You Can't Catch Me(58)

“It’s fine. Maybe you even saved me from a world of trouble.”

“Maybe.”

“What are you guys going to do now?”

Jessie hops off her chair. “First, we’re going to have to explain this all to JJ.”

“Worried?” Five asks.

“Nah, that’s going to be her job.” Jessie presses a finger into my chest too aggressively.

“It’ll be fine.”

Jessie doesn’t answer me. Instead, she reaches her hand out to Five. “Nice to meet you.”

“You too. I think.” Five turns and walks toward where she left her bag.

When she’s out of earshot, I say, “How did you get in here?”

“Forget about that. We are in so much shit.”

“What do you mean?”

“She was here.” Jessie pulls her phone from her pocket. There’s a text on the screen.

Nice try, it says from a number I recognize.

Shit.





Chapter 26

Incomplete Pass

One of my biggest regrets in life is that when I took Kiki out of the Land of Todd, I didn’t bring her right to Liam. I don’t know why. Probably I wanted to prove something. That I could do it on my own. That I could succeed at life without Liam being there to steer me in the right direction. And because I’d never told Liam about her, I didn’t want to have to explain why I’d kept her from him for so long. Besides, I knew Kiki. I knew her like I knew myself, and myself had made it out of the Land of Todd and through to something better. It was better, whatever Kiki thought. I’d show her.

I’d show her.

So I followed Liam’s plan without involving Liam. I took Kiki to the same run-down hotel in the Catskills even though I was supposed to be starting my job at FeedNews. I told them there’d been a death in the family and that I needed a couple of weeks off to process it. That was close enough to true to pass, even though it felt gross using Todd’s death for anything. He wasn’t my family; he’d ruined my family. I guess that’s a kind of death.

It was weird being back in that hotel. Not Land-of-Todd weird, but weird just the same. The place had continued to decay. The paint was chipping away. Leaves were left unraked. There was an abandoned look to the swimming pool. The random collection of guests made it feel as if we were on the set of a horror movie, or in a locked-room murder mystery. Was that man that little girl’s father, or was this some stopping place along a kidnapping route? I was suspicious of everyone, jumpy. Scared.

Kiki didn’t say much on the drive there. She was too used to following directions. When we got to our room, she walked to the bed closest to the door, kicked off her shoes, and lay down as if she were waiting to be examined. That scared me more than the silence, but after a night where we both slept more than twelve hours, I forged ahead. I started her on the deprogramming/relearning right away—showing her all the classic movies I could find on the movie channel the hotel got, only stopping for food and sleep. We ate on our respective beds, watching the screen, and I’d provide additional narration to explain what I knew she didn’t understand, something Liam never did for me.

“So, like, in this scene we’re learning that they have to come to school on a Saturday for detention. That’s, like, extra punishment. Not Back Forest or anything, but—”

“I got it,” Kiki said, pushing away her half-eaten pizza. “This is kind of gross.”

“It is. That’s the whole point.”

“Why?”

We were wearing matching pajamas that I’d gotten at the nearest Walmart. “Because sometimes you need to eat something that’s bad for you.”

“But Todd says—”

“Yeah, I know, but he’s wrong. I mean, not totally wrong about this one thing, because, ultimately, it is better to eat healthy most of the time, but you know, in the grander scheme of things . . .”

Kiki lowered her head onto her knees, stretching her back out. “I get it.”

“How can you?”

“We had books.”

“Crappy romance novels from the seventies.”

She turned her face toward me. “No, after you left, someone started smuggling in better stuff.”

“Covington? I mean, Terrence?”

His real name felt weird in my mouth. I thought about calling him, letting him know where we were. He’d let me take the car we’d rented to go to the funeral and told me he’d make his own way back, not to worry about it.

“Yeah,” she said.

“How?”

She sat up and turned her head back to the screen. “He found this way out of the back of the property. There’s a town over there. I never knew its name. But they had this used bookstore, and they’d sell books to him for a quarter. So, we’d all scrounge around to find whatever change we could and give it to him.”

“He didn’t tell me about that.”

“Do you guys hang out a lot?”

I watched Kiki’s bony shoulders rise and fall. She was so thin under her pajamas. She needed more pizza. “Not that much.”

“Did he mention me?”

He never had, but she didn’t need to hear that. Covington and I didn’t talk about those sorts of things.