2 Sisters Detective Agency(67)

I watched the teenage boy inside the gas station. He guzzled a bottle of water and shoveled the contents of a bag of Cheetos into his mouth as he walked to the counter to pay for an armful of snacks. It had been a big night.

Baby leaned against the car beside me, her eyes hidden behind her huge sunglasses. I knew she was nervous, and not only because we were on the run from killers. In Baby’s world, she was probably equally terrified that at any moment Ashton would tell me about how she’d kissed her teacher. The kiss was almost certainly “the thing” they had talked about in the hall outside my father’s office. I was sure I had heard Baby in the back seat of the Jeep growl something like “If you say anything” at the other teenager as we drove. When I’d glanced up, she’d been making a cutting motion at her neck and Ashton had looked distinctly uncomfortable.

Now Baby was rubbing her shoulders, trying to ease out some of the tension as I pumped the gas.

“This is the worst idea I ever heard of,” Baby said finally.

“When the heat is on, you go underground,” I said. “We’ve got a Mexican drug cartel after us and some kind of revenge-bent psycho after Ashton. Neither of those parties is going to pursue us all the way to Colorado, or if they do, we’ll have plenty of time to lose them and form a plan to keep ourselves safe when we get there.”

“Yeah, that’ll be really easy to do with us driving around in a bright orange car with a giant armpit printed on it.” Baby gazed at the freeway, the cars zooming past, a huge pink billboard advertising Jennifer Lopez’s new film. “Let’s assume we get there safely. Then what? We, like, hide out in your shitty condo until this all blows over? Just crawl under the beds with your thousands of cats meowing and pawing at our faces? Get real, Rhonda. This isn’t going to just blow over. We ought to stay here and fight.”

“Okay, hold up. First of all, my condo is awesome. And what’s with the cats? Why would you think I have thousands of cats?”

Baby shook her head.

“Oh, I see.” I nodded. “I keep thousands of cats because I’m so fat and lonely I just sit at home waiting for a man to come along and marry me?”

“You’re missing the point,” she said.

“Look, Vegas is a businessman. Or so he keeps telling us. Hopefully, if he’s weighing risk versus reward, he’ll find it far more rewarding to go back to the beach house and try to find the money and drugs there while we’re gone rather than come after us,” I said. “He might even be successful after a while.”

“So you did hide it in the house,” Baby said, chewing her lip.

“The search will keep them entertained,” I continued. “Those guys want their stuff more than they want us. That’s their priority. So we set them up to get busted while they’re searching. That’s one problem solved. As for whoever is after Ashton and his friends, without him in the picture, the killer will have only Vera to focus on. We can call the police and negotiate Ashton’s surrender, and while we’re at it, we tell them this guy is going to be watching her, and—”

My words were cut off by a wail of sirens. Two squad cars and an unmarked sedan with a flashing light bar in the windshield pulled into the gas station, surrounding us, the last to arrive screeching to a halt only feet from Ashton as he exited the building. He dropped his armful of snacks, shattering a glass bottle of soda on the concrete. Men and women congregating around the automatic doors backed up against the wall, their hands up.

Officer David Summerly was the last person I expected to see exit the lead unmarked vehicle and walk across the station toward me. He took a pair of cuffs from his belt and snapped one onto my wrist.

“Rhonda Bird,” he said, “you’re under arrest.”





Chapter 92



Jacob was rusty. That was his problem. He’d gotten worn down and slightly crooked, like an armchair flopped into too many times over too many years. Creaking and cracking. He was getting old. Jacob had made mistakes, and the biggest of them was falling in love, building a family. As he drove through the streets of Palos Verdes, slamming his foot on the accelerator of the BMW and hooking into turns like a race-car driver, he scolded himself. A family not unlike his own, two parents and a young girl, hurled themselves out of a crosswalk and onto the grass beneath a palm tree as he roared past.

When Jacob had been a killer for hire, he’d loved no one, nothing. He had obeyed the rules of men like him, in the last years of the Cold War, that glorious time before CCTV cameras and DNA and civilians with cell phones. Never walk into a room with only one entrance and exit. Keep your back to the wall and your gun loaded. Always have a backup plan, a bug-out bag, a safe house. Keep your body taut and tight. Practice holds and escape maneuvers whenever a spare moment presents itself—in traffic, in the bathroom, in a shitty motel room in Thailand across the road from the sprawling resort where the target lay relaxing in their final hours of life.

Jacob had abandoned all of it when he met Neina, told himself he wasn’t that man anymore. But that man would never die. He wasn’t as sharp anymore. Maybe he was carrying a couple of extra pounds. And his guns had been packed away, useless, in a cupboard in a basement. But the plan should never have changed. The old rules should have been obeyed.

Jacob crested the hill and pulled over, looked down at the house perched on the outcrop of cliffs looking over the vast, sparkling sea. The sun was hanging low over the horizon, making the windows of the house blaze pink. Jacob was glad he couldn’t see inside now. He knew as he sat there watching that there were no officers sitting around Neina on the couches, playing good cop to her while they tried to pry out what she knew. The gate to the property was open, and there were no cars in the driveway.