2 Sisters Detective Agency(80)

“Is it a roadblock?”

“Whatever it is, it’s for us. It’s gotta be.”

“I’m getting off the road.” Baby swung the wheel at an exit and made a couple of turns to get her to the opposite side of the interstate, where the CHP wasn’t watching. She doused the headlights and rolled unseen. Abruptly, the front wheels crunched on gravel, began to shudder over rocks.

“This thing wasn’t designed for off-roading, Baby!”

“Hang on.”

They crept through the blackness more slowly, sagebrush shunting under the bumper.

“You’ll blow the tires!”

“Shut up, Ashton!”

“There are ravines out here. Crevasses!”

“Don’t be such a wimp,” Baby yelled. “It’s a crevasse or a jail cell. Which would you prefer?”

In time, Ashton looked back to see a single pair of headlights behind them, blinking out too.

“Oh, shit, it’s them. It’s them. They’re back there. Speed up! Speed up!”

He held her wrist. Together they felt the rocks, shrubs, and broken stumps of Joshua trees crash and thump under the vehicle. Ashton watched the lights of the slowed vehicles on the highway disappear when a huge pair of headlights flicked on only feet behind their vehicle.

Baby screamed. The sound was strangled out by terror as the car behind smashed into their rear bumper, shoving the car sideways. Desert dust coiled and spun in the blinding light.

“Get ready to run!” Baby cried.

Ashton looked ahead. A torn and rotting billboard loomed into view and then collapsed, folding around the car as they plowed through it, bringing the Maserati to a crunching halt.

Ashton barely had time to read the sunbaked lettering:

ROCK-A-HOOLA WATERPARK.





Chapter 115



They crawled from the wreckage. Ashton’s blood was rushing so hard and fast through his veins that new injuries did not register in his mind—a nail scraping along his arm from the billboard frame, a sharp stone slicing the skin from his ankle as he stumbled in the dark, cutting almost to the bone. He grabbed Baby’s hand, and they raced over the cracked and tilted concrete of what had once been a wide, bare walkway between the attractions of the water park. Ashton followed her through the doorway of a crumbling building under a broken neon sign that read TICKETS.

“What is this place?” Ashton breathed.

“It’s an old water park. Abandoned. I used to come out here with some skater boys.”

“You would hang out here?” Ashton scoffed. The darkness inside the building made it impossible to see the room around him, but he could smell its contents clearly: stagnant water, urine, human feces, old beer. He kicked a blanket out from under his feet and crouched behind the counter, holding the rusted frame of what he guessed was an empty fridge. He could just make out the patterns of spray-painted artwork on the walls. “Who hangs out at a haunted water park for kicks?”

“The pools make great skate ramps.” Baby shoved at him. “Keep your head down.”

They waited. Sure enough, in the moonlight, they made out the shapes of four men emerging from behind where the Maserati was nestled in the collapsed billboard. They were walking. Bad men always walk, Ashton thought. They didn’t need to run. The water park was like an island in the middle of the desert. The kids could shelter here, or they could take their chances out there in the darkness where there was no cover, nowhere to hide. All Vegas and his crew had to do was hunt them from building to building until they locked them down.

When a voice drifted toward them from the group of shadows, Baby and Ashton gripped each other in the cool darkness.

“We just want our stuff!”

It was Vegas who had spoken. His deep, honey-smooth voice was as calm as a man calling his children inside from playing in the garden. Ashton almost felt like going to him. He sounded safe. Confident.

“It’s in the car!” Baby yelled.

“Shhh! Are you crazy?”

“The sound will bounce off the buildings,” Baby said. She was right. Vegas’s men shifted at the sound of her words but didn’t turn toward the ticket kiosk. There was a pause, then one of them turned and walked back toward the Maserati.

“They’ll go now,” Baby said. “You watch. They’ll leave us alone. They don’t want to hurt two stupid kids.”

“We’re too much trouble,” Ashton agreed, shuddering with fear. “Not smart. Not worth the effort.”

They waited. The man returned from the car with the duffel bag. In the dim moonlight the cartel men checked the bag, then one of them shouldered it.

Then the men fanned out across the park.





Chapter 116



Ashton could see his death clearly. He’d seen it in flashes as he lay in the back of the van when he was abducted, his wrists bound and the lights of the highway rolling over his helpless body. He’d seen his parents standing over a stainless-steel morgue table, clutching each other, trying to identify his twisted and broken remains.

Ashton had seen a dead body once. He’d pressed against the glass as their limo drove slowly by a car wreck on the way to his dad’s surprise fiftieth birthday at the Fairmont. All he’d glimpsed was a shattered knee poking out from the back seat area, but Ashton knew the person was dead from the leisurely pace of the emergency responders pulling tarps from their truck to cover the scene. He’d thought at the time how weird it was that people were just bodies in the end. Flesh and bones.