But he reminded himself this wasn’t like one of his old jobs. This was personal. He needed to take it slow, like he had with Benzo. As much as he burned for an end to it all, he knew the years ahead would be filled with moments in which he would think of the Midnight Crew. Whether Beaty was alive or dead, healthy or unhealthy, he was going to think of them. Ashton. Benzo. Sean. Penny. Vera. He didn’t want to regret not getting the fullest experience of murdering each of them for what they had done to him. To his family.
He had to make sure there was pain. Plenty of pain.
Chapter 60
I was surprised by Sean and Penny Hanley’s first destination when they left work: a Walmart. From a distance, Baby and I watched them tour the hardware aisle. Sean took a shiny new hammer off a rack and weighed it in his hand, turned it, looked at the claw, and said something to his twin that made her laugh. While he twirled it, they went to the weapons section and played with a crossbow for a while but didn’t seem serious about buying it. In the end, they each bought a hammer.
While Baby had seemed very enthusiastic about the mystery surrounding Ashton Willisee and his dead friend, she lost interest halfway through our tour of the Walmart. She paid all her attention to her phone, which was dinging and buzzing and making little popping noises with a frequency I had not yet witnessed. I was sure now that something was going on. In the parking lot, I watched Baby smiling at the screen while we walked back to the Maserati.
“Why would they buy two hammers?” I asked.
She said nothing.
“Even if they are building or repairing something by hand together, which I highly doubt, why wouldn’t they just pass the hammer back and forth?” I continued. “Or if they’re working on separate projects, what are the chances that—”
“I don’t know, Rhonda. Jeez, give it a rest, will you?”
In the car, she took out some eyeliner and started applying it.
“Aren’t we just going home?”
“Uh-huh.” She smiled knowingly.
“Baby, what have you done?” I watched her carefully. She shrugged. Her phone was going off with such consistency that it vibrated off the seat beside her and fell onto the floor. I drove home with a darkening sense of peril, watching dazzling yellow and green billboards for liability compensation lawyers fly by the windows.
ARE YOU ON YOUR WAY TO A CATASTROPHE RIGHT NOW? one asked.
As it turned out, I was.
Chapter 61
There were already crowds two blocks from the house. Young men and women getting out of cars or sailing down the streets on bikes, cell phone screens lit up in the gathering dark. I caught a glimpse of my father’s house one street away from it and saw lights on inside.
“Oh, dear.” I sighed. Baby was watching me, waiting for that defeated sound. She let out a mean little laugh.
“You shouldn’t have messed with my stuff,” she said. “This is my house. Dad’s house. You tried to put your stamp on it, and I’m here to show you that you can’t do that.”
“So let me get this straight,” I said. “As revenge for me hiring strangers to come into the house and mess with your personal possessions…you’ve invited a thousand strangers to come into the house and mess with your personal possessions?” I asked.
“I barricaded my bedroom door.” She grinned. “My stuff is safe. Yours? Well, I guess we’ll just have to find out.”
Chapter 62
There were too many teenagers in the street outside the house for the Maserati to turn onto our road. I parked, then pushed through the crowd to the front door and intercepted a skinny teen boy heading out in what was obviously my Van Halen T-shirt, the fabric dripping off him from his shoulders to his knobby knees. The crowd was crammed into the living room, music thumping so loud my eardrums pulsed. There were kids making out on the stairs and on the couches, a makeshift mosh pit at the bottom of the staircase, the scent of alcohol and weed smoke hanging like a curtain over everything. My boots crunched on plastic cups, broken glass, food wrappers, a broken lamp.
I climbed the stairs to the spare room where I had been sleeping and found my suitcase torn open, empty. A bunch of girls were sitting in the corner watching a YouTube video on my laptop. I snatched the machine away to a chorus of whines and slammed it closed, stowing it under a hutch in the hallway, and then went to check on the three million dollars of cartel money and drugs that I had hidden in my father’s bathroom. A crew of boys was hanging out in there, apparently oblivious to the hidden space beneath the vanity. They were passing a bong between themselves, sitting around the bathtub like pigeons crowded into a tiny space to avoid the rain.
Baby was dancing on the pool table in the first-floor lounge when I found her. The bar had been stripped of every bottle and every glass. I saw a girl going by with a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon and took it from her before she could squeeze by me.
“Hey, bitch! That’s mine!” she yelped.
“Honey, you couldn’t possibly appreciate it,” I said, walking on. I stood at the end of the pool table, drinking Pappy from the bottle and watching Baby dance until she noticed me. I was getting looks from all directions. They were all beautiful, sun-bronzed, and youthful creatures with metabolisms that allowed them to get by on only junk food. I was twice the age and three times the size of anyone in attendance. When Baby finally looked down at me, she had the same contempt on her features as they all did.
“Who’s that?” a girl beside her asked.
“My sister!” Baby yelled over the music. “Can you believe it?”
“Whoa, crazy!”
“Yeah, crazy!”
“So if your dad was Early Bird, and you’re Baby Bird, she’s…” the girl said. They looked at me. Baby burst out laughing.
