Baby laughed. He loved the sound of it, low and smoky, a cool girl’s laugh. He remembered that laugh from school. Back when everything was uncomplicated, pure, wonderful. Being with Baby was taking him back to happier times.
“What are we gonna do now?” Baby said.
A silence descended on them. Ashton gathered up some money, felt it in his fingers, began stacking the bills back together. He pulled one of the packages of meth out of the bag and turned it over in his hands, tossed it onto the back seat.
“The smart thing for us to do is to find Rhonda,” Baby said. “Ask her where to go. We use some of the money to keep ourselves safe for now. We dump this car. Buy a new one. Hole up in a hotel. We buy some phones to call her and wait for her to come get us. She comes, helps us negotiate your surrender, and then packs me up to live with her and her cats forever in some loser town in Loserville.”
Baby eased out a long, slow sigh. Ashton kept stacking up the cash.
“That’s the smart thing to do,” he agreed.
They drove in silence for a while.
“I don’t feel like being smart right now, though,” Baby said eventually.
“Neither do I.”
“This might be, like, my last night of freedom,” she said. “And yours literally.”
“Yeah, like, literally.”
“I don’t feel like going to Colorado.” Baby looked at him. “And I’m sure you don’t feel like going to jail for the next twenty years.”
They smiled at each other.
“Vegas?” Baby asked. Ashton threw the money into the air again.
“Vegas, Baby!” He laughed.
Baby floored it. The engine thrummed. They didn’t look in the rearview mirror again.
Chapter 112
Dave Summerly found me at his car, dialing and redialing Baby, my hands sweaty and my heart racing.
“The Bruhs just called me,” I said without looking up.
“Who?”
“The Bruhs!” I snapped. There was still blood on my fingers. Vera Petrov’s blood maybe, or Jacob Kanular’s. Both of them were killers—I’d seen Vera kill Jacob, and she’d shot two nurses, shot a police officer; Jacob had surely taken the lives of Derek Benstein, Sean and Penny Hanley, and possibly three or four innocent civilians inside the hospital. I wiped off my phone screen with the edge of my T-shirt, beginning to panic.
“I don’t know what you’re say—”
“My neighbors at the Manhattan Beach house, Dave,” I said, trying to regulate my breathing. “They said they heard gunshots inside and saw Baby and Ashton flee in my dad’s Maserati. They’re on the run out there somewhere, and they probably have three million dollars on them.”
“They what?” Summerly stepped back, shook his head. “She knew where the money was?”
“I told her.”
“Jesus, Rhonda!”
“I knew she’d go for the money. When she escaped your officers at the gas station, I thought she’d go home and collect it, and I was right. It’s a good thing I told her where the money was or she would have been caught trying to find it by the cartel guys.”
“You just knew she’d do that?” Summerly asked.
“She’s my sister,” I said. I realized as I said the words that the battle between whether I would see myself as Baby’s mother or sister had been won, for now. Maybe I would always swing between the two roles, but at that moment I was thinking and feeling like her sibling, like her ally and friend and coconspirator. It was Baby and me against the world now. We needed to be on the same team. “We’ve got to find her.”
“Well, if you think you’ve got this sister-sister ESP thing going on with her, you figure out where she is now, and we’ll try to snatch her up before the cartel does,” he said.
“Don’t you have to try to catch Vera Petrov?”
“The pursuit has been taken off my hands.” His shrug was labored. “I’ve been stood down, for now. Seems I let a civilian lawyer into the danger zone around an active shooter and she got an inch and a half away from having her head blown off.”
“Oh, Dave. I’m sorry.”
“Doesn’t matter.” He gripped my shoulder. “You almost had her, Rhonda. I saw it in her eyes. She thought about coming with you. If we ever had a chance of connecting with Petrov, that was the moment. I think you did good, and I’ll defend my decision to let you help.”
