2 Sisters Detective Agency(59)

At 3 a.m., Baby had appeared behind me in the kitchen, sniffing the air like a gopher just emerging from the earth. She had been sitting on the concrete wall at the edge of the Strand, drinking colorful flavored vodkas with some remaining teens, while I rattled around the house. I knew she was in for the hangover of her life, but I didn’t go out there and call her in. She had taken on the strange new woman in her life for Queen of the Party and lost. Her most sacred space, her bedroom, had been invaded by commercial cleaners and drug lords, and her father was only a few days dead. She needed to get it out of her system.

“What is that smell?” She groaned.

“Spam.” I showed her the pan I had been laboring over. Four thick slices of the tinned meat were bubbling in butter on the Teflon.

“Oh, God.” Baby gagged. “That’s not right.”

“It’s right by me.” I shrugged.

She slid onto a bench and shoved aside a bunch of junk to clear a path between us. “I’m feeling very emotional,” she said, after watching me cook for a while.

“You don’t say?” I smiled.

“I hit a guy in the face with a snow globe.” Her words were slurred. “I’ve never hit anyone. With anything. Ever. And I hit that guy. In the face. With a snow globe.”

I glanced over. Her lip was trembling.

“Rhonda, I didn’t even know his name!”

I couldn’t stifle a laugh. She started laughing with me.

“You want some Spam?”

“Oh, hell no. Are you crazy?” She watched me sit and start eating. “You’re just going to sit there and eat it like that? No toast? No pancakes? No eggs? Just fried slices of Spam?”

“I don’t like anything to interfere with the taste of my Spam,” I said.

She watched with a horrified look on her face for a while, then reached over and plucked a juicy slice from the side of my plate. Within minutes, I was frying myself more Spam while Baby devoured the original batch.

The knock at the door came maybe fifteen minutes after Baby had slouched off to bed. I opened the front door and found Officer David Summerly standing there. I hadn’t realized just how present the man was in my fragmented brain until I laid eyes on him again. I had been thinking about him ever since he’d left, while I’d pottered around the house alone, even while Baby and I had eaten and laughed together. The officer’s collar was unbuttoned, and he was tapping his hat against the thigh of his trousers.

“You didn’t say anything back,” he said.

“When?”

“When I said I liked you.”

“Oh.” I gazed over his shoulder, tried to look nonchalant. Probably failed. “I guess I figured that was just an LA thing. We’re on Hollywood’s doorstep here, you know. People get dramatic.”

Summerly laughed. “Well, it’s not an LA thing, Rhonda. I wasn’t being dramatic. I was being real.”

He stepped up from the front walkway, onto the stoop. I didn’t budge from the doorway.

“I see a lot of crazy stuff in my line of work,” he said. “Nothing surprises me much anymore. But you talking your way out of both jams you got yourself into over the past couple of days, that was really something else. That was like verbal…legal…gymnastics.”

“I’m pretty flexible,” I said. “Why don’t you get in here and I’ll show you a couple more of my moves?”

We both laughed at the cheesiness of our banter, the silliness of needing to exchange words at all when our bodies were busy doing all the talking for us. He was advancing into the entryway. I was walking back, drawing him in, both our hands already restless, ready to grab at clothes, to pop buttons and pull zippers and explore the hard, warm skin beneath. I closed the door behind him, and Officer Summerly’s hand found mine in the early-morning darkness of the foyer as I led him toward the stairs.





Chapter 79



Vera walked into her house from the back entrance, climbed the stairs, and quietly shut the door to her bedroom. She hadn’t been explicitly told by her father to stay at home and care for her mother during his absence, but it was expected that the hens would huddle together for safety when the rooster was away. It was a ridiculous rule. Vera wasn’t a frightened chicken but a lone wolf capable of hunting and surviving on her own. The light under her mother’s bedroom door had told Vera that she was up, even at 4 a.m., probably watching religious programs and fiddling with a battered Bible.

She went to her laptop, pushed it open, and clicked on the app that controlled her hidden cameras. The rooftop of the old woman’s house was the best angle, but she had hidden a couple of other cameras in trees along the street outside the property with the dogs. The feed was live, showing a cluster of fire and emergency-response vehicles currently jamming up traffic, the typical gathering of neighbors and gawkers outside the police tape. Vera could have searched the internet for news about whether the woman with the dogs was dead, but she didn’t. It didn’t matter. She would tell Sean, Penny, and Ashton that the woman had survived with only flesh wounds, and they’d be too weak to check for themselves, the way they’d been with the young girl who had collapsed at the Palos Verdes raid.

She rolled the footage back and watched the emergency trucks disappear and the neighbors recede, the street folding back into night. She stopped when she saw her crew bursting out of the gate into the little hidden alleyway, running like jail breakers onto the street. Their humiliating retreat had marked the end of the escapade, so she followed the footage carefully further back, all the way to the start. She stopped and played the tape. The four of them arriving, slipping under the cover of the leaves and vines around the alleyway, mere minutes passing between their disappearance from view and the lights inside the house flicking on as the woman was alerted by her dogs.