“That was a shotgun,” Sean said. His voice steadily rose in pitch. “She just pumped a fucking shotgun. There are three attack dogs and a chick with a shotgun out there, Vera! What do we—”
“I’m calling the police!” the voice said.
“You don’t want to do that!” Vera shouted back.
“We’re dead.” Penny was at the window, looking down over the drop to the concrete below. “We’re all dead. We’re all dead. We’re all dead.”
Sean grabbed Vera’s shoulder. “Vera, we—”
“I’m thinking!” Vera ripped Sean’s hand off her, bending it backward so that his fingers cracked as the boy howled. “Get your filthy fucking hands off me!”
Ashton looked at the walls, the shelves by the door, searching in his insane panic for an escape hidden somewhere, anywhere, even in the books standing in neat rows. The Handbook of Guard Dog Training. Canine Behavior for the High-Stress Environment. The Other End of the Leash. He saw nothing that made him feel any better.
“I’m dialing now!” the voice called. “You assholes move a muscle and I’ll fire through the door!”
“Put the phone down, lady!” Vera shouted. She was fishing in her pocket. As Ashton watched, she took out a small gold lighter and held it up to the door, flipped it open and ground the wheel.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
She ignored him. “You hear that, bitch?” Vera asked, flicking the lighter open and shut. “You hear that?”
Ashton, Sean, and Penny stood back as Vera went to the drapes, held the lighter to the bottom of one.
“Vera!” Penny cried.
“I’m lighting this place up!” Vera called. “You smell the smoke yet? I’m lighting the curtains! I’m lighting the papers on the desk!”
“You’re going to kill us!” Sean said.
“Listen, woman!” Vera went to the door, put her ear to it. Yellow flame was creeping up the curtain, rippling slowly across the surface of the desk. “You better think about your priorities. You leave us in here and the room will burn. By the time the cops and the fire department get here, you’ll have four dead kids on your hands. You want to try to explain that? Smart thing to do is call off the dogs, let us go now, and try to save your house before everything you own is toast and your ass is in jail. Up to you.”
Silence. The only sound was the crackling of the growing flames, the occasional whimpering of one of the dogs behind the door. Ashton watched black smoke coiling against the ceiling. Penny started coughing.
“It’s getting hot in here!” Vera called, gripping the door handle.
The door opened. Ashton felt relief rush over him. Until he saw Vera reaching for the gun hidden in the waistband of her jeans.
Chapter 67
I jumped.
Freeze-frame.
Time locked into place.
The wind rushed, warm and loud, past my ears. The impossibly bright blue surface of the pool soared up at me. For a long time it felt like I hung in midair, falling and yet not falling, a floating balloon suspended just above the unbroken surface of the water. A sound came up from the crowd, the sharp intake of three hundred gasps. My arms and legs were flung out and my eyes were bulging as I descended.
Later, I would see footage of the fall. Kids can do all kinds of things with videos on their phones these days. Like a great, round star, I descended in slow motion over the pool, floated down frame by frame, my belly rippling, my thighs jiggling, my pudgy fingers gripping at nothing, struggling for purchase. My stomach hit the surface of the water first, sent an undulating wave out in a perfect circle from the center of the pool. Then the rest of me hit. Asteroid slamming into Earth. Water balloon hitting concrete. The pool spewed water in return, walls surging ten feet high, directly upward, a display reminiscent of the Fountains of Bellagio in Las Vegas. The water sucked toward me and then rose and bellowed outward, soaking the first three rows of people completely and everyone behind them to the waist. The giant wave rolled out over the rooftop and flooded through the door to the house and down the stairs. I was swallowed whole beneath the surface of the pool.
Under the water, I heard nothing, saw nothing. When I righted and broke the surface, my ear canals cleared, but there was no sound. I stood and wiped the water from my eyes, looking around. The silence seemed to hang. Then three hundred kids all raised their arms and let out the greatest, loudest cheer I had ever heard.
