Sammy Keyes and the Search for Snake Eyes (26 page)

My heart starts slamming around as I stand up. Marissa, I'm thinking, Please be Marissa!

And looking out the vent, I can see that it
is
Marissa, and she's not alone.

Only those baggy pants behind her definitely do not belong to Officer Borsch.

Snake Eyes threw Marissa in the basement and closed the door. And he was acting madder than a rabid rattler, but he didn't say a word.

He turned the water off and tried to pull the hose back up, but I held on with all my might, so he just hacked through it with his switchblade, spilling water inside the basement as our piece of it tumbled down. I grabbed the cut end and held it up with the other end, trapping what water I could inside it.

As soon as he's gone, Marissa starts whimpering, “Ohmygod, Sammy. He came out of
no
where!”

Lena's sitting up with her head in her hands. “That's his way.”

“He kept asking about the baby—I thought he was going to slit my throat!”

“Did you tell him we don't have him?”

“Yes! But he wouldn't let me go! That Sonja girl must've called him because he knew you were with me. I'm sorry, Sammy! I'm so, so sorry!”

“I'm the one who's sorry, Marissa.” I put my arm around her because she's shaking so bad her teeth are chattering.

“You were taking forever, Sammy! I thought, you know, that someone had caught you.”

“I'm sorry,” I whisper again, kicking myself for putting her through all this. “I came back, but you were already gone.”

“He is so …so…
evil
. He oozes evilness! You should have seen the way he tore apart my backpack! I don't know
what
he was looking for.”

I turn to Lena and hand her the hose. “Drink this. All of it. We've got to get out of here.”

She shakes her head. “It's no use—he'll be back.” She eyes me. “With a gun.”

Marissa starts shaking even harder. “A gun?”

“There are three of us and one of him, Marissa. We'll figure something out.”

But then Lena says, “You don't know Caesar. He'll do you quick. Probably have a baby bust a cap in you. But me?” She collapses on the mattress. “He'll make me suffer.”

“What do you mean, a baby?”

“Some kid who's dying to jump in,” she says. “You mean he'll let them into the gang if they
kill
us?” “Yeah.” She nods like it happens all the time. “That's the way.”

“Great,” Marissa says, still chattering. “Just great.”

“Look, we're not tied up. There's got to be some way we can get out of here! Why don't we all just scream for help? What's stopping us?”

“You think I didn't try that?” Lena says. “I screamed my stupid heart out for hours and no one came. No one
but him, to tape me up.” She shakes her head. “They close up their windows, they roll up their hearts … they just want to stay out of it.”

“But —”

“Try it. Go on. He'll just come down here and wrap you up with that.” She nods at a fat roll of duct tape lying near the mattress. “Believe me, it ain't worth it.”

“Well, I'm not giving up. I still say it's three to one, and I haven't spent the last week of my life trying to find you just to let him kill you. Or us.” I force the hose on her. “Now drink this.”

She studies me a minute, then drinks. Seriously drinks. And when she hands the hose back, she starts pulling the duct tape off of her ankles, saying, “Where's my baby?”

“He's in some kind of temporary care home until you show up.”

She nods.

I hand the hose ends to Marissa, who's calmed down quite a lot, then I dig through my backpack for my squished banana. “Here,” I tell Lena. “It looks gross, but eat it. I've got part of a peanut butter sandwich when you're done with that.”

Then I start looking through the stuff in the basement, hoping to find a length of pipe or a two-by-four or something I can use to pulverize snake brains. There's the wheelbarrow, but no hoe or shovel or
rake
to go with it. Just a good-for-nothing old stirring stick for nonexistent paint.

But the wheelbarrow does have handles. I wrestle it around to see how they're attached. Six big rusty bolts.

“Okay! I need a wrench. A screwdriver. Something hard. Flat. Wedge-like!”

Lena's chewing on the banana like her jaw's rusted. “Before he tied me up, I dug everywhere for tools. You ain't gonna find a thing. There's a couple sacks of cement in the corner, but that's about it.”

