2 Sisters Detective Agency(57)

“You think I have a list of dodgy doctors in my phone?” he snapped, shoving the shifter and pulling awkwardly out from the curb. “A vet will be cheaper. A vet we can buy, any vet at all. No problem.”

“Ask Vera for—”

“She needs to know we can handle this ourselves,” Sean said. “Now shut up. I’m trying to concentrate here.”

It was on Sunset, outside the white walls of the Archer School for Girls, that they noticed the black BMW in their rearview mirror. The driver was in shadow, but he had stopped his vehicle close enough behind Sean and Penny to hide his headlights against the trunk of their car. Uncomfortably close. A gesture that commanded attention. The twins sat watching, waiting. The engine of the car behind them revved.

“It’s not him.” Sean reached over to put a hand on his sister’s knee, a rare gesture of comfort and affection. “Vera said he would just watch us tonight. Too risky to come after us with all the chaos back there.”

“Who is it, then?” She turned with difficulty in her seat, stared through the big empty car out the back window. “Is it…is it a gang?”

“Not in that car.”

“We’re about to get carjacked. Lock the doors.”

The doors were already locked. The light changed. He accelerated slowly, and the BMW stayed right behind them.

“Turn onto the 405. North on it, not south.” Penny’s voice was low, strangely calm. “Speed up. We’ll outrun him.”

For once, Sean did what she said. That’s when he knew he was in real trouble. Penny was talking sense, and he was listening. With a white-knuckle grip on the wheel, he turned onto the freeway, eased his foot down on the accelerator.

Penny was right. He couldn’t drive. He had spent about as much time driving as he had doing all the other things that regular people did. Cleaning. Filing paperwork. Calling their mother. He didn’t look before he changed lanes, almost sending a green Saab careening into the center divider. The Saab driver leaned on the horn. He heard shouts, winced, felt humiliated. The BMW was right on their tail, the high beams on, making the rearview mirror blaze at the corner of his vision. The Pullman wasn’t built for speed. It was big, heavy, low, built for gliding with style.

“We’re going to be fine,” Penny said. “We’re going to get out of this.”

“Call 911,” Sean said.

“We can’t,” she said. “This was a bad idea. Turn off the freeway again. We’ll lose him in the hills.”

He did as she instructed, and after a while, the road narrowed, began to wind through the hills. Trees here and there around them, leaning and black. Sean gained space between him and the black car, losing it again as he slowed hard for corners. The killer knew he couldn’t drive. He was probably back there laughing at him, a shark following lazily behind a struggling swimmer. Sean was drowning, catching glimpses of the shore as he came up to gulp air, the city below appearing between the hills and clumps of vegetation.

“We shouldn’t have come up here,” Sean said.

“Shut up! Pay attention to what you’re doing!”

“He brought Ashton up here. This is his hunting ground. This is exactly what he wanted us to do. We’re falling into his trap. Call someone, Penny, for fuck’s sake. Call anyone!”

“I’ve got no reception!” She looked up from her phone to him, her eyes wild. Then she spotted something on the road. “Stop, stop, stop!”





Chapter 75



Sean swerved right toward a hill, but the tires slid in the gravel, fishtailing, hooking around the deer harmlessly as it stood frozen in the road like a marble statue. The Pullman was so long it ground over the edge of the road, up and over the low bank of vegetation marking the drop-off, rocks scraping the underbelly. Sean felt them gouging the surface beneath his feet. The gold, sparkling city below was suddenly right in front of them, and they were plunging absurdly toward it.

There was no screaming. In the detached, hellish panic that gripped him as the car tumbled down the ravine, he realized that he wanted to scream but couldn’t. The sound caught in his throat like a painful bubble.

He must have blacked out, because when he woke, the car was crumpled against a tree, a branch piercing its roof. Hissing, creaking, popping sounds were issuing from the car all around him. He tried to figure out how the hell he’d gotten there but could only grip on to the memory of Vera and Ash and Penny standing in the street, Penny bloody and torn, Vera telling them to go home and hunker down for the night, that it was safe now. Penny shoved hard against him as she crawled out through the windshield, stepping on his crotch to get herself free from the wrecked vehicle.

She was gone for thirty seconds. He lay there counting them. Thirty seconds in which she tried to make her escape alone before remembering that her only sibling, the being who had shared a womb with her for nine months, needed her. She came back and leaned through the squashed window on the passenger side.

“Give me your hand.”

Penny pulled him free. They held each other in the dimness, listening to their pursuer crunching through the shrubs and stones toward them.

“Go, go, go.” He pushed at Penny, but she was rigid with terror, walking straight legged, slipping and stumbling in the loose rocks. Sean thought about pulling her to the ground, trying to hide. But all his senses were telling him the hunter behind them was closing in. The same natural electrical impulses were shooting through his brain that blasted through a rabbit’s mind when it saw the eyes of a wolf emerging from the undergrowth. They needed to run, run, run.