CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The fall could have been a lot worse. It came at the apogee of a half-pipe jump, which Scoot must have mis-timed.

The skateboard squirted out from under her feet. Scoot's shins cracked with white agony into the concrete lip. The board went skittering wheels-up down the curve Then, like in the old nursery rhyme about Jack and Jill, Scoot went tumbling after.

She fetched up groaning in a heap at the bottom of the half-pipe, the board on its back next to her with its wheels slowly spinning to a stop.

A round of sarcastic applause greeted her performance. Scoot flipped them the finger without looking. She got up and limped to a bench in front of a row of portable toilets, where she sat rubbing her lower legs.

It was all too easy to imagine her shinbones as long splintery sticks. They didn't feel broken, and the pain was already fading, but she knew from past experience that by morning she would have two colossal plum-colored bruises.

The skate park was always busiest on sunny Saturdays. Most of the crowd was made up of kids and families, the younger ones who would put up with the helmet-and-pads rule. But there were enough older participants that Scoot wasn't an anomaly.

Top-forty music thumped from pole-mounted speakers and the cement maze of ramps, bowls, half-pipes and jumps simmered in the sunshine. A few attendants perched on high chairs like lifeguards, ready with whistles and bullhorns whenever they saw someone ignoring the rules posted in red lettering on a large white billboard.

The park was adjacent to Funway, an arcade that offered miniature golf, bumper boats, batting cages, Laser Tag, singing robot animals and games that paid out in tickets to be redeemed at obscene exchange rates for cheap trinkets. The snack bar served pizza, hot dogs, popcorn, ice cream, soda pop, cotton candy and giant stale pretzels. Funway was the spot for birthday parties on this side of town.

Crowded, yes, and if Scoot had been interested in purses today there would have been plenty of mom-purses to choose from. Skateboard groupie purses, too. Not that she was interested. God, no. Right now, she thought she might be cured of her purse-snatching habit forever.

She had been here for most of the day, eating an unhealthy lunch and telling herself that at least her jaw muscles were getting a workout trying to chew a pretzel with the consistency of half-dried adobe. She was sweaty, achy and exhausted.

But she felt good. She'd needed this. Had been getting herself all worked up, tied in knots, about that purse. When really, it wasn't anything she had to worry about.

The thing to do was simply claim, as Allison, that she had found it. And that she'd been so shocked by what was inside that the only thing to do was contact the police.

After all, it certainly was not as if the blonde woman would have filed a report about the purse-snatching. Not with what she'd been carrying, what she'd been doing.

The police would take it from there. The police would warn Benedict Westbrook, and it'd all work out fine.

This was not something that she, either as Scoot or as Allison, needed to involve herself in. True, the wild and reckless part of her had contemplated heading over to Palmyra Hills today instead of to the skate park. Just to see the house, maybe see Westbrook, maybe get an idea of why someone would want him dead. That was the part most intriguing to her. What could he have done? Who would pay that kind of money to kill him? Why?

A case like this, though, was probably the sort of thing that would make the papers. She could read about it later. Read about it without seeing her own name in print.

Scoot had been sitting with sore legs outstretched, but had to draw them back fast as a herd of yelling children raced by. They had sticky faces and frenetic eyes, no doubt on a total sugar high.

As she got up, thinking to move to safer ground, she noticed someone looking at her. He was a guy she'd seen around the usual skater hangouts. Hard to miss. Big. Hairy. Resembled one of Dr. Moreau's test subjects that had started out as an orangutan. Room-temperature IQ. Camo pants and combat boots. Drawing looks of his own from the attendants because he might be the type to pull out an Uzi and turn birthday parties into bloodbaths.

His beady gaze was fixed on Scoot. The quality of it made her skin creep. Greedy. Predatory.

She did a hasty but surreptitious check to make sure that her clothes were still arranged, that she hadn't torn her shirt wide open in the fall and exposed her bra or something.

Did he know the truth about her? Did he know that Scoot was really a girl?

Her clothes were fine. Baggy stonewashed jeans, sneakers, an oversized tee shirt bearing the logo of the local major-league baseball team. Her helmet hadn't come off, either.

So why the look? Why the predator's greedy stare?

Scoot didn't like it.

Pretending not to be aware of him, she picked up her board and rose from the bench. She threaded her way through throngs of kids and teenagers. Her stuff was in one of the outdoor lockers.

He followed. At a distance, but he was following her all right.

Oh, great.

When she reached her locker, she unpinned the key stuck with a safety pin to the bottom inside hem of her shirt. She opened the locker and grabbed her duffel. By then, the hairy guy was lingering at the end of the row. He had a cell phone pressed to his ear. Seeing her glance his way, he acted – badly – like he was just innocently placing a call.

