked as though she was about to cry. “You expect us to just, what, let you go?”
“My arms are getting tired,” Spoon said. “Can I put them down?”
Scarface spun toward him. “I told you not to move.”
“Well, yes, you did, but then you had us move twice-once to put our hands up, once to take off our masks.” Spoon slid toward the right. “So that whole ‘don’t move’ thing? It seems more like a guideline than a hard, fast rule, you know what I mean? So I was hoping, seeing how my arms are getting really tired-”
And then Spoon did the unthinkable.
With all attention on the inanity of what he was saying, Spoon suddenly leapt at Sunglasses. The move surprised everyone, me included.
Next thing I knew, the gun went off. And Spoon fell to the ground, bleeding.
CHAPTER 38
For the briefest of moments, no one moved.
I say the briefest of moments because in reality, it was more like a flash-a whirlwind mix that will forever be frozen in my mind. Have you ever had a moment like that, a moment that is shorter than a snap and yet stays with you forever? It was as though time had truly stopped. I remember it all. I remember the sound of the gunshot. I remember Spoon falling back. I remember Ema screaming. I remember Spoon on the ground, the red stain on his shirt spreading, his face losing color, his eyes closed.
I will never forget any of that.
But even in that flash, the one that couldn’t have lasted more than half a second, I could feel the sickening guilt wash over me.
I had done this to him. I had gotten Spoon shot.
But while part of me was devastated and panicked, another part of me relied on my martial arts training. Somewhere in my center I was suddenly calm. I could not let Spoon’s sacrifice go to waste. Spoon, for all his outward immaturity, had understood the truth. These two men were going to kill us. Someone, he realized, had to make a move. Someone had to do something even if it meant sacrificing himself.
Spoon had distracted them. I could stand here and cry.
Or I could take advantage of the opening.
The rest was a quick fury. It seemed as though a hundred things happened over a long period of time, but when I looked back on it, I knew that it had only taken a few seconds from the time Spoon was shot until the time it was over.
First, we all moved at once. It was as if someone suddenly released us from this pause into a frenzied tornado. I was the first to react. I started toward Sunglasses and his gun, though Scarface was in the way. Ema dropped to the floor to take care of Spoon. Scarface turned toward me. And Sunglasses swerved his gun in my direction.
I was too far away from him.
I was fast; I had gotten a jump on them. But I was still too many yards away to reach Sunglasses before he pulled the trigger again. I tried to calculate the odds. I could hope that he missed, but the chances were remote. I was simply too easy a target.