100 Proof Stud (The Darcy Walker Series) (13 page)

Another Christmas was here, and she wasn’t going to show up under my tree.

In times of desperation, I caught a glimmer of a thing called hope. I suppose hope is what got me through the day. Unfortunately, hope didn’t hang around long. What usually worked in times of hopelessness was to go after the impossible and make it the possible.

That’s me: Darcy Walker, hope-bringer to the masses.

(You’re welcome, America.)

Case number one: who stole Tito Westbrook’s identity? Since Tito’s source claimed he was a teenager from Valley, my hunch was he might be in Coach Wallace’s file. So interviewing those three was key. Case number two: who painted Coach Wallace’s car? Even though the weather and Dylan cut my stakeout short, all things considered, I had some things to think about, i.e., Mustang and Chevy Colorado, white van, pictures to download, what was the connection…?

Bottom line, would it mean anything?

Dependent upon the sky and season, sometimes you could go to school in the dark and return in the dark. Looking outside, the light flurry of snow swirled into something more fierce, blowing sideways into wind shears, rattling street signs, and overturning trashcans like the first stages of a tornado. Cars traveled at a snail’s pace, and like earlier this morning, a weather alert pierced the air. With a loud crack, the sky lit up like a Roman candle.

Simultaneously, the overhead speaker sounded with Principal Grim Ward calmly requesting we get in disaster mode. Now disaster mode came ingrained in my DNA, people. Whenever I entered a building, I checked emergency exits first and decided which windows I’d break if I got backed against a wall. Well, let’s just say I
tried
when I didn’t fall victim to my ADHD. But everyone didn’t think like me. There were a lot of Chicken Littles on the planet…namely Ivy Morrison.

While the teacher waved her arms to get control of the class, I pulled the photographs out of my file, along with the names from Finn, and shoved them up under my Homeland Security t-shirt. Leaving our things at our desks, we single-filed into the hall in a semi-orderly manner. Before you could mutter Susan B. Anthony, the bulk of the females grabbed onto the nearest male.

Seriously, that set the feminist movement back by a decade.

Ivy, the biggest wuss, had plastered herself to Finn’s side, batting her fake eyelashes against her fake-baked face.

Finn and Grumpy were in this class, and both were charter members of my secret brother society. Jon, er Grumpy, was brother number one, yet he might be the most reluctant. We became blood kin when we wrecked on his dirt bike freshman year. We didn’t physically share bodily fluids. We held up our mangled limbs in a sign of mutual solidarity with the commitment of ’til death do we part. Gradually, I added other kindred misfits into my brotherhood, and I became Darcy Walker, AKA a teenage godfather. Finn was brother number two because he was…well, Finn. A brainiac whose skills I occasionally needed. The rule of our commitment was simple. Loyalty. We lied for one another. We spied for one another. And in Grumpy’s case, I spied on his crushes. He’d been infatuated with Ivy Morrison, Trudi Hatchett, and Clementine Miriam Rabinowitz since freshman year.

Clementine seemed sweet and showed he had good taste. Ivy and Trudi confirmed he was a freaking moron because Ivy was pure witch, and Trudi was a minion with man-hands. Like Clementine, she had dark hair and eyes, but her features weren’t as refined and sculpted symmetrically. Her body was disproportionate with a big nose, big hips, and hands that belonged on Goliath. Thing was, she had money—and a good stylist could camouflage where your mother’s and father’s genes screwed you.

Grumpy was smiling, the equivalent of seeing little green men. He had Clementine on one arm, Trudi on the other. That left me bringing up the rear, staring at all of their butts. Trouble was, when I made my way down the hall, I got shoved into a group from a different class. We huddled on the floor, shoulder-to-shoulder, sneaker-to-sneaker, and butt-to-butt. Realizing I was in a race against the clock, I ripped open the sealed envelope from Finn.

He’d typed up a detailed report that rivaled a brief from the FBI. The social security card of Lucas Carlton belonged to a baby boy, six months old. His mother had left her purse in her shopping cart unattended at Meijer and reported it stolen five weeks ago. The second victim, Kelley Lowder, lost her Visa during a wedding party weekend at The Horseshoe Casino. She had no clue she’d been violated (the bride and groom paid for all expenses) until she’d returned home and discovered the thief spent one thousand dollars at the nearest Coach Store, bought curly fries at Arby’s, and several Caffé Americanos at Starbucks. The third victim, Lindsee Maroni, had her check card eaten by an ATM at Speedway. The station manager returned it to her, and she thought she was fine, but unbeknownst to anyone, the ATM had a machine called a “skimmer” attached to it. A skimmer is camouflaged to look exactly like a component of the ATM, but in actuality it is a small computer storing the data from each card once the card is slid through. Consequently, your bank account, social security number, password, address, anything else the bank has on your magnetic strip is free game. The thief will then simply detach the skimmer and take it home. This particular thief had the capacity to manufacture cards because when Lindsee discovered her bank account had been cleaned out, her bank contacted the merchants in question who had actual credit card receipts…new receipts…and a signature eerily similar to Lindsee’s. So they not only skimmed her information but also made an entirely new card containing the same data, with a practiced signature.

