“Twenty-five years,” I said. “That’s twenty-five Christmases that passed without him trying to reconnect with me. Twenty-five birthdays. He missed my high school graduation. He missed me learning to drive. He wasn’t there when I got my first boyfriend.”
“Okay.” Baby held up a hand. “I get it. I get it.”
We fell into a long, uncomfortable silence.
“If it makes you feel any better, he didn’t come to any of my school functions either,” Baby said eventually. “And a couple of boys from the beach taught me how to drive before I got my permit.”
I strummed the steering wheel. Her words had actually made me feel a little better, but I didn’t want to acknowledge that I was jealous of Baby. In my mind, her relationship with our father was just peachy, everything I’d always wanted to have with him. I imagined he’d been supportive of her. Encouraging. Loving. Interested. But the more time I hung around with Baby, the more I was learning that Earl had been a problematic father figure for her too. I felt her sharing my pain, even though I knew it was probably a complicated issue for us both.
I turned onto the 110, following the signs for Downtown LA.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Back to school,” I said. “I think some kids are being hunted.”
Chapter 38
Baby said nothing as I punched into the GPS the address for Stanford-West Academy, which I remembered from the out-of-place bumper sticker on Ashton Willisee’s Mercedes.
The huge wrought-iron front gates looked impressively secure as we drove up—but all it took was some vague mumbling about being a lawyer, here to see Ashton Willisee, before the bored guard rolled back the gates without question.
I drove through the immaculate campus grounds, past rolling sports fields, toward large cream buildings nestled among lush green trees. My lovingly restored 1972 Buick Skylark’s leopard-print paint job stood out among all the high-end automobiles parked in the lot next to the school’s administration building. I figured I’d have more trouble in the school office, but at the first mention of the word attorney, the receptionist simply pushed a button and asked someone on the other end of an intercom to track down Mr. Willisee. She let her eyes wander over me, but I couldn’t tell if she was appreciating my System of a Down T-shirt or giving me the Fat Person Look-Over. Baby tugged at the bottom of her impossibly small denim shorts as though she could somehow extend them down toward her knees.
“A lot of lawyers come through here?” I asked the receptionist.
“Sure do,” she said with a yawn. “About five a day. Lawsuits mostly. These kids are always suing someone, or someone is suing them.” As she turned back to her computer, I could see a game of solitaire reflected in her glasses. “School hours are the best time to meet with child clients. Can’t pay the maid to listen in here.”
Baby and I exchanged a look at the receptionist’s candor. Before long, Ashton came around the corner of a long hallway chewing his nails and watching the floor pass beneath his feet, his mind obviously elsewhere. Being called into the school office was obviously not a novel experience for him. But he stopped short at the sight of Baby and me.
“Oh, no.” He shook his head. “Nope. No. We’re not doing this.”
“Five minutes.” I held up my hand. “We’re here to help you.”
Ashton didn’t even look at the receptionist as he gave the command, “Call security.”
“You can give them five minutes,” the receptionist shot back. “System of a Down fans are good people.”
“Rock on.” I flipped her the sign of the horns.
Ashton didn’t put up much of a fight. He walked quickly to a cafélike area off the administration building that was enclosed by walls of bright pink bougainvillea. Students were sitting clustered in groups, ignoring one another as they tapped on phones or laptops, little white earbuds plugging their ears. The space was eerily quiet.
“I remember when a bunch of kids being together meant noise,” I said, trying to lighten Ashton’s mood. “All I hear now are computer keys.”
“So you’re old,” the boy said, sliding onto a chair across from us. “Get over it.”
“What happened to Derek Benstein?” I asked.
“Who?” Ashton folded his arms.
“Don’t try to bullshit us.” Baby rolled her eyes and huffed, teen code for the lameness of the situation. “The two of you are all over social media together. You guys posted about eating at Soho House, like, yesterday.” Baby waved her phone.
I was silently thankful and awed at young people’s propensity to let the internet know exactly what they were doing at all times.
