Sammy Keyes and the Hollywood Mummy (2 page)

We locked Marissa's bike to a rusty rack in the corner of the parking lot, then headed for the glass double doors of the station.

There were five people already in the waiting room. One was asleep, sitting on an old army duffel bag on the floor with his head propped against one of the black plastic chairs anchored to the wall. Another man was huddled with a woman by the soda machine. They both had bleached hair, gelled straight up. He was wearing a gas station attendant shirt tucked into gray businessman
slacks, which were tucked into SWAT boots. She had more earrings than Heather Acosta, and nothing of hers was tucked in anywhere. Her bra strap was hanging off a shoulder, her T-shirt was ripped off at the stomach, and her belly button stuck out like an extra eye, fleshy and squinted.

Then there was a farmworker by the water fountain, rinsing his bandanna in the water, wiping down his face and neck. A bent old man in big thick glasses and Velcro-strap sneakers was watching him from across the room, and you could just feel him thinking that people shouldn't bathe themselves in public that way.

Marissa came to a halt in the doorway. “Uh…are you sure you want to do this?”

I wasn't, but I didn't want to let Marissa know that. I whispered back, “We're in downtown Santa Martina, Marissa. What were you expecting? Civilization?”

She let the door close behind her, and as she's dragging her suitcase along, everyone in the building stops what they're doing to check us out. And there's absolutely no doubt about what they're thinking.

Runaways.

Then the guy with the Velcro sneakers rasps up a giant wad of phlegm from the bottom of his throat, snorts any snot he can scare up from his fleshy old nose, squishes the whole mess between his teeth, and swallows.

I cringe and shudder, and Marissa says, “Oh, gross!” We scoot her suitcase toward the counter, and Marissa says to the clerk, “We want to catch the three-forty-five to Hollywood.”

He pulls out a couple of tickets. “One way?”

Marissa digs her wallet out of her purse, saying, “Round trip. What return times do you have for Monday?”

He hands her a schedule and has Marissa pass him her suitcase under the counter, then prepares the tickets. And just as he's finishing, he says, “It's pullin' up. Have a nice trip,” without even looking up.

I head for the pay phone wedged beside a video game and say, “I've got to call.”

Marissa watches the others filing outside. “Just use my cell phone from the bus.”

“You brought that thing?”

She shrugged. “Seemed like a good idea to me.”

“Are you sure it's going to work?”

“Why wouldn't it… Oh, no! It's in my suitcase!”

I raced over to the pay phone, popped in the coins, took a deep breath, and dialed. And after about twenty rings I hung up and tried again, thinking that maybe I'd punched the number in wrong. I mean, I was nervous enough about what I was going to say to Grams that dialing the wrong number sure
was
possible. Again, no answer.

Marissa's starting to dance a little. She whispers, “Sammy, they're getting on!”

I let it ring a few more times, then I slam the phone down and go charging outside. The bus driver's got a cigarette in one hand and is about to close the storage compartment with the other. I call, “Wait! Hey, wait a minute!”

He stops and looks our way. The bus motor is still running, growling and letting out puffs of exhaust. He calls over the rumble, “Have a change of heart?”

“No, we …” I point to Marissa's suitcase in the compartment and say, “I need to get something out of my luggage.” He frowns, so I add, “Please?”

He helps me pull the thing out and then turns away to finish his smoke as Marissa digs up the phone, zips the suitcase closed, and shoves it back inside.

We tell him thanks and give him our tickets, then hurry up the steps.

And it's funny—being inside the bus wasn't anything like I expected. No people checking each other out like kids do on school buses. No feeling of trench warfare like you get on field trips when the class clowns in back are packing spit-wad straws. Or water balloons. Or stink bombs.

No, the seat backs on this Big Dog were so high that even though I knew they were on board somewhere, the Depot Derelicts seemed to have just disappeared.

It was also the hum. Outside the running engine had sounded like a growl, but inside it was more a hum. A strong, no-nonsense hum. And it drowned out what people were saying to each other, so as we walked down the aisle looking for two empty seats together, it almost felt as though the people on board weren't really there at all. Their very existence seemed erased by the hum.

