Pretty Wanted by Elisa Ludwig Page B

trying to make sense of it, rippling and then scattering like a school of minnows.
    There it was again.
    Panic coursed through me in an electrical current, my body shuddering awake. Where was I?
    I opened my eyes.
    Right. The museum.
    We’d fallen asleep on the aquarium floor, the ghostly pale light of the fish tanks a strange comfort in the open, spooky dark. In front of me, a pair of bumbling sea turtles moved silently through their own dream world.
    “Willa.” Aidan, who’d been curled up beside me, was now sitting up. “We have a text.”
    Oh God. I swallowed. “From Corbin?”
    Was he on our trail again? Last I knew he didn’t have the number for the temporary phone, but that didn’t mean much. He was FBI. He could find it out. He’d done it before.
    Reality broke through—all of the problems we’d tried to kiss away the night before were still very much with us in the cold light of day.
    “No.” He handed me the phone. “Tre.”
    Tre? I blinked the blurriness from my eyes and looked at the screen.
    I’M ON A BUS TO ST. LOUIS. MEET ME AT THE STATION AT 9:30.
    “He must have left right after we got off the phone yesterday,” I said in disbelief. Phoenix to St. Louis was at least a day’s worth of driving. “He’d told me that he was giving up.”
    Aidan shrugged, and he looked slightly annoyed. At what I couldn’t tell. That Tre was coming? They were friends, though I’d noticed tensions between them cropping up back in Tahoe. “Guess he changed his mind. Guess he decided he still wanted in on the action.”
    That wasn’t like Tre. I didn’t know what to think. I had to admit, though, the fact that he was traveling all this way to find us made me smile. He still cared. He wasn’t abandoning me after all.
    Aidan was fully standing now and flipping his bag on his shoulders. “His timing is good. We have to get up anyway. It’s nearly seven. People will be here soon.”
    I summoned whatever coordination and balance I could muster and went to find a bathroom to wash up. In the too-bright light over the mirror, my complexion looked sallow, my hair excessively dark.
    So not cute.
    I splashed water and hand soap on my face and under my arms, then used some paper towels to dry off. I may have mastered half-assed hygiene, but after the last few days I was more than ready for a proper shower. We would have to figure out a way to get one in, and if that meant a little B&E, then so be it.
    The good news was that Tre would be here soon, and if he was back on our team, we could finish up what we needed to do more quickly. Maybe even in a day or two. Not that I necessarily wanted to think about what lay beyond that.
    The bus station was crowded for a Wednesday morning, though not quite as hectic as it had been the other day when we first arrived. We were early, so we parked ourselves on a row of molded plastic chairs and waited, watching a woman leaning over a stroller, tickling her baby in the folds of his chubby neck. Another couple was standing at the ticket counter, arguing with the clerk.
    Our twenty-three minutes sitting there felt twice as long. I updated my IOU list. I examined my fingernails. I counted all of the big-as-Texas hairdos and all of the comb-overs I could see. I hadn’t realized my foot was jackhammering against the floor until Aidan slapped a palm down on my knee.
    “Do you have to do that?”
    “Sorry. I’m just nervous, I guess.” But I couldn’t exactly put my finger on why. There was no good reason. Tre was our buddy, and we’d seen him a few days ago.
    Maybe it was the idea having of another part of Paradise Valley back with us again. Maybe it was the fact that Tre had seemed to change his mind so quickly—what made him come here? Or maybe it was Aidan’s seeming irritability all morning, which buzzed and nipped at me like a wayward fly. Try as I might, I couldn’t be at ease.
    “You might want to take your museum tag off,” Aidan said, pointing to the little red button