2 Sisters Detective Agency(58)

A puttering sound filled the quiet ravine, like gloved hands clapping, and Penny screamed. Sean knew the killer had sprayed the brush around them with bullets, his suppressor dulling the sound from the houses below. He tried to keep Penny moving, but she slumped against her brother, went down clutching her side.

She was in too much pain to make a sound. He followed her hand to the hole just under her ribs on the right side. Warm, wet, drenching his wrist and arm in seconds. Sean had a choice to make now. Die with her or survive alone.

“Don…” she managed. “Sean, don’t le…”

The footsteps were coming. Sean squeezed Penny’s hand, already consoling himself about what he was going to do. It had been her idea anyway to join the Midnight Crew. She’d been Vera’s friend from the dance academy when they were in grade school. Really it was she who had gotten them into this mess in the first place. He told himself that these excuses and others would be at hand later, in therapy, when he tried to get over the guilt of leaving his sister to die without him.

The killer was close. Sean could hear him breathing. Maybe readying the gun to fire blindly at them again. If Sean was wounded, that would be it. It would all be over. He wasn’t ready for it to end yet. Soldiers left each other behind all the time in war. Pushed on. Survived to fight again. He had no time to be honorable now, or to make her understand why he wasn’t.

“I love you,” he told Penny, because he supposed that might help. He looked her in the eyes when he said it, which was brave of him, he thought.

Then he turned and ran.





Chapter 76



The edge of the road lit up white, softly at first and then blazing as the car passed in the night. Sean watched it from where he hid in the bushes ten feet back from the asphalt, down an embankment on the hillside. He had considered waiting until daylight to move again, but the pain in his knees and hips from crouching, too frightened to move, was becoming unbearable. Even turning his head to peer through the gaps in the scrub oaks sent rocks and sand crumbling from beneath him. Instead he listened and watched the road.

He had lost the killer while the man dealt with Penny. There had been a kind of yelp and gurgle on the wind, and then nothing. Sean had made his way sideways up along the edge of a ravine, guessing the killer would predict he’d follow the slope of the earth. He was smart. He was going to survive this. Leaving Penny behind had been the right move—he knew that now, because her sacrifice had bought him time, security. Now all he had to do was get the attention of a passing motorist and he was home free. And the cars were coming with greater and greater frequency. His Hublot, the glass now cracked, told him it was 4 a.m. Normal people would be on the road at this time. Cleaners arrived at work. Bartenders departed. He looked around and saw no movement on the hillside.

Sean shifted onto his haunches, gripped the earth, and crawled forward into the shelter of the next clump of bushes, closer to the edge of the road.

A truck rumbled along the ridge in the distance. He watched, ready to spring. When it was right next to him, he saw two fat Hispanic men sitting in the cab, a Saint Joseph cameo hanging from the rearview mirror. Sean sunk back into the bush. He didn’t want to spend the first precious seconds of his escape trying to explain the need to step on the gas in broken Spanish to a pair of idiots. He watched the truck go by. The crunch of its tires on the road ahead masked all but the final moments of the killer’s approach.





Chapter 77



Sean heard the last footstep in the gravel. He turned, just far enough to catch the blur of a big hand sweeping up to grab a hunk of his hair, the other gripping his shoulder hard. He was yanked backward, hitting the ground with a thunderous impact that knocked the wind out of him.

He opened his eyes and tried to suck in air. Sean remembered the feeling from a summer day at Malibu Beach. A wave had tumbled him into the sand, and the pressure on his lungs had been terrifying in the seconds it took for him to reach the water’s surface again. When he breathed this time, though, something was different. Only one lung inflated, the air struggling through his lips, as thick as honey.

He reached up and gripped the tree branch protruding from the left side of his chest, sticking out from his smashed ribs by two feet or more. He thought about how, in movies, actors managed full conversations while impaled like this through the back, but he could move his lips only silently.

An old man stepped around Sean, stood in front of him, looking at the wooden spike with a kind of quiet satisfaction.

In his dying moments, Sean watched the killer’s face and tried to recognize him. He wanted to know which of the Midnight Crew victims he had been, which night of fun and laughter had brought such undeserved cruelty down on him and Penny. But the old man seemed to be just an old man, like so many other indistinct, unimportant people who had fluttered in and out of Sean’s life.

Sean died with his feet struggling in the dirt, his heart torn in half, and some nameless nobody staring at him in the growing dawn.





Chapter 78



It was five in the morning when the knock came at the door. I had been shifting around the house restlessly, gathering little Baggies of drugs from among the debris of the party in a kind of grim treasure hunt and emptying their contents into the toilet. During my scavenging I found a smattering of strange items brought by the teens for purposes known only to them—an inflatable sex doll, a unicycle, a bucket of twigs, and several cans of sausage and beans.