Fifty kids jumped into the pool with me in one united motion. There was no consensus. No starting gun. They all just dropped their phones and jumped. Kids were all around me suddenly, whooping and splashing and trying to lift me. More kids piled into the pool as the seconds passed. The rooftop was flooded again. Screaming and laughing and cheering filled the air.
I was an instant hero. My plan had worked. Like a thousand youth icons before me, I’d made a spectacular, dangerous, and stupid gesture, and in response the teenage mob had accepted me as their queen.
There was only one figure outside the pool who was standing still. Who was not grinning. Who was not shouting praise at me. That figure was Baby, and in the chaos and noise she soon disappeared.
Chapter 68
Vera threw open the door. She knew she had lost touch with reality, and that disconnecting in this way was a good thing. Disassociating. It would help her make decisions faster, go into a fully instinctual mode to protect herself. She had already decided as she stood there in the room slowly being consumed by fire that it was fine if Ashton, Sean, and Penny didn’t get out of this mess alive. She cared about only herself. It was time to fight, then flee.
She pivoted, stepping into the hall and bringing the gun up in one smooth motion. The lights were on. The space seemed smaller now than it had in the darkness. A tall woman stood there in a robe with a pump-action shotgun held with the barrel pointing upward. Vera fired twice. Aimed low. Hit the woman in the stomach. A self-defense strategy, if she needed it later. I panicked. I closed my eyes and fired.
She blasted the dogs without really aiming. Vera didn’t really like dogs, but she respected them. They were loyal. Predictable. Dependable. She hit one in the leg, and the others bolted, startled by the white light and the noise of her gun and the sound of their owner hitting the floor. The smell of blood. Vera ran for the back door, twisted the deadbolt, and yanked it open, running out into the cold night air before the woman with the bullets in her guts even realized what had happened to her.
When Vera turned and looked over her shoulder from two blocks away, she saw three masked figures behind her. Her crew had escaped. That was a plus, she supposed. Less cleanup. When they all stopped in the dark outside some mansion, she realized that Sean, Penny, and Ashton were huffing like they’d run a marathon. Her own pulse had hardly risen at all.
“Well,” she said. “That was unexpected.”
“What was unexpected?” Sean’s voice was low, dangerous. “The three attack dogs? The shotgun? Or the four of us now suddenly facing murder charges?”
“Attempted murder at best.” Vera snorted. “She’ll be fine. I hit her in the stomach. Maybe she’ll have to wear a bag for the rest of her life, but there’s no need to get all dramatic.”
Vera could smell smoke on the wind. In the distance, sirens wailed. She pulled off her mask and folded it, tucked it into her pocket, and slipped the gun back into her waistband.
“You’re weirdly quiet,” she said to Ashton. “I’ve been standing here bracing myself for your classic moaning and whimpering. Have at it.”
“I have nothing to say,” the boy said.
Vera waited, but he didn’t continue. She looked at them all, felt the tide turning against her in their silence. She was the only one unmasked, and they were standing there, hiding their contempt behind plastic and cloth. Typical. All mutineers are cowards, she thought.
“Listen,” she said. “If you guys think—”
Her words were cut off by a sound, a sharp pop on the sidewalk at their feet. Sparks. They all looked. Another pop and Pen
ny collapsed like a folding chair.
“Oh, God,” she wailed. “I’ve been shot! Help me, I’ve been—”
Vera didn’t stay to hear the rest. She threw herself behind a car as more gunshots went off all around them.
Chapter 69
I’d done three laps of the house, trying to find Baby, toured the Strand all the way to Hermosa Beach, my clothes drenched and heavy and my hair plastered to my skull. When my phone buzzed, I looked down at it, clutching the device in my fist without a dry pocket to put it in. A Twitter account I hadn’t used in six years was being tagged in a new post. The teens from the party had found me and were linking me to the video of my dive. It was going viral. A tweet attached to the video read:
Bell E Flopp just OWNED a house party at Manhattan Beach! EPIC!
I stood on the beach and looked up and down the stretch of darkness, watching the waves crash, feeling helpless. A couple of girls walking up the beach stopped and pointed at me.
