Ali Cross Read online

  Also, now that I had it in my head to go talk to them, I didn’t want to wait another second to make it happen. But first, I was going to need some kind of cover.

  I’m not allowed to just “wander the streets of Washington,” as Nana Mama likes to put it. But I am allowed to go alone to the store, or to school, or to some of my friends’ houses during the day, depending on where they live.

  So I made a quick plan. Then I put on my coat, grabbed my backpack, and headed downstairs.

  “Where exactly are you off to?” Nana asked when I passed by the kitchen. She’s in charge when Dad and Bree are at work.

  “You want anything from the store?” I asked.

  “Maybe just a little world peace,” she said. That was always her answer.

  “I’ll see if they have any,” I told her. And a second later, I was gone.

  BY THE TIME I ran to Gabe’s block on 17th Street, I was too out of breath to be nervous about what I was doing.

  Gabe’s place was a two-story rowhouse. One of the windows was cracked with a piece of silver duct tape covering it, and there were ragged bedsheets hung up inside instead of curtains. The front door had those paper scraps from an old eviction notice that nobody had ever bothered to clean off. I’d always felt kind of sorry for Gabe every time we passed by there, and I could guess why he never wanted me coming in.

  So I’d never even met his parents before, and didn’t know much about his family at all.

  When I knocked on the door, nobody answered for a long time. I could hear the TV volume up loud, so I knocked again, harder.

  A second later, the door banged open. The white man who answered looked straight out, but then down at me, like he’d been expecting someone taller.

  “What?” he said.

  “Mr. Qualls?” I asked. I was a little surprised. Gabe had lighter skin than mine, but I didn’t even know his dad was white. That’s how clueless I was.

  “Who are you?” he asked back.

  “I’m Gabe’s friend, Ali,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah. I’ve heard of you,” he said. “The dirty cop’s boy.”

  I don’t know what I’d been expecting. My dad’s always saying how people respond to trauma in all different ways, so I didn’t want to jump to conclusions about Mr. Qualls. That’s a rookie mistake for any detective. Maybe he was just mad about his kid being missing.

  “I don’t mean to bother you,” I said. “I was just wondering if there was anything I could do to help out.”

  “Yeah. You could tell that father of yours to find my boy,” he said. “How about that?”

  “Actually, do you think I could take a quick look at Gabe’s room?” I asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  I was losing my nerve fast, like water running down the drain. Mr. Qualls wasn’t small like Gabe. Just the opposite. And I didn’t know where the tattoos on his neck and arms came from, but I wasn’t asking, either.

  “I was just thinking, maybe he left something behind?” I said. “And maybe I could… I don’t know… check it out, if that’s okay?”

  “I ain’t got time for this,” Mr. Qualls said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Go home, kid. Let your daddy’s people do their work.”

  “Maybe I could come back later—” I started to say, but that’s as far as I got before the door closed in my face. And I definitely didn’t have the nerve to knock again.

  Now I was just standing there on the sidewalk, wondering what I was doing wrong. Between Dad, Detective Sutter, and Mr. Qualls, I’d basically struck out—one, two, three. Gabe deserved better than that. Maybe I just wasn’t thinking about it the right way. Maybe I needed to stop trying to do this all on my own.

  So I decided to do what Dad usually did at this phase of any investigation.

  It was time to start pulling together my own team.

  WHEN BREE GOT home from work, she had a surprise for me. It was a thumb drive with the traffic camera footage I’d been asking about.

  “You can’t keep this,” she said. “We’ll look at it together, but then I have to delete the files.”

  “Did you get this from Detective Sutter?” I asked.

  “I did,” she said. “It sounds like you impressed her with your questions.”

  “More like I bugged her with too many of them,” I said. Mostly, though, I was glad to get my hands on this information. “Can we look at it now?”

  “Sure can.”

  Bree opened her briefcase and took out the Toughbook laptop she used in the field for her own investigations. Once it was open, she navigated to an .avi file with a long name that was just a bunch of letters and numbers.

