CHAPTER 2
“Marissa!” I hiss. “Wait!”
Marissa dives back into the storage room, and points outside at a man in a sharp gray suit and a fluffy black ponytail hurrying along the corridor away from us. When he disappears
around the corner I whisper, “Did he see you?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t think so.” She turns to face me. “What made that noise?”
I switch on the light. “Trouble.”
Marissa gasps when she sees him. “Holy—”
“—shackled security guard?”
“It’s a security guard?” Marissa asks, looking closer.
The guy’s hands and wrists are bound, and he’s blindfolded and gagged and handcuffed
to himself like a giant pretzel. He’s squirming like crazy and gurgling through his gag,
so I try to calm him down by saying, “Hey, it’s okay. We’ll untie you. Hold still!”
He quits moving, and while Marissa pulls off the blindfold, I get to work on the knot
of his gag. It’s a silk scarf, though, so the knot is tiny and tight. But finally I get it loose, and
my reward for this? The guy lashes the air with cuss words like he’s reciting from The Mall
Guard’s Guide to Creative Cursing or something.
“Hey, take it easy!” I tell him. Then I do a kind of mental double-take. “Wait a minute—
did you say girls tied you up?”
The guard stops moving and stares at me. Then at Marissa. “I’m an idiot!” he says. “A
complete idiot!” He starts squirming like crazy, cussing away again, but finally he gives up and
lies there, panting, “Okay. What’s it going to take for you not to spill this to anyone.”
Now, I’m thinking, Spill what to who? but apparently Marissa’s caught on quick. She tilts
her head at him. “How about you get us backstage?”
“Backstage?” the guard says. “What excuse am I gonna give for that? It’s press only,
no fans.”
Marissa shrugs. “So tell them we’re reporters for the school paper.” She grins. “A small
price to pay for us not telling a soul that you got hogtied by some pansy girls.”
“They weren’t pansies, they were Amazons!”
“Amazons?” I ask him, and you better believe I’m having trouble not busting up.
“Yeah, smartlips,” he grumbles, “Amazons.”
But Marissa says, “Yeah, yeah, whatever. You’re supposed to be protecting the biggest act
to ever hit town, and you let yourself get tied up and then rescued by girls?”
Now, usually it’s just me sassing authority, but I guess the thought of getting up close to
The Boyz was bringing out Marissa’s brash side. And she did have a point. Even hogtied like
he was, you could tell—the guy was probably over six feet tall and at least two hundred pounds.
And who’s ever heard of Amazons roaming the Santa Martina mall?
“All right, all right!” he says then shakes his wrists. “Just get me out of this!”
So I retrieve the key from his pocket, and while I’m unlocking the handcuffs, the guard
mutters, “They took my radio, they took my I.D., took my keycard . . . took me for a chump.”
Once he’s completely untied, he leads us through the back corridors fast. Left turn, right
turn, up stairs, down stairs, right turn, left turn . . . and my mental compass was just starting
to feel hopelessly disoriented, when he stops at an unmarked door and faces us with a scowl.
“Is this where The Boyz are?” Marissa whispers.
He just keeps on scowling as he jabs at the combination keypad and unlocks the door.
We follow him inside and find ourselves in a mini cop locker room / office / kitchenette.
“Do not make yourselves at home,” he says, sliding into a chair behind a computer. He types
like crazy on the keyboard, studies the screen, then murmurs, “One-twenty-seven and one twenty-eight?
They think they’re the green room?” He actually grins at us and says, “This
might not be so bad after all.”
So as he types some more on the keyboard, I ask, “What are one-twenty-seven and onetwenty-eight?”
“Doors on the first level.” He laughs, and all of a sudden he seems like a completely different
guy. A friendly guy. “Instead of the band, they found a boiler room!” He gives the
keyboard one last jab and says, “And that should take care of that.”
“You deactivated their keycard?”
“Smart girl,” he says as he rolls open a desk drawer and pulls out a new keycard. And after
a few minutes of typing information into the computer, he slides the card through a card
reader and says, “They are out of business, and I am once again in business.”
Now it hits me that this guy might not even know that there’s a huge mob of kids out in
the mall. I mean, what if he’d been tied up for an hour? He’d have no idea. So I say, “Uh . . .
are you aware that the mall is packed with kids? And that other guards are out there trying
to make a bunch of them leave?”
“Am I aware?” He snorts and hurries to retrieve a walkie-talkie radio out of a locker. “Oh, yeah.” He keys his radio and says, “Sam-One to Unit Seven.”
A second later the radio crackles, “Seven.”
“Do you have a status report—lower level east side?”
“Everything’s Code Four, boss,” the radio says. “It was touch and go there for a few minutes
but we did what you said and we’ve pretty much got it under control.”
Marissa and I bug our eyes out at each other. We’d found the security boss in the supply room? No wonder he didn’t want anyone to know!
“What’s the ETA?” the Guard Boss says into his radio.
“We should be ready by fourteen hundred,” comes crackling back.
“Ten-four.”
“Copy that.”
“Well!” he says to us, all jovial now. “This situation’s taken a complete one-eighty. First
I’m grilled by the mall manager for tellin’ him we didn’t need to hire extra security—like
I was supposed to know every kid in the county was going to show up here? Then I get
chewed out by the fire marshal and the record label guy and the band’s manager. And then
on my way out to sneak a quick smoke I get ambushed by Amazons in the stairwell!”
He grins as he leads us to the door. “This day had CANNED written all over it, but fifteen
minutes in a closet and hey, the world’s a peachy place again.”
“Fifteen minutes?” I ask him. “That’s all you were in there?”
He pulls the door closed behind us and says, “Alone? Yeah. I actually thought you kids
were the Amazons, coming back for something.” He leads us down the hall saying, “Hey, I’m
really sorry about my behavior before—I owe you two big-time.”
So we followed him through the back corridors until we came to a door with a brass
CONFERENCE plaque on it. The Guard Boss hesitated at the door, then said, “I have your
word, right? Not a hint of what happened to anyone.”
Marissa and I nodded.
“All right, then. Try to act like student reporters, okay?”
We nodded again and he opened the door.
It was time to meet The Boyz.
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