Baby whirled around and looked at me, her eyes filled with horror. Then she took off into the house through the open door as though the place was on fire and she had to save a family of orphans inside. While I paid the cleaners and sent them on their way, she remained upstairs somewhere. I surveyed their work on the living room. My father’s house had been rid of the stench of cigar smoke, stale whiskey, and rotting food that had infested it when I first entered, now smelling of floral cleaning products. There were no nameless sleepy teens in sight. The enormous kitchen benches were bare and gleaming, where clutters of pots, pans, plates, and bottles had once sprawled over them. I heard Baby come down the stairs and emerged to find her standing trembling on the spotless rug in the middle of the foyer.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“They went into my room,” she said shakily. Her eyes were huge, brimming with rageful tears. Her teeth were locked. “They cleaned my room. How. Could. You. Do. This?”
“How could I…” I laughed, confused by her reaction. “Baby, the house was filthy. It was like something out of Hoarders. There was a pancake stuck to the wall of Dad’s shower. A pancake. When we were here earlier, I saw something scamper out the window. A possum or a raccoon or…I don’t know. Normal people can’t live like this.”
“They touched my stuff,” Baby said. “All my stuff. All my clothes are—”
“Yeah, I saw your clothes,” I said. “I glanced into your room while the door was cracked open. There was three feet of clothes on the floor in there. Another month and you’d have to get around the room with a snorkel and flippers.”
“You fucking bitch!” Baby barked.
“Whoa!”
“You don’t touch my stuff,” Baby screamed. Her voice was raw and wild. “You—or your cleaners or anyone associated with you—you don’t ever, ever, ever touch my stuff!”
Baby stormed out the back door and slammed it so hard behind her that the windows looking out over the Strand shook. As she crossed away from the house, a Rollerblader with a Weimaraner on a leash almost slammed into a lamppost trying to get out of her way. I stood stunned for a long time, looking after her, then climbed the stairs to her room. With the kind of reverence reserved for an ancient temple, I crossed the threshold and stood inside on the Hoover-tracked carpet. The closet stood open, overpacked with washed, folded, and hung clothes that were threatening to burst from the shelves and hangers. The space had clearly never accommodated all of Baby’s clothes at once. There was a desk against the window overlooking the distant surf that was neatly arranged with things the cleaners had had no clue what to do with: ornate candle holders and notebooks, piles of oversize sunglasses, hair clips, old iPhones with their tangled chargers.
I looked at the room around me and tried to imagine what was so precious that Baby would flip out with the kind of shock, panic, and dismay she had failed to demonstrate when we were almost killed in a car bombing only hours earlier. When I saw nothing that answered my question, I left the room and closed the door with a strange sense of certainty that I would end up paying for what I had done to the teenage girl whether I understood it or not.
Chapter 47
Ashton knew that Sean and Penny’s driver was named Tom. He’d heard their father call him that. The twins had been driven around by the same withered, white-haired man since Ashton first met them at some Brentwood mansion pool party, their parents getting drunk in cabanas while the kids were taken out for gelato by the help. Ashton remembered climbing into the big passenger cabin of the limo with the smirking, pointy-faced twins and a handful of other kids. They rode all the way to Venice Beach, young Ashton trying to work out how much richer the Hanley family was than his. He’d listened while Penny bragged about the private jet her mom had bought her for her twelfth birthday. The jet’s interior was all pink suede.
Ashton glanced through the darkened privacy screen of the Mercedes-Maybach S650 Pullman while they were stopped at an intersection. He’d never heard Sean or Penny call him anything but Driver. He wondered about Tom’s life as a private driver to a pair of spoiled rich brats, shepherding Penny from nail salon to hairdresser to laser facial rejuvenation clinic, picking up Sean from The Abbey at 2 a.m. with coke all over his face. He wondered if Tom questioned his existence, the fairness of Sean and Penny’s place in the back of the vehicle and his in the front.
Ashton sure questioned it. He questioned his own place with the two. He questioned the dangerous, humiliating games they liked to play. They played them so often that Ashton could see them coming a mile away. He watched Penny’s attention prick up as they approached Lincoln Park Skate Park. Tom had gotten stuck behind a Hummer, and Penny was eyeing a small kid moving back and forth down the main skate run.
