Sammy Keyes and the Runaway Elf (12 page)

So I had my dinner-dessert and he had his mega-mess, and our tummies were both happy by the time the batter ran out. I was helping clear the table when he asked, “So how are things with Elyssa?”

“Great! I’ve been taking her over to the nursing home where her mother works after school. She tells me stories about her teacher and this troublemaker kid named Shane—she’s really funny.”

He grinned at me. “Imagine that.” He sprayed up some suds in the sink and asked, “And Heather? Any progress there?”

So I told him what I’d been doing at school and how Heather was acting so nervous, and when I got to the part about Kris Kringles and how she’d thrown away her cupcake, he laughed and said, “This is perfect!”

I shrugged. “I can’t see her actually confessing.”

“Don’t underestimate the power of a guilty mind.”

He scrubbed dishes and I dried, and when we were about done he microwaved some cocoa and said, “What about the rest of your life? You still don’t want to talk about it?”

I just sighed. “I can’t, Hudson.”

We went onto the porch and sat there, looking at the sky. The stars were out and there was a little cloud like a feather pillow moving across the bottom of the moon. Finally Hudson said, “You’re afraid I’ll tell your grandmother, aren’t you?”

I just watched the cloud puff along the moon.

“Have I ever done that in the past?”

I shook my head a little.

“Sometimes it helps to let these things out.”

I wanted to tell him. All about Mrs. Landvogt and the way she was blackmailing me. All about Paula Nook and Mr. Petersen and Hero, the Preposterous Peeing Machine. But what came out of my mouth was, “You know Mrs. Graybill?”

“That meddlesome woman down the hall?”

I nodded. “She’s in a nursing home.”

He studied me for a minute, then looked up at the sky. “I wouldn’t wish a nursing home on anyone.” He smoothed back an eyebrow and said, “In your case, though, it doesn’t seem to be providing the relief that one might expect.”

I let out a big sigh, then told him about how she’d acted like I was a long-lost friend, wanting to hold my hand and stuff. And when I got to the part about Billy McCabe and her sister, he shook his head and said, “That’s a shame. Worse, that’s a waste. From the outside it seems so senseless, but from inside, spite is like an addiction. Like greed or power. It’s certainly as strong a motivator.” He cupped his cocoa in his hands and blew on the steam. “The cure’s a little forgiveness, but it seems hard to come by for some.” He turned to me. “She has no one?”

I looked back up at the moon and shook my head. No one, I thought.

No one but me.

*  *  *

I was on my way home to Grams when I got an idea. A very bad idea. Now, there’s no way I look anything but underage, but the more I thought about it, the more I
rationalized that Palmer’s was a bar and
grill
, not just a bar, and that maybe—just maybe—there was an area of video games where I could hole up and spy on Paula Nook.

Palmer’s is out on West Main. Not quite as far as Petersen’s Prints, but almost. And I don’t really know what I was going there to watch Paula do; it just seemed more constructive than sitting around the Senior Highrise wishing for an answer.

Now, I wasn’t really thinking about Mr. Petersen—he was like a block away in my mind. But as I walked past the parking lot I did a double take, because sitting right there between an old Toyota and a lowered four-by-four was his Bug on Wheels.

That got me a little nervous. I mean, Paula Nook might not really remember me. Not if she looked at me with both eyes, anyway. But Mr. Petersen? That was another story.

So I stood there in the parking lot, watching the martini glass in the Palmer’s sign flicker, telling myself that I should go home. I really should go home. But finally I decided that it couldn’t hurt to check things out a little.

I peered in the front door but couldn’t see much past an entry wall, so I went back around the corner, past the Bugmobile, and crouched behind a garbage can that was propping open a side door. Inside were two men working in the kitchen; one was rinsing down the sink, and the other was smashing the grease out of a patty on the grill. There were boxes all over the floor—like someone had been stocking up on paper towels and onions—and right in front of the refrigerator was a rolling rack of hamburger buns and bread. There wasn’t a copper pan in sight.

Next to the grill, on a back burner, was a big pot of soup that was bubbling and spurting like lava from a volcano. The guy at the sink yelled something in Spanish to the guy at the grill, who reached over and turned the heat down.