“Okay, so?” Ashton snapped. “My friend was murdered. I don’t know anything about it. I wasn’t with him at the time, and I don’t know who did it. What do you want from me?”
“Is that what you’ll be telling the police when they eventually get around to you?” I asked.
“Sure is.”
“So you’re going to claim it had absolutely nothing to do with your abduction two nights ago?” I asked.
“I wasn’t abducted!” Ashton gave an angry laugh. He took out his phone and fired off a text so fast I barely saw the movement. “God, you’re, like, obsessed with me, lady. Don’t you have anything better to do than try to get all up in my life?”
“Not right now,” I admitted.
“Well, that sucks for you,” he said.
“I don’t think so. This is what I do.” I could feel Baby’s eyes on me. “Everything about you is screaming I need help, and it has been since the moment I laid eyes on you.”
Both Ashton and Baby fell into stillness, silence. Ashton broke himself out of it by glancing at his Rolex.
“I don’t have time for this,” he said. “Look, Benzo was a friend of mine, and what happened to him is, like, really fucked up, but he was into a bunch of bad stuff, okay? He was using really rare black-market steroids and stuff to get big. The kind of stuff you can only get from criminals. He probably tried to rip off his dealer and got shot.”
My phone rang. I glanced at it, planning to ignore it, but the call was coming from my legal office back in Colorado. I excused myself and walked a few feet away to take the call, knowing I had cases that needed reassigning. Baby and Ashton sat sullenly slumped in their chairs. When the call ended, I pretended to type out an email, my ears pricked for their conversation. I knew it was helpful to allow myself to be seen as the bad cop at times, to let them align with each other against me. I hoped they would get real with each other the way teenagers sometimes can without the presence of adults. I found myself smiling as Baby attempted to do just that.
“My life is crazy right now,” Baby said. “I did not see it coming, Dad dying on me.”
“Heart attack?”
“Yeah,” Baby said. “Good guess.”
“Wasn’t hard. He was always yelling, those veins in his head popping out.”
“I still pick up my phone and try to call him.” Baby sounded sad. “I tried to call him just this morning, all like Dude, you’ve got to help me. This crazy chick is trying to take over my life. It’s like he’s still around.”
“Are you trying to relate to me right now because Benzo’s dead?” Ashton asked. “You think that’s going to work? I don’t even know you anymore. And I don’t know that bitch at all.”
“Rhonda’s pushy,” Baby said. “I get it. Try spending days with her. I’m about ready to blow my brains out.”
“What is she, like, your mom or something?”
“No way.” Baby sounded offended. “Umm, does she look like she could be my mom?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“She’s my sister,” Baby conceded. “Kind of. Half sister. We have the same dad. She turned up when he died. She’s here from, like, Chicago or something.”
Or something, I thought, exhausted.
“Maybe she’s exactly what you need right now, though,” Baby said. “Someone you don’t know.”
“What?”
“If there’s nobody in your life who can help, maybe it’s going to take someone from outside to save you,” Baby said.
“That is some Hallmark-level bullshit right there,” a new voice said.
I turned and saw a girl with white-blond ringlets approaching the table. She was dressed neck-to-knees in expensive black silk, immaculate leather ankle boots, and a handbag that was three times the cost of my car. She let the bag fall on the stones beneath the table like it was a sack of trash.
It’s not often that I feel the wave of dizzying heat and electricity that seems to come with purely bad people, but I felt it now as I stood before this nameless girl. Every animalistic sense in my body went on alert.
Big trouble had just arrived.
Chapter 39
Something changed in Ashton. Though he maintained his slouch, his spine seemed to stiffen, drawing hard on the tendons in his neck.
“And what are you doing back here, Teacher’s Pet?” the girl asked Baby.
“Don’t.” Baby turned and glanced at me, her eyes wild. “Just leave it, okay?”
“What’s going on here?” I asked. I gestured to the new girl and Baby. “Do you guys know each other?”
