That was it. Randy lost his grip altogether, and as Audrey started to topple over I lost my balance trying to hold on to her, and we all three crashed onto the gravel.
Sitting there, the gravel dust puffing up around us, we looked up to see a very wide, almost-square man in a dark suit glaring down. His gray hair was thinning on top, and he had a big, bushy swooping cowboy mustache.
“Get up from there,” he growled. “And let me see your IDs.” He wasn’t as tall as me, but his gut was bigger.
I pulled my ID out of my wallet and handed it to him, but Audrey wasn’t so ready to comply. “Hold on a minute,” she said. “Are you the police?”
“Never mind who I am.” He studied my ID, then returned it. “What are you doing back here?”
The idea crossed my mind that Nash and Rowan hired him to do security for Gangland.
“We were just in there,” Randy said. “We’re practically members of the place.”
“Shut up, Randy,” Audrey snapped. “We don’t have to talk to him.”
“Practically members, huh?” the man said. “Then maybe you don’t mind if we go around to the door and ask them about that.”
“That won’t be necessary,” I said, not wanting Nash or Rowan to know we were snooping around. “We were just getting ready to leave and got curious about what was going on in there, that’s all.”
“That’s all, is it?” Mr. Mustache said. “How well do you know Rowan Adams?”
“We know he’s a douche,” Randy said.
The bushy mustache raised a notch, and I suspected its owner was smiling underneath it. Maybe he didn’t like Rowan either. “Let me give you some advice,” he said. “You should steer clear of this place. There’s an investigation going on, and it’s not something you want to get caught up in.”
“An investigation?” I said. “You mean into Ashton Browning’s disappearance?”
“What do you know about that?” Mr. Mustache was serious again.
“Just what we saw on the news,” Audrey told him.
“Well, that’s none of your business,” Mr. Mustache said. “You got that? None of your business.”
“Yeah, we got it.” I didn’t see any reason to get into an argument at this point.
“All right, then. You three get on your way. And I don’t want to see you skulking around anymore.”
“We were just leaving anyway,” I said.
As we walked away, I glanced back over my shoulder to see he was still standing there watching us.
“That was creepy,” Audrey said. “What do you think that guy’s deal is?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if we run into him again somewhere down the Ashton Browning trail.”
CHAPTER 19
Writing the next installment of my series on Ashton wasn’t easy. Sure, I had my suspicions about Rowan Adams, Mr. and Mrs. Browning, the girls who Ashton unfriended, and those scary neighborhoods where Ashton delivered meals—plus there was the connection between the North Side Monarchs and Hector—but what could I say about any of that? All I really had were hunches, and you can’t start putting people’s names in newspaper articles based on hunches. Well, I guess you can—you see it all the time in the media these days—but the so-called newspeople who do that have some deep pockets behind them. Me, I’d probably get sued out of existence.
Then there was also the problem of writing about Gangland and the O-Town Elites and North Side Monarchs. For sheer reader interest it was a hard topic to beat. I’d come out looking like a star just for having been to a cool place like Gangland. But I wasn’t sure how it tied in with Ashton. Or Hector. Plus, I couldn’t break my promise to Nash. He’d been a good guy to me, and besides, as a journalist, I had the obligation to protect my sources. How could I get anyone else to talk to me if I didn’t do that?
So I decided to focus completely on showing who Ashton Browning really was. I described her blond hair and her perfect nose and most of all her blue eyes. I wrote about how broken up her brother was about her disappearance and how her friends didn’t always understand her charity work but admired her anyway. By the end I felt like I’d written a love letter to her.
I almost deleted the whole thing. I mean, how much crap would I catch if the kids at school knew I was falling in love with a rich missing girl from Hollister? But in the end I had to keep it pretty much like it was. I wanted people to care for her like I did. To see she was more than just a picture in the paper or a future candidate for a true-crime show on network TV.
And what do you know? When we got together after school to work on the next issue of the paper, Ms. Jansen said my piece was one of the best articles anyone had turned in that week. She thought it didn’t really work as hard news, but it was a perfect human-interest piece to follow up my last article. Now, she said, I needed to dig into some of my leads and find a new slant for my next article on the case. I felt pretty good about that, like I’d made the right choice after all when I quit the grocery-store job. Things were really looking up for my investigative-journalism career.
I recruited Audrey to head to Topper’s with me after school to discuss what my next move would be. On the way in, I said hello to Rockin’ Rhonda, and she started singing her “Mr. Mojo” song at me. At least it was a better nickname than Body Bag.
To shake things up, I ordered the mushroom and Swiss burger. It’s not as good as my usual, but having too much of the same thing all the time can kill the effect. We discussed staking out Rowan Adams’s house or even the Brownings’, but that sounded boring. Plus, you could probably get into some heavy trouble that way. Two teenagers sitting around a rich North Side neighborhood in a five-year-old Ford Focus? That’s bound to draw some unwanted attention. Especially since neighborhoods like that are known to have their own special police forces.