2 Sisters Detective Agency(40)

She took out her phone and tapped away.

“I’m sending you a list of suspects,” Vera said. Ashton felt his phone buzz in his pocket. “This is every male victim we’ve had in the last year prior to Mr. Newcombe, except for that banker we hit in November. He’s in rehab.”

“Did we do that?” Sean smirked. “Did we drive him to drink?”

“Maybe.” Vera gave a rare genuine smile of camaraderie. “He’s the guy who pissed himself, right?”

“What if it’s not one of the guys we actually hit?” Ashton asked. “What if it’s a relative of one of our victims? Or a friend? Or someone they hired?”

Everyone was looking at their phones. Ashton sighed at their silence.

“What is your plan, exactly?” he continued. “Once we find out who’s after us?”

“Simple,” Vera said. “We grab him, make him tell us exactly what he’s got on us, and then we destroy everything. Cover our tracks.”

“And then what?” Ashton asked. “What do we do with the guy once we have him?”

“We kill him, of course,” Vera said.





Chapter 49



Ashton laughed. But even to him, it sounded forced. He could see glitter dancing in the twins’ eyes. They loved this kind of talk.

“We’re not killing anyone,” Ashton said. “That was never what this was about. The Midnight Crew is about having fun and blowing off steam, maybe scaring some people, messing with them. That’s why I joined, anyway.”

“You joined because you were angry,” Vera said. “Your uncle made mincemeat of your aunt’s overpriced nose job at Thanksgiving and you wanted to feel like the big man for once. Now that you’ve righted things in your family, you’re not as angry at life.” She threw her hands up. “Well, good for you, asshole. Targeting your uncle, going to psychotherapy, popping some Prozac and doing your mom’s bullshit mindfulness trash has cured you. That doesn’t mean you get to walk away from what we’ve done here, what we are. You can’t abandon the Crew because you’ve lost your motivation all of a sudden. You know what that’s called? That’s called desertion.”

“Treason.” Sean nodded. “Going AWOL. You do that in war and the army guys will put you up against a wall and shoot you.”

“Don’t pretend you’re some kind of hard-core military guy, Sean,” Ashton said. “You spend a grand a month on pedicures and anal bleaching.”

“Who are we hitting?” Penny bounced in her seat. “I’m ready to go. This guy killed Benzo. We’re going to find him and cut his balls off.”

“You hated Benzo!” Ashton pleaded.

“It doesn’t matter who we hit,” Vera said. “As long as we move fast. We need to focus on damage control rather than get bogged down with the logistics.”

She stopped to think for a moment, watching the downtown stores roll by the window. “There’s a woman on my street with this dog. A little terrier. It barks at me every time I walk by. They’ll do. We go tomorrow night.”





Chapter 50



That night in my deceased father’s house was a long, exhausting one. Still rattled from the fight with Baby, I’d spent the first few hours after she stormed out sitting in the spotless living room, texting and calling her in vain. I’d lain awake until 3 a.m., when I heard her come in. She’d ignored me on her way to her bedroom, barefoot and trailing sand on the tiles, slamming the door in my face when I tried to talk to her.

In the morning, Baby’s bedroom door was still shut tight. I wandered to the rooftop of the massive house and discovered a large swimming pool stretching over its expanse. To the right of the door opening onto the roof, by a row of weather-beaten lawn chairs, stood a rusty and unused home gym draped with old, stiff beach towels.

I’ve been lifting weights since I was ten years old. My dad had set up a small gym in our home garage in Watkins with a treadmill and a set of dumbbells. My mother had been too gentle to guess that my father’s sudden interest in getting into shape was a sign of his infidelities.

I wandered in one morning and saw him struggling to bench fifty pounds, the bar shaking and tilting, only inches from his nose. I rushed in and grabbed the bar, helped him get it up and into the rack. Like the proud, shallow, self-involved idiot that he was, he was embarrassed and instantly banished me from the garage. The banishment effectively turned his gym into a forbidden and alluring destination for a young and lonely me.

As I perused the free-weights rack next to the pool, the sensation of being watched prickled over my skin. I looked over and noticed that on the roof of the adjacent French chateau–style house, a place that appeared to be under some renovation, with scaffolding erected in the gap between the two homes, a group of tanned, long-haired men in their early twenties were crowded around their own gym equipment, keeping a careful eye on me.

I jutted my chin at them in what I intended as a friendly but tough manner, the kind of greeting two dudes might throw across a public gym. Three of the four didn’t respond. The fourth put a foot up on the lip of the roof and glared at me. I guessed the fat chick playing with weights on the roof next door made a mockery of everything they stood for out there in the sunshine—health, strength, physical masculine beauty, pushing their bodies to the limit, like a bunch of modern warriors training for some unforeseen combat. I wasn’t welcome here, even on my own rooftop.