2 Sisters Detective Agency(30)

“Come up and see her,” Neina said. “Hold her hand.”

“I will,” he said. “I’ll just finish this.”

He gestured to the half-drunk coffee on the table. But her eyes went to what was beside it. The newspaper showing the image of a dead teenager, squad cars outside a mansion nestled behind tall palm trees.

Neina was smart enough to know that Jacob had done bad things in the past. And, very likely, that he had begun to do them again.

“Leave the coffee,” she said. She put a hand out. “Come.”

He didn’t take it. He couldn’t meet her eyes.

When he looked up again, she was gone.





Chapter 37



“Yeah, sooooo,” Baby said in the car. “Can we, like, make a deal?”

“I’m listening,” I said.

“Can you maybe tell me the next time you’re going to break a guy’s hand? Like, maybe give me some warning?”

“It’s not something I usually spend a lot of time planning,” I said.

“Where’s the money?” she asked.

I laughed.

She folded her arms and huffed. “What, you think I’m going to take it all, drive to Vegas, and have a wild time?” she asked.

“That does sounds like something you would do.” I shrugged. “That or spend it all on teeny-tiny handbags.”

“Seriously, though, you bust into my life all, like, Hey, Baby, guess what? You can’t do this. You can’t do that. You’re too young. You’re too irresponsible. Then you go and steal from a Mexican drug cartel?” She threw her hands up.

“I wouldn’t say steal. I prefer confiscate.”

“Those guys chop people’s feet off,” Baby said. “I read the news. The police in Mexico City just found a big barrel full of feet last week on the side of the highway. Just feet! Nothing else.”

“What do you want me to say here, Baby?”

She shook her head but didn’t answer. Traffic was backed up on the 105 heading east toward the 110. Palm trees stuck up like ragged black fingers out of the sea of warehouses and car lots. The Hustler Casino was advertising unlimited garlic bread with dinner Friday through Sunday.

“If you’re not going to give the cartel their stuff back, what are you going to do with it?” Baby asked, cleaning her huge sunglasses on the hem of her tank top.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Why don’t you give it to the police?”

“Because the police will want to know where I got it,” I said. “And the answer will implicate our father in a major criminal enterprise.”

“So? What do you care?” she asked. “The guy’s dead, and you hated him anyway.”

“How do you like the idea of being homeless?” I said, gesturing to a homeless encampment on the strip of land alongside the freeway. Under a crumpled blue tarp strung between eucalyptus trees, a woman was giving a toddler a bath in a plastic tub. “If the police think Dad was a drug dealer, they can take the house. They can empty his bank accounts. They can take anything he owned.”

Baby just stared at the homeless mother and her child.

“And I didn’t hate him,” I said, hearing the uncertainty in my tone. “He just…He abandoned me.”

Baby snorted.

“What?” I felt anger rising in my throat.

“‘He abandoned me,’” she repeated. “That’s kind of dramatic, isn’t it?”

“It’s the truth,” I said. “I haven’t seen the guy since I was thirteen years old. That’s twenty-five years. A quarter of a century. He had me cash in some stocks that were in my name, then he dropped me at my mom’s house and disappeared. He didn’t even tell me he was leaving. He didn’t even say good-bye.”

Baby shifted uncomfortably in her seat. The words were spilling out of me suddenly, my palms sweaty on the steering wheel.

“Twenty-five years,” I said. “That’s twenty-five Christmases that passed without him trying to reconnect with me. Twenty-five birthdays. He missed my high school graduation. He missed me learning to drive. He wasn’t there when I got my first boyfriend.”

“Okay.” Baby held up a hand. “I get it. I get it.”

We fell into a long, uncomfortable silence.

“If it makes you feel any better, he didn’t come to any of my school functions either,” Baby said eventually. “And a couple of boys from the beach taught me how to drive before I got my permit.”

I strummed the steering wheel. Her words had actually made me feel a little better, but I didn’t want to acknowledge that I was jealous of Baby. In my mind, her relationship with our father was just peachy, everything I’d always wanted to have with him. I imagined he’d been supportive of her. Encouraging. Loving. Interested. But the more time I hung around with Baby, the more I was learning that Earl had been a problematic father figure for her too. I felt her sharing my pain, even though I knew it was probably a complicated issue for us both.

I turned onto the 110, following the signs for Downtown LA.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Back to school,” I said. “I think some kids are being hunted.”