Mojo

  ALSO BY TIM THARP

  Badd

  The Spectacular Now

  Knights of the Hill Country

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the

  product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to

  actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2013 by Tim Tharp

  Jacket art copyright © Yakov Stavchansky for Shutterstock

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Hal Leonard for permission to reprint

  lyrics from “Peggy Sue,” words and music by Jerry Allison, Norman Petty,

  and Buddy Holly, copyright © 1957 (Renewed) by MPL Music

  Publishing, Inc., and Wren Music Co. All Rights Reserved.

  Reprinted with permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of

  Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of

  Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools,

  visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tarp, Tim.

  Mojo / Tim Tharp.

  p. cm.

  Summary: A boy who feels powerless in his own life sets out to investigate

  the mystery of a missing high school girl in his town, who attends

  an elite private high school very unlike his own.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89580-7

  [1. Self-realization—Fiction. 2. Missing children—Fiction. 3. High

  schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Secret societies—Fiction.

  6. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.T32724Moj 2013

  [Fic]—dc23

  2012023886

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment

  and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  CHAPTER 1

  I never set out to look for Hector Maldonado. I was just minding my own business, walking home from my part-time grocery-sacking job. This was fall of my junior year, and I was one of the carless crew. So my skinny little work buddy Randy Skivens and I were plodding down the side of one of the busier streets in our Oklahoma City suburb, not far from the high school, having our usual conversation about nothing.

  Randy’s like, “In my opinion Death Race is the best racing video game of all time.”

  I wasn’t exactly the world’s biggest fan of racing games, but just for the sake of argument, I told him I thought Adrenaline Monster was the all-time best.

  He gaped at me for a second. “Are you kidding, Dylan? Even Supercharger Pro is better than Adrenaline Monster.”

  I’m like, “No way. That red car in Adrenaline Monster is the coolest car ever.”

  “You mean that classic ’69 Mustang?”

  “Yeah, I love that car. Matter of fact, as soon as I get enough paychecks put away, I’m going to buy one just like it.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “Sure I am. It’s going to be the fastest thing anybody’s ever seen. I’ll pull into the high school parking lot and everybody’ll be like, ‘Check that out. I’ve never seen anything so awesome.’ ”

  “No they won’t.”

  “You don’t think people are going to be impressed by a ’69 Mustang?”

  “Oh, they’d be impressed all right, but you’re never going to get one.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because you don’t know anything about cars, and you’re never going to save enough money to afford a ’69 Mustang.”

  And that was when these two ape men in an orange Camaro drove by, and the guy on the passenger side unloaded a half-full beer can that hit Randy right in the crotch.

  Randy wasn’t a big guy, but he did have a big mouth and wasn’t exactly a genius, so he screamed one of his favorite obscenities and, in the direction of the Camaro, launched the single-finger salute, a.k.a. the “F” sign. As in “F” for fool. Because that’s what you have to be to flip off a couple of nineteen- or twenty-year-old vo-tech-dropout gearheads on a weeknight bender.

  The Camaro squealed to a stop.

  Randy and I looked at each other, bug-eyed. “You are an idiot,” I informed him.

  And Randy’s like, “Ruuuuuun!”

  So away we ran. Over the curb. Around our high school field house. Past the practice field. Onto the senior parking lot. Here, I have to admit I carry a few extra pounds, so I’m not exactly a track star. And it didn’t help when Randy stopped all of a sudden.

  “Wait a second,” he said.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  He bent over and plucked something up from the ground. “I found a dollar.” He held up the bill like it was a winning lottery ticket or something.

  “Are you kidding me?” I said. “Come on!”

  Luckily, the Camaro couldn’t follow us directly but had to take the road to the east. Still, they’d hit the entrance to the parking lot just ahead of us, and doom would hammer us straight in the face if we didn’t do something.

  “Split up,” I hollered. “They can’t follow us both.”

  Without bothering to check which direction Randy took, I headed west and around the high school to the back of the building—behind the cafeteria where they dump the spoiled milk and the leftover rubbery Salisbury steaks.

  The slamming of car doors echoed through the cool fall-of-junior-year evening, so I knew the ape men were close at hand. There was nothing to do but hide, and with the streetlight glaring down, I didn’t have any shadows to duck into. So, reluctantly, I flipped back the lid of the nearest Dumpster, hoisted myself over the side, and plummeted into the dank refuse of high school. With the lid closed, it was pretty much pitch black, and the stench was enough to cause a dude to almost puke. But that’s not all. As I tried to make myself at least a little comfortable, I leaned against what, for all the world, felt like somebody’s arm.

