2 Sisters Detective Agency(81)

He was going to die out here in the desert. If they found him at all, he was going to be scraped up, packaged, and tossed away. When he was gone, there would be reports of his involvement in the Midnight Crew. They would sit uncomfortably next to photographs of him on the Stanford-West Academy lacrosse team and the honor roll. Eventually it would all prove so unpalatable that his family and friends would stop talking about him altogether, and that would be it. He would exist as a family myth shared by distant cousins about their relative who was murdered by members of a drug cartel.

“We can’t let this happen,” Ashton relayed to Baby, crouched shivering beside him. “It can’t all end like this.”

Whatever Baby’s death dream was, whatever her vision was of what she’d leave behind if Vegas and his boys killed them, Ashton’s words seemed to give her strength.

She nodded, and they ran through the back doors of the kiosk.





Chapter 117



They were not the only living things in the water park. Ashton heard things moving in the dark as they made their way, as silently as possible, along the walkway between a bumper car enclosure and a pile of broken café furniture. Animals. He imagined desert foxes scurrying out of the shadows, rats sniffing along walls, rattlesnakes unfurling on the stones.

Baby climbed through a shattered fence, and they ran through a kiddie pool almost entirely overgrown with razor-sharp desert plants.

Ahead of them, the gentle curves of a roller coaster rose from behind a pool ringed by giant concrete elephants, coils of dried paint falling from their shoulders like flayed skin.

“Listen.” Ashton dragged Baby to a stop. “They’re going to search for us building to building. We have to think smart. Go somewhere unexpected.”

He pointed up at the roller coaster. A single train, three cars long, was stuck on the tracks twenty feet from the ground, probably dragged back up the line by hooligans hanging out in the park at night. Baby nodded. They turned and ran.

“Hey!”

From the battered, graffitied remains of a hot dog hut, a figure cloaked in a blanket emerged in the moonlight.

“You little assholes, keep it down!”

“Shhh!” Baby waved desperately at the vagrant. “Go back insi—”

The night erupted with white light. Ashton hadn’t realized there were members of Vegas’s crew so close behind them. The homeless man in the blanket bucked and twisted as the bullets tore through him, his body falling in a heap. Another figure, a woman, emerged from the hut and was also shot down, her squeal high and wild, animalistic.

Ashton grabbed Baby’s wrist to hold her back as she instinctively leaped forward to help the victims.

“Come on! Come on!”

A scent of fire was on the breeze. Vegas and his guys were going to smoke them out. Ashton and Baby rounded a corner and were confronted by the sight of an ancient carousel set alight, flames climbing up candy-cane poles to consume grinning dolphins, sharks, and mermaids. Beyond the carousel, another hot dog stand was just catching fire.

They raced along a line of palm trees, climbing onto the roller-coaster platform. Ashton hesitated before he put his foot on the track, inexplicably worried it would be electrified even though the controls on the driver’s desk at the side of the track were almost completely covered in weeds.

“We’ll climb up there.” He pointed up the steep rise, toward a row of carriages stuck on the track. “They’ll never look for us up there.”

He put a hand out and found Baby frozen, her hands protecting her neck.

“I can’t do it.”

“Yes, you can! Come on! We’ve got to go!”

“They’re going to light the whole place up.” Baby stammered, “Look. Look. There’s fire on the other side. They’re going to trap us!” Her shirt clung to her body with sweat, her stomach sucking in and out as she struggled to breathe. “We don’t have a gun. We don’t have anything!”

“Baby, I’ve got you.” Ashton climbed up off the tracks and onto the platform. He had his arms open to hold her when the bullets cut him down.





Chapter 118



The first shot hit Ashton in the lower back. Baby watched him arch backward sharply, his eyes wide and mouth gaping. The second bullet seemed to shove him forward, slamming into his shoulder from behind. He fell into her, and they went down on the rotting, peeling wood. Baby held him, expecting the next shots to take her, for it all to end in a single, fire-red burst of pain as a bullet cleaved its way into her skull.

But it didn’t.

The gunfire kept coming, but it was from behind her now.

Baby saw Officer Summerly step up onto the platform, taking cover behind the driver’s control desk as he shot at the cartel guy who’d appeared at the other end of the platform. Baby squeezed her eyes shut against the white light popping at the corners of her vision. Ashton didn’t seem to be breathing. She told herself she needed to let go of him, but her fingers wouldn’t unlock from around his arms and shoulders.

She came to herself eventually, forcing her legs to move. Baby dragged Ashton down off the platform, onto the ancient detritus in the dirt: cigarette butts, a lost ball cap, flattened scraps of paper cups. While more gunshots zinged over their heads, she shook the boy, held Ashton’s face, and yelled at him to wake up and stick to what they had set out to do in the darkness. That it couldn’t end this way. Not like this.