“Have a look at this little shit, will you?” Penny said.
Ashton and Sean followed her gaze. The boy, maybe eight or nine, was doing complicated flips of his skateboard at each bank of the run while a gaggle of other young kids cheered him on from the sidelines. Penny ordered Tom to pull over, just as Ashton anticipated she would.
The twins watched the boy on the run, and Ashton watched the twins. Ashton saw a flicker of something in Penny’s eyes. Hateful, jealous admiration. Penny hated anyone demonstrating a hard-won skill. Her apartment downtown was cluttered with broken toys she had taken up on a whim, ruined dreams of playing the violin, mastering archery, oil painting, dressmaking. If Penny wasn’t immediately an expert at something, she gave it up. Ashton had once seen her purchase a seventeen-thousand-dollar electric guitar signed by Dave Navarro that she left untouched in one of the spare rooms of her apartment for a year before having it taken to the dump.
Penny rolled down her window.
“Oh, come on.” Ashton huffed. “We’ve got to meet Vera.”
Penny ignored him. She called out to two lanky teen boys heading for the skate park with boards under their arms.
“Hey, you! Yeah, you. Come here.”
The boys approached the car. The teen with tight, curly hair bent his head to look in the window.
“We ain’t carryin’, lady.”
“I’m not looking for drugs, you idiot,” Penny barked. “Are you kidding me? This is a six-hundred-thousand-dollar car. You think I have to buy my coke from two dumb-ass kids in a skate park?”
The teens looked at each other. Ashton’s phone buzzed. Vera was asking where they were, impatiently sending her location, on the corner of West Fourth and South Main. He didn’t know what made him more nervous: leaving Vera hanging or whatever Penny was planning to do with these kids.
“I want you two to go over there.” Penny pointed. “See that kid on the skate run? The little one flipping his board? Go get his hat. Bring it back here to me.”
She pulled a roll of cash from her handbag, peeled off a hundred, and waved it at the boys. The teens didn’t need to think. They took off running. Ashton watched them intercept the small boy on his way back up to the top of the run, pushing and bullying the boy until he relinquished the hat.
The boys returned, laughing guiltily. Penny handed them the hundred-dollar bill and tossed the hat onto the floor of the car.
“Okay,” Ashton said. “That’s enough. We gotta go.”
“Back off, Ash,” Sean said. “We’re just having fun.”
“How much for you to go back and punch that kid in the face?” Penny asked the boys.
“What?” One boy laughed. “You serious? We can’t do that.”
“They can’t do that,” Ashton agreed. “Penny, leave them alone.”
“I’ve got…ten grand here.” Penny fingered the roll of cash. “I’ll give you five hundred dollars for every time you hit him.”
The boys glanced sideways at each other. Ashton could see scars on the knuckles of the one nearest to him, perhaps from neighborhood fights, working after-school jobs, or playing sports. He’d seen movies about kids from bad neighborhoods who skated or surfed or rode bikes to blow off steam, aggression from a bad home life, f
rom parents who worked three jobs and still couldn’t afford to put food in the fridge. His own hands were perfect, soft. Truth was, Ashton couldn’t guess how another teenager got scars on his knuckles. He didn’t know how they lived. He cracked his window to listen as the boys backed off and murmured to each other.
“Dude, we could just hit him once.”
“Or twice, even.”
“If we’re gonna hit him twice we might as well hit him a bunch, yo.”
“He’s pretty small.”
The boys looked back at the group of little kids at the top of the run who were now consoling their friend over his stolen hat.
“Are we really gonna do this, man?” the curly-haired kid asked.
“Don’t be pussies,” Penny said.
The boys conferred again. Ashton saw hopelessness in their eyes. Already feeling remorse for what they were about to do. What they couldn’t help but do.
“Five hundred per hit?”
Penny smiled and nodded. The boys ran off across the park. Ashton sat back in his seat and watched the beating unfold, the fists raining down.
