2 Sisters Detective Agency(22)

“I don’t know—what do I look like? A psychic?” She rolled her eyes.

“Well, you were doing all right on some things. You’re a terrible psychologist, but you noticed the drag marks on Ashton’s shoes,” I said. “You’ve got instincts. Observational skills. I like bouncing ideas off you. You’re smart.”

“Stop buttering me up,” she snapped. “I’m not a piece of toast.”

I laughed. My dad had always said that when I was a kid, whenever he caught me sucking up to him for treats, attention, money. Hearing the big man’s words coming out of Baby’s mouth tickled me.

My father’s storage unit was number 66. I unlocked the door, bracing for more mysterious bags of cash or a bigger cache of weapons than the one I’d found at his office—perhaps racks of neatly arranged knives and swords, big guns in cases stacked against the walls. I was ready for a host of other surprises—illegal exotic animals, stolen gold bars, bomb-making materials.

Instead, the storage unit seemed completely empty. I switched on the light. In the center of the ceiling was a hook, and from the hook hung a thin chain. On the chain was another key. I pulled it down. There was no label, no tag.

“Goddamnit,” I said.

“Chill.” Baby yawned. “It’s just a key. We can go now.”

“This isn’t good,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because the key to this unit was hidden,” I said. “I found it tucked away among Dad’s stuff in his office.”

“So?”

“So Dad didn’t want anyone to find that key. But on the off chance that someone did, he’s got another unmarked key waiting here. Whatever he’s hiding, in order to find it you’d have to find the first key to get all the way here, then figure out what this key is for to get all the way there. It’s like a puzzle.”

Baby yawned again. “Pretty stupid puzzle.”

“Whatever this key unlocks, it can’t be good,” I said.

“Can we stop and get nuggets on the way there?” she whined.

“We don’t even know where ‘there’ is,” I said.

“Well, obviously it’s in the desert. Just go back and check out the navigation system to Dad’s car, see where he’s been lately. Try to find something, like, desert-y, I guess.”

“How do you know it’s in the desert?” I asked.

She pointed to the floor, shuffled her sneakers on the concrete. There was a fine layer of orange sand scattered in a path from the door of the unit to the light, leading to the key in the center of the room. Baby let out a resigned sigh.

“He brought it in on his shoes,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “Right.”

“It’s all about the shoes, this stuff,” she said.

“Spoken like someone who’s been running a successful detective agency for a decade, not a fifteen-year-old kid whose dad let her hang out with him on the job a couple of times.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’m just quick,” Baby said as she walked back out of the unit. “If you’re gonna keep hanging out with me, you better keep up, lady.”





Chapter 25



The desert was alive at night. Our headlights picked up a dozen creeping, crawling, and slithering things as we rolled down a long dirt track between low mountains, an hour and a half out of San Bernardino. A rattlesnake crossed our path, skimming over the sand to the side of the road. I was drowsy and filled with dread at the idea of more surprises from my father’s ghost but spurred on by a desire to see all the demons exorcised before I slept. Baby was wide-awake in the passenger seat, her face lit by her phone screen as her thumbs danced over the glass.

In a shallow valley ringed by Joshua trees, a rusty shipping container sat lit by moonlight. I checked the navigation system we’d taken from my father’s car and saw that the last route visited led directly to where we now sat.

I reached over and opened the glove box in front of Baby, taking out the Magnum revolver I’d confiscated from my father’s office.

“Look,” I said. “Technically I’m wading into hazy legal territory here. This is not my gun. It’s not registered to me. Given the circumstances, I’m not even sure it’s Dad’s gun, but I—”

As I was speaking, Baby pulled a .25 Baby Browning pistol with a pink pearl-lite grip out of her handbag.

“This isn’t registered to me either,” she said.

I just sat there with my mouth open. She flicked the safety off the gun with an expert motion of her hand. I took the weapon from her carefully, flicked the safety back on, and unloaded it, popping the round from the chamber. I slipped the magazine into my pocket and the gun into the glove box.

“Hey, I—”

“Just don’t,” I said.

She threw her hands up and huffed a huge sigh.

We both exited the car. The desert air was warm and heavy. Baby might have been one of the toughest kids I had ever met, but as we neared the storage container, she closed the gap between us until she was right on my tail, her eyes big and round in the night. She grabbed my arm as I fit Dad’s key into a giant padlock on the front of the container.

“What’s that?”

“What?”