So there I am, cuddled up to a garbage can, holding as still as I can, when what comes crawling across my feet? A rat. And I’m not talking mouse, here—I’m talking this thing could eat cats.

I banged the trash can pretty good trying to get away from it, and when the goulash gourmets looked over to see what was causing all the commotion, well, I didn’t wait for them to chase me down. I just scrambled around the corner and hid in the back alley.

The alley was a trash heap. I kept one eye out for monster mice while I watched for the cooks to appear at the kitchen door. When they didn’t show, I took a look down the alley and noticed that Palmer’s back door was propped open, too.

I worked my way through the garbage to the back door and peeked inside. There was a skinny hallway that ramped up to some pool tables at the back of the restaurant. On one side of it were more boxes; on the other, two bathrooms. The Women’s room door was shut, with an Out of Order sign posted on it, but the Men’s door was wide open. And I’m sure that it was functional and all, but, well, let’s just say that if Hero was walking by, even
he
wouldn’t have stopped.

I didn’t want to stand there all night checking out boxes and bathrooms, so I finally headed up the ramp into the cloud of cigarette smoke.

When I got to the pool tables I ducked around the corner and tried to disappear in a chair in the shadows. There was a lady wearing an Indiana Jones hat and a kind of gypsy dress with a lot of blouse buttons missing. She was playing pool against this guy with a Fu Manchu mustache and a shaved head, and I think she was winning, because while she was sashaying around the table chalking her cue stick and taking shots, he stood back looking pretty mad.

Now, what I should’ve been doing was looking over the divider for Paula Nook or Mr. Petersen, but I couldn’t seem to keep my eyes off the Gypsy. She had roses tattooed on her legs, and had on sandals that weren’t really sandals at all. They had no soles. Just a long strap of leather looped around the second toe and then wrapped up around the ankle and tied in front. And she was kind of large, but the way she moved was really graceful. Like she was doing a tango with the table.

When she sinks the last ball, she says, “Nice game” to Fu Manchu. He grumbles something about snakes in the grass, then slaps a twenty-dollar bill on the table and disappears.

She stuffs the twenty inside her gypsy dress, then chalks up Fu’s stick and says, “You any good?”

She had her back to me, so I didn’t think she was talking to me, and I just sat there in the dark, looking around for who she
was
talking to.

She turns around and hands me the stick. “Don’t be shy. Get up here.”

I whisper, “I … I can’t. I’m sorry. I was just watching.”

She squints through the smoke at me. “Ooh, you
are
young.”

“Shhh!”

She grabs her bottle of beer, sits down next to me, and whispers, “We hiding from someone?”

I shook my head.

“Then come on! No one’s gonna care. Not if you’re not drinkin’.”

“I can’t. I—”

She grabbed me by the arm and said, “Oh, come on. It’ll be fun. I’ll teach ya.”

Now, I didn’t want to learn. I just wanted to hide in my corner and look for the Cyclops and the Stinkbug. But she was getting pretty loud, and I was afraid that if I kept arguing I’d get thrown out before I had a chance to see anything.

She put the cue stick in my hand, then leaned onto the pool table with her own. “You right-handed?”

I nodded.

“Good. Right here now, next to me. Hold it like this with your right hand. Prop it like this on your left hand … Come on now, what are you looking at over there?”

“Oh, sorry.” I tried to copy what she was doing, but it felt really awkward. Like the handle was too big and the tip was too small and there was about a mile of wood in between the two.

“Okay, now slide it back and forth … no, no,
easy …
there you go.”

So there I am, learning to tango with a pool table, when I notice Paula Nook walk by with a tray of food.

The Gypsy watches me watching her. “You know Paula?”

“Uh, no.”

She laughs. “You’re a terrible liar.”

I felt like dropping my stick and running. I mean, what was I going to find out there anyway? No one was going to talk to a thirteen-year-old. Not one who was stupid enough to walk into Palmer’s after dark, anyway.

She held on to my arm and said, “Hey, hey, chill. Come on over here,” then sat me back down in the corner. “I really thought you’d have fun. Thought you were just being shy.” She looked right at me and whispered, “What’s got you so amped?”

I checked over my shoulder at the dining tables and then did a double take. Paula Nook had delivered the order to Mr. Petersen, only she hadn’t just left it there. She’d sat down across from him.

