CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The warm milk didn't help.

Allison's sleep was thin and restless. She kept waking with a start and a painful gasp, sure that someone was in the room with her. The first time, she saw Uncle Bob's life-sized cardboard stand-up figure of Elvis in the corner and almost wet the bed.

She wrestled Elvis into the hall, but still spent the next few hours tossing and turning and getting up to check that the window was locked.

At six, when the eastern sky was beginning to turn pale, she gave up and got dressed. She moved quietly around the amiable music-memorabilia clutter of the guest room, trying not to knock anything over.

The guest room technically wasn't a guest room. It was a shrine, a museum. The bed was a rollaway that normally stayed in the closet, and had been set up in the middle of a cleared space barely large enough for it to fit. Allison was sure that not having any part of the bed up against the wall had contributed to her uneasy rest. She'd felt like she was on an island, or floating unanchored on a raft, out in a dark, dark sea.

Her body ached all over. Slowly, carefully, moving like a little old lady, she dressed in sweatpants and a white sweatshirt advertising a Rose Bowl now seven years gone.

She could still taste the toothpaste from when she'd brushed before bed, but it was a faint residue under a nasty coating. She shuffled into the tiny bathroom, avoiding her reflection.

Her throat burned and throbbed. There were pain-relievers in the medicine cabinet and she took three ibuprofen, thinking that she'd heard somewhere that ibuprofen reduced swelling. Each pill felt like a boulder going down. A boulder covered with jagged outcrops of stone. Obsidian-stone. Volcanic glass.

Then, because it was better to know the worst and view the damage, she closed the medicine cabinet and looked squarely at herself in the mirror.

"Damn," she whispered.

It was pretty bad, even allowing for the unflattering light. Her face was lumpy, bruised, and unfamiliar. The marks on her neck had darkened. Sunglasses and a turtleneck would only make her look like a battered woman trying to hide what had been done to her.

And she was supposed to go to the police station like this?

Well, maybe they'd take one look at her and feel so sorry for her that they'd go easy in their questioning.

She went back to the guest room to put her little overnight bag back in her duffel, and as she was doing that she saw the phone at the bottom. The pre-paid cell phone. She took it downstairs with her.

The house was old and creaky, and every stair tread that squalled under her made her pause, listening for an interruption to Uncle Bob's snoring. She felt bad enough for screwing up his night's rest already. But he snored on, undisturbed. He might not have heard if a jet buzzed the roof.

Downstairs, she sat by the front window and watched the sky brighten. Then she turned her attention to the phone and switched it on.

The display screen came alive and informed her that there were missed calls. She brought them up. All were from the same number, at various times through the night and even into the wee hours of the morning. Someone had really wanted to get in touch with the guy.

Allison fiddled with the keypad until she got the "return call" option. She held it to her ear. It rang once, then again, and then was answered.

"It's about time!" A woman's voice, sounding wide-awake despite the early hour.

"Um," Allison said, faltering. "Hello?"

"Who is this?" Instantly alert, and sharp as a blade.

"Who's this?" Allison countered.

"Let me speak to Jon."

"He's … um … not here."

"Well, where the hell is he?" She sounded like an older woman, angry, mature … and weirdly familiar. "Who are you, and how did you get his phone and this number?"

"I'm …" Allison trailed off as recognition dawned.

"Hello? Are you there?"

She felt like she'd been dipped in liquid nitrogen. The woman's voice … it was impossible. It couldn't be. How …? What …? Her mind did not so much spin or reel as it skidded, like tires on a sheet of black ice.

It was the blonde. The voice from the tape. The woman named Jade. The killer.

Somehow, it was her on the other end of the line.

Allison didn't know how that could be, and grasped mentally at straws. She hadn't listened that closely to the voices on the tape …

A lie. She had concentrated intensely on those voices, trying to absorb every nuance, once she understood what she was hearing.

"Damn it," the woman said. "I'm not in the mood for stupid games. Let me talk to Jon."

"How do you know Jon?" Allison asked. Her own voice was thick and odd, and not just because of her throat.

"Put him on the phone."

"I can't. He's not here."

"Then who is this?"

What could she say? "I'm … um …"

She heard the blonde grumble something about idiotic drugged-out kids.

"His girlfriend," Allison blurted.

"That figures. Where is he?"

"Out."

The blonde hissed in annoyance. Allison had thought herself awake before, but now she was sitting tense as a wire on the edge of the chair, fingers locked around the phone, heart skittering, mouth so dry she could barely work up the spit to say even those few words. She knew she should hang up, that this was too dangerous even for her tastes. The woman on the other end was a killer. Had somehow sent Jon after her. How much did she know?

