The girl bucked and twisted underneath her, the gagging, jerking dance of the unconscious body deprived of air. The girl’s eyes flew open. Vera held on. She’d imagined killing someone this way a few times before. This kind of death would be perfect for her mother. A slow, drowning, intimate death. Vera felt her whole body come alive with pleasure.
A slamming door cut the euphoric feeling short. Two nurses burst in, their squeals of surprise and horror making Vera retract her hands from the girl’s throat as though her skin was hot. She leaned over and fumbled in the handbag she had thrown on the table beside the bed while Beaty coughed and spluttered. Vera grabbed her gun and fired twice, hitting a nurse with each bullet. They lay still on the ground.
Outside the door, chaos was growing. People had heard the gunshots and were shouting out, trying to get a sense of what had happened in the room, too afraid to come look. They knew, of course. The distinct sound of a gun in a crowded public building meant only one thing in the modern United States. Vera heard running footsteps, alarms beginning to sound. But as she focused back on strangling the invalid girl, all she was really listening to was the sound of Beaty’s final gasps for air as the life drained out of her underneath Vera’s hands.
And then he was there. Jacob came into the room silently and quickly, striking so fast that his movement was a blur at the corner of Vera’s vision. He wrapped an arm around her neck, dragged her backward, and threw her against the wall. The gun clattered onto the floor between the two dead nurses. Vera righted herself and locked eyes with the man in the dimly lit room.
Chapter 98
The two teenagers ran through the streets. Above them, tall, thin palm trees looked like dark prison bars against the orange sunset sky.
They didn’t talk. Baby tried to turn down an alleyway, but Ashton grabbed her hand and pulled her in a different direction; after that, there seemed no reason to let go of her fingers. They were warm in his, and he needed something to hold on to.
Baby eventually took her hand back when they stopped on a street corner to lean against a fence, huffing with effort. The sweat on her forehead shone like a mist of diamonds.
“We need a plan,” Baby said. “You’ve got an assassin after you. I’ve got the police and a cartel on my tail.”
“I can’t believe this is happening.” Ashton tried to suck in air, but his chest was tight. “It was never meant to be like this. I’m not this person.”
“You can have a mental breakdown about it later.” Baby held a hand up. “Right now, we’ve got to get off the streets.”
“Can you call Rhonda?” Ashton asked. “She knew what to do. She can tell us what to do.”
“The police would have taken her phone, probably,” Baby said. “It’s just us now.”
Ashton shivered. The words hit him hard. It’s just us now. At least it meant Baby was going to stick with him. He hardly knew her, couldn’t trust her, but she was all he had. They were two kids on the run, and he’d never felt more like a kid: confused, angry, on the verge of tears, so completely out of his depth. Ashton knew how stories like these ended. They ended on lonely highways with the car littered with police bullets or they ended with the kids in jail for the rest of their lives.
“But Rhonda—”
“She can’t help us,” Baby snapped. “Her big plan was to go to Colorado and hide. She was right about one thing. We need to get out of the city.” The girl wheeled around on Ashton. “You’re rich. You’ve got money. We go to a bank and you get as much cash out as possible. We go to an airport and hire a pilot to take us to, like, Bermuda or something. Maybe a private jet. Have you got a private jet?”
“No,” Ashton said. “And I’m not as rich as you think. My parents are rich. I’ve got access to a couple of thousand bucks or so of pocket money, but that’s it.”
“What? Are you kidding me?”
“I overspent a while back.” Ashton could feel his neck and jaw becoming hot. “They put me on lockdown. I get two thou a week spending money. That’s it.”
Baby chewed her lip, shook her head in disgust. Her thoughts seemed to be racing.
“I might know where we can get three million bucks,” she said. “That should keep us safe for a while.”
“Jesus,” Ashton said. “You think? We could buy a boutique hotel to hole up in. Maybe a passable yacht.”
