2 Sisters Detective Agency(82)



She pressed her fingers into his neck.

He was gone.

Baby was aware of movement. Two cartel guys were trying to advance toward Summerly. Silence then drifted out over the roller-coaster platform, and Baby lifted her head in time to see the police officer pursuing Gunmouth into the dark.

Another of the cartel guys lay flopped on the stairs up to the roller coaster, his mouth open and leaking blood, the height restriction sign hanging above him on a rusty chain, swinging and pocked with bullet holes.

The sound of footsteps made Baby turn and look over her shoulder. Martin Vegas stepped onto the tracks twenty feet behind her. His footfalls were soft, measured, the casual stroll of someone completely assured of his situation. Yet they seemed to shake the entire structure.

Vegas had a long silver revolver in his hand, hanging by his thigh.

“It doesn’t have to go this way, you know,” he called out to Baby. “I’m always on the lookout for girls like you.”

Baby couldn’t say anything. Her skin prickled.

“You’ve got that look,” Vegas said. “It’s very marketable. A personal asset you’re not making use of. Young. Fresh. Put a California girl like you in a Mercedes convertible, maybe a surfer dude in the passenger seat, and I can move mountains. You’d get a cut of everything we make.”

“Fuck you,” Baby snarled.

“This isn’t clever,” Vegas said, chiding. “Look at your situation. It’s win-lose. If you choose to lose, you don’t get to play again.”

He drew the hammer back on the revolver. Baby refused to look at the weapon. It didn’t matter how big the gun was, how sickening the sound was of the cylinder turning and aligning the bullet with the barrel. If she was going to die, it would be between the two of them in those very last seconds. Baby watched Vegas drawing them out, savoring them, the way he had probably dozens of times before.

It was this indulgence that cost him his life.





Chapter 119



I’d scaled the structure behind the roller-coaster platform as quietly as possible in the darkness, but with every inch I advanced, I was sure Baby or Vegas was going to hear me. The rotting wooden beams and struts creaked, crumbling and groaning under my weight. As I hauled myself up onto the tracks, I felt the whole wooden frame rock back and forth in its fittings thirty feet below. If the scaffolding I’d leaped from at the Manhattan Beach house had been terrifyingly rickety, the old roller coaster was about as sturdy as a kid’s cardboard construction. I swung a leg over into the first car of the roller-coaster train and tumbled in, throwing my weight forward. Nothing happened. I saw below me, in the moonlight streaming through holes in the station roof, Vegas aiming a gun at Baby.

I could only hope Baby would get out of the way in time. I leaned back, threw myself forward again, felt the carriage’s rusty wheels grind on the track. Another shove and something snapped.

The train screamed down the tracks. My stomach lurched. I gripped the silver lap bar and yowled as the looming figure of Martin Vegas twisted around, spotting me soaring toward him in the car without time to leap out of the way.

A heavy, thundering crunch and Vegas disappeared under the coaster wheels, shoving the car upward and to the side, throwing me onto the platform with enough force to tear the skin from my forearms and rip holes in the knees of my jeans.

I rolled and crawled to the edge of the platform. I didn’t look back at the twisted body of the gangster for long. A shattered arm poking out from under the car, gravely still, was all I needed to confirm that Martin Vegas was at least too broken to do any more harm to us.

The car had stopped an inch or two from where Baby was cowering over the body of Ashton Willisee. I reached down, and with difficulty, she let go of her friend and let me haul her up.

We held each other, two sisters bloodied and bruised and shaking. In the distance, beyond the crumbling frame of a burning pool house, I saw Dave Summerly and Dr. Tuddy coming together, the big cop embracing the thin scientist with smiling relief now that the fight had ended.





Chapter 120



As she had done the night before, Vera crept into her house in Brentwood and walked past her mother’s bedroom. There was no telltale white light shining under the door this time. Her mother was in the first-floor living room being questioned by police officers.

Vera had come home to find the house surrounded. The police had been waiting in the shadows beneath trees, leaning and looking through the cracks in curtains in her neighbors’ houses, waiting for Vera to return. Stupid. If they knew anything about her father, they’d have known that having a discreet way of entering and exiting the family home was the first priority of any Russian gangster worth his—or her—salt.

Vera had slipped onto her neighbor’s property, unlatched the gate that led under the decking of his aboveground pool, and walked in a crouch through the crawl space, past the pool filter, and into the space under the decking of her own home’s pool. From there she had accessed the basement through a hidden panel and quietly climbed the stairs to the first floor. Vera had caught her father entering and exiting the house this way maybe a dozen times, either when the police were looking to question him or when he’d been out too late with his men and didn’t want to answer her mother’s questions.

She went to her bedroom, opened the closet, and brought down an empty backpack. It was a little unnerving not to have a plan. She liked plans. Liked to have direction, rules, a goal. Vera didn’t know what her life would be like by the time the sun rose. All she knew was that her day had been filled with killing, and she’d never felt more exhilarated than she did now, packing her passport, wallet, and gun into the bag. She wanted more days like this one.

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