2 Sisters Detective Agency(48)

But he reminded himself this wasn’t like one of his old jobs. This was personal. He needed to take it slow, like he had with Benzo. As much as he burned for an end to it all, he knew the years ahead would be filled with moments in which he would think of the Midnight Crew. Whether Beaty was alive or dead, healthy or unhealthy, he was going to think of them. Ashton. Benzo. Sean. Penny. Vera. He didn’t want to regret not getting the fullest experience of murdering each of them for what they had done to him. To his family.

He had to make sure there was pain. Plenty of pain.





Chapter 60



I was surprised by Sean and Penny Hanley’s first destination when they left work: a Walmart. From a distance, Baby and I watched them tour the hardware aisle. Sean took a shiny new hammer off a rack and weighed it in his hand, turned it, looked at the claw, and said something to his twin that made her laugh. While he twirled it, they went to the weapons section and played with a crossbow for a while but didn’t seem serious about buying it. In the end, they each bought a hammer.

While Baby had seemed very enthusiastic about the mystery surrounding Ashton Willisee and his dead friend, she lost interest halfway through our tour of the Walmart. She paid all her attention to her phone, which was dinging and buzzing and making little popping noises with a frequency I had not yet witnessed. I was sure now that something was going on. In the parking lot, I watched Baby smiling at the screen while we walked back to the Maserati.

“Why would they buy two hammers?” I asked.

She said nothing.

“Even if they are building or repairing something by hand together, which I highly doubt, why wouldn’t they just pass the hammer back and forth?” I continued. “Or if they’re working on separate projects, what are the chances that—”

“I don’t know, Rhonda. Jeez, give it a rest, will you?”

In the car, she took out some eyeliner and started applying it.

“Aren’t we just going home?”

“Uh-huh.” She smiled knowingly.

“Baby, what have you done?” I watched her carefully. She shrugged. Her phone was going off with such consistency that it vibrated off the seat beside her and fell onto the floor. I drove home with a darkening sense of peril, watching dazzling yellow and green billboards for liability compensation lawyers fly by the windows.

ARE YOU ON YOUR WAY TO A CATASTROPHE RIGHT NOW? one asked.

As it turned out, I was.





Chapter 61



There were already crowds two blocks from the house. Young men and women getting out of cars or sailing down the streets on bikes, cell phone screens lit up in the gathering dark. I caught a glimpse of my father’s house one street away from it and saw lights on inside.

“Oh, dear.” I sighed. Baby was watching me, waiting for that defeated sound. She let out a mean little laugh.

“You shouldn’t have messed with my stuff,” she said. “This is my house. Dad’s house. You tried to put your stamp on it, and I’m here to show you that you can’t do that.”

“So let me get this straight,” I said. “As revenge for me hiring strangers to come into the house and mess with your personal possessions…you’ve invited a thousand strangers to come into the house and mess with your personal possessions?” I asked.

“I barricaded my bedroom door.” She grinned. “My stuff is safe. Yours? Well, I guess we’ll just have to find out.”





Chapter 62



There were too many teenagers in the street outside the house for the Maserati to turn onto our road. I parked, then pushed through the crowd to the front door and intercepted a skinny teen boy heading out in what was obviously my Van Halen T-shirt, the fabric dripping off him from his shoulders to his knobby knees. The crowd was crammed into the living room, music thumping so loud my eardrums pulsed. There were kids making out on the stairs and on the couches, a makeshift mosh pit at the bottom of the staircase, the scent of alcohol and weed smoke hanging like a curtain over everything. My boots crunched on plastic cups, broken glass, food wrappers, a broken lamp.

I climbed the stairs to the spare room where I had been sleeping and found my suitcase torn open, empty. A bunch of girls were sitting in the corner watching a YouTube video on my laptop. I snatched the machine away to a chorus of whines and slammed it closed, stowing it under a hutch in the hallway, and then went to check on the three million dollars of cartel money and drugs that I had hidden in my father’s bathroom. A crew of boys was hanging out in there, apparently oblivious to the hidden space beneath the vanity. They were passing a bong between themselves, sitting around the bathtub like pigeons crowded into a tiny space to avoid the rain.

Baby was dancing on the pool table in the first-floor lounge when I found her. The bar had been stripped of every bottle and every glass. I saw a girl going by with a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon and took it from her before she could squeeze by me.

“Hey, bitch! That’s mine!” she yelped.

“Honey, you couldn’t possibly appreciate it,” I said, walking on. I stood at the end of the pool table, drinking Pappy from the bottle and watching Baby dance until she noticed me. I was getting looks from all directions. They were all beautiful, sun-bronzed, and youthful creatures with metabolisms that allowed them to get by on only junk food. I was twice the age and three times the size of anyone in attendance. When Baby finally looked down at me, she had the same contempt on her features as they all did.