2 Sisters Detective Agency Page 21

  When Jacob had been a killer for hire, he’d loved no one, nothing. He had obeyed the rules of men like him, in the last years of the Cold War, that glorious time before CCTV cameras and DNA and civilians with cell phones. Never walk into a room with only one entrance and exit. Keep your back to the wall and your gun loaded. Always have a backup plan, a bug-out bag, a safe house. Keep your body taut and tight. Practice holds and escape maneuvers whenever a spare moment presents itself—in traffic, in the bathroom, in a shitty motel room in Thailand across the road from the sprawling resort where the target lay relaxing in their final hours of life.

  Jacob had abandoned all of it when he met Neina, told himself he wasn’t that man anymore. But that man would never die. He wasn’t as sharp anymore. Maybe he was carrying a couple of extra pounds. And his guns had been packed away, useless, in a cupboard in a basement. But the plan should never have changed. The old rules should have been obeyed.

  Jacob crested the hill and pulled over, looked down at the house perched on the outcrop of cliffs looking over the vast, sparkling sea. The sun was hanging low over the horizon, making the windows of the house blaze pink. Jacob was glad he couldn’t see inside now. He knew as he sat there watching that there were no officers sitting around Neina on the couches, playing good cop to her while they tried to pry out what she knew. The gate to the property was open, and there were no cars in the driveway.

  Which meant Neina was dead.

  Rusty. Stupid. He’d allowed himself to be lured. Not lured into a trap but away from the only thing in the world more precious to him than his wife.

  Jacob stepped on the gas and spun the wheels, heading back toward the hospital.

  Chapter 93

  One of the patrol cops, I saw, was trying to grab Baby, with Ashton surely next, while Summerly shoved me toward his sedan.

  “What the hell is this?” I yelled as he shoved me into the back seat. I waited, barely containing my fury, while he walked around the front of the car and got in. “Are you kidding me? You’re arresting me for what?”

  “I can hear you, Rhonda. You don’t have to shout.” He winced, rubbing his ear. “There are only two of us in the car, you know.”

  “Where are you taking those kids?”

  “Just calm down.” Summerly turned the wheel and headed out of the lot. “We’re all going to the West LA station. They can service us there.”

  “Service us? What the hell is going on?”

  “I’ve been lying to you, Rhonda,” Summerly said. “I’m not a patrol cop.”

  I stared out the window at the gridlocked traffic. Somewhere behind us, I imagined, Baby and Ashton were being loaded into the patrol cars. It would have been tight with me in the back seat and the two of them squished in with me, but I wanted the kids by my side. The pendulum that had been swinging between being Baby’s mother and sister now had me feeling the hot, flustered stress of a mother duck with her ducklings loose from the flock, toppling and turning down river rapids.

  “I’m a detective,” Summerly said. “Gang and Narcotics Division.”

  “Well, congratulations!” I sneered, the new threat of danger creeping up my spine. “What has that got to do with me?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Summerly said. “Do you happen to know someone around here who might have millions of dollars of cartel cash and drugs in their possession somewhere?”

  I bit my lip.

  “You’re not under arrest for possession.” Summerly watched me in the rearview mirror with his warm brown eyes. “But I gotta tell ya, if I didn’t like you so much I’d be tempted.”

  “Well, what the hell am I under arrest for?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “We were making a show of taking you into custody so that the guy working for Martin Vegas who was sitting in the yellow Camaro at the gas station where we picked you up would know you guys were off-limits.”

  “You…” I tried to think. “What guy? There was a guy?”

  “You didn’t notice?” Summerly said. “The car was bright yellow.”

  “I was a little distracted.”

  “Drug dealers have terrible taste in cars.” He shook his head.

  “And clothes too,” I agreed.

  I felt strangely deflated. Stupid and gullible. Since I arrived in Los Angeles, I had been playing with the big bad kids, and I’d just been revealed to both them and myself as the odd one out. I’d thought I was putting the pieces of the puzzle together, and all this time it had been shifting around me as I stumbled along. I sagged into the seat, crushing my chained hands against the leather.

