She nodded, and they ran through the back doors of the kiosk.
Chapter 117
They were not the only living things in the water park. Ashton heard things moving in the dark as they made their way, as silently as possible, along the walkway between a bumper car enclosure and a pile of broken café furniture. Animals. He imagined desert foxes scurrying out of the shadows, rats sniffing along walls, rattlesnakes unfurling on the stones.
Baby climbed through a shattered fence, and they ran through a kiddie pool almost entirely overgrown with razor-sharp desert plants.
Ahead of them, the gentle curves of a roller coaster rose from behind a pool ringed by giant concrete elephants, coils of dried paint falling from their shoulders like flayed skin.
“Listen.” Ashton dragged Baby to a stop. “They’re going to search for us building to building. We have to think smart. Go somewhere unexpected.”
He pointed up at the roller coaster. A single train, three cars long, was stuck on the tracks twenty feet from the ground, probably dragged back up the line by hooligans hanging out in the park at night. Baby nodded. They turned and ran.
“Hey!”
From the battered, graffitied remains of a hot dog hut, a figure cloaked in a blanket emerged in the moonlight.
“You little assholes, keep it down!”
“Shhh!” Baby waved desperately at the vagrant. “Go back insi—”
The night erupted with white light. Ashton hadn’t realized there were members of Vegas’s crew so close behind them. The homeless man in the blanket bucked and twisted as the bullets tore through him, his body falling in a heap. Another figure, a woman, emerged from the hut and was also shot down, her squeal high and wild, animalistic.
Ashton grabbed Baby’s wrist to hold her back as she instinctively leaped forward to help the victims.
“Come on! Come on!”
A scent of fire was on the breeze. Vegas and his guys were going to smoke them out. Ashton and Baby rounded a corner and were confronted by the sight of an ancient carousel set alight, flames climbing up candy-cane poles to consume grinning dolphins, sharks, and mermaids. Beyond the carousel, another hot dog stand was just catching fire.
They raced along a line of palm trees, climbing onto the roller-coaster platform. Ashton hesitated before he put his foot on the track, inexplicably worried it would be electrified even though the controls on the driver’s desk at the side of the track were almost completely covered in weeds.
“We’ll climb up there.” He pointed up the steep rise, toward a row of carriages stuck on the track. “They’ll never look for us up there.”
He put a hand out and found Baby frozen, her hands protecting her neck.
“I can’t do it.”
“Yes, you can! Come on! We’ve got to go!”
“They’re going to light the whole place up.” Baby stammered, “Look. Look. There’s fire on the other side. They’re going to trap us!” Her shirt clung to her body with sweat, her stomach sucking in and out as she struggled to breathe. “We don’t have a gun. We don’t have anything!”
“Baby, I’ve got you.” Ashton climbed up off the tracks and onto the platform. He had his arms open to hold her when the bullets cut him down.
Chapter 118
The first shot hit Ashton in the lower back. Baby watched him arch backward sharply, his eyes wide and mouth gaping. The second bullet seemed to shove him forward, slamming into his shoulder from behind. He fell into her, and they went down on the rotting, peeling wood. Baby held him, expecting the next shots to take her, for it all to end in a single, fire-red burst of pain as a bullet cleaved its way into her skull.
But it didn’t.
The gunfire kept coming, but it was from behind her now.
Baby saw Officer Summerly step up onto the platform, taking cover behind the driver’s control desk as he shot at the cartel guy who’d appeared at the other end of the platform. Baby squeezed her eyes shut against the white light popping at the corners of her vision. Ashton didn’t seem to be breathing. She told herself she needed to let go of him, but her fingers wouldn’t unlock from around his arms and shoulders.
She came to herself eventually, forcing her legs to move. Baby dragged Ashton down off the platform, onto the ancient detritus in the dirt: cigarette butts, a lost ball cap, flattened scraps of paper cups. While more gunshots zinged over their heads, she shook the boy, held Ashton’s face, and yelled at him to wake up and stick to what they had set out to do in the darkness. That it couldn’t end this way. Not like this.
She pressed her fingers into his neck.
He was gone.
Baby was aware of movement. Two cartel guys were trying to advance toward Summerly. Silence then drifted out over the roller-coaster platform, and Baby lifted her head in time to see the police officer pursuing Gunmouth into the dark.
Another of the cartel guys lay flopped on the stairs up to the roller coaster, his mouth open and leaking blood, the height restriction sign hanging above him on a rusty chain, swinging and pocked with bullet holes.
The sound of footsteps made Baby turn and look over her shoulder. Martin Vegas stepped onto the tracks twenty feet behind her. His footfalls were soft, measured, the casual stroll of someone completely assured of his situation. Yet they seemed to shake the entire structure.
Vegas had a long silver revolver in his hand, hanging by his thigh.
“It doesn’t have to go this way, you know,” he called out to Baby. “I’m always on the lookout for girls like you.”
Baby couldn’t say anything. Her skin prickled.