“No,” Baby said. “We don’t. And I think we’re done here, Rhonda.”
“Are you sure?” the girl asked. “Because what you’ve been doing is harassing my friend here about his buddy, who was brutally murdered yesterday. He’s traumatized and emotionally vulnerable, and you’re questioning him without warning, consent, or police presence.”
She waved a hand at the chair nearest to me.
“Please, take a seat,” the girl said. “Stay longer. Minute by minute you’re racking up millions in a civil lawsuit for emotional damage caused by you violently bursting in to interrogate him over his friend’s murder.”
“Fine,” I said. “We’re done here, Miss…”
“Miss Go Fuck Yourself.” She smiled.
Baby and I left the blonde with Ashton and headed back to the car, Baby sticking so close behind me, she kept stepping on my heels.
“Baby, you need to give me some space,” I said. “You’re just about climbing into my back pocket.”
“Don’t stop,” she said, glancing back like we were being chased.
“Jesus. If I’d known you were this twitchy I’d have come here alone.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t think anyone except Ashton would recognize me.” She smoothed back her hair. “I had braids then, and I’m about a foot and a half taller now, and my skin is so much clearer. Australian pink sand exfoliating scrub. You should get on that.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s been two years. Things change so fast around here I figured everybody would have forgotten,” she said.
“About what?”
“Just drop it, Rhonda.”
“This is the thing you and Ash were talking about in the hallway outside Dad’s office. You hadn’t seen him since the thing. What happened?”
She didn’t answer.
“I’ll google it.”
“Yeah, only if you’re a nosy, invasive, obsessive bitch, you will,” Baby snapped.
“I am a nosy, invasive, obsessive bitch.” I shrugged.
Baby didn’t respond. When we reached the car, I unlocked the doors, and she silently slipped into the passenger seat, her coldness telling me the discussion was over.
I got in and turned the key in the ignition.
Sparks zapped and zinged along the base of the bench seat beneath us.
“Oh, shit!” I said, as flames burst from the floor of the Skylark and began to coil around our ankles.
Chapter 40
“We’re dead,” Ashton said.
Vera yawned and took out her phone to text the twins. She and Ashton were the only Midnight Crew members who still attended high school. Penny and Sean had technically graduated, though their disregard for formal education had increased as the time until their trust funds kicked in dwindled. And Benzo had never been an academic. His parents had basically bribed his teachers to pass him every year since kindergarten, until they’d given up in embarrassment halfway through high school.
“We’re not dead, Ashton. We’re fine.”
Vera needed to rally her people. A meeting would be required with the entire posse over Benzo’s murder. Excitement was coursing through her, but she needed to maintain a nonchalant air with Ashton, the most panicky of their number. The coward might interpret the thrill Vera now felt as fear unless she presented herself calmly.
“I know a guy who lives across the street from Benzo.” Ashton leaned in, gripping the tabletop with white knuckles. “He said they brought him out on a stretcher, and he could see marks on one of Benzo’s legs. Like, weird bruises.”
“Maybe he was tortured.” Vera shrugged. “Pay one of your therapists for double sessions for a while. You’ll be over it in a couple of months.”
“If I’m not dead by then!” Ashton said. “How are you not losing your mind over this?”
“Because whoever we’re dealing with, they’re stupid,” she said. “He came after the weakest members of the group. First, he tried to pick off your pussy ass outside the theater. Somehow, incredibly, he fucked that up. Then he went for the second biggest loser, Benzo. If he really wanted to take us down, he should have gone right for the snake’s head.” She tapped her chest.
“So you’re admitting you were wrong? That this is someone we’ve hit with the Midnight Crew and not just something random?” Ashton said. “It’s someone who wants to take the whole crew down. Someone who wants revenge.”
Vera gave him a dangerous look. He sunk back in his chair.
“Now that we know he’s after us,” she continued, “we’ll be prepared.”
