Anthony Horowitz - Nightrise

“No.”

“I have to look for him.”

“I know how you’re feeling, Jamie. Can I call you that? You said you were looking for Scott so I guess that answers my question.” Again he didn’t answer, so she went on. “Just try to think straight for a minute. You want to find your brother. But where are you going to start?” She walked over to a table and picked up a small, silver object, shaped like a bullet but with a needle jutting out at one end and a black tuft at the other. “Do you know what this is?”

Jamie felt his blood run cold.

“I dug this out of your shoulder,” the woman said. “God knows what was in it but you’ve been asleep for eleven hours. Your brother was hit too, and right now he could be anywhere. You can look all over Reno if you want. You can look all over Nevada. But you’re not going to find him.”

She was right. Jamie knew it. But it didn’t matter. He couldn’t stay here, not without Scott. “I have to see Uncle Don,” he said.

“Don? The woman blinked. “You mean Don White? The man on the posters? Is he your uncle?”

“No. He’s nothing – but he made us call him that. He’ll be wondering where we are. He was there at the theatre last night. Maybe he can help.”

“I’m not so sure…”

“I don’t care what you think.” Jamie took a deep breath. “We were renting a house. It’s over in Sparks. There’s him and Marcie. I have to tell them what happened. They’ll contact the cops.”

The woman thought for a moment. Then she nodded. “Why don’t you call them?”

There was a telephone on a table beside the bed. Jamie picked it up and dialled the number. He waited, listening as it rang at the other end. There was no reply. He let it ring a dozen times. Then he hung up.

“If they cared about you, they’d have called the police already,” the woman said.

“How do you know they haven’t?”

The woman sighed. “Fair enough. I haven’t seen the papers yet…”

“You knew what happened.” Jamie couldn’t keep the hostility out of his voice. “Why didn’t you call them?”

“I wanted to talk to you first.”

“Great. Well now you’ve talked to me. How long did you say I’ve been here? Eleven hours. That means you’ve given them eleven hours to get away with Scott. I don’t even know your name but you’re nothing to do with me. I just want to go home.”

“I’m not stopping you!” The woman raised her hands in a gesture of surrender. “You want to go home? That’s fine! In fact I’ll drive you there myself. OK?”

Jamie nodded.

“Then let’s go.”

The woman went over to the door and the two of them stepped outside. Jamie screwed up his eyes as the sun hit him. The door opened onto a parking lot and he could feel the heat bouncing off the tarmac, roasting his forehead and cheeks. The air smelled of burning rubber and gasoline. The Bluebird Inn was an old-fashioned building, two storeys high, mainly white-painted wood. It had been named after the state bird of Nevada but if anything with wings came close to the place it was more likely to be a plane. The motel had been constructed exactly opposite the runway and even as Jamie stood there, he heard the roar of a jet – though whether it was taking off or landing he couldn’t see.

“You always stay here?” he asked.

The woman glanced at him. “I always stay near airports,” she replied. Why? What did she mean? But Jamie didn’t ask her. Whatever her problems were, they had nothing to do with him.

She had rented a car, a silver four-door Ford Focus, and Jamie saw that she had called someone out early that morning. The window had been repaired. But one of the wing mirrors was missing. That would cost her plenty when she took the car back. He got into the front seat and closed the door.

“Alicia McGuire,” the woman said.

“I’m sorry?”

“You didn’t ask me my name, but I thought you’d like to know it anyway.” She started the engine. “So where are we heading?”

“It’s just off the 80. I can show you.”

They drove together in silence. Jamie looked out of the window as the offices and hotels of Reno slipped past. He knew them all. They had become as familiar to him as the features on his own face. And yet now, somehow, they seemed a long way away. As they drove up the ramp and onto the freeway heading east, he felt a sense of dislocation. It was as if someone had taken a giant pair of scissors the night before and cut a straight line through his life.

The air-conditioning was on full and he let the air current wash over him, separating his clothes from his skin. He hoped it would wake him up. He was still groggy, perhaps from the drug, perhaps from the shock of what had happened. He tried to make sense of the events at the theatre but he couldn’t. At least four men, perhaps more, had come for him and Scott. Two of them had been in the audience. The others had appeared from nowhere. But the whole thing had been carefully planned. That much was obvious. And if it hadn’t been for Jagger, the two of them wouldn’t even have made it out of the theatre.

Frank Kirby’s dog. Jamie remembered the struggle and hoped the animal was all right. Frank was always worrying about the dog… it was old and had a weak heart. Jamie knew that the men in the theatre would have quite happily killed Jagger without so much as a second thought, and these were the same people who had taken Scott. Well Jamie would find them, with or without his uncle’s help. They didn’t know him. They didn’t know what they were up against.

“It’s the next exit,” he said.

Don White and his wife had rented a house in Sparks, a suburb of Reno, just a few miles to the east. Alicia turned off and they descended into a grid system of pretty, tree-lined streets that seemed a world apart from the main city. And yet the poker tables and slot machines had spread out even here. Two huge towers, bookends that didn’t quite match, rose up on the other side of the freeway. This was the Nugget, another enormous casino and hotel complex. Many of the people who lived in Sparks worked there as waiters, croupiers, cleaners or security guards. There was no escaping it. It seemed to look down and sneer at the little community as if to say, I am your master. You owe your livelihood to me.

Every house in Sparks was different and each one stood on its own little plot of land. There were cottages made of brick, wooden bungalows with painted shutters and verandas, villas built in the Spanish style with wrought-iron gates and white stucco walls. Some of the houses had been decorated with wind chimes, dolls and flowerpots. Others had been allowed to fall into disrepair. It just depended who was living there – and it seemed that all sorts of people had chosen this neighbourhood for their home.

Number 402 Tenth Street was at the top end, close to the casino. It stood out at once because it was the most dilapidated building in the street, with a garden that had been allowed to run wild and a rusting barbecue on its side in the grass. It had a porch with a net screen running all the way round, but it was full of holes, as if it had been stabbed. The paint was flaking. The window frames were rusting. A single air-conditioning unit clung to one wall as if by its fingernails. The house was two storeys high with a garage to one side. There was a caravan parked in the driveway and from the look of it, it hadn’t been moved in a long time.

“This is it,” Jamie said.

“I sort of guessed.” Alicia didn’t stop outside. She drove a few doors further down and pulled up beneath an acacia tree. “Park in the shade,” she explained.

Jamie nodded. “Thanks,” he said. He reached for the door handle.

“Wait a minute!” Alicia stared at him. “What do you think you’re doing?”