2 Sisters Detective Agency Page 17

  It was Ashton’s hands that gripped her shoulders, turned her to go. She picked up her still-intact gun. Vera looked back into the darkness and fought the desire to run up there, to shoot wildly ahead of her into the trees. Instead, she followed her crew as they disappeared into the night.

  She knew the real confrontation wasn’t too far away.

  Chapter 71

  As soon as I stepped through the door off the Strand into my father’s house, every kid in the building erupted into cheers. Those who actually saw me started it, and the sound carried onward and upward through the levels to the rooftop. I noticed the Bruh guys walking out through the living room toward the front door carrying pieces of scaffolding. A smart choice. It wouldn’t have been long before teen boys tried to top my dive with backflips and tumbles of their own.

  Vegas and two of his guys had discovered the door to Baby’s bedroom that she had hidden ingeniously behind a bookcase on the third floor. The bookcase lay on its side, pushed over carelessly, books and trinkets spilled out onto the carpet. This was a quieter space in the house. The door to my father’s bedroom I’d passed on my way up the stairs had been closed, I assumed because teens were making out in there or worse.

  Vegas was sitting on Baby’s bed next to an incredibly nervous-looking teenage girl with spiky black hair. His two thugs were leaning against the window, seemingly waiting for us to arrive. Vegas’s hair was tied back in a ponytail, and his boots were a startling fuchsia-dyed leather branded with patterns of violets.

  “Jesus. What size shoe are you?” I said, trying to take all the danger out of the room, to show that I wasn’t afraid. “If I didn’t know you were the world’s most disgusting human being, I’d think of buying those gorgeous things right off your feet.”

  Vegas glanced down at his boots, uncrossed his legs, and planted his feet on the carpet.

  “We’ve finished messing around, Rhonda,” Vegas said. “It’s time to transition our relationship into reduction mode.”

  “You’re firing me?” I looked at Baby, made like I was miffed. “But I’m your key assets holder!”

  “Very funny, Rhonda.” Vegas smiled. He reached out with his long arm and scooted the teenage girl a little closer to him, hugged her waist in tight with his. Her eyes were wide, pleading with me. “But I’m being serious now. I want to terminate our relationship, and the only way I can do that is if you tell me where my stuff is.”

  I stood in Baby’s bedroom and looked the men in their eyes, each of them in turn. All I had to do was tell them where the cash and drugs were hidden. In seconds, they could walk downstairs and retrieve what they wanted.

  But I knew that if I let them do that, there would be no reason for them to keep Baby and me alive. There would be nothing to stop them from opening fire on us. On any of the hundreds of kids in the house.

  “You’re a businessman,” I said. “We can negotiate. But not under these conditions. Let the girl go and we—”

  “You don’t get to negotiate.” Vegas smiled again. “You don’t have any leverage in this situation. You’ll either give me what I want now or you’ll give me what I want after I’ve demonstrated what you have to lose.”

  I could see the ivory-inset grip of a revolver sticking out of his back pocket. He didn’t need to touch the gun. I understood he could whip it out and plant a bullet in the guts of the girl beside him before I could cross the room to stop him.

  I tried to think, but my brain was thrumming with panic. Vegas was cool. Calm. He stroked the girl’s waist.

  “I just want to say,” Vegas continued, “I think it’s so unfortunate that you have burned your bridge with me in this way. Your father and I were building something great. We had built something great.” He glanced around the enormous room, at Baby’s elaborate four-poster bed and the giant leather ottoman dominating the floor space before the walk-in closet. “I have a daughter. She didn’t grow up with a bedroom like this. Earl only wanted what was best for you, Baby. And you, Rhonda. You’ve come in and destroyed what was a very profitable relationship.”

  “Maybe we can salvage things,” I said. “Let that girl come over here to me and we’ll talk.”

  The girl piped up, her smile trembling. “I really would like to go. It’s been real cool hanging out, but—”

  “Quiet, honey.” Vegas snuggled her closer. The girl wriggled, tried to lean away. “The adults are talking.”