  I’m like, “Jesus, Randy, how did you get in here already?”

  No reply.

  “Randy?” I gave the arm a nudge, but
still no response. I was like, Hmmm, this is strange. Maybe it’s just a garbage bag or something. But I never knew a garbage bag to have arms.

  I reached over and gave whatever it was a squeeze. It felt like an arm all right, though it was somewhat on the rigid side. Not good. Either this guy was frozen stiff with fear or he was frozen stiff with a whole bunch of dead.

  Outside the Dumpster, the voices of the ape men piped up. “Hey, you little high school wussies, come out and face the music.”

  “Yeah,” added the other one. “We’re gonna play the bongos on your skulls, that’s what kind of music we’re gonna play.”

  “Heh, heh,” the other one snickered. “Bongos. That’s good.”

  That was the IQ level of what I was dealing with here. Stephen Hawking they were not. But cuddling up to what might be a corpse wasn’t so cool either. Unless—an idea suddenly hit me—maybe this wasn’t a corpse after all. Maybe it was a dummy, like the kind they practice CPR on. Sure, I told myself, that had to be it. Somebody got a little too rambunctious during first-aid lessons and busted the dummy, and the Dumpster was now its final resting place.

  I reached up toward the head area and copped a feel. Hair. That was strange. Since when did they start making CPR dummies with hair? But it wasn’t impossible, you know? If they can make bomb-detecting robots these days, why not a dummy with lifelike hair? A wonder of modern technology. And now here it was hiding in the Dumpster with me so Ape Man 1 and Ape Man 2 couldn’t get their paws on us.

  “You ain’t got a chance,” said Ape Man 1. “You might as well give up. We saw you run back here.”

  And then Ape Man 2’s like, “Hey, I got an idea.”

  An idea? That seemed unlikely coming from one of these knuckleheads, but there was always a first time for everything.

  Their footsteps headed in my direction. Loud footsteps. These guys must be wearing boots. All the better to kick my butt with.

  One of them banged on the side of the Dumpster. “Come on, little wussies. Don’t make us come in there and get you.”

  “You’re just gonna make it worse on yourself,” the other one said.

  At this point, my choices were severely limited:

  1. I could try to scrunch down in the trash, but that was likely to make too much noise.

  2. I could try to hide behind the CPR dummy, but it probably wasn’t big enough. Like I say, I carry a little extra weight.

  3. I could sit there as quietly as possible and hope they went away.

  But of course they weren’t going anywhere. The lid to the Dumpster sprang open and the streetlight’s glare flooded in.

  “Gotcha,” said Ape Man 1.

  “You ain’t gonna have any fingers left to flip people off with now, boys,” added Ape Man 2.

  Their fat white faces loomed over me like two evil moons. Then something happened—their snarling mouths went horrorstruck.

  Ape Man 1’s like, “What the hell?”

  And Ape Man 2 goes, “Jesus, what did you do, kid?”

  They looked at each other, and then it was like, both at the same time, they go, “Shiiiiiiiittt!” And bolted. I stood up just in time to see them fighting for the inside lane as they galloped around the corner of the building.

  I’m like, “Wow. What got into them?”

  Then I looked down. It was no CPR dummy stowed away with me in that pile of trash. No. It was Hector Maldonado.

  CHAPTER 2

  Hector Maldonado. Dead as a plank. You better believe I couldn’t clamber out of that Dumpster fast enough. It was like just touching the same trash might make me catch whatever it was that killed him. But once I was out, despite a case of the cold shivers, I couldn’t help gawking back in. I don’t know why, but there’s something about death that makes you want to stare at it. Maybe it’s just because you’re glad it’s not you.

  Hector was my age. I had him in Western Cultures. His father laid tile or something like that. I didn’t know about his mother. Hector and I weren’t friends, but he seemed like an okay guy. Smart, didn’t play sports, not in a bunch of clubs, didn’t crack jokes in class or bully anyone in the halls. I guess he was kind of a good-looking guy—not to sound gay or anything—but he was really quiet. Maybe in some other universe, he could’ve been cool, but not in the one at our high school. At our school he was just kind of there. Like desks, and water fountains, and vice principals.

  Now here he was, stiffly leaning against one side of the Dumpster, chest-deep in garbage, his eyes staring blankly at the sky, a candy-bar wrapper sticking to the side of his face. A strange coldness seeped into my stomach, my elbows, my knees, like some kind of poison. This was real. Final. Foreclosed on.

  “What’s going on?” It was Randy sauntering up from the east side of the building. “Are those guys gone?”

  “They’re gone.”

  “What are you looking at?”

  “You have your cell phone on you?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “We have to call the police.”