“You’ve got that look,” Vegas said. “It’s very marketable. A personal asset you’re not making use of. Young. Fresh. Put a California girl like you in a Mercedes convertible, maybe a surfer dude in the passenger seat, and I can move mountains. You’d get a cut of everything we make.”
“Fuck you,” Baby snarled.
“This isn’t clever,” Vegas said, chiding. “Look at your situation. It’s win-lose. If you choose to lose, you don’t get to play again.”
He drew the hammer back on the revolver. Baby refused to look at the weapon. It didn’t matter how big the gun was, how sickening the sound was of the cylinder turning and aligning the bullet with the barrel. If she was going to die, it would be between the two of them in those very last seconds. Baby watched Vegas drawing them out, savoring them, the way he had probably dozens of times before.
It was this indulgence that cost him his life.
Chapter 119
I’d scaled the structure behind the roller-coaster platform as quietly as possible in the darkness, but with every inch I advanced, I was sure Baby or Vegas was going to hear me. The rotting wooden beams and struts creaked, crumbling and groaning under my weight. As I hauled myself up onto the tracks, I felt the whole wooden frame rock back and forth in its fittings thirty feet below. If the scaffolding I’d leaped from at the Manhattan Beach house had been terrifyingly rickety, the old roller coaster was about as sturdy as a kid’s cardboard construction. I swung a leg over into the first car of the roller-coaster train and tumbled in, throwing my weight forward. Nothing happened. I saw below me, in the moonlight streaming through holes in the station roof, Vegas aiming a gun at Baby.
I could only hope Baby would get out of the way in time. I leaned back, threw myself forward again, felt the carriage’s rusty wheels grind on the track. Another shove and something snapped.
The train screamed down the tracks. My stomach lurched. I gripped the silver lap bar and yowled as the looming figure of Martin Vegas twisted around, spotting me soaring toward him in the car without time to leap out of the way.
A heavy, thundering crunch and Vegas disappeared under the coaster wheels, shoving the car upward and to the side, throwing me onto the platform with enough force to tear the skin from my forearms and rip holes in the knees of my jeans.
I rolled and crawled to the edge of the platform. I didn’t look back at the twisted body of the gangst
er for long. A shattered arm poking out from under the car, gravely still, was all I needed to confirm that Martin Vegas was at least too broken to do any more harm to us.
The car had stopped an inch or two from where Baby was cowering over the body of Ashton Willisee. I reached down, and with difficulty, she let go of her friend and let me haul her up.
We held each other, two sisters bloodied and bruised and shaking. In the distance, beyond the crumbling frame of a burning pool house, I saw Dave Summerly and Dr. Tuddy coming together, the big cop embracing the thin scientist with smiling relief now that the fight had ended.
Chapter 120
As she had done the night before, Vera crept into her house in Brentwood and walked past her mother’s bedroom. There was no telltale white light shining under the door this time. Her mother was in the first-floor living room being questioned by police officers.
Vera had come home to find the house surrounded. The police had been waiting in the shadows beneath trees, leaning and looking through the cracks in curtains in her neighbors’ houses, waiting for Vera to return. Stupid. If they knew anything about her father, they’d have known that having a discreet way of entering and exiting the family home was the first priority of any Russian gangster worth his—or her—salt.
Vera had slipped onto her neighbor’s property, unlatched the gate that led under the decking of his aboveground pool, and walked in a crouch through the crawl space, past the pool filter, and into the space under the decking of her own home’s pool. From there she had accessed the basement through a hidden panel and quietly climbed the stairs to the first floor. Vera had caught her father entering and exiting the house this way maybe a dozen times, either when the police were looking to question him or when he’d been out too late with his men and didn’t want to answer her mother’s questions.
She went to her bedroom, opened the closet, and brought down an empty backpack. It was a little unnerving not to have a plan. She liked plans. Liked to have direction, rules, a goal. Vera didn’t know what her life would be like by the time the sun rose. All she knew was that her day had been filled with killing, and she’d never felt more exhilarated than she did now, packing her passport, wallet, and gun into the bag. She wanted more days like this one.
Vera went to the desk and unlocked the bottom drawer, where she kept her trinkets from the Midnight Crew games. The photograph of Mr. Newcombe on the ski trip with his boyfriend. Neina Kanular’s ponytail. Jacob Kanular’s watch. She took Jacob’s watch and put it in her bag. She wanted to remember the old killer. The one who had set her free. The rest didn’t mean anything anymore.
Vera went to the hall, looked down over the banister at the officers standing in the kitchen doorway drinking coffee. One of them was using her father’s favorite mug. Vera thought about taking her gun out, shooting him where he stood. It was an easy shot. But now was the time to be smart and slip away into the dark.
She’d be back, when the time was right.
Chapter 121
I dressed for my father’s funeral in an Opeth T-shirt with a peacock on the front, worn over jeans with a nice blazer. Baby’s partygoer friends had left me little to choose from, and I hadn’t had time to hunt down formal clothing options in a city full of people a third of my size. Baby descended the stairs in a little black dress that was so short it made me choke on my coffee, but I decided it wasn’t the day to come down on her about her fashion choices.
