This guy is nothing like Gorilla Man. For one thing, he’s wearing a blue uniform with official security-guy patches. For another, he’s young and soft and has obviously never tossed anyone hard enough for them to catch air.
Still, from the look in his eye, I know we’ve hit the end of the line. So I pop off with “Hey, maybe you can help us!”
He steps out of the elevator but stays in front of it like he’s going to stop us from making a dash inside. “Help you?” he says, giving me a doughy look. “I can sure help you out of here.”
“Well, I don’t know where we want to be, actually, in or out. My mom told me to meet her at the loading dock for the House of Blues.”
“And what makes you think the loading dock is back here?”
“Well … I wouldn’t think you’d have your customers loading and unloading stuff, right? Employees would do that. So it makes sense to go to where the employees are?” I give a little shrug. “At least, that’s what we were thinking.”
Heather nods and says, “And you’re wearing blues—that’s what they call them, right? Your uniform? So … we must be on the right track?”
He gives her a little squint. “My blues have nothing to do with the House of Blues blues. That’s music. You know, wah-wah-wah, I got me a breaking heart?”
“Sounds like country music,” I tell him. “Is it a country music place?”
“No! It’s a blues place.” He studies me. “You seriously don’t know what the blues are?”
I give another little shrug, and Heather pipes up with “Personally, I’m just glad we ran into you so you can tell us where to go, because we are so lost, and this whole situation is ridiculous.”
I scratch the back of my neck. “You can say that again.”
Heather deadpans, “Personally, I’m just glad we ran into—”
“All right, all right!” Blues Boy says, then leads us back to the door we’d come through, saying, “Go out to the tram station—”
“There’s a tram?”
He scowls at us. “Do you two always talk this much?”
Heather hitches a thumb my way. “She does. Good luck shutting her up. It’s, like, constant.”
I blink at her. “Look at you right now, yammering away! Besides, I only talk too much when I’m nervous. Or lost in Las Vegas. Or in some back hallway getting cuffed by a cop for trying to find my mother.” I turn to Blues. “So okay, you’re not cuffing me. At least I hope you’re not going to. But—”
Mr. Security’s just staring at me, so I pinch my lips and wait until finally he says, “Yes. There’s a tram. It’ll take you to the Luxor and the Excalibur. But you don’t want to go to the Luxor or the Excalibur, so you don’t want to get on the tram.”
Now he’s talking to us like we’re stupid little kids, but that’s all right. These stupid little kids are tricking their way out of getting detained or arrested or whatever and finding out how to get to the loading dock, all at the same time.
Heather eyes me and I eye her back, and we both just let him keep talking down to us. “You want to go past the tram. Then keep walking around the building. The first down ramp you get to is the loading dock. Can’t miss it.”
I let go of my lip. “Do we go left past the tram or right?”
“Left.”
“And the loading dock is also on the left?” Heather asks him.
He opens the door and gives us a condescending smile. “Very good.”
“Well, thanks,” we tell him, and the minute the door closes behind us, Heather gives a little snort and slyly puts out a fist for me to bump.
So I do.
It’s just a little knock, but still.
Heather and I have bumped fists.
“So let’s find the tram,” she says, and I can tell she’s feeling a little weird about it, too.
“Yeah, let’s.”
So we wander through the casino looking for signs that say TRAM, and pretty soon Heather spots one. “There!” she cries, pointing straight ahead.
So out we go to the tram depot, which is like a train depot only more high-tech and full of people wearing way too much gold lamé and perfume.
“Shoot me if I ever look like that,” Heather whispers about a woman in a pink jumpsuit with oversized rhinestone jewelry.
“I’ve got your permission?” I whisper back. “ ’Cause you know, it seems wrong to first save someone’s life and then shoot them.”
She groans. “Don’t remind me!”
Now, Casey had told me that my pulling Heather up from the bottom of a swimming pool last summer had made her hate me even harder, but it was something I’d never really understood. I mean, would she rather I’d let her drown? Hudson had explained that it was because she didn’t want to owe me her life, especially since she obviously would like to kill me. Still—I’d never really been able to wrap my head around it.
So as we’re heading down some steps and away from the tram holding area, I tell her, “I actually thought it was Marissa at the bottom of the pool.”
Her head snaps to face me. “You did?”
The steps take us down to a walkway that goes through some landscaping between the building and a service road. So I follow that to the left, saying, “You were wearing the same swimsuit, remember?”
“Oh my God!” she cries, throwing her hands in the air. “All this time I thought you were trying to show off how you’re a better person than me.”
“By pulling you off the bottom of a pool?”
“Yeah! You could have sent anyone down after me! But no—you went and did it yourself.” She grabs my arm and actually pogos up and down. “But you thought I was Marissa! You thought I was Marissa!”
“Which means …?”
“Which means I don’t owe you my life!”
I blink at her. “Wow. Hudson was right.”
She stops jumping for joy. “That old guy? With the pink car?”