  The cartel boss turned to me. When I didn’t budge, he nodded at one of his men.

  “Maybe I need to put a bit more pressure on the situation,” he said.

  Chapter 72

  The goon went for Baby, as I knew he would. In the same way she had been in the Denny’s parking lot, Baby looked like the vulnerable one in our duo, a waiflike and reedy young girl. But she was ready this time. I hadn’t noticed her hand creeping along the doorframe to a shelf on the wall, packed with loose items the cleaners had gathered there.

  She grabbed a snow globe and smashed it into the goon’s face as he reached for her. Her blow was quick, sharp, and true, aimed right between his hands at his nose. The heavy wooden base of the globe pulverized his upper lip against his teeth.

  It was clear to me in that instant that Baby had never been violent with anyone before. As soon as she’d landed the blow the girl dropped her weapon, grabbed her own mouth, and howled in sympathy for her victim and in horror at what she had done. I stepped in, blocking the guy as he recovered and shoving him into the desk.

  Vegas watched all this from the bed. His remaining goon watched from the window. Both had hard, unsurprised stares, like they’d assumed all along I would only deepen the dangerous debt between us. They seemed all too willing to extract payment when I finished ringing up my tab.

  I waited for Vegas’s second man to come for me, but before he could, something outside the window caught his attention, and he gave a frustrated sigh. The ceiling was lit by red and blue lights. Downstairs I heard kids screaming warnings, fleeing out the door to the Strand and the beach. For the first time since I had entered the room, Vegas’s eyes left me and watched the kids barreling down the stairs, leaping over the toppled bookcase in the hall like antelope fleeing a pack of lions.

  Vegas didn’t say anything. He just stood and slipped by me, glancing at me as he went, the promise of future violence so clear in his eyes that I felt my stomach clench tightly and the blood rush to my head. As his goons followed him, one cupping his bleeding face and the other helping him along, the girl on the bed burst into tears.

  Chapter 73

  The first time I ever saw the police disperse an unruly crowd, I was standing on a platform with a bunch of other angsty teens watching the authorities try to contain a small riot at a Sepultura concert. I now stood on the threshold of my father’s house, watching the long arm of the law clear the Manhattan Beach streets, badges and buckles reflecting the red and blue lights of their cars.

  The cops swept at the kids in rows like a vacuum trying to clean up after a beanbag had exploded. Now and then they got some kids, but every time they cornered some between the houses or in the street, others would seem to float upward and billow out, tumbling beyond reach and pooling back together. There were a couple of bad eggs jumping on the hoods of cars and throwing beer bottles at the officers, but all in all, the entire crowd was gone within fifteen minutes.

  Officer David Summerly’s approach was less intimidating this time. I missed his earlier commanding stride toward me. He walked up and stood on the stoop, his hands on his hips, the two of us blocking the main entrance to the house entirely.

  “I’m going to get you this time,” he said.

  “You sound like some kind of supervillain,” I remarked, stepping back so I could admire him in all his uniformed finery again.

  “You might have wriggled out of a charge for the exploding car, but you can’t wriggle out of this,” he said. “This party is disturbing the peace, plain and simple. There must have been five hundred kids in there.”


  “Five hundred?” I asked, reluctantly proud of Baby and her efforts. “You think?”

  “I can charge you with disturbing the peace, and also charge you for every single instance of illicit drug use on your property,” he said. “I just had a look through the beachfront windows. There are so many pills scattered around in there you could open up a pharmacy.”

  “Well, I hate to break your heart,” I said, “but you’re not going to put the cuffs on me tonight, Summerly. At least not for a crime.”

  He rolled his eyes, waiting. I couldn’t keep the grin off my face as I replied.

  “The owner of this domicile is deceased,” I said. “I haven’t yet filed the paperwork to claim the property as my own. I don’t know if I ever will. But until then, no one can authorize a search of the premises, and you can’t do one yourself because you can’t prove anything illegal happened inside.”

