I click the Refresh button for the billionth time. Three more emails come in for fake IDs, adding to my steadily growing pool of reprobates. But still nothing from Murphy.
“Stop it. You’re making me twitch,” Sam says without even looking up from the soundboard. We’re hanging out in the recording studio his parents set up for him in their ginormous basement as a Christmas present last year. He’s working his magic on that phone call for the dean. I’m mostly sitting in the corner, pretending to help. He’s grumpy for some reason, and I’m too frazzled to drag him out of it.
Watching the video my dad recorded at Sam’s birthday while Sam extracts pieces of it to create a phone call for the dean was harder than I thought it’d be. After all, I’m getting him back. Finding his second note at the racetrack gave me a significant boost in confidence.
But still, with the autumn light fading into darkness, the nagging worry that he could be in a worse way than I’ve been letting myself believe is tormenting me. Mobsters may be utter morons, but they’re far from cuddly. What if they have him chained up? Or worse?
I hit Refresh again to distract myself. Nothing.
“He’ll send it when he has it downloaded. Give him a break.” Then, in a whisper meant for himself, he adds, “Give me a break.”
I hit Refresh again to spite him. He glares at me.
I set my laptop on the floor next to me, drawing my knees up as my mind returns to unwanted images of my dad in dank rooms with bare bulbs and grimy floors. My imagination adds a busted lip, a black eye, a broken arm. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to block out the scene.
My brain is whirring so loud, I don’t notice at first when Sam stops fiddling. Once I do notice, I glance up and see Sam looking at me. All the irritation has evaporated from his expression, replaced by deep concern. Poor Sam. He worries so much about me. I should say something to reassure him. But he knows me well enough to tell when I’m faking.
“We’ll find him, Julep,” he says, his voice not so much soothing as certain. The irony is that I’m usually the certain one. In fact, I was certain myself not ten minutes ago. But my dad’s voice is echoing in my head, calling out to me to be careful of the azaleas, conversing with Sam’s mom about the state of health care. Silly, inconsequential stuff to inspire such deep and abiding angst.
I sigh and try to pull myself together. “Jeez, I had no idea I had such capacity for emo.”
Sam looks down at the soundboard and makes a few adjustments, then says, “Well, I think we’re ready. Want to hear it?”
I get up and dust myself off, though there’s more likely to be an alien spaceship in here than a speck of dust.
“Let’s do it.”
Sam pulls his headphone cord out of the jack and hits Play, or at least, that’s what I think he does—the soundboard is indecipherable to me. My dad’s voice booms out of the speakers, and Sam moves a few sliders to get the sound down to a reasonable volume.
“Good afternoon. This is Joe Dupree, Julep’s dad. I approve Julep’s absence from school on Thursday. She was at the hospital with me. I’m sure you understand. Thank you for marking her absence as excused.”
The excused sounds a little more like “excuse-duh,” but other than that, it’s seamless.
“It’s not perfect, but it should fool the dean,” Sam says.
“It’s wonderful, Sam,” I say, squeezing his arm.
Then I hear a ping coming from my laptop. I make an unladylike dive for it, pushing the screen back as I stand, cradling the keyboard in my other arm and hoping it’s not another fake-ID request.
But finally, Murphy’s username—WoWarlock98—appears in the Sender field. I click to open the message, and voilà! A high-quality, full-on face shot of my muscle-car stalker. She looks pissed, which makes me happy.
“You got it?” Sam asks, coming to look over my shoulder.
“Yep. Murphy came through.”
“How’d he do it?”
I bend my head to get a closer view. Her face and shoulders are surrounded by the car’s window frame. Her expression is definitely in the scowl family, but she doesn’t seem to be in the act of hopping out of the car or drawing a weapon.
“I told him to use the car as an excuse to get close. He pretends to be interested in the car, taking pictures from several angles before ‘accidentally’ getting a shot of the driver when she rolls her window down to tell him to get lost. Brilliant, huh?”
Sam chuckles. “Now if only you’d use your powers for good instead of evil.”
I forward Sam the email with the image.
“What are you going to do with her picture, anyway? It’s not like we don’t know what she looks like,” Sam says, returning to his seat in his audio-captain’s chair.
“True. What we need to know is who she is and who she’s working for. And I’m not doing anything with the picture—you are.” I poke him in the chest.
“Really.” He leans back in his chair, lacing his fingers behind his head and rolling his eyes up to the ceiling. He sounds somewhat resigned, which is often the case when we’re hip-deep in a job.
“I need you to hack the FBI facial-recognition database.”
I pause, waiting for the inevitable “you must have fallen off the crazy wagon if you think I’m doing that” spluttering as his chair tips over backward, spilling him on the floor.
Instead he just sits there, staring at the ceiling.
A minute passes. Then two. I start to get nervous.