I leaned into him a little. His hand ran along the back of my arm, a small, swift gesture that reminded me of our bodies twisting, his breath on my ear, my foot running up his calf.
“I’m coming with you,” he said. “We’re gonna find these kids. Where do two reckless kids with nothing to lose go with three million bucks and a Maserati?”
Baby’s voice traveled back to me from a couple of days earlier, the first time she had asked about the location of the money.
You think I’m going to take it all, drive to Vegas, and have a wild time?
Dave seemed to know what I was thinking.
“Rhonda, they wouldn’t,” he said.
“Don’t bet on it,” I said. “Ashton thinks he’s going to jail for the rest of his life, and Baby thinks I’m going to abduct her and lock her in my cattery of social doom.”
“Your what?”
“Never mind.”
Night had fallen. I looked helplessly at the lamps as they sprang to life all over the parking lot, shuddering on in the reflections on the windshields of cars, making the plastic crime-scene tape shine like tinsel. I thought of Baby driving through the night with the cartel behind her. If they were clever, Martin Vegas and his guys would let Baby and Ashton get a little ahead of them. Hang back, so the kids would think they’d gotten away. Vegas and his boys would wait for the teens to relax, before pouncing on them when the opportunity arose.
I saw it as the obvious strategy, but I was older, wiser, and savvier than the kids. I knew Baby and Ashton would probably fall for it, meaning that every second ticking by as I stood there was sending my sister farther and farther away from me, and closer and closer to danger.
“How do we catch them?” I said. “They have a huge head start.”
“I might know a way,” Summerly said.
Chapter 113
At night, from three thousand feet above the desert beyond Victorville, the I-15 from Los Angeles to Las Vegas looked like the ocean. There were long stretches of nothingness, bare roads, then here and there clusters of gold lights floated in the blackness like little meetings of fishermen. Streams of slow-traveling red dots wound gently through the desert basin, the taillights of people leaving the coast for the city of cards and dice.
In the sixties, the mob used the desert outside Vegas as a dumping ground for whacked guys, and serial killers used it to pick up hitchhikers heading from the Midwest to be singers and actresses in LA. Desert highways always made me think of lonely ghosts, and tonight I was hoping my sister wouldn’t become one of them.
Summerly hunched over his phone in the seat in front of me as he connected it to a cable in his headset, punching in a call before he’d secured the unit over his ears again. “I need CHP keeping an eye on 15 near Barstow, at the turnoff for route 127, and at the state border, just before Primm,” he yelled as the helicopter blades thumped outside our windows. Then, once his headset was in place, he continued in a quieter tone. “Yes, that’s what I said. No, you don’t need his approval. You’ve got mine. I wasn’t stood down, I was…I’ve just been reassigned. Just set it up! It’s two kids in a black Maserati!”
My headset clicked as Dr. Tuddy was patched through from his seat next to the helicopter’s pilot. I saw his shaggy brown hair shift as he tilted his head back toward me.
“Beautiful night for an air pursuit!” he said, his voice barely audible through the headset.
“You’re so good to loan us your chopper!” I said.
“This is one of many toys I bought with the patent money,” he said. I saw his shoulders rise and fall as he sighed. “It’s not th
e best of my collection. I also have a Bell 47G from 1946. It still runs! I’d have suggested we take that one, but there’s no way it would cope with our collective weight.”
“There’s also no way I’m getting into a seventy-five-year-old helicopter!” I yelled. “Are you nuts?”
Dave ended his call and sat back.
“Vera’s gone,” he said. I reached out and put my hand on his knee. I had the cold, awful feeling deep in the pit of my stomach that we would hear from her again. She was not a nimble and crafty fox, darting into the night to hunt chickens another day, a nuisance that would be dealt with the next time it appeared. She was a rampaging tiger going to ground in the jungle, a creature who wouldn’t and couldn’t stay hidden for long. I had the feeling that Vera had gotten a taste for blood, and wherever she ended up next, people would start to disappear.