“Getting the cash will be dangerous, though,” Baby said, his attempt at humor shot down with a single glance. She grabbed his hand again, and Ashton felt his stomach plunge. “Come on,” she said. “This way.”
Chapter 99
“Goddamnit.” Summerly yanked the wheel again. We had been driving along in stony silence when his phone rang. He’d listened to the call and then thrown the phone onto the dash of the car. “Baby got away.”
“What?” I sat up. “Got away how? Where is she?”
“I don’t know.” Summerly flicked the sirens on. “They were putting her in the car at the gas station when some kid came up and got in the middle of everything. The two ran off together.”
“Ashton,” I said.
“Who?”
“Never mind. She’s gone. She’s out there alone. We’ve got to go back and find her.”
“I’m trying.” Summerly leaned on the horn as drivers ahead of him panicked and tried to get out of his way in various different directions, blocking the lanes even further.
I could only sit back and burn with frustration, wondering what Baby’s plan was. I guessed she would be afraid and angry at me for abandoning her, even though the arrest wasn’t my fault. Maybe she would split off from Ashton, or she would take him along, but in either case, she wouldn’t let the older boy be in charge of keeping them safe—she didn’t trust him, didn’t trust anyone, and would be thinking quickly about the best route to safety. Yes, that’s what she would do. I didn’t know Baby completely, but I thought I knew how she would act under duress.
I felt confident that she would go back to the house for the drug cartel money. There’d been a sharpness in her eyes at the gas station when she realized that I’d given her a clue to the whereabouts of the cash.
So you did hide it in the house, she’d said.
Baby and possibly Ashton would almost certainly head to the house. Vegas and his guys were probably heading there too, now that he knew I was under arrest and out of the picture.
I opened my mouth, almost told Summerly that I was near certain Baby would be heading back to Manhattan Beach. But like my young sister, my trust had been ground down to nothing. If I sent the police back to the house, I risked surrounding Baby with cops just as she left the premises with a bag full of cash and possibly the cartel drugs, since I’d stuffed the meth into the duffel too. It was a situation even I couldn’t see myself arguing her out of.
Maybe the best thing I could do at this point would be to help Baby get in and out of the house quickly, before Vegas and his guys turned up. The longer Baby and Ashton searched for the money, the longer they would be in danger. I had to tell them where to find it.
I worked my phone out of my back pocket and tried to visualize the screen, but there was no telling if I had been successful in swiping it open. I took a moment to lament the days when phones had actual buttons that beeped when pressed. I tossed my phone onto the seat beside me and stared helplessly at it. In the front of the car, Summerly’s phone rang again and he reached for it and answered.
“What? Where? How many?”
He was distracted. I shuffled sideways and lay down on the seat, my mouth to the phone.
“Hey, Siri,” I murmured.
“Yes?” the robotic female voice answered.
“Text Baby.”
“What do you want to say?”
“Under vanity.”
“Your text says, ‘Under vanity.’ Would you like to send it?”
“Oh, my God,” Summerly said from the front seat. He gave a hard sigh as he swung the wheel again, cutting through traffic and off an exit ramp.
/> “Where are we going?” I asked.
“Change of plans,” he said. “I’ve been called elsewhere. Baby’s gonna have to wait. There’s an active shooter on the loose.”
Chapter 100
The blond girl, Vera, launched herself at Jacob. She hit him in the stomach with her shoulder but didn’t even knock the wind out of him.
Jacob twisted and threw her against the other wall of the little room, smashing down a little shelf of books and a whiteboard covered with magnets, paper, and pens. They scrambled together against the wall, knocking a vase of flowers off the bedside table and onto the floor.
Vera screamed with rage and pain as Jacob picked her up again and threw her into the hallway. He took a moment to roll his shoulders, flex his triceps. He was going to take his time, enjoy this. For Beaty. For Neina.