“Yo, there she is!”
“It’s her! It’s Bell!”
I gave an awkward wave, politely refused selfies.
When I finally found Baby, she was sitting on the ramp of a lifeguard tower, vaping as the wind tousled her hair. Her phone was glowing on the ramp beside her. She spotted me and stood.
“Don’t run off again,” I said. “My clothes are wet. I’m getting chafed like you wouldn’t believe.”
“You were right.” She threw her hands up. “You’re queen of the house. Queen of the internet. Queen of the world. You win, Rhonda. Now go away and leave me alone.”
I was glad she was still angry and not crying. Angry meant we could talk, that the responses would be rapid-fire instead of sullen and wading through misery. If I played my cards right, I hoped I could bring her around to my side of the argument without her being embarrassed by her tears. An angry teenage client had always been a lot easier to handle than a sad one. But then nothing about Baby had adhered to the principles of managing teenagers that I had followed since I had been one myself. She was my sister. She shared my blood. And yet she was the one kid on the planet I couldn’t possibly understand.
“I’m not trying to win anything against you, Baby,” I said. “We’re on the same team here.”
“Whatever.”
“‘Whatever,’” I mimicked, sighing.
I watched the waves crashing in, white foam appearing and then dissolving into the blackness.
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere. You can push me and push me and push me, but I’m not going to go away. Dad’s gone out of our lives for good, and I’m here to stay. And those are two realities you have to deal with.”
Baby didn’t respond. She sucked hard on the vape.
“Have you even cried about him dying yet?”
“No,” she said. She turned away, but I saw her lip tremble. “I’d rather cry about you being here.”
I didn’t take offense. Baby wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Have you cried about him dying yet?” she asked.
“I haven’t,” I admitted. “But look, I didn’t know the guy like you did.”
She chewed her nails.
“Losing him is harder for you than it is for me. You didn’t have a proper mom,” I said. “My mom was great. Is great. After Dad left, she married a guy named Tony. Total opposite of Dad. You probably feel like you’re on your own in the world. But you’re not. You’ve got me. I’m not the enemy.”
Baby didn’t respond.
“Do you want a hug?” I asked.
She seemed to consider it. I was betting anger, confusion, and tears were sparkling in her eyes. “I don’t want to hug you. You’re all wet. And I don’t know you. We haven’t even figured out who you’re supposed to be in my life. You’re here trying to be, like, my sister right now. But one minute you’re trying to be cool and then you’re telling me not to listen to the Hanley twins about my age. It’s like you don’t know if you’re my friend or, like, my boss.”
“It’s going to be fine, Baby. All of it. When we get back to Colorado, you—”
“When I what?” Her head whipped around to look at me. “Colorado?”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “We’ll have to go back there. You can’t stay here by yourself, and I have a job. I have a condo. I have friends, and—”
“I have a job! I have friends!” Baby yowled. Her eyes were huge. “Don’t they matter at all?”
“They do,” I reasoned. “But I mean, you’re young. You’ll make new friends. Your life is not as—”
“Not as important as yours.” She nodded.
“No, that’s not—”
“I’m not going to Colorado,” Baby said. “If you try to take me there, I’ll run away and you’ll never find me.”
A punch of terror directly to my chest. Baby had already run off on me twice. I knew her threat was real.
“Hey, hey, Bell!” someone called. I turned and saw two gangly boys with long black hair jogging across the beach toward us, their silhouettes almost alien in their angularity against the lights of the house.
“Are you Bell E Flopp?”
“I guess so,” I said. “No selfies, guys.”
“Some dudes are going through your stuff back at the house,” one of the kids said.
“It’s okay. Everybody’s going through my stuff.” I sighed. “Everything important is tucked away. Don’t worry.”
“No, we mean, like, badass guys.” The boy nearest me swept his hair behind his ears and out of the wind. “Like gangsters. They’re old. Like, forty maybe? And they’re really looking for something. They’re breaking stuff and throwing things around. They pushed some girl down the stairs.”