“Well, Hudson would insist the color’s ‘sienna rose,’ but yeah. He said you hated owing me your life.”
“But it turns out I don’t owe you my life!” she says, letting go of my arm.
“I never thought you did.”
“But I did!”
I shrug. “Well, even if you did, it’s not like I’d make you be my house elf or something.”
She eyes me. “I’d make a terrible house elf.”
“Don’t I know!” I laugh. “So forget it happened, would you?”
We keep on walking, with the backside of the Mandalay building on our left and the service road to our right. There are streetlights that help us see where we’re going, and even though it’s pretty isolated, it doesn’t feel like we’re in danger.
Well, unless we count each other as danger, which if we were back in Santa Martina, would have been a real thing.
Anyway, we finally come to a large opening in the building. It’s like a giant cement garage, only without a roll-up door.
“Do you think that’s it?” Heather asks, and even though we’re still a ways away, she’s whispering.
I give her a nod, then cut off the walkway and through some bushes to get us out of the streetlights. We head toward the edge of the building, and when we peek around the corner, what we see are two cars and a large panel truck parked at the end of a big cement delivery bay that’s lit up by floodlights.
“Do you hear that?” I whisper, ’cause there’s a steady thumping of music, fighting to be heard.
“This must be it!” She gets a little giddy and says, “I can’t believe we’re sneaking in to see Darren Cole!”
“I’m not sneaking in to see Darren Cole. I’m sneaking in to see my mom. And find out who she’s with!”
“What’s it matter anymore? As long as it’s not my dad, right?”
I think about this a minute and grumble, “What kind of ditz comes to Las Vegas with one man and winds up with another?”
“Uh, your mother?” Heather laughs.
“Not funny.”
She studies me a minute. “You’re right. But what does it matter?”
“There’s a lot you don’t know, so just trust me—it matters. And the goal here is to help me find her, okay?”
“Fine, but if we actually do get inside and you actually do find her, I’m going to watch the concert while you deal with your mother.”
“Okay … but then where do we meet afterward?”
She shrugs. “Back at the hotel room?”
“Then your mom will know we split up.” I think. “How about back at the box office?”
“That works.” She eyes my backpack and skateboard. “I know this is gonna be like ripping out your heart, but you have to leave your skateboard here. And nobody wears a backpack to a concert.”
As much as I don’t want to admit it, I know she’s right.
So I take the rest of my reward money out of my backpack and stuff it in a front pocket of my jeans. And at the last minute I take my mother’s picture, fold it, and put it in a back pocket. Then I stash the pack and my skateboard behind a hedge.
“Okay,” Heather says. “Now, how are we going to pull this off?”
My heart’s already starting to pound as I head out of the bushes and into the loading dock. “I have no idea.”
TWENTY-ONE
There’s a side door on the way down to the loading dock and a roll-up door at the end of it.
Both are locked.
So I head over to the panel truck.
“Wait!” Heather croaks out. “Where are you going?”
“To see how long that truck’s been here.”
“How are you going to tell that? And what’s it matter?”
“If the hood’s hot, it may have just gotten here. If it’s cold, that means it’s been a while and there’s probably no one coming back out here.”
“Why don’t we just knock?”
“On the door?”
“Yeah! We’ll make up some story, or—”
“They’ll think we’re groupies!”
“Of Darren Cole? He’s way too old for us!”
“Groupies don’t care!” I touch the hood of the truck, then head over to the cars to check them. “Or maybe the guitar player’s young and cute or something.”
“He’s the guitar player.”
“Okay, fine. The keyboard player, then.”
“Nobody knows who the keyboard player is!”
“Well, maybe you don’t, but a real groupie might.”
“No. Nobody ever knows who the keyboard player is.”
“They’re cold,” I say, changing the subject.
“For not knowing who the keyboard player is?”
“No! The hoods are all cold.”
“Oh. I thought you were talking about groupies.”
“I don’t want to talk about groupies anymore, okay?” I look around, feeling like we’ve hit a total dead end. I mean, we could knock on one of the doors, and I could try showing the pictures of my mother to whoever answered, but how in the world would anyone be able to pick her out of a huge crowd of people coming in to see the concert?
And that’s when something finally hits me.
And makes me feel like a complete moron.
My mother hadn’t been in the crowd outside the House of Blues waiting for the concert to start. It had never even crossed my mind to look for her in the line, because I was sure she was already inside.
But why was she allowed inside if everyone else was blocked off or kicked out?
And the guy in the fringed jacket had walked in like he owned the place, so maybe he did.
Or had something to do with managing it.
Or maybe he managed the band.
Or was the publicist or an agent or a label guy … or whatever band people had in their, you know, entourage.
Or wait. Maybe he was in the band.
Maybe he was the keyboard player!
Vaguely I hear, “What is going on in your head?” and when I snap out of it, there’s Heather, studying me like she’s looking through a microscope.