Sam is not the nonreacting sort. What is he thinking? That I’m nuts? Maybe I am nuts. Maybe I’m standing here like an idiot asking him to do the electronic equivalent of getting a strawberry-nutmeg smoothie from an ATM.
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay?”
That’s all he’s going to say? Okay?
“Okay,” he repeats.
“But—won’t it be hard?”
“Sort of like trying to chip through the Hoover Dam with a toothpick.”
“Oh.”
He still hasn’t changed position. Or looked at me, for that matter.
“But you can do it?” I ask, fiddling with the corner of the cabinet.
“I will try. I always do.”
We fall into a strange silence I’m not used to hearing between us. Something’s been off about Sam for the last couple of days. Probably has something to do with the mess I’ve gotten him in. He did get his car run off the road. And I’ve been so wrapped up in trying to find my dad that I’ve been asking a lot of Sam without giving anything back. That has to be getting old.
“I am grateful, Sam. For all your help. I know I don’t say it a lot.”
I feel at a loss for something to say to make him stop staring at the ceiling.
“That’s all?”
I frown at him even though he’s not looking at me.
You’ve probably guessed by now that I’m not really the touchy-feely type. I have my moments. I can emote with the best of them when the situation calls for it. But I don’t tend to wear any of my weak and vulnerable bits on my sleeve. One of the ten con-man-dments: Always keep your feelings close to your vest.
“I couldn’t do it without you? You’re the man? What are you looking for, here?”
“Not that,” Sam says. “I mean, is that all it is? Gratitude?”
“All what is? I don’t know what you want me to say.”
Sam looks at me then, and his gaze is the most direct and intense I’ve ever seen it. It lasers right through me. My insides melt a little around the beam of it, cauterizing the hole even as he creates it. He gets out of his chair and leans over me, his face inches from my nose.
“Is that all I am to you? A sidekick? A tool you can use when you need to hack into something?”
My heart stumbles over the question. Is that really what he thinks?
“You’re my best friend,” I say, swallowing. “You know that.”
He looks disappointed in my answer, though I can’t figure out why. So I try again, my voice dissolving to a whisper. “You’re my rock, Sam. If anything … changed between us”—I can’t say if you leave me without breaking something inside, I just can’t—“I don’t—I couldn’t—I’d be lost.”
And then, as quickly as it came, the crazy intensity leaves Sam’s eyes and he slouches back against the soundboard, looking tired.
“All right,” he says, rubbing his face. “Never mind. Let’s just make the call.”
He’s typing the dean’s number before I can even respond. I want to stop him, make him understand how much I value him. But my grifter Spidey sense is clamoring at me to leave it alone. At least for now. Eight years of friendship and we’ve never had a come-to-Jesus moment like that one. Not that we haven’t argued, or he hasn’t balked at some impossible task I’ve set for him. We’re best friends; we’re going to get into some disagreements.
But this was different. I’ve unwittingly unleashed something capable of breaking Sam’s faith in me. As much as I want to resolve it, I can tell that if I keep pushing him to find out what it is, I’ll just lose him faster.
Before I come to terms with this new complication, the dean’s answering machine picks up the line. Sam and I calculated the best time to call the dean’s office to have the greatest chance of getting her voice mail. After years of working the system, we have her routine down pat—four-thirty coffee break, in her office for another hour, rounds of the campus to make sure the buildings are empty and locked, back to her office to pack up, and then home.
The trick for us was to call when she was out of the office but before she left for home. Sounds like we’ve timed it perfectly. Sam begins the playback of the recording.
“Good afternoon. This is Joe Dupree, Julep’s dad. I approve—”
“Hello? Hello?” the dean’s voice interrupts. Sam races to stop the recording before she realizes what’s happening.
Damn it. She must have been waiting by the phone to catch me out. What is up with my awful luck lately?
I give Sam a sharp nod. He punches a few buttons and inches up a slider from a different track on the soundboard. My dad’s voice comes through again, this time with a good deal of static interference masking some of his words.
“… Hello? Sorry—there seems to be some … on my end of the … wanted to confirm Julep’s absence is excused as she … at the hospital …”
Then Sam disconnects the call.
“Whew,” I say, clinging to the soundboard as I sink to my heels. “That was close. Glad we decided on the backup.”
“Do you think she bought it?”
“Doubtful,” I say. “But she got a call. She can’t prove anything. I’m safe for now.”
“Safe?” Sam says, sounding exasperated. “What about any of this is safe?”
I push myself to my feet and place a hand on Sam’s knee. It stills under my touch.
“I have to go,” I say, unsure where we stand after our earlier … whatever it was. “I owe you. I won’t forget.”
I draw the door shut behind me and wince a little as it clicks into place. Then I beat feet to the bus stop at the end of Sam’s street, catch the 379, and settle into the circle of my troubling thoughts.
I change bus lines twice before giving up entirely on getting my brain in order. But it isn’t till I’m on the train home to Forest Park that I realize I’m being followed.