Vera scrambled away up the hall, her hand bleeding, leaving little wet prints. Jacob walked up, tried to straddle her, but she whipped around and slashed at his leg with something thin and sharp, a piece of glass from the broken vase. He bent and punched at her face, missed, hit the floor, felt her sharp nails gouge across the side of his head and into his eye. She moved fast and had good aim, the natural instincts of a predator.
Jacob gathered himself, grabbed Vera’s wrist, and bashed it against the linoleum until the shard of glass came free. She wriggled out of his grip and got up, ran around a corner and down a short hall, scattering terrified hospital staff and visitors. Jacob followed. He drew his gun and blasted three times into a door, one bullet hitting an inch from her shoulder as she barged through.
An old man in a thin paper gown came out of his room, eyed Jacob, and retreated into the darkness again, flashing his sagging underwear as he went.
Jacob pushed through the doors and found himself in a huge operating theater. On the operating table a man lay unconscious, his chest spread open and innards exposed under white lights. The surgical staff cowered as Vera snatched a scalpel off the abandoned tray table. She brandished the scalpel in one hand and beckoned Jacob with the other.
Chapter 101
“What’s ‘vanity’?” Baby asked. She stood in the kitchen of the Manhattan Beach house, the cupboards all around her emptied of pots and pans, plates and glasses, all of it now mixed with the party debris on the floor and countertops, a sea of mess. Ashton was in the hall nearby, going through a cabinet of silverware and dumping the drawers’ contents on the floor.
“It’s, like, your self-esteem, I guess? If you’re vain, you think you’re cool.”
“‘Under vanity,’” Baby said, looking at her phone.
“What?”
“I got this text from Rhonda that just says, ‘Under vanity.’ It’s probably autocorrect. Unless she’s trying to tell me that I’m too full of myself? But it’s not really the time for—”
Ashton’s eyes widened. “The bathrooms. Come on!”
The teens ran to the stairs. Halfway up, they heard the front door burst open. Baby shoved Ashton down, and the two huddled, listening. Slowly, they crept back down a couple of steps and peered around the banister at what they could see of the foyer.
A single boot appeared. Blue ostrich skin with a skull-shaped cap on the toe. Martin Vegas dropped the twisted and bent handle of the front door on the tiles at his feet.
“Go.” Baby pushed at Ashton to head upstairs. “Go, go, go.”
Chapter 102
The parking lot of the hospital was in chaos. Summerly’s sedan nosed its way in between the vehicles of medical staff and hospital visitors trying to flee the scene. A woman running with an IV pole rolling along beside her was almost knocked down by a man in an orderly’s uniform who had jumped the curb with his green four-wheel drive. I could see other patients and civilians standing at windows inside the hospital, watching the activity in the parking lot, their hands pressed against the glass.
Summerly’s phone had continued to ring as he drove, but he left it wailing alone on the seat beside him. The radio crackled with updates, which he now and then responded to.
“Unit Five at the scene. We’re getting reports on the identities of the shooters,” a voice on the radio said. “Two suspects. One male, fifties. Female, late teens. The guy has been identified as Jacob Kanular. He’s a local. Family man. Has a kid in critical care. Over.”
“This is Summerly. Who’s the girl? Over.”
“A witness recognized her as one Vera Petrov.”
“Oh, my God,” I said. “He found her.”
“You say something?” Summerly put his radio down and looked at me.
“I know the girl,” I said. “Vera. Well, I mean, I don’t know her. But I’m pretty sure I know why that guy, Kanular, is after her.”
“You know why they’re shooting at people?” Summerly asked.
“They’re not after random people,” I said. “Kanular is after Vera.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Witnesses are saying they’re both shooters,” Summerly said. “People inside the hospital have told officers on the scene that the girl killed two nurses.”
I shook my head. Terror and dread washed over me.
“I don’t get it.” Summerly slammed on the brakes and put the car into park. A woman ran past us with a tiny baby in her arms. “How do you know the shooters, Rhonda? What’s your link to all this?”
“Never mind,” I said. “I don’t have time to explain. Uncuff me, and let’s get inside.”
