41.
Once we left the hospital and drove off in the Jeep, we didn’t stop driving until we were sitting in a bright and busy Denny’s three hundred miles away from the hospital. We all ate like starving contestants on Survivor who have just won their first real meal in thirty days. I felt kind of guilty for eating so much after Spear’s death, but fear and grief can make you really hungry. As if every bite was proof you were still alive.
I don’t know what Mink felt, but she was pounding down her second bacon cheeseburger and stealing my onion rings. Marvella skipped the extra burger and went straight for cherry pie ala mode. We didn’t talk during the meal. Maybe because we were eating so fast that we were afraid we’d choke. Or maybe because we needed the time to think, to absorb the sudden change in our situation. Spear was dead. I was probably next.
Which in no way affected the taste of my chili cheeseburger and fries.
When the eating frenzy was finally over, we hunched over our Cokes and discussed our options in whispers like thieves planning a bank heist. I had already filled them in during our getaway drive on everything Spear had told me about the cuffs and my powers. After some heated discussing, we came up with a four-pronged plan to save our lives:
The Four-Pronged Plan to Save Our Lives
Get a cuff on me as soon as possible. With the headaches and bleeding increasing, I needed to get recharged by a cuff ASAP. The closest was Spear’s original cuff, now residing at The Coliseum Military Academy. (We got this information from a CIA guy who Marvella used to date. He wasn’t a spy, just a research analyst. But between the time Marvella phoned him as we were driving away from the hospital and our arrival at Denny’s, he’d researched all gas station and motel receipts around Des Moines during the date when Spear sold the cuff, tracked down traveling salesmen in the area at the time, and traced it to one Frank Decosta in Lincoln, Nebraska. A quick phone interview revealed that Frank’s daughter (the one he was trying to bribe because he forgot her birthday) sold the cuff on eBay to get a down payment on a pick-up truck. The purchaser of the cuff was gladiator enthusiast Connor St. John, a member of the board of The Coliseum, in Tarrytown, Virginia.)
Get my original cuff. Then we would go back to Washington, D.C. where Marvella had hidden my cuff in a place she wouldn’t tell me about. With both cuffs, I would be able to get rid of all those bits of personalities that were clogging up my system like undigested steak. Also, I’d then have enough power for the third prong:
Confront the jerk who’d hired Bishop, Bev, and Beefy Mike. The tracker that Marvella had planted on the fake cuff told us the address of Mr. Big. The tracker had already been destroyed (obviously, they realized pretty quickly that the cuff was a fake). But we had a lock on his address and the name of the person who lived there. Turns out that not only is he internationally famous, but also amazingly wealthy. (More on him later.)
Mink had to go home. This was the tough part, tougher even than facing assassins. I liked her, okay? I admit it. Not just as buddies on an adventure together, but liked liked her. Her face. Her smell. Her voice. She argued against going home, but Marvella wouldn’t budge on this. It was one thing for us to risk our lives, we didn’t have much choice, but we couldn’t bring Mink into this. Besides, her mother was due back home soon and the school was probably already calling about Mink’s absences. Reluctantly, Mink agreed. We decided to put her on a bus back to Des Moines so she could pick up her ex-boyfriend’s car.