  “Yes, I can,” he blurted. He gestured to the street. “All these kids came out of this house!”

  “Have you got any proof of that? Photographs or video maybe?”

  “Probably. It’s probably on the patrol cars’ dash cams. On the officers’ body cams.”

  “Are you personally going to verify that footage in a court of law? With paid experts?” I asked. He paused, thinking. I continued. “Because the way I see it, all these kids showed up and caused a ruckus around this house. But you have absolutely no proof at this very moment that any of them were ever inside or that the presence of all these rambunctious youths has anything at all to do with me. I’m only as guilty as those people next door.” I pointed to the Bruh house. At the houses across the street. “Or them. Or them.”

  “A party has clearly occurred on these premises.” He waved an arm through the open door, at the beer cups and used condoms and broken glass and pizza boxes everywhere, the fallen earrings and lost shoes and torn T-shirts that rain down during good parties the world over.

  “Maybe I just live like this.” I shrugged.

  Summerly gaped at me. “You just live like this?” he said. “Every morning you get up and throw handfuls of glitter and pills and condoms everywhere? These…” He bent and picked up an item lying at my feet by the door’s threshold. It was a huge pair of novelty sunglasses with a plastic penis glued where the nose would go. “These are yours?”

  I took the sunglasses and put them on. The plastic penis stuck out from my face six inches and wobbled as I smiled up at him. “They sure are,” I said.

  Summerly managed to hold it together for a moment before he burst out laughing. “Lady, if you really do live this way, I want to be a part of that life.” He adjusted his belt, stretched his back. “There’s probably enough stuff on the floor in there to cure my backache for the next twelve years.”

  We continued to smile at each other. I took the penis sunglasses off and thought about saying something further. But I didn’t. While everything in my world was wildly out of control, I had just enough sense to wrangle back anything that might interrupt the delicious moment Summerly and I were sharing.

  He stepped down to the sidewalk. When he turned back, I was sure he caught me checking out his butt again, but it didn’t matter, because what he said blew apart any and all concern that might have existed before he opened his mouth.

  “You know,” he said, pointing at me, “I really like you.”

  My mouth fell open. I couldn’t find the words to reply. I just stood there with my jaw hanging as he went back out onto the street.

  Chapter 74

  When Driver arrived, Sean took the keys to the Pullman from him and told him to go away. He did. Good staff were like that. They nodded silently and did exactly as they were told, no questions asked. There were no weird looks about Penny sitting crying on the curb with her leg soaked in blood, the two of them dressed in black and obviously rattled. Over the years, Driver had picked up Sean from highway gas stations between LA and Mexico in the middle of the night, from outside the houses of big-deal politicians in nothing but his underwear after someone’s wife returned home early from a weekend away with the gals. Sean watched the old man walk away with his hands in his pockets and wondered what regular people did when they couldn’t buy silence.

  “You can’t drive,” Penny wailed as her brother helped her into the front seat.

  “I can drive,” he said as he slid into the driver’s seat and searched for where to put the key. “I drove to a bodega last year when the house lady was sick.”

  “Take me somewhere nice,” Penny said. “I can’t go to a regular emergency room. That’s how you catch things. Call ahead and get us a private room.”

  “We’re going home, and I’m calling you a vet,” Sean said.

  “What?”

  “That’s what you do when you get shot,” Sean said. “You call a vet. We can’t go to a hospital. The police will be involved.”

  “So call me a deadbeat doctor!” Penny said. “Like Vera’s dad did with that guy.”

  “You think I have a list of dodgy doctors in my phone?” he snapped, shoving the shifter and pulling awkwardly out from the curb. “A vet will be cheaper. A vet we can buy, any vet at all. No problem.”

  “Ask Vera for—”

  “She needs to know we can handle this ourselves,” Sean said. “Now shut up. I’m trying to concentrate here.”