The fact that Finn successfully exposed this information was absurd.

The fact I’d asked him to do so was even more absurd.

Pulling the three photographs from under my shirt—along with the faxed photo from Tito—I resolved to use my time wisely by interviewing the poor fools next to me.

I got a lot of, “No, never seen him…Big guy…He’s weird…What did they do?” But there was nothing definitive from a credible source. Then I heard this voice—the voice that’d be burned into my brain eternally as nothing more than Beelzebub’s brother.

Oliver “Bean” Anatoly was the biggest ponkey that ever walked the earth’s surface.

“Walker!” he shouted. I swear to God, if there were a beach around, I’d dig my way to freaking China.

I shifted my weight and slid further down the wall. “Walker!” he screamed louder. Now Bean had a loud voice—possibly the biggest ever placed on a human’s head—but he somehow found an even higher pitch. “What were you doing on the roof this morning?” he finished.

When I gave him a surprised, who-me look, he laughed hysterically, “You’re so stupid.”

He got a takes-one-to-know-one stare. I didn’t particularly like Bean. Maybe it’s because I saw in him what reminded me of
me
—unstable, unpredictable, with a mountain of OCD quirkiness. Bean could be the poster child for
Things That Can Go Wrong When You Never Read a Fashion Magazine
. He had glasses two inches thick, hair balding at the crown, and wore all blue with a pocket protector and gel pens. What hair remained had been styled in a bowl cut he’d been rockin’ since second grade.

How did Oliver get the nickname of Bean? In third grade, he stuck a lima bean up his nose to see how long it’d take to germinate. The answer? Four days. Sure enough, a little green sprout was seen when we shoved a flashlight up his nostril during classroom changes. Forever after, he was known as Bean, the kid who shoved a bean up his nose. Unfortunately, I became known as the kid who dared him.

I’m thinking he held a grudge. “Nice to know you’re still a ponkey,” I mumbled.

“Ponkey?” the boy beside me asked.

I explained ponkeys were a cross between a punk and a jackass. At least I got a laugh.

While teachers paced up and down the hall, Bean wriggled over the tan linoleum, army-style, and squeezed in on the opposite side. He pulled a folded-up sheet from his back pocket.

“What’s that?” I asked, pitching my chin toward the paper.

“Voting ballot. It’s that time of year for the It Girl election.” I raised a brow. “Yeah,” he continued. “The guys from the in-crowd,”
believe me, I stifled a huge freaking laugh here
, “decide who is this year’s It Girl. Then we rank the runners up.”

“Runners up?” the guy to my side wanted clarified.

“Yeah, we call them Hot Girls,” Bean explained. “Last year, you were a Hot Girl, Darcy. Actually first on the list. Although there might’ve been problems with the balloting. At least that was the rumor.”

Well, excuuuuuuuse me.

I choked down the overwhelming urge to spit on him. “I’m sure the balloting was fine,” I said self-righteously. “So who was I behind?”

“Behind Brynn Hathaway, there’s a list of nine other girls.”

My ears started to bleed. Of course it was Brynn. That was like saying grass was green and dogs hate cats. That stuff was written in the stars.

“So am I number two again?” I asked hopefully.

Bean looked like someone shoved him in front of a moving car. “Um…no. Geeky girls are out. Brains are in.”

I shot up to my feet, shoving my arms on my hips, defiant like a mule who refused to move. I didn’t care who saw me, and I didn’t care I was supposed to be hunkered down like a good little girl waiting for a storm to kill us all. “I’ve got brains,” I snorted. Bean glanced up, raising a brow. “I do!” I shouted and articulated all of the things I was smart about. Eh, the list was small. So be it. I asked, “What does it take to go from last year’s It Girl—”

“Runner-up,” he corrected. “Runners up are Hot Girls.”

“Last year’s runner up Hot Girl,” I repeated sarcastically, “to not even blipping on the radar?”

Someone yelled, “Sit down, Walker!” and when I turned, I tripped over Bean’s boat of a foot and took a header—my legs twisting painfully in the scorpion over my back.

God hated me. He really, really did.

“And that’s why you dropped out of the Top Ten,” Bean mumbled as explanation. “I’d tell you it’s an honor to be nominated, but I stopped lying a year ago. All that matters is making the list.”

I found it weird that I crawled back to a sitting position, like making a fool of myself was as expected as a sunrise. Maybe that’s why I tumbled from the list. I was too weird to date.