“You guys are fucking sick,” he told the twins. Sean and Penny ignored him. In the front seat of the car, Tom was staring straight ahead as he always did, watching the sun set behind the smog. Ashton wanted to speak up, to ask Sean and Penny what they enjoyed so much about the violent spectacle they had created across the park. But the truth was, he knew. It was the same thing he enjoyed about the Midnight Crew games: the power, the danger, the vengeance. Ashton didn’t know where the anger came from, but he felt the white-hot pleasure of release when he smashed the possessions of their victims, when he knocked over bookshelves and tore down pictures and lit things on fire. Ashton’s life was full of pretty things. Expensive things. Cars and bikes and toys and gadgets, designer clothes, watches. It was as thrilling to accumulate the stuff as it was to break it. To Sean and Penny, it seemed, people were stuff too. That was the only difference.
Penny waited until the boys had finished beating the little kid and turned back toward the car, their faces hungry and fists smeared with blood. The other smaller kids had bolted from the park. The talented skater was on the ground, unmoving. The teens started jogging back toward the vehicle like happy dogs ready to receive their treat.
“Now drive,” Sean said. “Quick, before they get back. “Go, Driver. Go!”
Tom started the engine. Penny and Sean erupted in laughter. Ashton saw the teenagers’ mouths fall open as the car rolled away into the growing night.
Chapter 48
Vera slipped into the car and dropped her handbag onto the console beside her, tossing her shopping bags from boutique jewelry stores onto the floor. She threw a look around the limo’s cabin that made the teens writhe in their seats at their lateness.
Sean lifted his pointy nose in the air, wouldn’t meet her eyes. “We just had a little game on the way here,” he said.
“A little game?” Ashton scoffed. “Benzo is dead, there’s some kind of sicko after us, and these two wanted to play blood sports with grade-schoolers. We need to be really careful right now.”
“Don’t talk like you’re in charge here, Ashton.” Vera gave a thin smile. “You sound like an idiot.”
Ashton worked his jaw, letting seconds pass as he recovered his dignity. “So what do we do?”
“We hit another house,” Vera said.
“What?” Ashton cried.
“Yes.” Penny was nodding eagerly. “I’m with you. I was thinking the exact same thing, Vera. We go hard this time. Break some bones. Show this dumb fuck that he shouldn’t mess with us.”
“Shut up, Penny,” Vera said. “This competition you guys seem to be having to sound like the biggest simpleton in the car is really getting on my nerves. The plan is we hit another house. We set a trap, lure this guy out.”
“This is insane.” Ashton shook his head.
“He must be following us,” Vera said. “He’s probably been following us from the moment he took Ashton’s phone. He most likely emptied the phone of everything he needed before you could shut it down. He’ll know who we are, where we live. He’ll have all our videos. That’s why we can’t go to the police or to any lame-ass private investigators.” She gave Ashton a withering look. “Tomorrow morning, we split up and try to shake him off. Then we come together again and make sure he’s following us to the next raid. While he thinks he’s watching us, we can get a good look at him.”
She took out her phone and tapped away.
“I’m sending you a list of suspects,” Vera said. Ashton felt his phone buzz in his pocket. “This is every male victim we’ve had in the last year prior to Mr. Newcombe, except for that banker we hit in November. He’s in rehab.”
“Did we do that?” Sean smirked. “Did we drive him to drink?”
“Maybe.” Vera gave a rare genuine smile of camaraderie. “He’s the guy who pissed himself, right?”
“What if it’s not one of the guys we actually hit?” Ashton asked. “What if it’s a relative of one of our victims? Or a friend? Or someone they hired?”
Everyone was looking at their phones. Ashton sighed at their silence.
“What is your plan, exactly?” he continued. “Once we find out who’s after us?”
“Simple,” Vera said. “We grab him, make him tell us exactly what he’s got on us, and then we destroy everything. Cover our tracks.”
“And then what?” Ashton asked. “What do we do with the guy once we have him?”
“We kill him, of course,” Vera said.
Chapter 49
Ashton laughed. But even to him, it sounded forced. He could see glitter dancing in the twins’ eyes. They loved this kind of talk.