“Right. So we’ll get out of town.” Ashton nodded. “We can go to my mom’s place in Aruba, wait it out there. Penny and Sean’s aunt is, like, in the FBI, I think. She can track this guy down, try to pin him with something that has nothing to do with us. She did it for that twenty-five-year-old guy Penny was seeing. Remember? She didn’t ask any questions. She just zeroed in and nailed him with bank fraud. This shouldn’t be hard for her. We can provide her with a list of everyone we’ve hit, and she can figure out which one of them is the goddamn psycho.”
“You’ve been working on that little plan all morning, haven’t you?” Vera reached over and gave Ashton a condescending stroke on the shoulder. “You must be tired.”
“Come on, Vera.”
“We’re not running from this asshole,” she said. “My people don’t run.”
“Your people?” Ashton asked, but even as the words left his mouth he seemed to want to snatch them back from the air. Vera’s father, Evgeni Petrov, was thought to be somewhere in New Jersey, living under an assumed name, being protected by allied factions of the Russian and Armenian mobs. Vera wasn’t stupid—she knew it looked to everyone else like he’d run away from bad debts and underhanded deals inside the mob. But her father had done this many times before over the span of her life. He went underground, dug in, raised his hard back against his pursuers, and took the worst against his unbreakable spine. Then when things settled, he rose and attacked. It wasn’t cowardly. It was smart.
“We’re going to find this guy ourselves.” Vera lifted her bag and slung it over her shoulder. “We’re not kids anymore. We deal with our own problems.”
Ashton stepped in front of her as she turned to go, blocking her path. She was impressed with him for challenging her, holding her glare. Ashton had always been weak; Vera liked having weak people around her. They were malleable and predictable.
“This is getting out of control,” Ashton said. “You’re out of control. You brought a gun to the raid last night. That’s against the rules—rules that you came up with. This thing that we do—it only works because we all know the boundaries.”
Ashton poked her in the shoulder. Vera’s eyes narrowed.
&nb
sp; “You said from the beginning, ‘No one gets hurt,’” Ashton continued, seemingly thriving on the terror and exhilaration of finally asserting a bit of power in his miserable little life. “You also said, ‘If we ever get found out, we back away, go underground, come up with a smart plan.’ This isn’t smart, Vera. This is reckl—”
Vera grabbed Ashton’s balls through his tight jeans and squeezed slowly. Ashton bent double as his mouth slammed shut.
“I’m saying something different now,” Vera said. The people around them were all looking up from their screens, tugging earbuds from their ears. “And you better listen carefully, because I make the rules, and they’ve changed.”
Chapter 41
I lunged sideways and grabbed the handle of Baby’s door. In one movement I barreled us both out of the car in an awkward, painful roll just as the front of my car exploded.
The ball of flames quickly consumed the engine and led to a second explosion. I felt the sonic boom of the blast in the ground beneath me, as the cars all around us bounced on their suspensions, the windshields of two or three of them dissolving into showers of glass.
I knew Baby was screaming, but I couldn’t hear it. For what felt like a long time there was only ringing in my ears as we crawled into the middle of the parking lot, out of the reach of the flames.
As I dragged myself to my feet, Baby hung off me by her fingernails with one leg wrapped around my waist and her armpit smooshed against my mouth. I had to peel her off and place her on her feet, where she stood trembling and watching the car burn.
“What happened?” she wailed as my hearing sucked back into functionality. “What happened? What happened, Rhonda? What did you do?”
“What did I do?” I brushed singed pieces of fabric off my shoulders. I could feel the warm California breeze through the holes in the back of my clothing. “I pissed off a Mexican drug cartel, that’s what.”
People were rushing out of the administration building. Where once they might have run toward us to assist, the sight of the burning car had everyone bolting in the other direction, disappearing back into the building almost as fast as they had emerged. Unexpected and dangerous events on school grounds, explosions included, meant active shooters to these people. Baby and I stood alone, watching the flames, as sirens began to wail from the buildings around us.
2 Sisters Detective Agency Page 10
