Pretty Sly (3 page)

Well, Aidan was doing the digging and I was doing the encouraging. A small mound of gravel had already piled up beside him.

A gecko skittered between the rocks a couple of feet from us. The palm tree in front of my house swayed gently in the breeze, dry fronds rattling. Your typical night in the paradise of Paradise Valley, Arizona.
Some paradise.

“I don’t think I see anything. Are you sure this is right?”

Since this was the first I’d ever heard of my mom burying anything in the yard, I was not clear on this point. It was also nighttime and hard to see exactly what we were doing or what we were looking for.

“These are the only agave plants we have. Here, let me,” I said, moving closer. We didn’t have time for questions. We just had to find it.

I knelt down and sank my hand into the hole, which was surprisingly cool. As I worked my way deeper, densely packed sand passed through my wiggling fingers. Then my thumb brushed against a smooth and slippery surface.

“Wait, I feel something,” I said, my breath quickening.

With the help of my other hand, I worked to loosen the object from the surrounding dirt. As I brought it up, I saw it was a red satin envelope, like the kind jewelers use to package earrings. I recognized it immediately. My mom had given me a necklace in this very same bag. I was wearing it now, as I did every day. It was a cloisonné bird pendant that she had gotten from her mom, the grandmother I’d never met.

I opened up the envelope. Inside was a small steel key and a plastic access card, a pink ribbon holding them together. This was it!

“Let’s look up that address,” I said, sliding the key
onto my keychain. “I think it’s in Scottsdale.”

“Now?” Aidan asked, incredulous. “It’s kind of late and dark. What if the place is closed?”

“Then we break in if we have to. Aidan, I can’t wait until tomorrow.” My voice was firm but my insides were shaking. “I need to understand what’s going on and there’s no way I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”

“And I guess you need me to drive?”

I did. My beloved vintage bike had blown out during the chase from the cops the night I broke into Kellie’s house—it was now probably police property. Losing it was just another kind of punishment, another reminder that I’d really messed up. Yet again, I wished I could undo all that I had done. Maybe my mom would still be here.

He nodded. “Okay, okay. We’ll go now. But maybe we should call someone to come with us.”

I shook my head. Was he crazy? We’d both just read the email. “No way. My mom doesn’t want anyone to know what’s going on.”

“Well,
I
know,” he said. “Somehow I don’t think she meant for that to happen.”

“Right, but that was only because you were here with me.”
And because I trust you.

Well, that’s what I should have said, but I was too distracted by worry. Besides, we’d only just crossed the line from flirt buddies to something else. That something else was still undefined, for the moment.

“We could call that Agent Corbin,” he suggested.

“No,” I said, vehement. “The cops are out of the equation now. She said so. We’re on our own. And I thought you were anticops.”

Aidan looked at me with concern, his face falling out of its usual sardonic angles. “Yeah, well, that was before your mom skipped town. I just have a weird feeling about this. Someone could be waiting. Someone shady.”

His words washed over me. Was the email a fake? A forgery? It was possible but I doubted it. The language sounded just like my mom. Someone could have forced her. . . .

Yes, there were plenty of terrible scenarios we could conjure up, but I couldn’t allow myself to go there. If my mom was in trouble, I needed to help, and right now this key and this address were the only things connecting me to her. I couldn’t let her down—not now. I’d disappointed her enough already.

I tried to push past him back into the house. “Then I’m going to have to take my chances and go myself.”

But Aidan stood close, his chest squared off as if to block me. “I can’t let you go alone.”

“Well, then, I need you to promise me that you won’t tell anyone—not about any of this.” I paused and tried to take a softer approach. “You’re helping me out here, and I do appreciate it, but I need to make the rules.”

He shrugged his arms open. “You know how I feel about rules.”

“Seriously, Aidan.”

“I’m being serious. I’m also trying to be responsible, for once. We’re in this together now.”

Together.
Before I could say anything else, before I could make him repeat the promise, I was caught in his arms, pressed against him. I could feel the muscles of his chest, the wiry strength of his shoulders. I felt the urgency of the moment coursing through me, and underneath that, his warmth.