“Big Bird!” Baby said. They both cackled.
I stepped up to the edge of the pool table. “Enjoying the festivities?” I asked.
“Sure am.” She grinned, crouching and leaning in so I could hear her. “This is what you get for messing with my stuff, Rhonda. You shouldn’t mess with me—I’m the queen!”
I nodded appreciatively. A stupid, childish, competitive spirit was twisting in me. This is what it’s like to have a sister, I thought. I had the strange compulsion to grab a fistful of Baby’s hair, throw her iPhone in the pool. A delicious meanness was growing in my heart.
“You know what’s hilarious?” I asked.
“What?”
“I could make myself the queen of this whole party in ten minutes flat and you don’t even know it.”
“You think so?” She blurted out more laughter. The other kids were getting in on the game, giving me laser-beam eyes so hot they could fry an egg. I was the loser big sister. The party crasher. The fun police.
But not for long.
“Watch and learn, little girl,” I told Baby. I turned and walked out of the house.
Chapter 63
They stood between two big properties in a dark alleyway that was so overgrown with bougainvillea, from the street it was invisible. Ashton thought about the Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman murders, committed only streets away, the rear-gate access that only the killer would have known about, the alleyway secretive and overgrown with foliage. All the kids Ashton knew were overly familiar with rich-people murders—the O. J. Simpson thing, the Menendez brothers, the Manson family killings. Poor kids feared slow-driving cars with their windows rolled down. Rich kids feared hippies and disgruntled relatives.
Vera, Sean, and Penny were standing silently, listening, waiting for the terrier on the other side of the gate to find the meatball they’d laced with diazepam and go off to nighty nights.
“What’s to stop this guy from leaping out and mowing us all down right now?” Ashton asked, glancing into the street. He was imagining every shadow as a tall man with a big rifle. “One gun spray and that’s it. We’re all done for.”
“He’s not like that,” Vera said. “He messed around with Benzo. He was going to mess around with you b
efore you slipped out of his grasp. He wants to take his time. He’ll watch us tonight and creep up on one of us when we’re alone.”
“Well, that’s just awesome,” Ashton said. “My parents flew out to New York this morning. I’m alone tonight.”
“Aww.” Sean smirked under his mask. “You can come curl up on the end of my bed like the little pussy that you are, if you like. I’ll get you a blankie and a bowl of milk to keep the boogeyman away.”
“Go get a room at the Ritz.” Penny was tucking her hair under her mask. “They have great smoked salmon at breakfast.”
Vera pushed open the gate at the back of the house. The crew followed her through a lush garden, past the little terrier lying unconscious on its side on the terra-cotta tiles. Vera took out her lock-picking kit, knelt, and worked the doorknob. Ashton bet she had been picking locks since before she could walk. He’d known Vera since grade school, and she was that kind of kid—interested in doing anything that put her where she wasn’t meant to be. In the empty staffroom between classes. In the out-of-bounds area under the school bleachers. In the classroom after the bell had sounded and all the teachers had gone. Even if there was nothing to do there, nothing to see, she hated being shut out. If it was gated, roped off, signposted, locked, bolted, or chained, Vera wanted in.
They opened the door and shuffled inside. Ashton’s eyes adjusted to the darkness after a moment. He smelled dog and wondered how the scruffy little thing they’d passed in the dimly lit yard could infest the house with such an odor. Then he saw the rack bolted to the wall beside him. The hooks holding four leashes. One small, thin pink one.
And three heavy chain-link ones.
Ashton saw the dogs over Sean’s shoulder. Three enormous figures emerged in the hallway before them, sharp ears pricked and luminescent eyes locked on the intruding teenagers.
Chapter 64
When the weight-lifting dudes’ front door opened, the first thing I saw was a giant red logo on the wall. A flexed biceps, veiny and bulging, the word BRUH underneath. The armpit of the flexed arm in the logo was strangely hairy. The long-haired, beefy dude who opened the door recognized me from the rooftop weight-lifting showdown. I saw a quick grimace pass his lips—wounded pride. He seemed as surprised to see me as I was to see the long table of computers set up in the dining room behind him, monitors everywhere, wires running all over the floor. His fellow muscle-bound friends were all staring at me.
“You’re a tech company?” I said.
“Yeah.” The beefcake glanced back at his friends, then at the logo. “What? You think just because we lift that means we’re idiots?”
“I lift.” I shrugged. “I lift better than you.”
“That’s what you think.” He puffed up. “That wasn’t my best performance on the rooftop this morning. I’m recovering from bursitis.”
“What’s Bruh?” I asked, gesturing to the logo.
“It’s an app. Tracks your protein intake, lifting schedule. Stuff like that. You can order supplements and share your progress with other bruhs.” He spotted a troupe of girls going into my father’s house behind me. “Party at your place, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You and your bruhs are invited. But you have to bring something with you.”