“You’re not going anywhere.” Summerly pulled his gun from a shoulder holster. A couple of officers running through the lot used the car as a shield for a second, bracing themselves to make a run for the hospital’s automatic doors. I saw their hot breath on the glass only inches from my face.
“Dave, you’ve got to let me out,” I said. “At least uncuff me!”
“You’re not a cop, Rhonda. Stay in the car.”
Summerly got out and ran toward the hospital. I growled with frustration, turned and kicked the window of the car out. I knew there was a spare handcuff key in the glove box of every squad car in Colorado, just in case there was a traffic accident and an officer was ever hauled away with their key before a suspect could be freed from the back seat. I hoped LAPD detectives had the same rules. I struggled forward and kicked as hard as I could at the inside of the door.
Chapter 103
Jacob ran at Vera. He batted the scalpel away, took a deep cut across the palm of his hand in doing it, but the pain didn’t register. He was in killer mode. His body was shutting down all unnecessary senses, focused only on survival, on neutralizing the threat.
Vera couldn’t beat him physically, but she was doing a good job outsmarting him. The second he had knocked the scalpel from her hand, her wrist seized in his big fingers, Vera’s other hand was coming at his face with some kind of steel hook, another instrument she had snatched from the floor as he’d dragged her along. He slammed her into the steel cupboards, felt the thunk of the hook as she embedded it deep in his shoulder. She scrambled out of his bloody hands like a wet cat, impossibly strong and nimble, slipping out into the hall again.
He followed her, drawing his gun from the waistband of his jeans where he had tucked it as he entered the operating theater. The desire to use his hands on Vera had been too strong to ignore.
A chair swung out of nowhere into his field of vision. He lifted an arm and blocked it. The attacker was not Vera. Some civilian hero in a pink shirt hoping to save the day. Jacob almost laughed. If there was one thing he knew, it was that a man who tried to separate two fighting dogs was going to get bitten. He reached out, grabbed the guy by his salmon-colored lapel, and landed a punch in his stomach that folded him in half like a deck chair. A plastic ID tag and pen clattered onto the floor as Jacob dropped the guy in the doorway. The badge crunched under Jacob’s boot as he walked on. Some kind of medical consultant, he guessed. A surgeon maybe. It didn’t matter. Everybody went down if you hit them hard enough. Jacob turned and shot the guy in the ankle to keep him down.
Screams came from behind a door marked as a nurses’ lounge. Jacob went inside and found Vera there, clutching a plump woman in scrubs around the throat, the teenager’s small arm a pale noose by which the older woman hung. Vera pushed a cutlery fork against the woman’s neck, jutting her chin at Jacob defiantly as she backed her hostage away.
“Think about it,” Vera said. “Stop and think about it. You won’t kill an innocent woman just to get to me.”
“Don’t be so sure, little girl,” Jacob said. He shot a trembling orderly in the chest. Vera dropped her hostage, staggering back as Jacob surged forward to fire again. The bullet entered Vera in the arm, sending her flying back. Jacob might have grabbed the girl then, but a pair of male nurses who had been huddling behind a table made a run for it, cutting between them, giving Vera the seconds she needed to shoulder her way through the lounge’s other door, back into the hallway.
Chapter 104
Ashton and Baby slipped into the guest bathroom on the third floor and shut the door as quietly as they could. The space was larger than most regular bedrooms but seemed impossibly small, their heavy breathing echoing off the ceiling. Ashton caught a glimpse of his face in the huge mirror. His cheeks were drained of blood, the whites of his eyes stark. Baby’s shaking hands fluttered over the sink, almost knocking over a bottle of perfume, which she grabbed just as it slipped over the edge of the counter.
“Under vanity,” she breathed, ripping open the doors under the sink. “This thing is called a vanity. But it’s not here. It’s not here. I don’t see anything.”
“How many bathrooms does your place have?”
“Six. But this is the room Rhonda has been sleeping in.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s the vanity she was talking about.”
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