“We weren’t dealing with a kid there,” Summerly said, as though he could read my thoughts. “She wasn’t a child making a mistake. She was a killer with training wheels.”
“And now they’re off,” I agreed.
He nodded.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have—”
“You couldn’t have known, Rhonda.” He waved a hand. “You did your best, and that was pretty amazing, even if it didn’t work out.”
He reached into his pocket and took out a handkerchief. I wasn’t crying but took it anyway. Only when I looked down did I realize it was for the blood still on my hands, on my face.
“They said Jacob Kanular had a kid inside the hospital?” I asked.
Summerly nodded. “They’re saying his ten-year-old daughter came in after a severe asthma attack. She’s been in a coma. A unit went to the house a couple of hours ago and found her mom dead. Knife wounds.”
“If that poor little girl wakes up, they’re going to have to tell her that both her parents are dead,” I said.
“She’s awake,” Summerly said. He was scrolling through his phone. “She’s on her way to another hospital. I’ve got a report here that says she’s cooperating with police as best she can.”
I looked out the window. Summerly reached over and rubbed my knee.
“You can’t save them all, Rhonda,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “I know. But I like to try when I can. It feels good. It feels like I’m helping some version of me when I was that age. In some stupid way it’s almost like if I help enough of them, I’ll get back there, through time, to myself. I’ll be able to undo all the pain.”
“That’s a nice thought.” He smiled at me. But I didn’t have the strength to return it. Baby and Ashton were down there somewhere in the dark, and our hopes of finding them seemed to be ticking away with every turn of the rotors above our heads. The land below was a mess of scattered lights, as unreachable as distant stars.
“How the hell are we going to find them?” I asked helplessly.
Chapter 114
Baby took her right hand off the wheel and reached out to grab Ashton’s arm, shaking him awake. All the terror and pain had left him weak to the temptations of sleep. The hypnotic shadows of rocky terrain drifting by had taken him deep into slumber.
“Police,” she said.
“Oh, man.” Ashton sat up, rubbed his eyes. In the distance a cluster of California Highway Patrol vehicles sat on the wide median between the two lanes of the freeway heading in each direction, but all of them were pointed toward their eastbound lanes. The taillights of cars ahead brightened as they slowed on approach.
“Is it a roadblock?”
“Whatever it is, it’s for us. It’s gotta be.”
“I’m getting off the road.” Baby swung the wheel at an exit and made a couple of turns to get her to the opposite side of the interstate, where the CHP wasn’t watching. She doused the headlights and rolled unseen. Abruptly, the front wheels crunched on gravel, began to shudder over rocks.
“This thing wasn’t designed for off-roading, Baby!”
“Hang on.”
They crept through the blackness more slowly, sagebrush shunting under the bumper.
“You’ll blow the tires!”
“Shut up, Ashton!”
“There are ravines out here. Crevasses!”
“Don’t be such a wimp,” Baby yelled. “It’s a crevasse or a jail cell. Which would you prefer?”
In time, Ashton looked back to see a single pair of headlights behind them, blinking out too.
“Oh, shit, it’s them. It’s them. They’re back there. Speed up! Speed up!”
He held her wrist. Together they felt the rocks, shrubs, and broken stumps of Joshua trees crash and thump under the vehicle. Ashton watched the lights of the slowed vehicles on the highway disappear when a huge pair of headlights flicked on only feet behind their vehicle.
Baby screamed. The sound was strangled out by terror as the car behind smashed into their rear bumper, shoving the car sideways. Desert dust coiled and spun in the blinding light.
“Get ready to run!” Baby cried.
Ashton looked ahead. A torn and rotting billboard loomed into view and then collapsed, folding around the car as they plowed through it, bringing the Maserati to a crunching halt.
Ashton barely had time to read the sunbaked lettering:
ROCK-A-HOOLA WATERPARK.