  “So you’ve been onto me since the car bombing?” I asked.

  “No, we’ve been onto you since Earl died,” Summerly replied. He blasted the horn at a vehicle ahead of us holding up the lane while I tried to collect my thoughts. “Rhonda, your dad was working for us.”

  Chapter 94

  Vera felt numb. That was good. Once, when she was about eight, she’d crept to her father’s office and lingered outside the door, listening to Evgeni Petrov describe his first kill to an associate. The anticipation of what it would feel like had been so great, he’d said, that the act itself passed over him as seamlessly and unremarkably as the act of pouring a cup of coffee or making the bed.

  Vera had always wondered what her first real kill would feel like, whether she would work through it mechanically, like her father had, or whether she would connect with what she was doing emotionally, something she assumed would make her weak and vulnerable. But killing Neina Kanular had been like smacking a mosquito. She’d fought a little. Been difficult to catch, to pin down. But then the superefficient death strike, right on target, had given Vera a little ripple of satisfaction and nothing more.

  She had the mind for it. The soul. She really was Daddy’s girl.

  Vera walked now through the hospital halls and took the elevator to the fifth floor. Neina hadn’t given up any further information on her daughter’s location, but Vera knew the girl wouldn’t be hard to find. She used the mirrors in the elevators to wipe a blood smear from her neck and tuck her wild curls back in. Though Vera was sure she had buried Neina’s death somewhere deep in the dark corners of her mind, her eyes seemed a little wild to her. She closed them, breathed, tried to reset. A family with a stroller got onto the elevator at the third floor, and Vera cooed at the smiley baby.

  Vera walked confidently onto the ward and turned left into the first room as though she knew exactly where she was going. She shoved back a curtain to reveal an old man with a neurosurgery scar sleeping with his mouth hanging open. She turned and walked out, checked the next two rooms: two teen boys sitting on a bed playing with their phones while a woman took a phone call by the windows, another old man reading a newspaper.

  Three more rooms revealed nothing more. Vera pretended to read a chart on the wall about visitation hours while she thumbed the safety off the pistol inside her bag. She didn’t want to use the weapon, but she was running out of time, and she knew that if Jacob returned earlier than she expected, she would need to be ready. Her hope was to slip in and out, leaving the kid for her father to find, pale and lifeless in the bed, still warm to the touch. Vera had always thought it was wonderful in movies when the parent arrived just seconds too late to save the child. The closer the margin, the better the tragedy.

  She turned into the next room and found a bedside cabinet crowded with cards and flowers, the bay where the bed should be sitting empty.

  She went and snatched up the nearest card.

  Dear Beaty, We hope that you…

  Vera threw the card on the floor.

  Outside the room, an orderly in a blue uniform was cleaning off a whiteboard with a cloth and spray.

  “I’m looking for my sister.” Vera smiled, her hand on the gun in her bag. “Could you please help me?”

  Chapter 95

  Ashton saw Rhonda Bird being driven away in an unmarked cop car, then stood and looked around him at the scene that remained: a squad car
pulling out slowly to join the traffic heading in the other direction on the 405, with the people who had paused to gawk now resuming their activities. Baby was standing beside the open door of the second squad car while a silver-haired officer tried to corral her into the vehicle.

  Two things struck him. The first was that everybody seemed to have completely forgotten his existence. This meant that whatever Rhonda and Baby were being arrested for, it had nothing to do with the Midnight Crew. The second was that the officer at the front of the remaining squad car had slid into the vehicle, leaving her partner alone to deal with getting Baby into the back of the car, and the old patrol cop was struggling with the outraged teen.

  Ashton gathered up his pile of snacks. The temptation to walk away pulsed in him, heavy and urgent. He could walk to the edge of the gas station and disappear down an alley into the streets, get a cab home. But all that waited for him out there was a killer who had only him and Vera left to track down.