“Cement?”

She points. “Back there.”

I read the sack: “EZ-CRETE. Sets in thirty minutes.”

Marissa wails, “What good's
that
going to do us?” and she's right. They're too heavy to throw, and besides, he'd come in from above. Gravity was working against us. So I started looking around again, saying, “Maybe we can ram the door.
Pry
the door.”

“With what? A
hose
?” Marissa says.

“There's got to be something down here! Help me search.”

So Marissa starts looking around, and that's when she sees them, nesting in the rafters in their sticky, messy webs about a foot above her head. She shrieks and the hose flies out of her hands as she freaks. “Black widows!”

“Uh-huh,” Lena says, nodding. “They're everywhere.”

I snatch the hose off the ground, rescuing whatever water I can keep from running out. Then I give it to Lena and say, “Drink this. Every bit of it.”

She nods and takes both ends in one hand and I can tell—she's feeling a little better already.

Then I go over to Marissa and hold her by the shoulders. “Marissa, look at me. Look at
me
.”

She pulls a horrible face and whimpers.

“They're bugs, Marissa. Squash, splat, smear—they're dead.”

She's practically hyperventilating. “They're exoskeletons and they crunch. They're the grossest, ugliest, poisonest —”

“Poisonest?”

“Yes! They —”

“They leave you alone,” Lena says, taking a sip from the hose.

“See?” I said to Marissa. “She's been down here for
days
and she hasn't gotten bitten.”

“I'd take them over Caesar any day,” Lena mutters. “Once you're in his web, you ain't never gonna get out.”

“I don't get it,” I tell her. “Everyone says you killed Joey—that you were back in the gang after marrying him.”

She shakes some water out of the hose and onto her palm; then she rubs her hand all over her face, saying, “All my life I've got to live with this.”

“You
did
kill him?”

She shakes her head. “Caesar set me up. Said he wanted to give Joey and me a wedding present. He had Buzzface driving, which right there shoulda told me something. But I was so wantin' to just put it all to rest and get on with my life that I fooled myself into believin'.” She eyes me and says, “Caesar can ooze smooth when he wants to.” She shrugs. “So we're drivin' up to meet Joey and when I see him waitin' outside, I wave and call, and the
next thing you know, shots is blastin' from through my window. Caesar shoved the gun right under my arm and out the window. Set me up good.”

“Why didn't you just tell the police that?”

“ 'Cause everyone,
everyone
, who was eyewitness or in the car was claimin' it was me. So I hid. And then I split. Joey was dead and I didn't care about nothin' no more. Then I found out I was pregnant and I just had to shift my head. Get over myself, you know? Ain't nothin' like a baby to make you see what a chump you've been.”

She shook her head. “Caesar's all about power, but it's power over
nothin
’. He wants to do me in, do my baby in, 'cause I dissed him? Like that's gonna make him king? Of what? This dump? This neighborhood? His little king-dom's nothin' but a big heap of trash.”

She'd finished the banana, so I dug up what was left of my peanut butter sandwich. “Here,” I said. “Work on this.”

She pulled a face. “I'm feeling really weird from that banana….”

“Well, just nibble.” I looked at Marissa, still petrified by all the spiders.

“We're looking for tools, Marissa. Any kind of tool. Or weapon. Those spiders aren't going to hurt you nearly as much as that snake will.”

“Snake?” Marissa jumps back, crying, “What snake! Where? Where?”

“The snake slithering around up there,” I said, pointing to the creaking floorboards above. “What's he
doing
up there?”

“Talkin' on his cell,” Lena says. “Makin' plans.” She nibbles on the crust. “He paces when he's uptight.”

“Help me, you guys! Help me find something we can use!”

Lena stands up, wobbles for a few seconds, then crumples back onto the mattress.

Marissa grimaces at Lena's pants and whispers, “You're a mess.”

Lena nods. “I don't even smell it no more, but it burns pretty good.”

“So Marissa, help me!”