“Have they got flowers on their shirts?” I asked.
“Yeah. And real bad tattoos.” The boy nodded.
Baby and I looked at each other. For once, we were instantly on the same team. She rose, and we ran toward the house.
Chapter 70
Penny, Sean, and Ashton were crouched behind one car with Vera behind another. Bullets skittered off the curb and the sandstone wall nearby. Vera figured the shooter had to be in the trees on a nearby hillside.
“We’re gonna die here,” Sean said. Penny was moaning beside him.
Vera thought about running, leaving the three of them for the gunman. It was a strategic move. He would likely try to keep the others pinned, keep the bigger target in hand rather than pursue her. But she couldn’t be sure of that. Was it time to be loyal to her crew or risk going out on her own? She held her breath, crouched, and sprang forward, leaping the gap between the two cars to join the rest of the Midnight Crew. Sparks flew as a volley of shots popped into the bumpers of the cars beside her.
“Penny, you need to shut up,” Vera said. “You sound like a dying cat.” She took out her phone and turned on its flashlight, examined her friend’s ankle.
“It’s shrapnel,” Vera concluded.
“I’ve been shot,” Penny whined. “He shot me. He shot me!”
“I said, it’s shrapnel,” Vera said. “Stop losing your fucking mind.”
“How would you know that? Are you a fucking gun expert?” Sean asked.
“I know because her foot is still attached,” Vera growled. “He’s not shooting at us with a BB gun.”
The crew was silent. Vera needed to rally them. There were times for abandoning the flock and times for using them as cover. Safety in numbers. She swallowed hard, forced herself to soften her tone.
“I’ve seen a gunshot wound before,” Vera said. “My dad brought a guy home once who took a hit in a robbery. They had a deadbeat doctor treat him in our garage. That wound was from a 9mm gun. Whatever he’s shooting at us with, it’s bigger than that.”
“What the hell are we gonna do here?” Sean asked. “If we break cover, he’s going to kill us.”
“If he wanted us dead, we’d be dead,” Vera said. “He’s playing with us. He just wants to watch us squirm. In a couple of minut
es emergency services are going to be swarming all over this place, and we’ll be trapped here like sitting ducks.”
“I can’t go to jail.” Sean ripped his mask off, gripped his hair in both hands. “I’ll kill myself before they put me in there.”
“You’re all being so dramatic.” Vera laughed suddenly. She looked at Ashton, but he was still worryingly silent. Vera didn’t like that. She knew he was planning something. He was too stupid to think and talk at the same time. Maybe the boy would run off on his own, abandon them all. It would be the first smart thing he did in years. She couldn’t let him do that. She needed to make a gesture. Show them she was still in control.
Vera slowly rose. Then, with more confidence, she stepped out into the street between the cars. She could hear Penny screaming in protest. Sean begging her to come back. But the only sound that was important was the pocking of bullets at her feet. Each time a bullet hit, she tried not to flinch. Not to glance down at the sparks hitting the asphalt. The window of the car behind her blew out, the bullet missing her shoulder by mere inches. Vera knew he could hit her if he wanted to, but she wasn’t going to play his game. She lifted up her arms, her pistol in one hand, and smiled broadly in the light of the streetlamps in the direction where she guessed the shooter was hiding.
“Let’s go, motherfucker!” she roared. “I’m right here!”
Lights came on in a house behind her. Then at the house next to that. The sirens in the distance had grown much louder. Smoke was flooding the streets, smudging the streetlamps. She heard voices shouting. A bullet hit the car beside her. Sean shouted out in terror. Vera bit her tongue to stifle a surprised sound as the pistol in her hand was ripped from her fingers by a passing bullet, the shot clanging hard against the muzzle, sending shock waves up her arm and into her shoulder.
“I’m coming for you!” she called.
Lights came on in the house next to where she had guessed the killer was hiding. The firing stopped. Vera smiled triumphantly as dogs barked and people stirred in the properties nearby.
2 Sisters Detective Agency Page 16
