2 Sisters Detective Agency(75)

“You did,” I said.

“But you’re here. Which means somebody let you out or you ripped my car open like a sardine can.”

“I’m sure it’s fixable,” I lied. The detective’s car door had collapsed under my boot by the fourth kick. I had been squatting about 350 pounds for months. It never stood a chance. “Where are they?”

“We think they’re in the cafeteria, in a seating area above it,” he said, then shook his head, catching himself sharing details of the operation with me. “But look, this is not your scene.”

“I want to help.”

“I know you do.” He nodded tersely. “You’re that kind of person. I get it. But, Rhonda, you don’t just get to pick and choose which situations to insert yourself into.”

“Yeah, I do,” I said. “And I’ve picked this one because there’s a teenage girl up there who needs help, and that’s what I do and I’m good at it. And I’m not just inserting myself into this situation. I’m barging in. Because I’m good at that too.”

I shoved past him, waiting to hear him order his officers after me. But those words didn’t come. When I turned and looked after a few seconds, I realized Detective Dave Summerly was beside me, marching toward the double doors at the end of the hall that led into the cafeteria.

“You’re crazy,” he said. I thought I saw a flicker of a smile at the corner of his lips. “Damn crazy woman.”





Chapter 106



Ashton threw himself against the door. The handle rattled, and after a few seconds a thump came against the wood as Gunmouth heaved himself against the opposite side of the door. Baby joined Ashton, throwing all her weight against their side. After a few moments of silence, they heard a click.

“Get down!” Baby shouted.

Four bullets smashed through the door, a fragment of a second after Ashton had hit the carpet. He barely managed to keep the door shut as the man in the hall threw himself against it again. Baby ran to a bedside table and shoved it sideways against the door. Ashton dragged over the dresser.

“Dar la vuelta al lado!”

“They’re going around the side!” Baby cried. “Go, Ashton!”

Ashton dove into the bathroom, throwing open the doors of the cabinet beneath the sink. Deodorant cans, cologne bottles, face cloths, soap packets.

Nothing else.

“It’s not here!” As he rose and turned, he knocked the wooden facade at the bottom of the cabinet with his toe. It tilted inward, one corner popping out. He wrenched the wood away, then shoved his hand into the dark space and felt fabric.

He dragged the bag out from beneath the vanity and ran into the bedroom in time to hear gunshots. He saw Baby cowering against the pile of furniture they had shoved against the door as bullets pierced the wood above the makeshift barricade.

“Come on! Come on!” He grabbed her hand. They shoved open the bedroom’s large window together. Beneath part of it was a huge bougainvillea bush, dense with razor-sharp thorns. Ashton looked down the side of the house and saw Martin Vegas and two of his guys clambering over the small fence separating the back half of the property from the front.

“I can’t do it,” Baby said. She gripped his hand, backing toward the door of the bedroom, where the man with the gun tattoo was shouldering through the door, splintering it slowly, the furniture barricade shifting on the carpet with every shove.

“I’ve got you,” Ashton said. He gathered her up and helped her climb onto the window casing.

They closed their eyes, held hands, and jumped.





Chapter 107



Jacob and Vera were alone together in the wide mezzanine seating area perched above the cafeteria. Vera knew this was the place where one of them would die. She could smell it, like an approaching storm, the smell of a coming force that would sweep the earth and carry one of them away with it. Inevitable, unstoppable. Jacob had come through the double doors from the hallway and now stood between the tables and scattered chairs. As she’d hoped, he put his gun down on the nearest tabletop and smiled at her.

She wanted it to be equal. The end. Two killers coming together, discovering which of them was the strongest using only their hands. There had been enough playing around with weapons, enough chasing and running away. Vera gripped the bullet hole in her arm, gave it a final squeeze, and let it go. She would bleed while they battled. So would he. Their blood would mark the floor beneath them, the tables, the walls. When they were done, the cafeteria would look like a bear pit.

“You’ve been doing this a while, haven’t you?” she said. “You’re not just some dad who’s pissed. There were others before Benzo and Sean and Penny.”

“Plenty of others,” he said. “I’ve been doing it since before you were born.”

“What are the chances?” Vera asked. She laughed and felt blood dribble on her lip. “We choose some asshole from a shopping mall parking lot and he turns out to be a real psycho.”

“We’re more common than people think,” he said, and they both smiled. Because they had recognized the thing in each other that made them different. Not something extra but a lack of something. They were empty people.

She went to him. He grabbed her throat and squeezed, and for a moment he had total control, until she kicked the wound she’d given him earlier, almost as if she had planned it, ground her heel into the glass cut in his thigh while she grabbed at his head. They wrestled, knocked over a table, smashed plates and glasses onto the floor. She reached for a weapon, something, all thoughts of fighting it out with him bare-handed abandoned as Jacob continued to grip her throat, her brain crying out for air.