"He told me about you," her mouth said, seemingly independently of her sliding-on-black-ice brain.

"What?" The word snapped through the phone like a whipcrack.

She had to find out how much Jade knew. "You're looking for Scoot."

"Yes," Jade said, with a tight, clipped tone that made her sound like she was striving to hold onto her temper. "He's got something that belongs to me."

Tentative relief thrilled through her at the knowledge that part of her secret was still safe. "You mean, he took your purse."

"That's right."

Allison closed her eyes. The spinning tires in her mind caught traction and raced. She'd seen Jon place a call from the skate park. Saying what? Saying he'd found Scoot and was going to follow Scoot home. Then he'd lost the trail and hadn't wanted to admit to it … and somehow caught up with Scoot again.

He must have seen Scoot go into the junkyard, and either spied as she changed – she squirmed with revulsion – or guessed when he saw Allison come out. And then what? Why hadn't he called back and told Jade that Scoot was really a girl?

She could envision the cold-voiced woman on the other end of the line getting Jon or someone like him to follow Scoot. She couldn't wrap her head around the idea that Jade would tell Jon to retrieve the purse. Not with what was in it. Jade must've only wanted him to find Scoot, and then planned to take over from there herself. But Jon had gotten ambitious.

"So, like, what's in there anyway?" Allison giggled the vapid, empty giggle of a skater groupie.

"Look, maybe you can help me." The voice warmed, became just-us-girls conspiratorial, and if Allison had really been the dippy skater-girl persona she was pretending to be, she would have been taken in by it. "I really need to find Scoot, or Jon. Can you tell me where either of them are? Jon was supposed to call me when he found him."

"Gee, I think Scoot lives over on the south side somewhere," Allison said. "I see him on the bus, you know, the 62?"

"Does Scoot have a real name?"

"Well, duh, like, probably!" Again with the giggle. "I don't know it, though. Maybe Kip. I think I heard someone call him Kip once."

"Who are you?"

"Steffi." The names popped out. Kip and Steffi were another couple of skater-kids she had known, back when she'd still been learning her way around. Kip was tall, lean, and hot, and had gone off to college in another state. Steffi had been his girlfriend, though rumor had it that he'd turkey-dumped her when he came home for Thanksgiving.

"And what about Jon? Are you at his place?"

"Yeah."

"Where's he?"

"I told you, out. He said he had to see a guy about some stuff. He's been gone all night."

"He left the phone?"

"I just found it under the bed."

"You've been there all night?" The sharp edge was back.

Allison got a precarious feeling. "Not all night, I guess. It was pretty late when I got here. What time is it?"

"Never mind that. Did anyone come by?"

The urge to hang up was stronger than ever. She suddenly felt that Jade was seeing right through her stupid act and stupider lies, was playing with her, stringing her along. "Um … not that I know of."

"You're sure."

"Yeah, why?"

"When Jon gets home, tell him he needs to call me. It's important. He knows why."

"Okay. Hey, I better go."

Before Jade could reply, Allison jabbed the buttons to end the call and turn off the phone. She dropped it onto the rug between her feet and put her hands over her face.

She had the shakes again, and was beginning to seriously reconsider her self-conception of a daredevil and risk-taker.

The skateboard stunts, the shoplifting, even the purse-snatching now seemed childish and moronic. Only risky on the surface, but safe underneath, the way a roller-coaster might scare the hell out of you but you knew, deep-down, that it was a controlled situation and nobody was really going to get hurt.

She'd had a few close calls and a few minor injuries pursing her various interests these past few years, but always, down-deep, she'd known she wasn't really going to get hurt. If she took a bad fall on her board, the worst that was likely to happen was a broken wrist. If she got arrested for shoplifting or purse-snatching, nothing too terrible would come of it. Especially not once they found out who her parents were. Oh, she'd be in plenty of trouble with her family, yeah, but no one was going to throw her in jail for it.

Now, though …

Now she was playing with fire. Now, the risk was real. Now, she could get her impulsive butt killed.

Her apartment had been broken into. She'd been beaten up and nearly raped. She had just gotten off the phone with a cold-blooded murderer. The police would expect her to come and talk to them on matters a lot more serious than a few stolen purses.

And a guy had been shot. Might even be dead.

Allison went even paler as she thought about that. Hector had shot Jon. Eva and the paramedics had saved him, but for all she knew he could have died on the operating table. If he was dead, she was responsible.

If he wasn't, though … if he wasn't, what would he tell people?

**