  “I’ve got two of these for you,” she said, and clicked the first one open. When the player started up, I saw a black and white image that was obviously from a camera mounted on a traffic light. Along the bottom of the screen, it said “E Street, 3700 block.” That was maybe a block away from school.

  For about fifteen seconds, I saw cars, buses, and random people going by on E Street. But then Gabe walked into the frame.

  I practically lost my breath when I saw my friend. According to the date stamp, this was December twenty-first at 3:34 p.m., just a minute or two after he’d headed away from me outside of school.

  “So that’s the first clip,” Bree said, while we watched Gabe cross out of the frame. Then she switched to another file and hit Play. This one was two blocks down and three minutes later, at the corner of E Street and 14th.

  “There he is,” she said. It was just a blurry image of Gabe with that same backpack of his, the one I’d seen him wearing outside of school that day.

  “Hang on. What’s in there?” I asked, and hit Pause. I put my finger on the screen over his backpack. It looked pretty heavy.

  “Why do you ask?” Bree said.

  “Gabe never carried a bunch of books home like that,” I told her. “Especially not for winter vacation.” I’d actually made a joke to him once, about the way that black and silver Spurs pack of his was always flopping around on his back, like all he ever brought to school was a bag full of air.

  But not in the video. It was definitely weighed down with something that day. I hadn’t noticed it either way when I last saw him, but it stuck out to me now. Like maybe he’d packed up a bunch of stuff to run away? “I’m just wondering what’s so heavy in there. Can I take a screenshot?” I asked.

  Bree shook her head. “Sorry, kiddo. I’m out on a limb just by showing this to you. Try to take a mental snapshot if you can.”

  I’d already done that. It was something, anyway. Maybe a clue. And I’d definitely be letting Detective Sutter know about it. This qualified as unusual, if you asked me, and that’s what she’d wanted me to try and remember.

  Already, I was in front of my new bulletin board, looking at the yellow highlighter line on my map of DC, the one that showed Gabe’s usual route home after school.

  “So somewhere between that spot at 14th Street and 17th Street where he lives, he changed course,” I said.

  “Looks that way,” Bree said. “But don’t draw too many conclusions. Maybe he just had an errand to run.”

  “Well, he didn’t go straight home, anyway,” I said. “Not the way he usually walks. Otherwise, he would have kept going down E Street until 17th. But instead, he must have turned onto 15th or 16th. The question is, which direction? And why?” I looked at the map again, checking north and south of E Street. “It’s too cold to be sleeping in Anacostia Park, but maybe he was trying to get across the river?”

  Bree closed up the laptop and started putting it away. “Listen to you,” she said. “You sound just like your dad.”

  She was looking at me the way Bree does sometimes. Like a proud mom, I guess you could say. I came back over and put my arms around her. She always smelled really good, too. Like vanilla ice cream or something. “Thanks for doing this,” I said.

  “I figured you could use a little boost,” she told me. And she was right about that.


  I still had endless questions about what was going through Gabe’s head that day after school, but still, this was more like actual progress than anything else I’d gotten done so far. And I wasn’t finished for the day yet, either.

  Not even close.

  AFTER DINNER THAT night, I went straight to the TV in the basement to play Outpost. When I logged on to the server, I saw that Lowkey-Loki, Cagey-B, and Blackhawk were already online. Those were the screen names for Cedric and our other friends, Mateo and Ruby. The only one missing from our usual squad was Gabe—also known as QUB in the game. From his profile I could see he hadn’t logged in since he went missing.

  “Hey, I’m here,” I said into my headset, once I’d connected to a party chat. “What’s going on?”

  “Yo,” Cedric said. “Just waiting for you.”

  “You find anything out from your dad?” Ruby asked.

  They all knew Gabe had disappeared, of course, but somehow we hadn’t talked about it much. If we did, it would be like admitting he was really gone. But now I needed their help, so I caught them up on everything I’d done so far, including the meeting with Detective Sutter, my conversation with Mr. Qualls, and what I’d learned from the traffic camera videos.