  It was on Sunset, outside the white walls of the Archer School for Girls, that they noticed the black BMW in their rearview mirror. The driver was in shadow, but he had stopped his vehicle close enough behind Sean and Penny to hide his headlights against the trunk of their car. Uncomfortably close. A gesture that commanded attention. The twins sat watching, waiting. The engine of the car behind them revved.

  “It’s not him.” Sean reached over to put a hand on his sister’s knee, a rare gesture of comfort and affection. “Vera said he would just watch us tonight. Too risky to come after us with all the chaos back there.”

  “Who is it, then?” She turned with difficulty in her seat, stared through the big empty car out the back window. “Is it…is it a gang?”

  “Not in that car.”

  “We’re about to get carjacked. Lock the doors.”

  The doors were already locked. The light changed. He accelerated slowly, and the BMW stayed right behind them.

  “Turn onto the 405. North on it, not south.” Penny’s voice was low, strangely calm. “Speed up. We’ll outrun him.”

  For once, Sean did what she said. That’s when he knew he was in real trouble. Penny was talking sense, and he was listening. With a white-knuckle grip on the wheel, he turned onto the freeway, eased his foot down on the accelerator.

  Penny was right. He couldn’t drive. He had spent about as much time driving as he had doing all the other things that regular people did. Cleaning. Filing paperwork. Calling their mother. He didn’t look before he changed lanes, almost sending a green Saab careening into the center divider. The Saab driver leaned on the horn. He heard shouts, winced, felt humiliated. The BMW was right on their tail, the high beams on, making the rearview mirror blaze at the corner of his vision. The Pullman wasn’t built for speed. It was big, heavy, low, built for gliding with style.

  “We’re going to be fine,” Penny said. “We’re going to get out of this.”

  “Call 911,” Sean said.

  “We can’t,” she said. “This was a bad idea. Turn off the freeway again. We’ll lose him in the hills.”

  He did as she instructed, and after a while, the road narrowed, began to wind through the hills. Trees here and there around them, leaning and black. Sean gained space between him and the black car, losing it again as he slowed hard for corners. The killer knew he couldn’t drive. He was probably back there laughing at him, a shark following lazily behind a struggling swimmer. Sean was drowning, catching glimpses of the shore as he came up to gulp air, the city below appearing between the hills and clumps of vegetation.

  “We shouldn’t have come up here,” Sean said.

  “Shu
t up! Pay attention to what you’re doing!”

  “He brought Ashton up here. This is his hunting ground. This is exactly what he wanted us to do. We’re falling into his trap. Call someone, Penny, for fuck’s sake. Call anyone!”

  “I’ve got no reception!” She looked up from her phone to him, her eyes wild. Then she spotted something on the road. “Stop, stop, stop!”

  Chapter 75

  Sean swerved right toward a hill, but the tires slid in the gravel, fishtailing, hooking around the deer harmlessly as it stood frozen in the road like a marble statue. The Pullman was so long it ground over the edge of the road, up and over the low bank of vegetation marking the drop-off, rocks scraping the underbelly. Sean felt them gouging the surface beneath his feet. The gold, sparkling city below was suddenly right in front of them, and they were plunging absurdly toward it.

  There was no screaming. In the detached, hellish panic that gripped him as the car tumbled down the ravine, he realized that he wanted to scream but couldn’t. The sound caught in his throat like a painful bubble.

  He must have blacked out, because when he woke, the car was crumpled against a tree, a branch piercing its roof. Hissing, creaking, popping sounds were issuing from the car all around him. He tried to figure out how the hell he’d gotten there but could only grip on to the memory of Vera and Ash and Penny standing in the street, Penny bloody and torn, Vera telling them to go home and hunker down for the night, that it was safe now. Penny shoved hard against him as she crawled out through the windshield, stepping on his crotch to get herself free from the wrecked vehicle.

  She was gone for thirty seconds. He lay there counting them. Thirty seconds in which she tried to make her escape alone before remembering that her only sibling, the being who had shared a womb with her for nine months, needed her. She came back and leaned through the squashed window on the passenger side.