2 Sisters Detective Agency(33)

“We’re dead,” Ashton said.

Vera yawned and took out her phone to text the twins. She and Ashton were the only Midnight Crew members who still attended high school. Penny and Sean had technically graduated, though their disregard for formal education had increased as the time until their trust funds kicked in dwindled. And Benzo had never been an academic. His parents had basically bribed his teachers to pass him every year since kindergarten, until they’d given up in embarrassment halfway through high school.

“We’re not dead, Ashton. We’re fine.”

Vera needed to rally her people. A meeting would be required with the entire posse over Benzo’s murder. Excitement was coursing through her, but she needed to maintain a nonchalant air with Ashton, the most panicky of their number. The coward might interpret the thrill Vera now felt as fear unless she presented herself calmly.

“I know a guy who lives across the street from Benzo.” Ashton leaned in, gripping the tabletop with white knuckles. “He said they brought him out on a stretcher, and he could see marks on one of Benzo’s legs. Like, weird bruises.”

“Maybe he was tortured.” Vera shrugged. “Pay one of your therapists for double sessions for a while. You’ll be over it in a couple of months.”

“If I’m not dead by then!” Ashton said. “How are you not losing your mind over this?”

“Because whoever we’re dealing with, they’re stupid,” she said. “He came after the weakest members of the group. First, he tried to pick off your pussy ass outside the theater. Somehow, incredibly, he fucked that up. Then he went for the second biggest loser, Benzo. If he really wanted to take us down, he should have gone right for the snake’s head.” She tapped her chest.

“So you’re admitting you were wrong? That this is someone we’ve hit with the Midnight Crew and not just something random?” Ashton said. “It’s someone who wants to take the whole crew down. Someone who wants revenge.”

Vera gave him a dangerous look. He sunk back in his chair.

“Now that we know he’s after us,” she continued, “we’ll be prepared.”

“Right. So we’ll get out of town.” Ashton nodded. “We can go to my mom’s place in Aruba, wait it out there. Penny and Sean’s aunt is, like, in the FBI, I think. She can track this guy down, try to pin him with something that has nothing to do with us. She did it for that twenty-five-year-old guy Penny was seeing. Remember? She didn’t ask any questions. She just zeroed in and nailed him with bank fraud. This shouldn’t be hard for her. We can provide her with a list of everyone we’ve hit, and she can figure out which one of them is the goddamn psycho.”

“You’ve been working on that little plan all morning, haven’t you?” Vera reached over and gave Ashton a condescending stroke on the shoulder. “You must be tired.”

“Come on, Vera.”

“We’re not running from this asshole,” she said. “My people don’t run.”

“Your people?” Ashton asked, but even as the words left his mouth he seemed to want to snatch them back from the air. Vera’s father, Evgeni Petrov, was thought to be somewhere in New Jersey, living under an assumed name, being protected by allied factions of the Russian and Armenian mobs. Vera wasn’t stupid—she knew it looked to everyone else like he’d run away from bad debts and underhanded deals inside the mob. But her father had done this many times before over the span of her life. He went underground, dug in, raised his hard back against his pursuers, and took the worst against his unbreakable spine. Then when things settled, he rose and attacked. It wasn’t cowardly. It was smart.

“We’re going to find this guy ourselves.” Vera lifted her bag and slung it over her shoulder. “We’re not kids anymore. We deal with our own problems.”

Ashton stepped in front of her as she turned to go, blocking her path. She was impressed with him for challenging her, holding her glare. Ashton had always been weak; Vera liked having weak people around her. They were malleable and predictable.

“This is getting out of control,” Ashton said. “You’re out of control. You brought a gun to the raid last night. That’s against the rules—rules that you came up with. This thing that we do—it only works because we all know the boundaries.”

Ashton poked her in the shoulder. Vera’s eyes narrowed.

“You said from the beginning, ‘No one gets hurt,’” Ashton continued, seemingly thriving on the terror and exhilaration of finally asserting a bit of power in his miserable little life. “You also said, ‘If we ever get found out, we back away, go underground, come up with a smart plan.’ This isn’t smart, Vera. This is reckl—”

Vera grabbed Ashton’s balls through his tight jeans and squeezed slowly. Ashton bent double as his mouth slammed shut.

“I’m saying something different now,” Vera said. The people around them were all looking up from their screens, tugging earbuds from their ears. “And you better listen carefully, because I make the rules, and they’ve changed.”





Chapter 41



I lunged sideways and grabbed the handle of Baby’s door. In one movement I barreled us both out of the car in an awkward, painful roll just as the front of my car exploded.