“We’re not killing anyone,” Ashton said. “That was never what this was about. The Midnight Crew is about having fun and blowing off steam, maybe scaring some people, messing with them. That’s why I joined, anyway.”
“You joined because you were angry,” Vera said. “Your uncle made mincemeat of your aunt’s overpriced nose job at Thanksgiving and you wanted to feel like the big man for once. Now that you’ve righted things in your family, you’re not as angry at life.” She threw her hands up. “Well, good for you, asshole. Targeting your uncle, going to psychotherapy, popping some Prozac and doing your mom’s bullshit mindfulness trash has cured you. That doesn’t mean you get to walk away from what we’ve done here, what we are. You can’t abandon the Crew because you’ve lost your motivation all of a sudden. You know what that’s called? That’s called desertion.”
“Treason.” Sean nodded. “Going AWOL. You do that in war and the army guys will put you up against a wall and shoot you.”
“Don’t pretend you’re some kind of hard-core military guy, Sean,” Ashton said. “You spend a grand a month on pedicures and anal bleaching.”
“Who are we hitting?” Penny bounced in her seat. “I’m ready to go. This guy killed Benzo. We’re going to find him and cut his balls off.”
“You hated Benzo!” Ashton pleaded.
“It doesn’t matter who we hit,” Vera said. “As long as we move fast. We need to focus on damage control rather than get bogged down with the logistics.”
She stopped to think for a moment, watching the downtown stores roll by the window. “There’s a woman on my street with this dog. A little terrier. It barks at me every time I walk by. They’ll do. We go tomorrow night.”
Chapter 50
That night in my deceased father’s house was a long, exhausting one. Still rattled from the fight with Baby, I’d spent the first few hours after she stormed out sitting in the spotless living room, texting and calling her in vain. I’d lain awake until 3 a.m., when I heard her come in. She’d ignored me on her way to her bedroom, barefoot and trailing sand on the tiles, slamming the door in my face when I tried to talk to her.
In the morning, Baby’s bedroom door was still shut tight. I wandered to the rooftop of the massive house and discovered a large swim
ming pool stretching over its expanse. To the right of the door opening onto the roof, by a row of weather-beaten lawn chairs, stood a rusty and unused home gym draped with old, stiff beach towels.
I’ve been lifting weights since I was ten years old. My dad had set up a small gym in our home garage in Watkins with a treadmill and a set of dumbbells. My mother had been too gentle to guess that my father’s sudden interest in getting into shape was a sign of his infidelities.
I wandered in one morning and saw him struggling to bench fifty pounds, the bar shaking and tilting, only inches from his nose. I rushed in and grabbed the bar, helped him get it up and into the rack. Like the proud, shallow, self-involved idiot that he was, he was embarrassed and instantly banished me from the garage. The banishment effectively turned his gym into a forbidden and alluring destination for a young and lonely me.
As I perused the free-weights rack next to the pool, the sensation of being watched prickled over my skin. I looked over and noticed that on the roof of the adjacent French chateau–style house, a place that appeared to be under some renovation, with scaffolding erected in the gap between the two homes, a group of tanned, long-haired men in their early twenties were crowded around their own gym equipment, keeping a careful eye on me.
I jutted my chin at them in what I intended as a friendly but tough manner, the kind of greeting two dudes might throw across a public gym. Three of the four didn’t respond. The fourth put a foot up on the lip of the roof and glared at me. I guessed the fat chick playing with weights on the roof next door made a mockery of everything they stood for out there in the sunshine—health, strength, physical masculine beauty, pushing their bodies to the limit, like a bunch of modern warriors training for some unforeseen combat. I wasn’t welcome here, even on my own rooftop.
One of the dudes loaded his bench press up with 220 pounds, glancing over at me as he made some comment to his bros. I went over to Dad’s bench press and loaded it up with the same. As I sat on the bench, the guy lay back and pumped out five fast reps. I did the same. The bros laughed. One of them pushed his friend out of the way and loaded up another 80 pounds. I watched him work five slow, perfect reps. I loaded my weights up to 300 pounds and did the same.
2 Sisters Detective Agency Page 12
