2 Sisters Detective Agency(78)

“That’s the smart thing to do,” he agreed.

They drove in silence for a while.

“I don’t feel like being smart right now, though,” Baby said eventually.

“Neither do I.”

“This might be, like, my last night of freedom,” she said. “And yours literally.”

“Yeah, like, literally.”

“I don’t feel like going to Colorado.” Baby looked at him. “And I’m sure you don’t feel like going to jail for the next twenty years.”

They smiled at each other.

“Vegas?” Baby asked. Ashton threw the money into the air again.

“Vegas, Baby!” He laughed.

Baby floored it. The engine thrummed. They didn’t look in the rearview mirror again.





Chapter 112



Dave Summerly found me at his car, dialing and redialing Baby, my hands sweaty and my heart racing.

“The Bruhs just called me,” I said without looking up.

“Who?”

“The Bruhs!” I snapped. There was still blood on my fingers. Vera Petrov’s blood maybe, or Jacob Kanular’s. Both of them were killers—I’d seen Vera kill Jacob, and she’d shot two nurses, shot a police officer; Jacob had surely taken the lives of Derek Benstein, Sean and Penny Hanley, and possibly three or four innocent civilians inside the hospital. I wiped off my phone screen with the edge of my T-shirt, beginning to panic.

“I don’t know what you’re say—”

“My neighbors at the Manhattan Beach house, Dave,” I said, trying to regulate my breathing. “They said they heard gunshots inside and saw Baby and Ashton flee in my dad’s Maserati. They’re on the run out there somewhere, and they probably have three million dollars on them.”

“They what?” Summerly stepped back, shook his head. “She knew where the money was?”

“I told her.”

“Jesus, Rhonda!”

“I knew she’d go for the money. When she escaped your officers at the gas station, I thought she’d go home and collect it, and I was right. It’s a good thing I told her where the money was or she would have been caught trying to find it by the cartel guys.”

“You just knew she’d do that?” Summerly asked.

“She’s my sister,” I said. I realized as I said the words that the battle between whether I would see myself as Baby’s mother or sister had been won, for now. Maybe I would always swing between the two roles, but at that moment I was thinking and feeling like her sibling, like her ally and friend and coconspirator. It was Baby and me against the world now. We needed to be on the same team. “We’ve got to find her.”

“Well, if you think you’ve got this sister-sister ESP thing going on with her, you figure out where she is now, and we’ll try to snatch her up before the cartel does,” he said.

“Don’t you have to try to catch Vera Petrov?”

“The pursuit has been taken off my hands.” His shrug was labored. “I’ve been stood down, for now. Seems I let a civilian lawyer into the danger zone around an active shooter and she got an inch and a half away from having her head blown off.”

“Oh, Dave. I’m sorry.”

“Doesn’t matter.” He gripped my shoulder. “You almost had her, Rhonda. I saw it in her eyes. She thought about coming with you. If we ever had a chance of connecting with Petrov, that was the moment. I think you did good, and I’ll defend my decision to let you help.”

I leaned into him a little. His hand ran along the back of my arm, a small, swift gesture that reminded me of our bodies twisting, his breath on my ear, my foot running up his calf.

“I’m coming with you,” he said. “We’re gonna find these kids. Where do two reckless kids with nothing to lose go with three million bucks and a Maserati?”

Baby’s voice traveled back to me from a couple of days earlier, the first time she had asked about the location of the money.

You think I’m going to take it all, drive to Vegas, and have a wild time?

Dave seemed to know what I was thinking.

“Rhonda, they wouldn’t,” he said.

“Don’t bet on it,” I said. “Ashton thinks he’s going to jail for the rest of his life, and Baby thinks I’m going to abduct her and lock her in my cattery of social doom.”

“Your what?”

“Never mind.”

Night had fallen. I looked helplessly at the lamps as they sprang to life all over the parking lot, shuddering on in the reflections on the windshields of cars, making the plastic crime-scene tape shine like tinsel. I thought of Baby driving through the night with the cartel behind her. If they were clever, Martin Vegas and his guys would let Baby and Ashton get a little ahead of them. Hang back, so the kids would think they’d gotten away. Vegas and his boys would wait for the teens to relax, before pouncing on them when the opportunity arose.

I saw it as the obvious strategy, but I was older, wiser, and savvier than the kids. I knew Baby and Ashton would probably fall for it, meaning that every second ticking by as I stood there was sending my sister farther and farther away from me, and closer and closer to danger.

“How do we catch them?” I said. “They have a huge head start.”