I did feel safe, almost. And I also felt the sheer thrill of being so close to him.
Aidan. Aidan. Aidan.
I doodled his name on the notebook of my mind.

We unfolded ourselves from the hug. He kissed me softly on the mouth. It was different from before, somehow. Quieter. More nourishing, maybe. But just as good.

I went back into the house to get my bag. Aidan said he was going to wait outside and text home to say he’d be late. I ran my hands through my hair and splashed some cold water on my face. Then I grabbed a can of pepper spray my mom had bought me at the hardware store.

“We’re single ladies,” she’d said at the time. “We need to watch out for ourselves.”

Outside, Aidan was waiting for me in the driver’s seat of his Mercedes—I could make out the dark shape of his profile from a distance, his head bowed over his phone. I shut the door to my house, locked it, and headed down the path to the driveway. As I walked, the cool metal of
the pepper-spray canister shook in my jeans pocket. My mom had always wanted me to be prepared for dangerous situations, but somehow I wasn’t sure if what was happening right now was the kind of thing she’d had in mind.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

THREE

I WAS RIGHT—THE
WeStore facility was in a forgotten corner of Scottsdale, a good ten-minute drive from my house. I’d been to this particular area of town before, back when I’d brought some stolen goods to hock at the Finer Things Pawnshop.

It wasn’t pretty—certainly nothing like where we lived, where every house, tree, and desert vista seemed to have been conjured up by an interior decorator to the universe. This was the area of town you only knew about if you needed quick money, or a gun—maybe even drugs.

As we pulled up to the security gate in front of the WeStore complex, I caught myself instinctively checking out the locks. Tre, my friend and tutor in all things larcenous, had shown me how to break into gated communities and disarm systems, among other skills. But there was no hacking, reprogramming, or code-breaking necessary now. My mom had kindly seen to that. Aidan
simply rolled down his window and held up the access card to the digital reader. A little red light flashed and the gate swung open. Totally legit and supereasy.

So why was my heart racing?

We drove on in through the entry, and up a long driveway lit by towering street lamps. At the end were rows and rows and rows of identical concrete sheds with orange-painted roll-down doors.

Maybe it was my recent visit to juvie hall, but to me they looked like jail cells, each block labeled with a letter. The buildings were surrounded by asphalt, a big sea of a parking lot, which was empty but for a few cars.

I tensed. “This place is creepy.”

“Well, normally people come here in the daylight,” Aidan muttered. “Now which way?”

I ignored his crack and squinted into the dark outside of the car. “That sign over there says Units 70–90. Aisle G.”

Aidan pulled up in front of the block and parked. Before he turned off the car I noted that the dashboard clock glowed nine
P.M
. The endless day kept going.

Without the music from his stereo and without the gentle hum of the Mercedes’s engine, the quiet felt violent and sudden.

“Guess we should actually go in, huh?” I said, unbuckling my seat belt. I slung my bag over my shoulder and closed the passenger-side door. We walked toward aisle G. Sensing us, a light mounted on the corner of the
building snapped on with a buzz. It was supposed to be comforting, but I felt caught in the spotlight, like a movie convict escaping prison.

Aidan’s hand encircled mine, and we fell into step. The soft pressure of his fingers sent another kind of shiver through me. Was this what it was like to have a boyfriend? Nothing about my life felt remotely normal so it was hard to judge.

As we walked along the row of doors, each identical and closed off to the world, I imagined what was inside the little chambers: possessions that were too important to throw out but too difficult to hold on to, or things the owners wanted to hide away. Some of these units looked abandoned. Maybe the people had meant to come back but never had the chance. Maybe they’d even died.

I stared at my shadow looming in front of me, long and thin like a bony finger. The sound of our footsteps ricocheted on the concrete. Every so often a light overhead buzzed on, while another switched off.

Then I remembered a cop show I’d seen about a serial killer who kept his victims trapped inside a storage unit for days, starving and torturing them before he actually murdered them.

That was all I needed. Dismembered bodies to think about.

“It’s the last one on the left, I think,” Aidan said.

