2 Sisters Detective Agency Page 18

  “Give me your hand.”

  Penny pulled him free. They held each other in the dimness, listening to their pursuer crunching through the shrubs and stones toward them.

  “Go, go, go.” He pushed at Penny, but she was rigid with terror, walking straight legged, slipping and stumbling in the loose rocks. Sean thought about pulling her to the ground, trying to hide. But all his senses were telling him the hunter behind them was closing in. The same natural electrical impulses were shooting through his brain that blasted through a rabbit’s mind when it saw the eyes of a wolf emerging from the undergrowth. They needed to run, run, run.

  A puttering sound filled the quiet ravine, like gloved hands clapping, and Penny screamed. Sean knew the killer had sprayed the brush around them with bullets, his suppressor dulling the sound from the houses below. He tried to keep Penny moving, but she slumped against her brother, went down clutching her side.

  She was in too much pain to make a sound. He followed her hand to the hole just under her ribs on the right side. Warm, wet, drenching his wrist and arm in seconds. Sean had a choice to make now. Die with her or survive alone.

  “Don…” she managed. “Sean, don’t le…”

  The footsteps were coming. Sean squeezed Penny’s hand, already consoling himself about what he was going to do. It had been her idea anyway to join the Midnight Crew. She’d been Vera’s friend from the dance academy when they were in grade school. Really it was she who had gotten them into this mess in the first place. He told himself that these excuses and others would be at hand later, in therapy, when he tried to get over the guilt of leaving his sister to die without him.

  The killer was close. Sean could hear him breathing. Maybe readying the gun to fire blindly at them again. If Sean was wounded, that would be it. It would all be over. He wasn’t ready for it to end yet. Soldiers left each other behind all the time in war. Pushed on. Survived to fight again. He had no time to be honorable now, or to make her understand why he wasn’t.

  “I love you,” he told Penny, because he supposed that might help. He looked her in the eyes when he said it, which was brave of him, he thought.

  Then he turned and ran.

  Chapter 76

  The edge of the road lit up white, softly at first and then blazing as the car passed in the night. Sean watched it from where he hid in the bushes ten feet back from the asphalt, down an embankment on the hillside. He had considered waiting until daylight to move again, but the pain in his knees and hips from crouching, too frightened to move, was becoming unbearable. Even turning his head to peer through the gaps in the scrub oaks sent rocks and sand crumbling from beneath him. Instead he listened and watched the road.

  He had lost the killer while the man dealt with Penny. There had been a kind of yelp and gurgle on the wind, and then nothing. Sean had made his way sideways up along the edge of a ravine, guessing the killer would predict he’d follow the slope of the earth. He was smart. He was going to survive this. Leaving Penny behind had been the right move—he knew that now, because her sacrifice had bought him time, security. Now all he had to do was get the attention of a passing motorist and he was home free. And the cars were coming with greater and greater frequency. His Hublot, the glass now cracked, told him it was 4 a.m. Normal people would be on the road at this time. Cleaners arrived at work. Bartenders departed. He looked around and saw no movement on the hillside.

  Sean shifted onto his haunches, gripped the earth, and crawled forward into the shelter of the next clump of bushes, closer to the edge of the road.

  A truck rumbled along the ridge in the distance. He watched, ready to spring. When it was right next to him, he saw two fat Hispanic men sitting in the cab, a Saint Joseph cameo hanging from the rearview mirror. Sean sunk back into the bush. He didn’t want to spend the first precious seconds of his escape trying to explain the need to step on the gas in broken Spanish to a pair of idiots. He watched the truck go by. The crunch of its tires on the road ahead masked all but the final moments of the killer’s approach.

  Chapter 77

  Sean heard the last footstep in the gravel. He turned, just far enough to catch the blur of a big hand sweeping up to grab a hunk of his hair, the other gripping his shoulder hard. He was yanked backward, hitting the ground with a thunderous impact that knocked the wind out of him.

