2 Sisters Detective Agency(66)

“Oh, sorry.” She laughed. “Uh, maybe a cold one? Do you mind?”

Neina rolled her eyes and went to the fridge, turning her back on her visitor.





Chapter 89



Something about the hospital room felt different as soon as Jacob walked in. Though the flowers and greeting cards at his daughter’s bedside were the same, he sensed a shift in the air as if a window had been opened somewhere, letting the room finally breathe. Jacob knew the smell of death, and he also knew the scent of life. He went to the bedside and sat beside his child, took Beaty’s limp fingers in his.

There was blood under Jacob’s nails. He noticed a splinter, probably from the tree branch he had used to impale Sean Hanley, embedded in one of his knuckles. He picked at it and, while he was focused on it, almost missed the sensation of Beaty’s fingers moving in his. Her hand gripped his for an instant—no more than a flutter, but the movement shot a bolt of painful energy through Jacob. He looked at her passive face and saw no signs of wakefulness.

Finally, finally, some of his work out there in the world, hunting down the ones who had done this, was bringing some life back into his little girl. Three of them were gone, and their passing was bringing Beaty home one step at a time.

He stood and brushed off the legs of his dirty jeans, fixed his hair. He’d walked into the hospital looking like he’d been scrabbling up the sides of rocky ravines hunting wild animals, but his appearance hadn’t raised eyebrows. The halls were full of men and women who looked bedraggled and worn and dirty from days and weeks spent refusing to leave the sides of the sick and dying.

He had to find someone, tell them Beaty was coming back. He would get them to order more brain scans. He kissed Beaty and walked into the hall, grabbed his phone as it buzzed in his pocket. Neina’s name flashed on the screen.

“She moved,” he said before his wife could speak. He tried flagging down a doctor walking busily past in the hall before him. “I felt Beaty’s hand move.”

“Can you come back to the house, please?” Neina’s voice was tight, strangely low, like she was afraid of being overheard. “The police are here.”

“What?” Jacob stopped walking.

“There was another home invasion last night in Brentwood, up north. A woman got shot. The police know about what happened to us.”

Jacob looked back at the door to his daughter’s room. A painful prickling was creeping out from the center of his chest. His old instincts warning him.

“Do they know…” he said. Neina was silent for a long time, and in his thoughts he screamed at her words that he could never say out loud.

Do they know what I’ve been doing?

“Just come here,” Neina said. “Now, Jacob.”

“I’m on my way,” he said.

He hung up, looked back down the hall. The old Jacob, the hit man for hire, the shadow who had walked the earth with only a backpack and a gun and a desire for blood, said one word to him: Run. Beaty would be okay, or she wouldn’t. Neina would be okay, or she wouldn’t. If he decided to go now, to slip away from the hospital, out of the city, and into the ether again, there would be no coming back, no dropping in now and then, no watching his little family from afar. He either abandoned them completely now or stayed to fight through whatever implications his revenge would have on his existence as a father and a husband.

He tapped the phone against his leg, watched a man with a toddler girl hugged against his hip using the nearby vending machine. The little girl was slapping the glass as the colorful treats glowed in the bright lights.

Could he have his vengeance and go back to the life he had built himself here with Neina and Beaty? Or was having both of those things simply too much to hope for?

Jacob decided he had not lost hope yet.

He turned and headed for the parking lot.





Chapter 90



Neina Kanular put the phone down on the tiles beside her face and stifled a scream. She was pressed facedown on the floor of the kitchen, the teenage girl’s bootheel pressing into the tender place beneath her shoulder blades, the muscles knotted and bunched, trying to protect the bones beneath. Neina rolled onto her side and clutched at the deep slash wound the girl had cut across her chest, the tiles around her already smeared and streaked with blood. She scrambled into the corner of the kitchen.

“Jacob’s coming,” she said. She cowered on the floor and tried to remain calm. “It’s him you want, right?”

The girl didn’t answer. She was using the knife to flick photographs stuck to the refrigerator door onto the floor. Beaty and her friends in sleeping bags on the living room floor, camped out watching a horror movie. Beaty and Jacob at the helm of a small sailboat.

“If he comes and sees there are no cop cars out front, he’ll know something is up,” Neina said. “You’ll need me to get him in the door.”

“I don’t need you for anything,” the girl said. She shifted the knife in her grip. “You’ve served your purpose.”

She advanced toward the older woman. Neina dragged herself to her feet, backed against the wall, an animal cornered.

“Now, don’t scream,” the girl said.





Chapter 91



At a gas station off the 405 heading north, I kept Ashton in my sights as he walked into the main building to buy some snacks. I filled up the little orange Jeep I had borrowed from the Bruhs. The huge biceps logo emblazoned on the side of the vehicle wasn’t the most subtle thing in the world, particularly as we didn’t know if the man hunting Ashton and his crew was following and watching us. But I’d turned the keys in the car knowing it was unlikely to explode on us, which was more than I could say for my father’s Maserati.