  At least here he had an ally. He had thought Vera would protect him, that she and the other members of the Crew had been the kind of team who would be there for him when things got scary. He’d been wrong. Maybe it was time to start hanging out with a different crowd.

  Ashton walked up behind the older officer and gave him a nudge on the back of the ankle with his shoe.

  “Hey, man.”

  The officer turned.

  “Catch this.”

  Ashton threw all his snacks at the officer at once. Two bags of Ruffles, a Hot Pocket, a can of nuts, and two doughnuts. A crackling explosion of color and crinkled confectionery packaging. He didn’t need to tell Baby what to do. While the old man struggled to catch the barrage of treats, the teenagers bolted.

  Chapter 96

  I sat quietly for a moment. My father, an undercover operative? Whatever was clogging the traffic suddenly released and we were on our way again.

  “My dad was—”

  “Not a hero,” Summerly said. “Before you go too far down that track. He was not working with the police out of a sense of honor and justice and service to the community.”

  “Oh.”

  “We had a tracker planted in a shipment of drugs coming up from Mexico, and your dad received it,” he said. “We got him dead to rights. He agreed to work with us in a sting on Martin Vegas. All he wanted was to stay out of jail and take care of Baby, so we cut him a deal.”

  “Oh, he didn’t want to stay out of jail to care for Baby,” I sneered. The anger was boiling up inside me, hotter and hotter. “He wanted to stay out of jail because they don’t serve whiskey there. Is Perry Tuddy in on all this?”

  “Of course,” Summerly said.

  “So all his bullshit about enjoying being locked up by the cartel was just a lie?”

  “Nope,” Summerly said. “That guy is a genuine nutcase. He gets himself locked up by the cartel almost intentionally because he enjoys it for some weird reason. But we approached him after he was last released and asked him if he wouldn’t mind us placing a tracker on him too, to see where the cartel took him. And, yeah, even though he likes being locked up, I still felt conflicted about it. What kind of jerk lets a guy rot in a shipping container in the middle of the desert just to make a case?”

  “I don’t know. The same kind of guy who would sleep with a woman just to make a case?”

  Summerly jerked the wheel and slammed on the brakes. The car’s bumper barely missed scraping the concrete barrier at the side of the road. He turned and stared at me.

  “You can’t honestly believe that’s what I did.”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “It’s hard to believe you have any genuine feelings for me while I’m cuffed in the back of your police car, Dave.”

  “You’re only back there for show,” he said. “How would it look to Vegas’s guys if I tossed you the keys and we both swung through Miffy’s for a shake?”

  “Just about as bad as it does for us to be sitting here by the side of the road having a heart-to-heart.”

  “Well, I don’t care.” Summerly snorted and locked eyes on me. “Rhonda, I haven’t met a person like you in…”

  He thought about it. I waited.

  “In all my life.”

  “How romantic. I’ve lost feeling in my fingers and I really need to pee. Can we get moving?”

  “I was kind of hoping you and me could hang out after all this. Go out on a real date.”

  “You’ll be lucky if I don’t put your head through the windshield of this car as soon as you take these cuffs off,” I said.

  “I mean…” He turned, looked at me in the rearview. “I mean, I was kind of hoping you felt the same.”

  “I don’t know how I feel about you. For me, it was just something that happened. I haven’t thought about it yet. I haven’t had a chance to!”

  “Oh, so it’s okay for it to have been just something that happened for you, but not for me?” He smirked. “Nice.”

  “I don’t care what kind of something happened, as long as it wasn’t something for the sake of searching my house for Vegas’s drugs and money while I was asleep.”

  “Well, it wasn’t.” Summerly huffed.

  “Well, good,” I snapped.

  We sat in silence.

  The yellow Camaro drove by us on the freeway, the driver’s head swiveling toward us as he passed. “That was him. He saw us. Vegas’s guy will report back that Baby and I are locked up and out of reach. You can let me go now.”