“Okay, okay!” she says, then walks around muttering, “A tool. A tool.”

I checked all around the water heater. Behind it, under it, on top of it. No pipe wrench, no loose pipe, nothing.

“That thing kept me from freezing at night,” Lena said. “It makes god-awful popping noises, but at least it's warm.”

It was more than warm, it was
hot
. No insulation around it, just a giant radiator flaming on in the corner. Then I had an idea. I got on my hands and knees and nearly burned my fingers trying to open a small door near the bottom of the water heater. Inside was a big orange-and-blue pilot light. “Marissa! Check it out, Cavegirl. We've got fire!”

She comes over, looks inside the door, and scowls at me. “Pack any miniature marshmallows?”

“Maybe we can start something else on fire!”

“Like what?”

“Like … like …” I look around. “The stirring stick!”

“And pretend it's what? A torch?”

“No! We can take the stick and light … the mattress!” Marissa crosses her arms. “You're going to kill us before he does, aren't you.”

“Okay, maybe we can catch the
door
on fire!”

“And then the door'll catch the house on fire and the whole house'll come collapsing down on us! They won't even have to buy us plots at the cemetery!”

Lena snickers. “You two are somethin'.”

I look at Marissa and smile, because she's not shaking anymore—she's up for a fight! “Come on, you guys! Let's figure
some
thing out!”

So we all look around, thinking, the creaking of Snake Eyes' footsteps above like a scar on the silence. Then Marissa actually finds a brick, which we decide will be just great for knocking Snake Eyes out. If we can get that close to him.

It wasn't enough, though, and even though I searched all around, I kept coming back to the water heater. There had to be
some
thing we could do with it. We didn't
have
anything else. Just a stupid wheelbarrow I couldn't get the handles off of, a mattress rank with pee, a good-for-nothing stirring stick, a roll of duct tape, and some cement. And oh yeah—a boatload of icky, crunchy exoskeletons.

Lena held the hose to her mouth to wash down some peanut butter, and pretty soon, she'd worked the full length of it.

“It's empty?”

“Yeah,” she says.

“You need more?”

She smiles at me and puts the hose down. “You're sweet, you know that? You planning to run out and get some, or what?”

“Well, we could maybe drain some from the water heater … let it cool down? I mean, if you're thirsty, we should try it.”

“I'm fine,” she says. “Fine.”

“Try standing up, then. See what it feels like.”

She does, and her legs hold her up like Jell-O.

“See? You're all dehydrated and weak. You've got to keep eating that sandwich, okay? And I'll try to drain some water for you.”

Now, water heaters and I haven't spent much time together. I don't even know where the one in the Senior Highrise is. But inspecting this water heater, I notice it's got a kind of spigot—with a handle and a place to attach a hose. So I figure that's what we'll do—attach the hose and turn the handle. Trouble is, when I go to do it, I realize I've got the wrong end of the hose.

“Darn!”

“What's wrong?” Marissa says, her eyes back to bugging out at the rafters.

“I need the other end!”

She made herself come over. “What if you hold the hose up to it and I turn it on? We'll spill, but who cares?”

So I held the hose to the spigot and waited. And waited. And waited. And finally Marissa grunts and says, “It's stuck, Sammy! I can't get it to budge. Plus, it's hot. Man!” She flicks her hand up and down. “It's
really
hot!”

So I tried it myself. And yeah, it was stuck. And hot. “Sorry,” I told Lena. “No water.”

She stood up and wobbled at the knees, but didn't fall down. “See? I'm gonna be fine.”

I tried the valve one last time and nearly burned my hand on the pipe.

Then all of a sudden I had an idea. And at first I'm telling myself, Nah—that'll never work—I've got the wrong end of the hose. But then I started thinking, Hey, I could use the rubber end, not the metal end, because right there next to me is a roll of the world's thickest, stickiest tape. It could work! It could! I cried, “My high-tops for a wrench!” which made Marissa eye Lena and say, “She seriously wants some tools, can you tell?”