Free Sammy Keyes and the Kiss Goodbye by Wendelin Van Draanen Page A

consulting the previous day’s horoscope for Aries, she snatched up her purse (and a pack of cigarettes) and, not wanting to waste time on the hotel’s dilapidated elevator, jangled down four mind-bending mirror-flanked flights of stairs to the Heavenly Hotel lobby.
    “André!” she cried at the manager, who was behind the counter, an unlit cigar stub clamped between his teeth as he concentrated on punching numbers into a calculator.
    “We on fire?” the manager growled without looking up.
    “When’s the last time you’ve seen Sammy?”
    Now
André looked up. And to his surprise, he found he was dealing with one of his more sane (and financially responsible) residents.
    Ordinarily, Madame Nashira was a cool character. Draped in scarves and jingling with jewelry, she spoke of astral planes and cosmic coordinates, and there was nothing like her mysterious coo to make a man part with a few bucks for a palm reading.
    But at the moment the coo was gone, and there was more than simple panic in her eyes.
    There was full-blown fear.
    “It’s been a couple of days,” André replied carefully. “Why?”
    So Gina blurted out what she’d seen on the news, then cried, “Yesterday’s horoscope for Aries was ‘Avoid heights and stay close to home. Danger lurks in the shadows.’ ” Her eyes widened even farther. “Sammy’s an Aries!”
    André was (to put it mildly) a skeptic when it came to Gina’s astral forecasts and fortune-telling. He considered it mumbo-jumbo. Bogus. A fool’s folly.
    The word
stupid
also came to mind.
    After all, Gina had once assured him that a woman was about to enter his life. She’d had a vision. One that included him and a woman who embodied “true heart and humor.”
    And homemade lasagna.
    “I could almost smell it,” she’d cooed. “The garlic? The oregano? My mouth was waterin’!”
    Gina hadn’t charged him for relaying the vision, and itwas a good thing, too, because it had been six months and no woman of true heart
or
humor had entered his life. Nor had there been any signs of homemade lasagna—which was the part of Gina’s vision that had intrigued André the most.
    So the horoscope would ordinarily not have rung any alarms in André’s mind, but the combination of the news, the horoscope, and the uncharacteristic concern in both Gina’s voice and her streetwise eyes caused the hotel manager to do more than just roll his cigar stub to one side of his mouth to facilitate better communication.
    He actually removed it.
    “What are you sayin’?” he asked the fortune-teller.
    So Gina repeated everything she’d already said.
    The upside to managing a run-down hotel is that you become familiar with local law enforcement. They’re in a lot. They get to know you. They learn not to blame you for your clientele, and begin to empathize with your plight.
    After all, you don’t
own
the place. You just work there. And who would want to spend their days (and nights) in a place that smelled like rotten potatoes, squeezing rent out of derelicts and drunks?
    So André was on a first-name basis with a number of people at the police station, and he managed (after several phone transfers) to confirm that the girl who’d been hurled from the fire escape of the Senior Highrise was, indeed, Samantha Keyes.
    “It’s her,” he told Gina once he hung up. And while the fortune-teller whimpered and paced and cursed on oneside of the counter, André turned back to the phone and called Community Hospital from the other side.
    Unfortunately, he knew no one at the hospital. ODs and stabbings funneled from the Heavenly had done nothing to build a rapport between the hotel manager and hospital personnel. If anything, the opposite was true.
    So extracting information about Sammy’s condition was impossible.
    There were rules.
    And André wasn’t “family.”
    “You don’t understand,” he tried to explain, because what was family, anyway?
    A diva mom who was never there?
    Or the people who