2 Sisters Detective Agency(70)

“Well, I don’t care.” Summerly snorted and locked eyes on me. “Rhonda, I haven’t met a person like you in…”

He thought about it. I waited.

“In all my life.”

“How romantic. I’ve lost feeling in my fingers and I really need to pee. Can we get moving?”

“I was kind of hoping you and me could hang out after all this. Go out on a real date.”

“You’ll be lucky if I don’t put your head through the windshield of this car as soon as you take these cuffs off,” I said.

“I mean…” He turned, looked at me in the rearview. “I mean, I was kind of hoping you felt the same.”

“I don’t know how I feel about you. For me, it was just something that happened. I haven’t thought about it yet. I haven’t had a chance to!”

“Oh, so it’s okay for it to have been just something that happened for you, but not for me?” He smirked. “Nice.”

“I don’t care what kind of something happened, as long as it wasn’t something for the sake of searching my house for Vegas’s drugs and money while I was asleep.”

“Well, it wasn’t.” Summerly huffed.

“Well, good,” I snapped.

We sat in silence.

The yellow Camaro drove by us on the freeway, the driver’s head swiveling toward us as he passed. “That was him. He saw us. Vegas’s guy will report back that Baby and I are locked up and out of reach. You can let me go now.”

“Not until you tell us where Vegas’s drugs and money are.”

I sighed. “If I do that, I’ll be admitting that I have it.”

“Tuddy says you took the meth from the shipping container,” Summerly said.

“Yeah, well you’ve only got his word on that. There may be footage from the camera inside the container, but I assume that was a cartel camera and not something you planted,” I said. “You’ve got about as much of a chance proving that I committed a felony as you do proving that the earth is flat.”

“Rhonda, I’m not going to charge you with possession of the drugs and cash.” Summerly looked me right in the eyes. “But if you don’t tell me where it all is, I can’t protect you from Vegas.”

“And you can’t catch him either,” I said.

Summerly didn’t reply. He was asking me to trust him. Not only about the hours we had shared together but also about my future, about whether I would spend it behind bars or wandering around in the free world. He was asking me to trust that he wouldn’t charge me for failing to surrender the drugs and cash to police even as I sat in his car in cuffs that he himself had snapped onto my wrists.

I didn’t like the powerless feeling of the metal restricting my movement, the reek of the back of the police vehicle, where probably wrongdoers of every shape and form had sat before me, contemplating the very thing that I was contemplating: how their families would survive in the outside world without them. Because there was no escaping the fact that Baby would go into foster care without a legal guardian to care for her. She thought her life was hard in my custody? I tried to imagine her arriving on the doorstep of a crowded group home or a suburban house packed to the rafters with neglected toddlers and teenage runaways.

“Take me to the station,” I said. “I want to speak to Baby.”

“Rhonda, I need you to tell me where—”

“I’ve done enough talking,” I said.





Chapter 97



Vera followed the signs to the children’s ward on the second floor. Colorful drawings were taped to the walls, and misshapen artwork made from pipe cleaners and cotton balls hung from the ceiling like weird descending spiders. She gripped the gun in her handbag and went from room to room, peering in to look for bed 29. Vera didn’t know why the girl had been moved, but she wondered if Jacob had called ahead and requested it.

If that was the case, it meant that Jacob had found his wife in a pool of her own blood on the kitchen floor, and he would be on his way back now, so she didn’t have much time. Trying to hide his daughter instead of calling building security and the police meant Jacob had not alerted the hospital authorities of her plan. It meant he wanted to fight. He wanted Vera to himself.

She smiled. She wanted him too.

Vera found the girl in an empty room, the light from the crack in the curtains falling across her soft face. There was a dullness and a sunken quality to her features that told Vera the girl wasn’t out of the coma yet, that behind the closed eyelids and long dark lashes there probably wasn’t much going on.

In a way, that was a shame. Neina had known what was coming. Vera had seen her thoughts shuddering through her face as she lost her grip on the earth and began to leave her body. All the days that she wouldn’t experience, days that had been promised to her—birthdays and anniversaries and simple evenings staring at the rolling sea with her loving family by her side. Sunrises and sunsets. Neina had known then that she’d enjoyed her very last meal. She’d made her last phone call. She’d chosen her last outfit. This was it. This painful and terrifying and fury-filled end was hers, and there was not a thing she could do about it.

Vera wouldn’t get to see all those emotions race through Beaty, the knowledge that Vera was the all-powerful force that had chosen when to bring her life to a close. But that was okay. More victims would come. More delicious ends. Vera had crossed into the bad world, and there was no going back.