So I tell her, “Your dad said—no, he implied—that my mom was going to see the Darren Cole concert tonight. And Elvis said he saw her go inside the House of Blues with the Fringed-Jacket Guy, and since the Fringed-Jacket Guy went right by the velvet rope without getting tossed on his ear—”
“Or rear.”
“—that means my mother must have already been somewhere inside the concert hall.”
“That’s what you’ve been thinking? We knew that already!”
“But what that means is that the guy in the fringed jacket either works at the House of Blues or—”
“Is in the band!” She gasps and then covers her mouth. “Oh my God! Your mother’s a groupie!”
“My mother’s a …? No! My mother’s the opposite of a groupie. She is uptight and hates noise and blood and mice and has to be, you know, perfect.”
“Who says groupies like noise and blood and mice?”
“You know what I mean! The point is, I could see her with some big-shot manager or agent or producer or something. Maybe it’s some Hollywood hotshot who wants to put her in a movie. Or a video! He probably got them VIP seating and got let in early.”
She looks at me like I’ve got beans for brains. “So she takes a trip to Las Vegas with my dad, happens to meet up with some bigwig producer, and dumps my dad on Valentine’s Day to get a part in a movie?”
It does sound ridiculous, but the sad thing is, I could see my mother doing just that. “Why else would all this happen? She really liked your dad—she’s not going to dump him to be some groupie.”
Just then headlights turn into the loading bay and start coming toward us. Without a word, we both dive for cover behind the truck and hold our breath while the headlights get closer and closer … and then go off.
We hear a door slam and then the sound of another door sliding open, and when we finally peek out, we see a man in a turquoise shirt walking away from a van that says CONNIE’S CATERING in fancy turquoise lettering. He’s carrying two big deli trays and heading straight for the back door of the House of Blues.
“It looks like he’s working alone,” Heather whispers.
“And I think he left the van’s slider open,” I whisper back, because I hadn’t heard it close.
“Which means he’s making more than one trip?”
I nod. “That’s what I’m thinking.”
We watch as he beats on the regular door, and when no one answers, he goes to the roll-up door and beats on that. It makes a lot more noise than banging on the regular door did, and after he does it twice, someone inside rolls the door up.
The music goes from thumping to loud, and the combination of an open door and a rock concert must have overloaded Heather’s logic circuits, because she starts to make a break for it.
I yank her back. “No! You’ll get busted!”
“So what are we going to do? Sit here and watch the door close?”
It turns out that’s exactly what we do. Only before it closes, a big guy in a red SECURITY T-shirt steps out from inside and looks all around like he’s making sure nobody’s out in the loading dock planning to infiltrate the House of Blues.
“So now what?” Heather says after the door’s rolled down.
I tap her arm as I move out. “Come on.”
“Now?”
“Shh! Just follow me.”
So I lead her around to the van’s open door, and what do we see inside?
A whole bunch of deli trays and bakery boxes and baskets of fruit.
I also see some turquoise polo shirts on hangers, dangling from a hook on the side of the van.
“We’re wide-open here!” Heather whispers. “What are we doing?”
So I grab two of the shirts and we zip back around to the far side of the van. “Here,” I tell her. “Put this on over your clothes.”
She doesn’t say, That’ll look dorky! or anything like it. She just puts it on.
And yeah, she looks
dorky.
But then, so do I.
Anyway, I peek up through the van’s side window, where we’ve got a clear view of the building. And we don’t have to wait long before the regular door starts to open.
Heather grabs my arm. “There he is!” And as we’re watching him stoop over to wedge some paperwork down by the threshold so the door won’t latch, she suddenly looks at me and says, “Is this what it’s like to be Marissa?”
“Huh?”
She shakes her head a little. “Never mind.”
But it does sink in, so I tell her, “Actually, yes. I’m always dragging her into something.” I eye her. “Not so much dragging going on with you. I’m more having to hold you back.”
“Yeah, well, you were right—this is definitely a better plan.”
If we had been doing something less, you know, adrenaline-intensive, I would probably have fainted. But seeing how we were about to dive into some security-infested waters, I didn’t actually pass out from shock. I just let her words kind of ring in my ears.
Anyway, the catering guy is heading back for another load now, so we duck down, and when we’re sure he’s walking off with the second load, Heather whispers, “We’re grabbing a tray, right? And going in?”
“That’s the plan. We’ve just got to time it right.”
“We want him to be in long enough to be far enough away—like in the greenroom, right? But not so long that he’s on his way out when we’re coming in with his trays?”
“Bingo.”
The catering guy goes back through the regular door, and even though it looks like it closes, I can tell the door’s not latched.
“So … when?” Heather whispers.
“Not yet.”
Ten seconds go by.
“Now?”
“Not yet.”
“Now?”
“No.”
“So … when?”
“Going by his last trip, I’d say”—I give her a grin—“now.”
So we zip around the van, grab a deli tray each, and beeline for the door the catering guy went through. Sure enough, it’s not latched.
Since the roll-up door is to the right, I whisper, “Once we’re in, I’m planning to go to the left and walk like I know where I’m going.”