Baby was pouring cocktails in the kitchen when I arrived back at the house with my crew of meaty tech heads. I led them through the crowd without stopping to speak with her, pushing aside kids to make way for the steel poles they were carrying. A bunch of kids on the stairs using a deodorant can as a flame thrower to amuse the crowd stopped what they were doing to follow us up to the roof, where the bruhs dropped the poles and left to get some more.
There were about a hundred young people standing around the pool, no one with so much as a toe in the water. I stood and felt sad for them, for the simple fact that being the first one to jump in the water on a sweltering night like this was social suicide to these kids. The weight-lifting coders from next door had brought the painter’s scaffolding from the side of their house up the stairs and to the edge of the pool and erected it within twenty minutes. Baby appeared beside me, her eyes bleary from drink. She inhaled deeply from her vape pen, and I resisted flicking it out of her mouth.
“You said ten minutes,” she said.
“You can’t get good help these days,” I replied.
One of the dudes had climbed to the very top of the scaffold, tested its sturdiness by rocking it back and forth. He gave me the thumbs-up and climbed down. Even with her head swimming with booze, Baby soon caught on to what I was doing.
“You wouldn’t,” she sneered.
“Hold my drink.” I grinned.
Chapter 65
Height is relative. Twenty feet experienced while standing above thick landing pads, safety-harnessed under the watchful eye of professionals, feels exactly like what it is: twenty feet. The same twenty feet experienced from the top of rickety scaffolding being buffeted by sea breezes, standing above concrete and water and the watchful gaze of a hundred drunk teenagers, feels like one hundred feet or more.
I climbed the scaffolding with difficulty, my legs trembling, mentally erasing the stupid gesture I was performing one step at a time even as I performed it. I envisioned myself climbing down. Smiling gingerly and apologizing as the bruhs disassembled the scaffolding. Melting into the crowd in embarrassment as I had at a thousand social gatherings before—senior prom, the Watkins county fair ball, a singles dance I had ventured into once. The farther up the scaffold I climbed, the deeper my regret stretched, until there I was: at the top.
The view was spectacular. The gold, glittering coast stretched to the left and right of me, sparkling arms reaching out into the black sea, Malibu to the right, Palos Verdes to the left, the city over my shoulder, dancing towers of stars. The pool below blazed neon-blue with underwater lights, and as I stood there, I realized the crowd around the pool had just about tripled. Kids were rushing into the house to gather their friends. People were standing on the walls around the rooftop, squeezed into the doorway and hall, whooping and cheering at the edges of the pool, leaning back so they wouldn’t be forced into the water by the press of people.
It seemed like every single kid in attendance got out their phone and started filming all at once. Three hundred bright white lights. Even with the wind in my ears, I could hear individual jeers and insults.
“You won’t do it!”
“Come on, fatty! Get down!”
“Chicken! Chicken! Chicken!”
“Thar she blows!”
I looked down and saw that Baby had folded her arms triumphantly, her head cocked, listening to the chants all around her. I took my hand off the rail and stepped to the edge of the scaffolding, my toes hanging over the gaping nothingness. I pressed my palms together like an Olympic diver.
Chapter 66
A scramble, a crash. Vera, Sean, and Ashton backed up hard, crushing Penny, the last into the house, against the closed door. The deadbolt had clicked into place automatically, and it stuck slightly as Ashton grabbed at it over Penny’s head. He heard a scatter of paws on tiles and gave up on the back door. He whirled around, followed the shadows before him into a room off the hall. The door slammed shut, and immediately there came the sound of huge paws scratching at it, wet, snapping barks coming through the wood loud and clear.
“Oh, fuck! Oh, fuck! Oh, fuck!”
“What the—”
“Turn on the light! Find a light!”
Ashton backed into a table. Sean found a light switch, revealing a spacious office, leather wing-back chairs, and a U-shaped desk. Ashton caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the big window to the street, the black skull mask hiding his tensed jaw and bulging eyes.
They looked absurd in the reflection. Four kids playing dress-up games. Ninjas in black clothing, Sean and Penny with shiny new claw hammers and Vera with her lock-picking kit still in hand. Ashton’s weapon of choice this time was a wooden baseball bat. He looked at it, gripped in his
gloved fist. Even if he went out swinging like Max Muncy, he couldn’t take down three huge German shepherds before one of them tore his throat out.
All at once the dogs fell silent.
A female voice called out from the hall. “Who’s in there?”
“Nobody speak.” Vera’s whisper was hard, urgent. Ashton was glad he couldn’t see her face. If she was as scared as he was, they were all dead. They needed their leader to be an unshakable pillar of certainty. But as he waited for Vera to give them a course of action, she simply didn’t. She stood there, frozen, her arm stiff when he grabbed it.
“Tell us what to do! What the fuck do we do? We’re trapped!”
“Shut up.” She pushed him off.
“Who’s in there? Answer me!” the voice called from beyond the door.
Ashton heard a sound that made his throat constrict and his stomach lurch. A loud double crunch, metal grinding on metal.
Sean recognized the sound as well.
2 Sisters Detective Agency Page 15