  He opened his eyes and tried to suck in air. Sean remembered the feeling from a summer day at Malibu Beach. A wave had tumbled him into the sand, and the pressure on his lungs had been terrifying in the seconds it took for him to reach the water’s surface again. When he breathed this time, though, something was different. Only one lung inflated, the air struggling through his lips, as thick as honey.

  He reached up and gripped the tree branch protruding from the left side of his chest, sticking out from his smashed ribs by two feet or more. He thought about how, in movies, actors managed full conversations while impaled like this through the back, but he could move his lips only silently.

  An old man stepped around Sean, stood in front of him, looking at the wooden spike with a kind of quiet satisfaction.

  In his dying moments, Sean watched the killer’s face and tried to recognize him. He wanted to know which of the Midnight Crew victims he had been, which night of fun and laughter had brought such undeserved cruelty down on him and Penny. But the old man seemed to be just an old man, like so many other indistinct, unimportant people who had fluttered in and out of Sean’s life.

  Sean died with his feet struggling in the dirt, his heart torn in half, and some nameless nobody staring at him in the growing dawn.

  Chapter 78

  It was five in the morning when the knock came at the door. I had been shifting around the house restlessly, gathering little Baggies of drugs from among the debris of the party in a kind of grim treasure hunt and emptying their contents into the toilet. During my scavenging I found a smattering of strange items brought by the teens for purposes known only to them—an inflatable sex doll, a unicycle, a bucket of twigs, and several cans of sausage and beans.

  At 3 a.m., Baby had appeared behind me in the kitchen, sniffing the air like a gopher just emerging from the earth. She had been sitting on the concrete wall at the edge of the Strand, drinking colorful flavored vodkas with some remaining teens, while I rattled around the house. I knew she was in for the hangover of her life, but I didn’t go out there and call her in. She had taken on the strange new woman in her life for Queen of the Party and lost. Her most sacred space, her bedroom, had been invaded by commercial cleaners and drug lords, and her father was only a few days dead. She needed to get it out of her system.

  “What is that smell?” She groaned.

  “Spam.” I showed her the pan I had been laboring over. Four thick slices of the tinned meat were bubbling in butter on the Teflon.

  “Oh, God.” Baby gagged. “That’s not right.”

  “It’s right by me.” I shrugged.

  She slid onto a bench and shoved aside a bunch of junk to clear a path between us. “I’m feeling very emotional,” she said, after watching me cook for a while.

  “You don’t say?” I smiled.

  “I hit a guy in the face with a snow globe.” Her words were slurred. “I’ve never hit anyone. With anything. Ever. And I hit that guy. In the face. With a snow globe.”

  I glanced over. Her lip was trembling.

  “Rhonda, I didn’t even know his name!”

  I couldn’t stifle a laugh. She started laughing with me.

  “You want some Spam?”

  “Oh, hell no. Are you crazy?” She watched me sit and start eating. “You’re just going to sit there and eat it like that? No toast? No pancakes? No eggs? Just fried slices of Spam?”

  “I don’t like anything to interfere with the taste of my Spam,” I said.

  She watched with a horrified look on her face for a while, then reached over and plucked a juicy slice from the side of my plate. Within minutes, I was frying myself more Spam while Baby devour
ed the original batch.

  The knock at the door came maybe fifteen minutes after Baby had slouched off to bed. I opened the front door and found Officer David Summerly standing there. I hadn’t realized just how present the man was in my fragmented brain until I laid eyes on him again. I had been thinking about him ever since he’d left, while I’d pottered around the house alone, even while Baby and I had eaten and laughed together. The officer’s collar was unbuttoned, and he was tapping his hat against the thigh of his trousers.

  “You didn’t say anything back,” he said.

  “When?”

  “When I said I liked you.”

  “Oh.” I gazed over his shoulder, tried to look nonchalant. Probably failed. “I guess I figured that was just an LA thing. We’re on Hollywood’s doorstep here, you know. People get dramatic.”