  “Dang, you’ve been busy,” Ruby said.

  “Well, yes and no,” I said. “I still have a whole ton to do. I was actually hoping you guys would get in on this with me.”

  “In on what?” Cedric asked.

  “My investigation,” I said. I knew that Cedric, Ruby, and Mateo were only friends with Gabe because of me. They never hung out with him when I wasn’t around, so I had to come at this kind of carefully.

  “Your investigation?” Mateo said. “Oh, man. You are such a geek.”

  “Nah, he’s just Alex Cross’s kid,” Cedric said. “It’s in the blood.”

  In fact, they were both right. I knew it wasn’t a real investigation. Obviously. But at the same time, what else was I going to call it?

  “I was thinking we could start out by checking Gabe’s base station,” I said. “As long as we’re in the game anyway.”

  “Yeah, all right. Let’s do it,” Ruby said, and we all joined a new game.

  In Outpost, the playing area is one big island, but you can build your own home base wherever you want. It can be a watchtower, a house, a barracks, or whatever else you feel like coming up with. The more resources you pick up while you play, the more you can trade those in for building supplies, weapons, vehicles, or upgrades to your avatar. The whole point is to be as much of a good guy or bad guy as you want; build stuff if you feel like it; and try to survive for as long as possible.

  I knew Gabe liked building stuff in Outpost at least as much as he liked shooting stuff, so I was thinking his home base was probably going to be pretty sweet. And if I couldn’t get a look at his actual room on 17th Street, maybe his virtual one in the game was the next best thing. Maybe I could find a clue about what he’d been up to before he disappeared.

  So once we were ready to go, I cashed in five hundred units from my bank to requisition a four-seat all-terrain vehicle for Blackhawk, Lowkey-Loki, Cagey-B, and me.

  My own screen name was Cassius Play. As in Cassius Clay, also known as Muhammad Ali, the greatest boxer who ever lived. He’s my dad’s idol, and that’s who I’m named after.

  So as soon as we were all on board, I put the pedal to the metal of that ATV and started driving toward the quadrant where I knew Gabe had built his place. Ruby (well, Blackhawk) rode shotgun, with Cedric (Lowkey-Loki) and Mateo (Cagey-B) in the back. The guys had swivel seats, so they could watch out for enemy fire and keep us covered along the way.

  Sure enough, we hadn’t gone far before I heard Cedric over my headset.

  “Hold up. We’ve got some trouble here,” he said. Another squad was coming up on us, probably hoping to snag that ATV for themselves.

  “Behind you!” Ruby said, just before Mateo fired off a laser spray that took out most of the problem in one shot. I checked my rearview mirror and saw half a dozen avatars on the ground, receding into the distance while I kept us moving.

  “Nice!” I said. I had to focus on driving, so defense was on them.

  “Watch that sniper!” Cedric said.

  “Got it,” Ruby answered. On screen, Blackhawk fired two fast pulses up into the trees. A second later, some random alien creature dropped to the ground, flopping its blue tentacles for a second. But then it didn’t move.

  “That’s right, son! Nobody messes with us!” Mateo said. His voice cracked at the end, and I didn’t even try not to laugh.

  “Who’s the geek now?” I asked.

  After that, I spent another two hundred units on some shields for the ATV so we wouldn’t be bothered the rest of the way there. I still needed to talk some more about the Gabe stuff while we traveled.

  “So listen,” I said. “I want to start canvassing soon, in real life.”

  “Canvassing?” Cedric asked.

  “It’s what cops do on a case like this. You go out in the neighborhood where the missing person was last seen and start talking to people, looking for witnesses, and handing out flyers. That kind of thing.”

  “Dude, you live in a house full of detectives,” Cedric said. “What do you need us for?”

  That was about as complicated as a question got. I didn’t know if Cedric and the others knew about Dad’s trial, but I wasn’t going to dig into that right now.

  “Whatever,” I said. “I’ll do it myself if nobody wants to help.”