  “What for?”

  “Look.” I nodded toward the Dumpster.

  Randy had to stand on his tiptoes. “Holy crap. Dude’s dead.”

  An argument about whether we should actually call the police followed. Randy was against it. Finally I persuaded him that we might find ourselves in plenty of hot water if the cops discovered we’d been here and didn’t report Hector’s condition. “Okay,” he said. “But call on your own phone.”

  Things got involved from there. The cops don’t want you calling in about a dead body and then leaving the scene. We had to stay and answer a bunch of questions:

  “Name?”

  “Dylan Jones.”

  “Age?”

  “Sixteen and a half.”

  “Occupation?”

  “Grocery-sacker-slash-student.”

  “Relationship with the deceased?”

  “We go to the same school.”

  “And why were you enemies with the deceased?”

  “What? We weren’t enemies. I hardly knew him.”

  “Just a routine question.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Apparently, we were actually suspects, which was really a pisser. I was like, “Look, I’m on the school newspaper. My dad’s a teacher and my mom’s a nurse,” but they didn’t care. Somehow we still looked unsavory to them.

  At first, it was just a uniformed cop, but then a couple of detectives showed up along with some forensics people. The detectives were even bigger assholes than the uniforms. There was a huge one with a forehead like a cinder block and then a wiry cool-guy type who was too in love with his hair gel. It wasn’t hard to see what their routine was. Detective Forehead’s job was to intimidate you physically, and Detective Hair Gel was there to throw in a few zingers to deflate your self-esteem.

  They were convinced Hector had OD’d on some drug or other and seemed to have their minds made up that Randy and I were involved somehow. Which was stupid—we obviously weren’t on drugs at the moment—but once a cop gets an idea in his head, he has a hard time shaking it out.

  “We’ll need you to come down to the station,” Detective Forehead told us.

  “Just routine,” added Detective Hair Gel.

  Just routine. I’m thinking, What? Is that the cop rationale for everything?

  At the station house, they split me and Randy up, I guess so they could try to poke holes in our stories. Relieved us of our phones too. Just routine. Lucky me—I was the first one they decided to mess with. They took me into an office—not one of those cop-show interrogation rooms where they beam the bright light in your face—and I ran through the story about the ape men again, but it didn’t take long to find out I wasn’t there to fill in some minor details.

  “Dylan, we see this kind of thing all the time,” Detective Hair Gel started out. “Kids out partying, trying new ways to get a buzz. Next thing you know, one guy goes too far, and then that’s it.” He snapped his fingers, his way of summing up the death of Hector
Maldonado.

  “We can tell you’re a party boy,” said Detective Forehead. He was standing behind his partner’s chair, looming you could say, so as to keep up the intimidation.

  I was like, “What? I’m not a party boy.”

  But Detective Hair Gel was unconvinced. “Sure you are. You got the hipster-style glasses, the baggy jeans, the rocker-boy black T-shirt. Shaggy hair. I’d say you probably like a taste of the ecstasy.”

  For the record, my jeans were baggy because I don’t like pants pinching my gut too much, and the shirt was a retro Black Sabbath T-shirt that I only wear because I think Ozzy Osbourne is hilarious.

  Anyway, I’m like, “Ecstasy? Is that still a drug? I don’t even know anyone who’s done ecstasy.”

  Detective Forehead leaned forward and glowered. “Oh, it’s still a drug all right. And you know it.”

  This was getting ridiculous. You can live your whole life a certain way and what good does it do when the law clamps down on you? I mean, I’m no goody-goody, but I probably hadn’t missed a day of school since I had the flu in seventh grade. Made mostly low B’s but could’ve bagged some A’s if I really cared that much and turned all my stuff in. The only time I ever got sent to the principal’s office since I got to high school was for wearing a T-shirt that said F***K BIGOTS on the front. Now, just because I happened to stumble over a dead body, all of a sudden the cops were treating me like I was some kind of terrorist with a bomb in my underwear or something.

  They kept at me for about an hour. Didn’t matter that I told them I’d better call my parents so they’d know where I was. They just said it was early yet and I could call them in a little bit. Then they came back at me, wanting me to tell the story again and again until finally they got sick of hearing the same answer over and over.

  “Why don’t you call the place where I work? They’ll tell you I was there and not out snorting crystal meth and ecstasy or whatever.”

  “Hey,” said Detective Forehead. “You don’t make the rules around here. We do.”

  “Dylan, just sit here and think about your predicament for a while,” Detective Hair Gel said. “We’ll see what your buddy has to say. And it’ll be too bad for you if he rolls over first.”

  Then they swaggered out the door to put the screws to Randy.