Marissa let me have the window seat, and I looked down at the station—at cars going along Broadway and a boy cutting through the parking lot on his bicycle. And it felt odd, being up so high, looking out such a large, tinted window, vibrating from the hum. Like I was leaving the planet, not just Santa Martina.

Then the door closed. And as the driver put the bus into
gear and eased out of the parking lot, Marissa handed me the phone and said, “Here. You'll feel a lot better once you take care of this.”

She was right. I was feeling queasy. I mean, what was I thinking, going off to Hollywood? I didn't even really know where I was going. Sure I had an address, but the map I'd pulled off the Internet in the library wasn't exactly razor-sharp. And I hadn't really thought through what I was going to say to my mother. I just knew I had to go.

I punched in Grams' number, and while I'm listening to her phone ring, we turn from Broadway onto Main. And then, like in a dream, who do I see in the intersection, crossing the street from Maynard's Market with a sack of groceries in her arms?

Grams.

I want to wave. I want to call her name and explain what I'm doing. Why I couldn't tell her about it before. Why I
have
to go.

But I can't. I can only sit there with her phone ringing in my ear and the hum of the bus purring through me from everywhere else. As we pull away from the intersection and Grams disappears from view, a cry catches in my throat. And even though Marissa's right there beside me, I feel panicky.

Panicky and painfully alone.

When I did get ahold of her, my conversation with Grams went pretty much as expected. And my grams — who's normally a very sensible person — worked herself into telling me I should take the bus hostage and flip a U-turn home. That actually made me laugh. I reminded her about the first — and last — time I'd tried to drive, and how I'd plowed my way through downtown Santa Martina giving everyone in my wake a heart attack, and then totaled the motor home I was driving and a police car to boot. “Imagine,” I told her, “what I could do with a bus.”

She didn't find much funny about that, but she did change the subject. She wanted to come, too. She'd take the next bus. Find someone with a plane and sign over her Social Security. Hitchhike. Something.

I just said, “Grams! Grams, stop it! We'll be fine. Stop treating me like a little kid!”

She almost said, But Samantha, you are
behaving
like a child, but she changed her mind at the last second, and what came out instead was, “But, Samantha, you are … going to call me? Every hour?”

“Not every hour, Grams, but I will call. And please,
please don't tell Lady Lana I'm coming. If you do, it will ruin everything!”

She finally agreed, and then all of a sudden she was getting off the phone, telling me to take care and be safe.

The switch in her attitude seemed strange. I clicked the phone off and stared at it, and then it hit me. “Oh, no!”

Marissa asked, “What?”

I turned the phone back on and started punching. “She's going to call Hudson!”

“So?”

“So I've got to get ahold of him first!”

“Why?”

To my relief, there was a ring instead of a busy signal. “Do you want him driving her down so they can both watch over us?”

Marissa cringed at the thought of two senior-citizen chaperones. “He would
do
that?”

“Marissa, he's Hudson! Of course he would!”

Just then Hudson picked up. So I gave him a one-giant-sentence explanation about what we were doing and why, and asked him to please-please-please take care of Grams, but whatever he did, not to drive her to Hollywood.

He asked me a few questions, made me promise to be careful, and then gave me his word. I got off the phone and handed it to Marissa with a great big
pfew!

Marissa was right. I did feel better. Tons better. And after she got done leaving a “Just checking in, we're fine, see you Monday” message on her parents' machine, we settled in and just talked. About everything from Mrs. Ambler to the Depot Derelicts to Lady Lana and what I
was going to say to her. And before you know it, we were making our transfer, boarding another Big Dog for the long stretch into Los Angeles.

After we settled in again, we dug into the peanut butter sandwiches I'd packed, and then, with our tummies happy on the inside and darkness blanketing us from outside, we let the bus hum us to sleep.

The next thing I knew, Marissa was whispering, “Sammy? Sammy, are you awake?”

I cracked open an eye. “Are we there?”

“No, but I think we're close. Look!”