  “Nah, I’m on it,” Cedric said.

  I didn’t mean to call him out like that, but I knew Cedric would be up for helping if I pushed just a little. He’s also really big for his age—he kind of looks like Lebron, but without the beard—and it never hurts to have a little muscle on your side.

  “Our parents are a no-fly zone for anything like that,” Ruby said. “We can’t be going around talking to strangers on the street.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Mateo said. “I’ll help.”

  “Oh, so you’re going to go up against Daddy on this?” Ruby asked. “Yeah, I’m so sure.”

  Ruby and Mateo were brother and sister. They were also preacher’s kids. Their dad, Reverend Sandoval, was from another big city—Buenos Aires in Argentina—and he was even stricter than my dad. They weren’t allowed to go anywhere without an adult.

  “There’s still other stuff you could do,” I said. “Actually, Ruby, I was thinking you could get all over social media with this.”

  Ruby had more than seven hundred followers on Instagram. I had like twelve, including my family members. Even Gabe had way more than me, but they were all gamers and Outpost-heads.

  “I can do that,” she said.

  “Anyway, hold that thought,” Mateo said, “because I think we’re here. Check it out, straight ahead.”

  On the TV screen in front of me, I could see where some kind of building was just coming into sight through the woods. And since there was nothing else around, it seemed like we’d come to the right spot. Gabe really was a loner, in the real world as much as the virtual one. No wonder he’d built his place all the way out here.

  As for whether our little side mission was going to be worth the effort, I guess we were about to find out.

  GABE’S PLACE WAS a simple bunker from the outside. It looked like a big corrugated steel half-cylinder lying on its side, with no windows and just one door that I could see.

  “That’s it?” I heard Ruby ask over my headset. “I mean, no offense to Gabe, but I thought he was some kind of genius with this stuff.”

  “Just wait. I’ll bet he’s got a sick underground compound in there,” Mateo said.

  “That’d be so Gabe,” Cedric added. “Little dude is like, not much on the outside, but super deep on the inside.”

  I was thinking the same thing. My guess was he’d designed this base to look lame on purpose, so if anyone wandered into this quadrant and spotted it, they’d just keep m
oving.

  Not us, though. We were already out of the ATV and spreading out to check the surrounding area. The bunker was on a cliff looking over the ocean, with Outpost’s three moons hanging in the sky—one red, one orange, and one white. I did a quick lap around the building to check it from all sides, and jumped up on the roof, too. Sure enough, the only door was on the south side, where we’d started. By the time I got back around to it, Cedric’s avatar was already trying to break in.

  “Door’s locked,” he said, and didn’t waste any time giving it a couple of full roundhouse kicks. Not that it did any good. The door looked like reinforced steel, and it didn’t budge.

  “Hang on. What’s this?” Ruby asked. On my screen, I saw her slide open a little panel embedded in the door itself. Inside that, there was a keypad. “Looks like some kind of combination lock.”

  The keypad was just letters, no numbers, with five spaces on the input screen.

  “So the combination’s some kind of five-letter word?” Cedric asked.

  “Or maybe just a random sequence,” Mateo said.

  I went in close on the keyboard and punched in G-A-B-E-Q, just to try something. But when I hit Enter, all I got was a soft clunking sound. No surprise there. Gabe was too smart to make it that easy.

  “Any other ideas?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I got an idea,” Cedric said. “Stand back.”

  On screen, Lowkey-Loki was already powering up his wrist cannon and taking aim at the door again.

  “Wait!” I said, about half a second too late. He’d already fired off a white-hot blast at full power. His laser rebounded off that door and rippled right back at us, like some kind of sci-fi explosion. I heard a loud bang, and the whole screen went blue, right before it all faded out to black.

  Just like that, I was back outside the game. Cassius Play was rotating on the welcome screen, with a damage report scrolling across the bottom. His energy reserves were down to 8 percent from whatever had just booted him to kingdom come.

  “Ohhh, man! That was harsh!” Mateo said. “But also… awesome. How did he even set that up?”