Chapter 115
They crawled from the wreckage. Ashton’s blood was rushing so hard and fast through his veins that new injuries did not register in his mind—a nail scraping along his arm from the billboard frame, a sharp stone slicing the skin from his ankle as he stumbled in the dark, cutting almost to the bone. He grabbed Baby’s hand, and they raced over the cracked and tilted concrete of what had once been a wide, bare walkway between the attractions of the water park. Ashton followed her through the doorway of a crumbling building under a broken neon sign that read TICKETS.
“What is this place?” Ashton breathed.
“It’s an old water park. Abandoned. I used to come out here with some skater boys.”
“You would hang out here?” Ashton scoffed. The darkness inside the building made it impossible to see the room around him, but he could smell its contents clearly: stagnant water, urine, human feces, old beer. He kicked a blanket out from under his feet and crouched behind the counter, holding the rusted frame of what he guessed was an empty fridge. He could just make out the patterns of spray-painted artwork on the walls. “Who hangs out at a haunted water park for kicks?”
“The pools make great skate ramps.” Baby shoved at him. “Keep your head down.”
They waited. Sure enough, in the moonlight, they made out the shapes of four men emerging from behind where the Maserati was nestled in the collapsed billboard. They were walking. Bad men always walk, Ashton thought. They didn’t need to run. The water park was like an island in the middle of the desert. The kids could shelter here, or they could take their chances out there in the darkness where there was no cover, nowhere to hide. All Vegas and his crew had to do was hunt them from building to building until they locked them down.
When a voice drifted toward them from the group of shadows, Baby and Ashton gripped each other in the cool darkness.
“We just want our stuff!”
It was Vegas who had spoken. His deep, honey-smooth voice was as calm as a man calling his children inside from playing in the garden. Ashton almost felt like going to him. He sounded safe. Confident.
“It’s in the car!” Baby yelled.
“Shhh! Are you crazy?”
“The sound will bounce off the buildings,” Baby said. She was right. Vegas’s men shifted at the sound of her words but didn’t turn toward the ticket kiosk. There was a pause, then one of them turned and walked back toward the Maserati.
“They’ll go now,” Baby said. “You watch. They’ll leave us alone. They don’t want to hurt two stupid kids.”
“We’re too much trouble,” Ashton agreed, shuddering with fear. “Not smart. Not worth the effort.”
They waited. The man retu
rned from the car with the duffel bag. In the dim moonlight the cartel men checked the bag, then one of them shouldered it.
Then the men fanned out across the park.
Chapter 116
Ashton could see his death clearly. He’d seen it in flashes as he lay in the back of the van when he was abducted, his wrists bound and the lights of the highway rolling over his helpless body. He’d seen his parents standing over a stainless-steel morgue table, clutching each other, trying to identify his twisted and broken remains.
Ashton had seen a dead body once. He’d pressed against the glass as their limo drove slowly by a car wreck on the way to his dad’s surprise fiftieth birthday at the Fairmont. All he’d glimpsed was a shattered knee poking out from the back seat area, but Ashton knew the person was dead from the leisurely pace of the emergency responders pulling tarps from their truck to cover the scene. He’d thought at the time how weird it was that people were just bodies in the end. Flesh and bones.
He was going to die out here in the desert. If they found him at all, he was going to be scraped up, packaged, and tossed away. When he was gone, there would be reports of his involvement in the Midnight Crew. They would sit uncomfortably next to photographs of him on the Stanford-West Academy lacrosse team and the honor roll. Eventually it would all prove so unpalatable that his family and friends would stop talking about him altogether, and that would be it. He would exist as a family myth shared by distant cousins about their relative who was murdered by members of a drug cartel.
“We can’t let this happen,” Ashton relayed to Baby, crouched shivering beside him. “It can’t all end like this.”
Whatever Baby’s death dream was, whatever her vision was of what she’d leave behind if Vegas and his boys killed them, Ashton’s words seemed to give her strength.
2 Sisters Detective Agency Page 24