There were more lights than I'd ever seen. Headlights were strung together like white Christmas lights, turning and twisting from highway to highway. Skyscrapers sparkled with office lights. Neon hotel and restaurant signs glowed pink and green and blue. Billboards were flooded with spotlights. The twinkling and shimmering arced away at the horizon, so it felt like we were riding across the surface of an enormous disco ball.

Marissa gasped, “It's beautiful!”

I nodded and whispered, “Wow.”

“We are definitely not in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

“You can say that again.” I eyed her. “You got ruby slippers in that pink suitcase?”

She laughed and said, “Who wants to go home? God,
look
at that!”

We spent the rest of the trip glued to the glass. And when the bus driver took an off-ramp, we were still in a
trance. The bus sashayed from side to side, the humming came down in pitch, and it felt like we were coming in for a landing.

But as we purred at an intersection waiting for the stop-light to change, I looked around and realized that up close this place was nothing like it had seemed from the freeway. It wasn't dancing with lights, it was buzzing with them. And they didn't even seem to twinkle anymore. They just made the air a fuzzy gray.

Suddenly the feel of the place was cold and hard. Wall-to-wall hard. The road looked like an asphalt runner on a carpet of dirty cement. And all around were buildings made of cinder block, their windows and doors covered with burglar bars and steel gates.

I peeled myself from the window and leaned back in my seat, but I kept one eye on what we were driving by. Marissa shrank back into her seat, too, and neither of us said anything for a few minutes. Finally I said, “It's not looking so beautiful anymore, is it?”

She shook her head but didn't say a word.

“It's like we've gone from disco to metal.”

She frowned. “Death metal.”

The bus bounced into the station, and when the driver stood and called, “Hollywood, California,” we got up and stretched, then shuffled out the folding doors.

I guess it's not fair to judge a city by its bus station. I mean, if Santa Martina were judged that way, we'd probably have a population of about ten. But there we were— landing in a universe with browning palm trees and cement, populated by skanky people with bloodshot eyes
and paper-sacked bottles—definitely judging a town by its bus station.

Marissa whispers, “
Now
what?” and just like her, I was scared. I mean, on my map it had seemed easy. Catch the bus to Hollywood, from there take a city bus to Beverly Hills, walk a little ways, and knock. Ta-da! But a few simple inches on a map translate to a state of confusion in real life. And I didn't see city buses waiting to whisk us away. Only rusty green taxis driven by greasy guys with faded tattoos.

But I didn't want to panic Marissa by letting on that I was scared. So I pointed to where they were unloading luggage and said, “Hey! There's your King Kong carryall— let's go!”

We retrieved her suitcase, then I pulled out my map and said, “Okay, we're right here, on North Vine. Sunset is that way a few blocks. There's bound to be a bus running there.”

“Sunset? As in the Sunset Strip?”

I unfolded the map, looking for the answer. “I think so.”

All of a sudden Marissa's full of energy again. “Cool!”

Now really, I should've asked. I should've just gone in and asked somebody, anybody, about buses. Or how much taxis cost. Or what other choices there were for getting from here to there. But everybody was so stony. Or strange. And then, when I realized that the guy standing a few feet over from us was peeing in his paper-sacked bottle, I just wanted to get
out
of there.

So we headed up to Sunset. Up to the Strip. And let me
tell you, we figured out in a hurry that this is not a place for lost girls with tattered pink suitcases to be walking around at night. Not that there weren't other pedestrians— there were. And most of them were of the female variety, but they weren't
walking
anywhere, if you know what I mean.

We had trouble not staring as we scurried past them. It was like the stuff you see in the movies: short skirts, high heels, and enough makeup to paint a barn.

What you don't see in the movies, though, is the shivering. And they were
all
shivering. Even the ones wrapped in rabbit. In the movies you can't smell the clashing odors, either. Garbage, musk, and exhaust make for a pretty putrid combination, let me tell you.

The only time I'd seen anything close to this in real life was over at the Heavenly Hotel. Gina and the other people I've gotten to know over there all seem to be edge-dwellers. Like one little tap and they'd be gone,
poof !
over the edge. And it's not just the way they dress or smoke or act. It's more the attitudes they cop. Like their survival depends on getting you before you get them.