2 Sisters Detective Agency(14)

“What job?” I flicked the vape pen, sending it sailing out the window.

“Goddamnit, bitch! You do that again and I’m gonna smack you, I swear to God.”

“Dad gave up being an accountant?”

“An accountant?” Baby burst out laughing. I pulled into a parking lot in front of a strip mall and found a space. “He was an accountant?”

“Last time I saw him he was,” I said.

“Well, when he got landed with me, he had a shop on Sunset that sold taxidermy.”

“Oh, sure.” I rolled my eyes. “Because that makes complete sense. So what was he doing lately?”

Baby gestured through the windshield. We were parked outside a small office door wedged between a busy nail salon and a crab boil restaurant covered in nautical paraphernalia. The stenciling on the door read EARLY BIRD PRIVATE INVESTIGATION—WE’LL GET THE WORM!





Chapter 16



“‘We’ll get the worm’ was my idea.” Baby jutted her chin proudly. “When he started out he was mainly just catching cheating husbands and bail jumpers. You know. Worms.”

“Genius,” I said.

I opened the office door, which led to a stairwell, and was hit with a wall of cigar stink mingled with the smell of crabs from the restaurant next door. There was something else there too: my father’s cologne. Trumper’s West Indian Extract of Limes. I’d smelled it now and then on my clients’ fathers over the years, and it always struck pain into my heart. I walked up the rickety stairs as Baby reassured herself behind me.

“Seven hours and four minutes,” she said. “That’s still plenty of time to get home, pack, get to the airport. Settle into the lounge nice and early. Nab a spot by the window.”

“You’re not going to Milan, Baby. Not this time.”

“It’s hilarious that you think you can stop me,” she said. “You’re gonna give me my credit card, and I’m gonna go.”

In a tiny office above the crab restaurant, my father’s desk sagged under a three-foot-high pile of papers, books, take-out containers, and unopened UPS packages as well as scrunched gambling tickets and receipts, all sprinkled with cigar butts and ash. Just as I had anticipated. The only difference from the office I remembered in Watkins two and a half decades earlier was the weapons. From the doorway I could see four knives—two big hunting knives lying in the pile on the desk, a penknife on a windowsill crowded with used Starbucks cups, and a kitchen knife stabbed into the wall by the window—plus a huge Magnum revolver lying on the seat of his battered leather chair.

I sighed and moved the gun, then sank into the chair. My dad’s groove in the chair fit my butt exactly. Baby shoved a pile of debris off an old sofa onto the floor with the familiarity of someone who had done it many times, then she reclined dramatically with an arm up over her head, holding her phone aloft.

“The woman is trying to take over everything,” Baby narrated to her followers. “She’s ransacking my father’s office now. I can tell she’s going to try to dominate my entire life. She thinks she’s my mom already. She says I’m not going to Milan, and she still hasn’t given me my credit card. This is going to be a battle, people.”

“Are you out of your mind?” I said. “Ransacking? I’ve touched one thing since I walked in!”

“The woman is trying to lecture me now,” Baby narrated.

“I have a name. It’s Rhonda.”

Baby ignored me. I tried to shake off the hot, heavy annoyance creeping up between my shoulder blades, a sensation that had begun in the car and was peaking now. Baby had clearly hung out in this office a lot. My dad had brought her around his work. He’d let her brand the business with a slogan. He’d spent enough time with her that she’d picked up some of his mannerisms—that aggressive hand flick, and the jut of her chin at her own cleverness like a happy cat looking for a scratch. She’d been dumped in his lap as a tiny toddler, and instead of foisting her off on her mother’s relatives, he’d chosen to raise her himself. There was no mistaking it.

I was deeply jealous of this girl.

My entire life, my dad had been aloof, stern, or completely absent. When I reached age thirteen, he’d had enough of me. What did Baby have that I didn’t? What was wrong with me? I strummed my purple-painted fingernails on a small bare spot on the desk.

“What was the lawyer getting at when he said I needed to secure this place?” I asked. “Both doors were locked.”

Baby said nothing and tapped furiously on her phone. I was starting to shift the stuff on the desk into piles when Baby finished her post or whatever it was and popped up again.

“I’m gonna go get a crab stick,” she said. “I assume you want one. Maybe more than one.”

“You assume right,” I said, refusing to take offense. “Get me three. And if you try to run off to Milan, I will find you so fast it’ll make Liam Neeson look like an amateur.”

“Who’s Liam Neeson?”

“What? Liam Neeson isn’t even Marlon Brando old. He’s current!”

“If you say so.”

Baby didn’t get far in the hall, it seemed. I heard her bump into someone, and racked with guilt, I went to the door to listen in.