She hurried for the exit, not like she was being chased but like she happened to need to catch a bus in a few minutes. The parking lot was full of minivans. She wended her way between them, reached the sidewalk of Pine Street, and set her board on the ground.

Lost him. Good.

But moments later, he appeared behind her on a bike.

No coincidence. He was following her.

Maybe she was being paranoid. Hell, didn't she have a right to be, after yesterday? She didn't know why he would follow her even if he did suspect that there was more to skateboarder Scoot than met the eye.

But he was. She was sure of it.

All right, then. Let him try. Even with wheels, he wouldn't be able to keep up with her.

Scoot was off in a flash, building up speed with a series of strong kicks. The skateboard jolted over seams in the sidewalk with a rapid thud-thud, thud-thud.

Ahead, a city bus was in the process of disgorging its passengers. Several were kids bound for Funway, happy and excited, carrying birthday presents and gift bags with tissue paper foaming out of the top. Scoot veered around them.

Mailman, dead ahead! Not paying attention. Head down, sorting through a pile of catalogs. Navy blue canvas bag taking up half the sidewalk.

Scoot went off the curb, directly in front of the city bus as its doors hiss-thumped shut and it began to pull back into traffic. The horn, right over her head, sounded like the end of the world. If she fell, the huge tires would crush her into roadkill.

Rather than try and get out of the way, she braced both feet on the skateboard and leaned her back and butt against the front of the rolling steel behemoth. It pushed her along. Her wheels shuddered on the asphalt and the word "whoa!" came out of her in a jittery stutter.

She craned her neck. Through the wide windshield, she could see the bus driver gesturing at her. The horn blew again. The bus slowed as he braked.

"Spoilsport!" she shouted over her shoulder, and kicked off from the bus. She hopped back onto the curb, dodged a man walking a cocker spaniel and a woman with a stroller, and sped around a blind corner.

A shop owner and a delivery man had been nose-to-nose arguing, but both leaped backward as Scoot shot between them. "Sorry!" she called back. But she'd done them a favor, because instead of resuming yelling at each other, they both forgot whatever they'd been fighting about and were joined in brotherhood as they yelled after her.

Another dog, this one no clownishly cute cocker spaniel but a bulldog with a scrunched-up face and a pissed-at-the-universe bark, was tied to a parking meter and tried to take a bite out of Scoot's leg. Avoiding that with some fancy footwork, she damn near ran over a portly man too busy reading the Wall St. Journal to look where he was going.

She reached the next cross street and had to stop for the light. There were too many cars moving too fast here for her to risk it. She was a daredevil, maybe, but not suicidal.

Looking back, she saw the bus go through the intersection.

And the hairy red guy come around the corner on his bike.

Shit!

The light went from green to yellow, and Scoot lunged into the street heedless of the last few drivers who tried to make it before the red. A beat-up old Mustang the color of cat puke screeched to a smoking-rubber halt inches from her, and a man's hand popped out the driver's side window to give her a stiff-fingered salute.

Then she was across, pushing hard, whirring along, trying not to bean anybody with her wildly-swinging duffel. Midway down the block she hung a hard right into an alley. It was a narrow corridor between low-rent apartment buildings, all rusty fire escapes and barred windows and overflowing Dumpsters –

-- and three little girls playing jump-rope in the middle of the alley.

"Cinderella-dressed-in-yella-went-upstairs-to-kiss-a-fella," they chanted, two of them turning the long rope while the third, scabby knees showing beneath pink shorts, jumped.

Scoot dismounted at a run, slammed her heel on the back of the board, and flipped it up so that she could catch it by the front end. She trotted to a stop a few yards from the girls, who had left off their chanting to look at her with wide, solemn eyes. The rope lay slack between them, and the jumper stood with one white-sneakered foot on either side of it. She had pink barrettes in her frizzy-dark hair and the Powerpuff Girls on her shirt.

"Made-a-mistake-and-kissed-a-snake," Scoot said. "How-many-doctors-did-it-take?"

The three little girls gave her three gap-toothed smiles. She hopped over the rope and broke into a run, though the jogging motion renewed the pain in her shins in a way that riding the board hadn't done.

At the end of the alley, she looked back. The girls had resumed their jumping and chanting, and she didn't see the guy on the bike.

He hadn't been following her after all.

Relieved, Scoot headed for home.

She changed in the junkyard again, the shadows by now long and cool. Booger the dog was eating kibble in great snuffling gulps out of a stainless-steel bowl big enough to bathe a baby in. The tag on his collar made atonal metallic clinks and clanks.

As she stepped through the fence into the alley, and then onto Dunley Street, she was bathed in whirling pulses of red light from the roof-rack of a police car.

**