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floor by the desk, large ones on the bottom, medium in the middle, small on top. They were dirty, but stacked neatly—like a load of dishes ready to be washed.
    And the boxes being so tidy made me think that maybe Buck’s brother had messed the place up.
    Maybe he’d torn through everything looking for something.
    Something that fit easily inside a grocery sack.
    But what?
    And maybe I should have felt creepy, snooping around the room of a man I’d scared to death, but I didn’t feel creepy.
    I felt curious.
    What was a man with so much money on him doing living in a place like this?
    Maybe he really
had
robbed someone.
    Maybe that someone lived in the Senior Highrise.
    But…nobody I knew kept stacks of cash lying around waiting to get stolen.
    Especially at the Senior Highrise!
    And the bills were all twenties. It was more like he’d robbed a
bank.
    So I was feeling more curious than grossed out or guilty, and I found myself snooping around a little desk near the window, looking for something that might explain what he’d been doing on the Highrise fire escape late at night with a boatload of cash in his pockets.
    All I found on the desk, though, was an ancient black phone—one with no punch pad, let alone a redial function—a rusted lamp, a small notepad, and a gnawed-on pencil.
    Inside the single drawer, I found a Bible, a small stack of sketches, and about a hundred years of grime.
    The sketches were done on the same paper as the notepad that was on top of the desk. Three of them were of birds—one in flight, one on a branch, and one that was just the head. The other two were human faces, but just the eyes, nose, mouth, and eyebrows. Like faces floating free from their skulls.
    The sketches were all really lifelike, which was amazing because they were actually made of really fine lines that
weren’t
actually lines.
    They were lines that were made up of gazillions of tiny dots.
    The more I looked at the pictures, the more mind-boggling they seemed. How could you make a bird look that real out of
dots
?
    But still. Mind-boggling or not, what did pictures made out of gazillions of dots tell me?
    Not a doggone thing.
    So I laid them on the desk and was just deciding to do what André had asked me to when the phone rang.
    “Aaargh!” I cried, jumping back.
    Then I just stood there like an idiot, staring at the phone as it clanged away on the desk, wondering who could be calling.
    Well, duh, I finally told myself. It’s someone who knows Buck Ritter from Omaha, Nebraska! And then I had the brainy idea that maybe I’d be able to figure out something from
them.
    “Hello?” I said in a deep, rich Buck-Ritter-from-Omaha-Nebraska kind of voice.
    “Sammy?” came the whispered response.
    “André?” I asked in my normal voice.
    “Get out of there,” he said. “Get out of there fast!”

SEVEN
    I was starting to slam down the phone when I heard André say, “And don’t…”
    I put the phone back up to my ear. “Don’t what?”
    “Don’t take anything! Dump whatever’s in the bags!” Then he added, “But take the bags!”
    “What? Why?”
    “Just do it!”
    Dumping what I’d put in the bags was easy—which goes to prove that it sometimes pays to get sidetracked. I grabbed the box of garbage bags and slipped out of the room, locking it behind me.
    The trouble was, I didn’t know where to go or why I was supposed to get out of there so fast. But I hurried away from the room, and when I heard the elevator clanging open down the hallway, I ducked into the stairwell.
    The Heavenly’s stairwell is like a house of horrors. It’s lined with mirrors that bounce your reflection back and forth to infinity. And since the people who stay at the Heavenly are usually kinda deranged-looking to begin with, running into them on the stairs can be very scary. Most people would rather risk their lives on the elevator.
    So I tried to ignore my reflections as I hung around the corner, waiting to see who had just come