  “Not until you tell us where Vegas’s drugs and money are.”

  I sighed. “If I do that, I’ll be admitting that I have it.”

  “Tuddy says you took the meth from the shipping container,” Summerly said.

  “Yeah, well you’ve only got his word on that. There may be footage from the camera inside the container, but I assume that was a cartel camera and not something you planted,” I said. “You’ve got about as much of a chance proving that I committed a felony as you do proving that the earth is flat.”

  “Rhonda, I’m not going to charge you with possession of the drugs and cash.” Summerly looked me right in the eyes. “But if you don’t tell me where it all is, I can’t protect you from Vegas.”

  “And you can’t catch him either,” I said.

  Summerly didn’t reply. He was asking me to trust him. Not only about the hours we had shared together but also about my future, about whether I would spend it behind bars or wandering around in the free world. He was asking me to trust that he wouldn’t charge me for failing to surrender the drugs and cash to police even as I sat in his car in cuffs that he himself had snapped onto my wrists.

  I didn’t like the powerless feeling of the metal restricting my movement, the reek of the back of the police vehicle, where probably wrongdoers of every shape and form had sat before me, contemplating the very thing that I was contemplating: how their families would survive in the outside world without them. Because there was no escaping the fact that Baby would go into foster care without a legal guardian to care for her. She thought her life was hard in my custody? I tried to imagine her arriving on the doorstep of a crowded group home or a suburban house packed to the rafters with neglected toddlers and teenage runaways.

  “Take me to the station,” I said. “I want to speak to Baby.”

  “Rhonda, I need you to tell me where—”

  “I’ve done enough talking,” I said.

  Chapter 97

  Vera followed the signs to the children’s ward on the second floor. Colorful drawings were taped to the walls, and misshapen artwork made from pipe cleaners and cotton balls hung from the ceiling like weird descending spiders. She gripped the gun in her handbag and went from room to room, peering in to look for bed 29. Vera didn’t know why the girl had been moved, but she wondered if Jacob had called ahead and requested it.

  If that was the case, it meant that Jacob had found his wife in a pool of her own blood on the kitchen floor, and he would be on his way back now, so she didn’t have much time. Tr
ying to hide his daughter instead of calling building security and the police meant Jacob had not alerted the hospital authorities of her plan. It meant he wanted to fight. He wanted Vera to himself.

  She smiled. She wanted him too.

  Vera found the girl in an empty room, the light from the crack in the curtains falling across her soft face. There was a dullness and a sunken quality to her features that told Vera the girl wasn’t out of the coma yet, that behind the closed eyelids and long dark lashes there probably wasn’t much going on.

  In a way, that was a shame. Neina had known what was coming. Vera had seen her thoughts shuddering through her face as she lost her grip on the earth and began to leave her body. All the days that she wouldn’t experience, days that had been promised to her—birthdays and anniversaries and simple evenings staring at the rolling sea with her loving family by her side. Sunrises and sunsets. Neina had known then that she’d enjoyed her very last meal. She’d made her last phone call. She’d chosen her last outfit. This was it. This painful and terrifying and fury-filled end was hers, and there was not a thing she could do about it.

  Vera wouldn’t get to see all those emotions race through Beaty, the knowledge that Vera was the all-powerful force that had chosen when to bring her life to a close. But that was okay. More victims would come. More delicious ends. Vera had crossed into the bad world, and there was no going back.

  Vera climbed onto the bed, straddled the girl, and wrapped her fingers around Beaty’s thin neck.

  The machines started ticking and singing around her. A part of Vera’s mind knew this was a bad plan. That killing her this way would bring nurses and doctors, and she’d have to dispense with them too. But she had to take Beaty. Then Jacob. She’d worry about plans later. She was good at this. It had always been in her. She was so good at killing she didn’t need an exit strategy. This was her entry into a new life.