  Summerly laughed. “Well, it’s not an LA thing, Rhonda. I wasn’t being dramatic. I was being real.”

  He stepped up from the front walkway, onto the stoop. I didn’t budge from the doorway.

  “I see a lot of crazy stuff in my line of work,” he said. “Nothing surprises me much anymore. But you talking your way out of both jams you got yourself into over the past couple of days, that was really something else. That was like verbal…legal…gymnastics.”

  “I’m pretty flexible,” I said. “Why don’t you get in here and I’ll show you a couple more of my moves?”

  We both laughed at the cheesiness of our banter, the silliness of needing to exchange words at all when our bodies were busy doing all the talking for us. He was advancing into the entryway. I was walking back, drawing him in, both our hands already restless, ready to grab at clothes, to pop buttons and pull zippers and explore the hard, warm skin beneath. I closed the door behind him, and Officer Summerly’s hand found mine in the early-morning darkness of the foyer as I led him toward the stairs.

  Chapter 79

  Vera walked into her house from the back entrance, climbed the stairs, and quietly shut the door to her bedroom. She hadn’t been explicitly told by her father to stay at home and care for her mother during his absence, but it was expected that the hens would huddle together for safety when the rooster was away. It was a ridiculous rule. Vera wasn’t a frightened chicken but a lone wolf capable of hunting and surviving on her own. The light under her mother’s bedroom door had told Vera that she was up, even at 4 a.m., probably watching religious programs and fiddling with a battered Bible.

  She went to her laptop, pushed it open, and clicked on the app that controlled her hidden cameras. The rooftop of the old woman’s house was the best angle, but she had hidden a couple of other cameras in trees along the street outside the property with the dogs. The feed was live, showing a cluster of fire and emergency-response vehicles currently jamming up traffic, the typical gathering of neighbors and gawkers outside the police tape. Vera could have searched the internet for news about whether the woman with the dogs was dead, but she didn’t. It didn’t matter. She would tell Sean, Penny, and Ashton that the woman had survived with only flesh wounds, and they’d be too weak to check for themselves, the way they’d been with the young girl who had collapsed at the Palos Verdes raid.

  She rolled the footage back and watched the emergency trucks disappear and the neighbors recede, the street folding back into night. She stopped when she saw her crew bursting out of the gate into the little hidden alleyway, running like jail breakers onto the street. Their humiliating retreat had marked the end of the escapade, so she followed the footage carefully further back, all the way to the start. She stopped and played the tape. The four of them arriving, slipping under the cover of the leaves and vines around the alleyway, mere minutes passing between their disappearance from view and the lights inside the house flicking on as the woman was alerted by her dogs.

  Vera waited. As the action played out inside the house, a car rolled slowly down the street, on screen for only two seconds before it disappeared. She rolled the footage back, took a screenshot of the car, and stared at it. An old, beaten-up panel van, maybe dark-blue or green, the back windows blocked with patterned curtains. One of those “If the van’s a-rockin’, don’t come a-knockin’” type vehicles.

  No, that wasn’t him.

  Vera knew the man had used a white van to abduct Ashton. A panel van with the windows blocked was also a perfectly serviceable vehicle for an abduction. But there was no need for two grab vans. And this vehicle was too distinct, too memorable. It was probably the last remnant of some aging hippie’s former life before they sold their soul to Wall Street and bought a seven-bedder with a screening room in the hills behind the Getty.

  No, Vera knew she should be looking for something with discreet sophistication. Something that wouldn’t look out of place rolling around the neighborhood at night. He didn’t want to be pulled over and searched with an enormous rifle perched on the passenger seat, a series of telescopic lenses in the back, surveillance material on a bunch of rich teenagers stuffed into the glove box. He wouldn’t bring his grab van. He’d bring his everyday car.

  No other cars passed in the street while the failed raid played out. Vera tapped her nails on her desk and thought. Maybe he wasn’t following behind. Maybe he’d kept just ahead of them, anticipating their moves, keeping them in his rearview mirror as they headed for the target.