“Who is the It Girl this year?” the guy on the other side asked.

“Of course, Brynn is number one,” Bean almost drooled. “But Rudi Morgan is number two, by only one vote. Just you wait. She’s invading the school. And I’m going to take her and the rest of the list on a date before the year ends.”

A smile crept up my lips, quirking all the way to the sky. Rudi
deserved
to be the It Girl. One of the few girlfriends I had, she was a colleague of mine at The Double-B and teeny-tiny at barely five feet and less than one hundred pounds. She had big brown eyes, cool Ben Franklin glasses, and brunette hair styled in an asymmetrical chin-length bob. If I were a guy, I would’ve voted her number one. Trouble was, she was deaf and dirt poor. She could speak in that underwater-muffled sort of way, but she preferred to sign, lip read, or have someone interpret. Being the almost It Girl would make you think she’d have plenty of dates—she’d didn’t. Not only did she have to fight a language barrier, but also the fact she was just too good.

Most guys found good a foreign concept.

“I don’t think we’ve talked this much since counseling,” Bean said to me. “Do you remember?”

This would fall under the category of
There Are No Words
. Bean and I saw the same therapist, and as much as I tried to avoid him, we ultimately wound up on the same weekly rotation. After two years, I’d sprung the joint, and I briefly wondered if Bean ever had. Bean suddenly snagged all four photographs from my hand, pulling them up to his eyes. I feared he’d blow the lid off of my plan, but instead of decking him, I flat-out lied.

I took a deep breath, jutting my jaw out with confidence. “School contest,” I fudged. “Just like yours. All of them have come into some money, and it’s my job to track them down.”

No one questioned or even cared. That’s one of the benefits of a school this size. Contests, raffles, and split-the-pots were constantly in play. Last I remember, Bean ran with a seedy crowd. Maybe this was destiny speaking. I adjusted the wattage on my smile and started the twenty questions. “Do you know them, Bean?”

I fluttered my eyelashes flirtatiously, choking down the vomit that reminded me Bean was Grade A Ponkey.

Bean flipped through all four photographs, stopping to wipe his nose on the back of his sleeve. “Detention,” he said when he was finished. “They’re part of the Saturday morning crowd. These two,” he muttered, pausing at the coffee-stained photograph and the one Rookie was investigating, “I’ve never seen before.”

That stripped the wind right from my psychotic sails. When I debated a sob, Bean slid them across the hall to an equally geeky friend of his. My palms started itching, and before I could get my fingers back on those photographs, they’d gone through about ten people. What the heck, I went for it. I cupped my hands over my mouth in a loud whisper, “Could you write on the backs of the pics if you have classes with any of them?”

There was no protest; interested folks simply took the pink gel pen Bean pitched, jotting down notes like it was a classroom assignment. While the sky cracked with angry sounds from Mother Nature, Assistant Principal Vance Unger scurried up and down the hall like we were one foot from the grave. It reminded me that no matter where you came from, at the end of the day, everyone is one and the same…no matter what you have in your brain or what number you are on the It Girl List.

AP Unger stopped directly in front of me with a frown that’d scare the hair off of Sasquatch. “Walker, you can’t wear a shirt to school with guns on it.”

I glanced down, totally forgetting I’d worn my “Homeland Security” t-shirt with Native Americans, proudly holding their rifles.

I grinned, “I’m celebrating my people.” Murphy had Native American roots; you could see the chiseled features all over his face. My skin was darker than normal, but the rest was watered down by European influences.

“You’re advertising terrorism,” he frowned.

“No, I’m advertising Homeland Security which
combats
terrorism. Sounds to me like you’re discriminating against my people and culture. Or maybe you’re a liberal. Liberals believe we can love people into good behavior. Murphy will straight-up tell you that’s not possible. He’s tried and failed—and has the battle wounds to prove it,” I giggled.

“Oh. My. God,” he groaned. “You’ve given me a migraine.”

AP Unger and I had a tempestuous relationship. In fact, when a gun-wielding student chased me last spring, he took a couple of bullets as he ran in hot pursuit. I rushed to his side when he fell, triaged as best as possible, and took his BlackBerry to call for help under the alias of Jester. He had no memory of giving me his phone, and I accidentally chucked it in the water when said student breathed down my neck like a fire-breathing dragon on drugs. In fact, AP Unger barely remembered getting shot—only that he woke up in the hospital a week later.

Jester, my alter ego, was safe…for the moment.

By the thank-you-God look on his face, we were destined for an early dismissal. There were no two sweeter words in the student language than “snow day,” but today that spelled disaster. He gave me his we’ll-discuss-later frown and hotfooted it down the hall.

Bean propped himself up, his body falling into mine. “Can I help with your project?”