The Gypsy said, “It’s Paula, isn’t it?”

I decided not to answer her. “Do you know the guy she’s with?”

“Royce? Sure. He’s a regular.”

“Are they friends?”

“Him and Paula? I guess so. Not
friend
friends, if that’s what you mean. More like business acquaintances.”

Now, Mr. Petersen and Paula Nook weren’t sitting at that table discussing the weather. She was huddled up across from him, jabbing her finger in the air like she was trying to convince him that the world was round. He sat there shaking his head like he knew darned well it was flat, and no matter what she said, it was going to stay flat.

The Gypsy said, “Well, dust my chalk. I’ve never seen her act like
that
around him before.” She scratched up and down one of her rose tattoos and mumbled, “Me and Paula have gotta have a little talk if she’s tanglin’ with him.”

“Wait. No! Why?”

Her eyelids came in for a landing. “You some kind of narc for the wife?”

“No! I’m just … I’m just trying to get out of this gigantic mess I’m in.”

“Yeah?” Her eyes opened back up. “Anything I can do to help?”

I shook my head. “Just don’t let them know I was—” Then Mr. Petersen looks up, straight at me. I gulp, “Here.”

For a minute he just stares. Then he taps Paula on the arm and points at me.

Well, I guess she did recognize me, even with both eyes, because she was up in a flash, charging after me.

I said, “Gotta go!” to the Gypsy and flew down the ramp to the back door like a cannonball. And I would’ve hit the alley and hurdled rhino rats all the way back to the street, only as I ran by the women’s bathroom I heard something. Something high and yippy.

The Cyclops was charging down the ramp after me, but I did a U-turn anyway and yanked on the Women’s doorknob. It didn’t budge.

Now, I’ve never been thrown out of a place before. Not literally, anyway. But all of a sudden the Cyclops is clamping on to my sweatshirt and jeans, saying, “If ya gotta pee … use the bushes,” as she’s heaving me into the alley.

The door slams shut, and there I am, in the dirt, in the dark, only a few yards away from what’s probably my way out of the Crocodile’s jaws, and there’s only one thing on my mind.

Getting back inside.

It didn’t take me long to get up. If that really was Marique yipping in the women’s bathroom, I had to break the door down. That, or call the police and tell them there was a bomb in the building. Or children being tortured in the bathroom. Something.

The back door was locked up tight, and since the rats hadn’t exactly had a pay phone installed in the alley for my convenience, I went around the building to the kitchen door. Somebody had closed it, too. So I was on my way to tackle Palmer’s from the front, when who should come storming out? Big Bug Petersen.

He was on the lookout for me, all right, he just wasn’t looking in the right spot. He checked up and down Main Street, and then, while he’s jingling around trying to find the right key to the Bugmobile, he turns around and practically steps on me.

He backpedaled a bit, saying, “Get away from me! I got nothin’ to say to you!”

I just stood there, looking straight at him.

“I’m serious!”

He skittered past me, and from the way he was acting, I knew he was guilty of something. And watching him shaking the key into his Bug on Wheels it hit me that he
wasn’t just trying to hide something from me—he was desperate about something.

I took a stab and said, “If you lose your business, that doesn’t leave you with much, does it, Mr. Petersen?”

He plopped in his car and slammed the door.

I called through the window, “ ’Course, fifty grand might help out a bit … if you could get it.”

The window zoomed down and all of a sudden I was looking down the barrel of his handgun again. “If I’ve told you this once, I’ve told you a hundred times—stay out of it!”

Now, you may think at this point I’d be getting used to him poking a gun in my face, but let me tell you, I wasn’t. I jumped back, threw my hands up, and then stood there all bug-eyed as he squealed out of the parking lot. And I was in the middle of remembering how people turn up dead on the west side all the time when I heard, “That was not cool.”

I spun around, and there was the Gypsy looking really disgusted. She took a couple of steps closer saying, “Hey, don’t freak. He’s gone.”

All of a sudden my legs felt wobbly and I couldn’t seem to breathe right. I sat down on a parking curb and held my head in my hands, and before I could stop myself, I was crying.

She sat down next to me, and for the longest time she didn’t say a word. Finally she whispered, “I think you’re in way over your head.”