  Vera rewound the footage back further, to those moments when the four of them stood in the alley, waiting for the terrier to succumb to the diazepam. Further again, until the street was silent, just seconds before they would appear on screen. A car rolled by. Vera stopped the film and screenshot the image, blew it up.

  She knew a little about cars. If there was one status symbol among Russian mobsters, it was their mode of transportation. She googled some BMWs and found the model—the Gran Tourer. Jet-black. The website advertised that instead of a trunk, the car had a big cargo space for kids’ scooters and sports bags, nets behind the front seats for their iPads and crap. A family man. A man with kids, killing kids. Vera smiled. This was very interesting.

  She opened the list of Midnight Crew victims on her desktop and deleted all the childless couples. There were four men remaining. One of them had been her target: the jerk from the mall who had stolen her and Ashton’s parking spot. She’d been having a terrible day. The mall valets had been on break, and then the stolen spot had pushed her over the edge. Vera sat back and thought. The mall guy was the same guy with the kid who had collapsed. Jacob Kanular. But she remembered his car from the mall: a blue sedan of some kind, whizzing into the space ahead of them. Not a BMW. She selected the Kanular family from the list and rested her finger on the Delete button.

  Then she stopped.

  A white van. A blue sedan. Was there another car? Had the sedan been his? Or was it the car his wife usually drove?

  She remembered the Kanular guy glaring at her over the duct tape wound around his head, his black eyes strangely calm, calculating. She googled the Kanulars’ address and selected Street View. Outside the house, Google had caught someone coming home, one door of the four-car garage rolled halfway down, a pair of legs, jeans, and boots, standing by the trunk of a vehicle.

  She saw the black, blue, and white BMW symbol on the trunk of the car and smiled.

  Chapter 80

  Officer David Summerly lay beside me in the late-morning light, the gold hair on his chest glowing in the sunshine from the open window as he fiddled with the edge of the sheet and stared up at the ceiling. He was probably turning over the same idle things in his mind that I was, the same strange questions and possibilities that had opened up after we unexpectedly fell into bed together before sunrise. How he was going to get out of the house without running into Baby, who was loudly clattering around in the kitchen below. Whether we would see each other again. How to discern if the morning’s recent activities meant anything—what we had shared both before and after the “I really like you” moment, the intimate whisperings we’d had in the bathroom as he’d watched me in th
e shower. Those words that had come before we fell asleep, excited murmurings, soft laughter.

  The hand that was fooling with the sheet wandered up the pillow and toyed with a strand of my pink hair. Something crashed in the kitchen, and we heard Baby’s curse echo through the big house. She sounded hungover and desperate, rattling around, shifting bottles and opening and slamming the fridge.

  “Is there any more Spam?” she roared through the big empty house.

  “I know that kid, you know,” Summerly said.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I responded to the thing at the school a couple of years ago.”

  “What thing at the school?”

  “Nobody told you?” He paused for a moment to think. “Oh. I shouldn’t, then. But…if you’re her guardian, maybe it’s relevant.”

  I had told Summerly some of my situation with Baby in the hours since he’d shown up. I had come to a crossroads now. I could trust Baby to have handled her past and leave it where it lay, unexposed to me, or I could open her box of secrets and see if there was anything in there that concerned me.

  “What happened?” I asked, knowing even as I said it that I was betraying Baby’s trust.

  “She kissed a teacher,” Summerly said. He was looking at a photograph on the dresser near the window of Baby as a kindergartener. “She got confused, I guess. She was thirteen. She might have thought the guy was flirting with her or something, wanted to be her boyfriend. You know how teenage girls dream up these things sometimes. Man, I’ve dragged enough runaways out of dangerous situations they got themselves into based on dreams and fantasies. I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Same.” I nodded. “How did it happen?”

  “Story is, she was the teacher’s pet. He’d kept her back on her own after class that day to compliment her on her work, and she just launched herself at him and kissed him.”