Free Killer Spirit by Jennifer Lynn Barnes Page A

the room.
    If Hassan was the one who’d bugged Jacob Kann’s phone, then there was at least a chance that he was the one who’d planted the bomb. I was suddenly overcome with an urge to jump off the exam table and rush out to kick some TCI a-s-s. Because as it turned out, almost getting blown up? Not nearly as much of a deterrent as one might think.
    “Toby Klein?” the doctor said.
    I nodded, and Tara subtly hit the pause button, ending our communication with Brooke, before gently taking the earpiece from my ear.
    “Sorry,” she said. “We were in the middle of a song.”
    The doctor nodded and approached me. “What seems to be the problem?”
    “I…uhhhh…got dropped.” I still couldn’t believe that anyone would buy that excuse.
    “Prep or full extension?” the doctor asked.
    I was somewhat disturbed by the fact that this doctor knew cheerleading terms that I didn’t.
    Seeing my confusion, the doctor grinned. “You must be new,” he said. “Let me ask it this way—how high up were you?”
    I tried to gauge the right way to answer that question. “Kinda high up?” I answered. “I think I hit pretty hard. I blacked out for a few minutes.”
    The doctor shook his head and then took a closer look at the cut on the side of my head. “It’s not deep,” he said. His gentle tone lulled me into a false sense of security, and then his fingers prodded my bruise. “Does this hurt?”
    I yelped and let loose an impressive string of expletives.
    “Okay,” the doctor inferred, seemingly bemused, “that hurts.”
    He pulled a light out from the front pocket of his lab coat and shined it in my eyes. He continued examining me as he ran through a list of questions, some of which Tara had asked me earlier, and some of which she hadn’t. In the end, he said that he didn’t think I had a concussion and that an MRI wouldn’t be necessary this time.
    “You got off easy,” he told me. “If you’ll take my advice—and they never do—you’ll get out of this game while you still can.”
    I had to remind myself that he was talking about the cheerleading aspect of it. He had no idea what we were really up to. Either way, there was exactly zero chance of me quitting. If anything, recent events had caused some perverse part of me to want to throw myself into this mission more.
    Seeing the refusal to quit in my eyes, the doctor sighed. “I have three daughters,” he said. “The oldest one is five. If she wants to play football when she’s in high school, I’ll buy her the jersey, but the second the word
cheer
leaves her mouth, I’m locking her in her room until she’s thirty. It’s just too dangerous.”
    And with that, he was gone.
    I turned to Tara. “And you said
I
was a drama queen.”
    Tara grinned. “Let’s go,” she said. “I think you have something Brooke will be very, very happy to see.”
    Tara’s words registered, and after a few seconds, my hand flew to my throat. My necklace was still there, and the charm appeared to be in one piece. Until that moment, I’d completely forgotten that I was wearing the contents of the late Jacob Kann’s laptop around my neck.
    I smiled, thinking how satisfying it would be to hand the data stick to Brooke all gloatylike, and echoed Tara’s words. “Let’s go.”
    And then, because a full fourth of my brain had become dedicated to cheers, I rephrased my words with but a hint of irony in my voice. “L-e-t-s-g-o, let’s go, let’s go, l-e-t-s-g-o…”
    Tara grinned. “Let’s go!”

CHAPTER 10
    Code Word: Prezzies
    By the time Tara and I got back to the Quad, my mood had improved significantly. You know your life is bordering on the absurd when a day you almost get blown up, but
don’t
have a concussion, is a good day. I think it’s safe to conclude that I was pretty much in happy denial land. All I could think about was that, despite our mission’s disastrous ending, I’d managed to do something that none of the other girls had.
    I’d gotten