2 Sisters Detective Agency(28)

“Are you kidding me?” I sighed, snuffing it out. “A carriage and horses? This is present-day Los Angeles, not Victorian England.”

“You’ll figure it out.” Baby sighed. “Call a movie set or something.”

“I want to look into this Willisee and Benstein thing,” I said. “There’s something there.”

“Not my problem,” Baby said. “I gotta bounce.”

I was about to tell her she wasn’t going anywhere, but her retreat was halted by a force much more persuasive than mine. She turned and slammed into the chest of a big thick-necked guy in a black shirt covered with roses. Three more men emerged from the purple Subaru, which I recognized from last night. They were all around us before I could even begin to form a plan of escape.

“Rhonda, right?” the big guy said to me. “We want to talk to you.”





Chapter 34



I took Baby by her impossibly small biceps and pulled her backward, away from the huge lug in the ugly shirt. The four guys seemed to be attendees of some kind of bad shirt convention. Embroidered roses, lilies, and hibiscus flowers adorned lapels and cuffs all around us. And the poor aesthetic choices didn’t end with fabric and car paint. The guy closest to me had a gun tattooed on his right cheek, the barrel edging on the corner of his mouth.

“I’m Martin Vegas,” the big one said. “We’ve got a problem.”

“You bet we do,” I agreed. “Baby, get in the car.”

“No way.” She stuck close to me, as she had in the desert, her hip and shoulder against mine as though my physical bulk could protect her. Her voice dropped to a murmur. “I’m not leaving you alone with these guys.”

“What are you gonna do?” I murmured back. “Unfriend them to death? Get in the car.” She didn’t budge.

“We can probably skip right to it,” Vegas said. “We’re friends of Earl’s. Or at least we were. I understand he passed away a couple of days ago. Sorry to hear it.”

“Yeah, you guys look real torn up about it,” I said.

“We are torn up. About losing not only Earl but our very talented cook too.” Vegas was looking Baby over. “Tuddy was hard to obtain. He’s very in demand. A real asset. Your dad played a big part in bringing him in, and now the two of you have undone that arrangement.”

I tried to stifle the fear and dread running through me at the mention of your dad. I could imagine how these men pieced together that Baby and I were connected to Earl—we’d been seen on a camera likely monitored by the cartel at the shipping container, and freed their meth cook, after all. It was even reasonable that Vegas could know my name—Baby had probably mentioned it in the container. But if Vegas knew we were Earl’s daughters, it meant he probably knew everything. He would know I was staying at my father’s house. He would know about my job in Colorado. He would know I was the only adult in Baby’s life. And those were very dangerous pieces of information for drug cartel guys to have in their pockets.

“Well, we won’t waste your time,” I said, pulling Baby toward the car. “You must be anxious to go find Tuddy again. Good luck. Last time I saw him he was on a Greyhound bus to Seattle.”

I stepped back. The assembly of men moved around us. One of the guys leaned on the passenger-side door of my Buick, preventing me from shoving Baby in. I found myself wishing I had let her go to Milan after all.

“Tuddy will show up again,” Vegas said. “What we’re anxious about now is getting our money and product back.”

“We don’t have that stuff,” Baby said. Her voice seemed impossibly small and squeaky in the circle of big men.

“Yeah, we do,” I corrected her.

“What?”

“I took all the meth from the shipping container,” I said. “And about three million bucks in cash from Dad’s office in Koreatown.”

“First, why the hell would you do that?” Baby slapped at me. “And second, why the hell would you admit all that right now?”

“They’ll figure it out eventually. They’re rubbing at least two brain cells together, although probably not much more.” I glanced around the circle of guys. “And I took that stuff because I didn’t have a full grip on the situation yet. That’s what I do in my job. I gather all the pieces together and hold on to them until they make sense.”

“Well, now you’ve got a grip,” Baby said. “So give the guy what he wants before his goons kill us. My Wikipedia page can’t say I died in a Denny’s parking lot!”

“Goons?” the guy with the gun-mouth tattoo said.

“Sorry.” Baby pulled her head in like a turtle. “I meant, like, helpers?”

Gunmouth glared at her.

“Henchmen?” she squeaked.

“I could probably accept henchmen,” he grumbled.

“Look,” Vegas said. “We’re offering you an opportunity to put things right here. We’re businessmen, okay? We don’t like losses, either of assets or useful relationships. I don’t know what you’ve seen on TV about the Mexican drug cartels. But we’re not like that.”

“You’re not?” I glanced at the purple chrome car and the roses on his shirt.