Night Sky by Suzanne Brockmann

started the bike’s engine. I could barely hear my voice over the roar. “Please!”
    Motorcycle Girl revved the engine before leaning forward and glaring at me with eyes so intense that, again, I couldn’t look away. “Listen to me. I’ll be in touch. But right now, get into your car, both of you, and drive away. You need to get the hell out of here. Now .”
    With that, the girl sped off on her motorcycle, leaving a cloud of dust and a whole crapload of unanswered questions behind.
    At the same time, a different question was answered.
    I looked down at Cal. He looked up at me and nodded. It was definitely Motorcycle Girl that we’d nearly hit and killed yesterday. Coincidence, or had she been following us?
    Neither one of us said a word as we got into Cal’s car. We “got the hell out of there” before the police arrived, because I’d had that little talk with Detective Hughes, and Motorcycle Girl was right. It hadn’t gone well.
    â€œI can’t believe you couldn’t smell that fish,” I said, finally breaking our silence as we headed back home.
    Calvin looked at me, his hands tight on the steering wheel. “Yeah. That’s what you can’t believe. A crazy lady with a gun, pulling out her own teeth, and Destiny addicts sense your powers sometimes when they joker ,” he said in a very decent imitation of the motorcycle girl, “whatever the eff that means. Blondie knows both your name and Sasha’s—and you’re all about my clogged sinuses.”
    I reached for my bag, which I’d left on the floor of his car, and dug for my phone with its Internet access. Maybe we could answer some of these questions with a little help from Google. “Destiny addicts.” I nodded as I powered up my phone. “And joker. And what else did she say? G and T . Let’s see if we can find out what the eff at least some of this means.”
    â€”
    What had Calvin said? That his cray-cray limit had maxed out?
    Well, mine was now pinned. Plus that feeling of uneasiness had moved into my belly. Permanently.
    We sat in Cal’s car, pulled off to the side of the road and safely back in our neighborhood in Coconut Key, as we both used our phones and the intermittent Internet to attempt to understand what the blond-haired motorcycle girl had told us.
    A-bil-i-ties .
    â€œDestiny,” Calvin read, the screen of his phone almost touching his nose, “is the street name for an illegal drug, quote, a chemical compound called oxy-clepta-di-estraphen that has not yet been approved for use by the corporate drug administration . Lobbyists claim it’s safe, although expensive. Says here it was developed to treat people with terminal diseases. Cancer patients with a month to live. One article says clinical trials have proven that it completely eradicates all traces of cancer in patients who’ve used it .”
    He looked over at me and there was something wistful in his eyes. “It makes users stronger, smarter, faster, literally younger . One doctor claims he gave the drug to a fully paralyzed patient, someone who needed a respirator to breathe after breaking her neck, and after a single dose, the woman was out of bed, breathing—and walking—on her own steam.”
    That was amazing. And now I knew what that look in Cal’s eyes was about.
    â€œWhat’s the catch?” I asked.
    â€œShe died a day later,” he said. “Patient number two—a man in a similar condition—lived a little longer, but he jokered and killed the doctor before he died too.”
    And there was that word again. “Jokered?” I asked.
    â€œUrban Dictionary defines it as to succumb to illegal-drug-induced insanity, complete with super strength, inability to feel pain or compassion, and enhanced mental powers, à la a comic-book super-villain ,” he told me.
    â€œSo the drug’ll heal you,” I deduced, “right