I nodded, letting go of his hand and pushing in front of him, wanting to seem braver and more in charge than
I felt. This was
my
scary storage unit, after all. As a criminal in training, faking it had become my MO, and it served me well every time I needed to pull off another theft with a fresh set of challenges.

And we had the key, right? This was legal. So it should have been no big deal.

No big deal,
a voice in my head repeated, a mantra as much as an affirmation.

“Hey,” a deep voice boomed behind us. In the next five seconds, a million images ran through my mind, several of them involving chloroform-soaked rags and the backs of retrofitted vans.

Panicked, I grabbed at Aidan’s shirt as I turned around.

Then I saw it was only Tre emerging from the shadowy night. He was wearing a baseball cap and jogging to catch us. “Scared you, didn’t I?”

He twitched his hands in my face like a zombie, teasing. I clutched at my own chest now, trying to hold my heart in the place where all the bad action-movie clichés had jolted it. “Sheesus! Yes. Yes, you did. What are you doing here?”

“I got a text from this dude.” He pointed a thumb in Aidan’s direction. “Something about needing backup.”

Aidan and Tre exchanged some kind of secret handshake, or so it seemed to me. “Glad you made it. But we could’ve done without the dramatic entrance.”

I glared at Aidan. He’d texted Tre? So he’d deliberately
gone behind my back after I asked him not to.

“That’s funny because I told him we didn’t need help,” I said, scowling.

“Look, Willa, I’m sorry,” Aidan said, shrugging and not sounding terribly sorry. “But I told you I didn’t want us to get hurt. And I felt like if anyone would know what to do, it would be Tre.”

“You know, because of my vast experience with the criminal underworld,” Tre said, stitching up his eyebrows. Under the brim of his hat, his broad, square face relaxed into a playful smile.

I looked from Tre to Aidan and back again. “That’s not really the point. What did he tell you, Tre?” I had to know how much Aidan had shared.

“Just that someone did a job on your house and your mom bounced.”

So everything, basically. I shook my head. “This was supposed to be a secret. My mom’s safety could be at stake.”

“Hey, we’re all on your side,” Tre said, patting my back. “Don’t you trust me, Willa?”

Tre had always been there for me, even when everyone else at Prep decided I was trash. And he’d always been honest with me, too, telling me straight up, when he found out how I was really using his lessons, that he thought what I was doing was wrong. I
did
trust Tre, and I respected him. It was Aidan I wondered about now.

I put an arm around Tre—his height and my lack
thereof meant it landed on his waist. “Yeah, I trust you.”

I could feel Aidan looking back at me and I refused to make eye contact. Did he think I was some little kid? Did he think I needed him to make decisions for me? That wasn’t cool.

“And this guy”—Tre flicked his chin in Aidan’s direction—“he was just worried.”

I was sheltered now by Tre’s body. I peered around his chest at Aidan, who batted his eyelashes at me and tented his fingers together like a choirboy.

It was classic Aidan. Working the charm angle. He had me. He knew he did. All I had to do was think of earlier—the driveway, the lawn . . .

“C’mon, Willz,” Tre said. “Don’t be mad. We just want to help Sly Fox out. We want to be part of the dream team.”

I still cringed a little when I heard the nickname the press had given me. “Yeah, okay, you two. I get it. Let’s move on.”

“So should we do this thing?” Tre asked.

I nodded. Aidan turned back to the unit and hunched over to unhook the padlock. Then he pulled open the metal gate, which rolled up noisily, its echoing rumble like an approaching train.

Inside, another sensor-rigged light flicked on, cold, blue, and harsh in the cement-floored room. Aidan cocked his head at us, then inched his way in. We followed, moving tentatively. No one wanted to say anything, but I think
we were all half-expecting to get jumped. Maybe Aidan had been right to tell Tre after all—not that I would ever let him have the satisfaction of knowing that.

Fortunately, there were no signs of human life. The room felt cool and smelled like musty paper. It was surprisingly big, about twenty feet by twenty feet, with several cardboard cartons, some old furniture, and trash bags full of stuff. And I’d had no idea that my mom even kept a storage locker.