She looked older. It had been only days since Ashton was shot dead right in front of her, a shock to her system that came only moments before she also witnessed the gruesome death of Martin Vegas. For a kid who had lost so much already, the week had stripped away her innocence and left her at times with a faraway look, the kind a person gets when they realize how easy it is to come face-to-face with death.
We hadn’t talked much since the night at the water park, let alone about whether her future lay in Colorado or Manhattan Beach. She snapped her little handbag closed and checked herself in the hall mirror, eyeing the makeup she’d layered on over a deep gash carved high on her cheekbone.
I had passed her bedroom a couple of times a night and peeked in, saw her lying on her side scrolling the same news sites I was scrolling in my own bed. The world was just beginning to learn what Ashton and his friends had been up to in their spare time, and videos of their activities were surfacing on the dark web. The hunt for Vera was continuing without success, and a hidden room in Jacob Kanular’s house, revealed during a search, was leading investigators down a long, dark path to discover just how many times the mysterious father had gone on the hunt before.
The doorbell rang.
“That’ll be our ride,” I said.
Short of any functioning vehicle, I had hired a pricey black limo to take us to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, but I had the driver leave us just outside the wrought-iron entrance gates. When Baby stepped out of the limo beside me, she stopped dead at the sight before her. Six shiny black stallions stood harnessed to a gleaming black carriage, its top-hatted driver waving at us from the front bench seat. My father’s coffin was visible in the back of the carriage through glass panels rimmed in gold filigree, surrounded by lush red roses. Baby and I climbed up into the front of the carriage to sit on either side of the driver.
“Where the hell did you get this?” Baby blurted.
“Warner Bros. is doing another Dracula reboot,” I said.
As Baby and I stood by the grave, we looked around us. I’d invited a short list of people from my father’s address book to the funeral, but somehow the word had spread. Among the neighbors and legitimate business associates were others with whom he’d clearly had more illegitimate dealings: tattooed bikers huddled under a tree, wraparound sunglasses glinting in the morning light, a small sub-gathering of chained pit bulls panting at their feet; sly-looking mafioso types in pinstriped suits; guys in sports jackets with suspicious bulges at their hips and ankles; and a smattering of what were clearly undercover cops there to eavesdrop on any criminal whisperings. A few women, maybe girlfriends or mistresses, cried loudly and elbowed each other for space close to the grave, throwing nasty looks at one another. And some other women, perhaps even more private than these, stood off in the distance, pretending to visit the graves of other people.
A few of these attendees—gangsters, hit men, loan sharks, or whatever the hell they were—gave Baby their condolences as the priest readied himself for the service, some pushing thick envelopes of cash into her hands, which she secreted into her handbag. I pretended not to notice. When the priest began speaking, I leaned in to Baby.
“I know about the kiss,” I whispered.
“What?” She wheeled on me. “Are you kidding me?”
“No, I’m not.”
“You’re telling me this now?”
“When the hell was I supposed to tell you?” I said. “When Martin Vegas was shoving a gun in your face? When you were in your room crying about Ashton? Over cupcakes at the wake while we try to decide which one of these guys the undercover cops are after?”
“I don’t know,” Baby said. “How about three weeks from now, when I’ve had a chance to get over this.” She gestured at our father’s grave.
“I’m telling you now because I think it’ll help you get over this,” I said. I looked at the grave before us. “What happened between you and that teacher was just a silly mistake made by a confused kid.”
“I can’t believe this,” Baby muttered, folding her arms.
“I’m trying to tell you that those times, when you’re feeling confused and alone and you do stupid things, are going to keep coming. And while Dad’s not here to help you through them anymore”—I pointed at our father’s coffin—“I am.”
Baby looked at the people around us. She sighed, but it was unreadable to me. It could have been exhaustion or solace—I didn’t know.
“Look,” I began, “I know I annoy the crap out of you—”
“You don’t annoy me, Rhonda,” sh
e said. “You’re cool.”
“I’m cool?” I laughed. “Me? Of all people?”
“Sometimes.” She smirked. “You’re kind of exciting and weird. That’s cool.”
“Well, how’s this for cool?” I said. “I quit my job this morning.”
“You what?” Baby gasped. People turned to look at us. The priest kept speaking, oblivious.
“We’re staying here,” I said. “I’ll take the bar exam and any other tests to get licensed in California. Try to get some local defense gigs, I guess. I don’t know. I’ll work it out. But the truth is, cleaning up after Dad is going to be hard. I’ve got to shut down his office. Make sure there are no more little criminal surprises hiding under the floorboards. We’ll probably have to fend off legal action against the house. The police will want to know if it was acquired with drug money.”
“Sounds hard,” she said.
“Too hard to do from Colorado.” I nodded.
She sighed again. This time I could hear the relief in it.
Chapter 122
There were indeed more criminal secrets hidden in my father’s office. Beneath the stacks of paperwork, boxes, and takeaway containers, I found what looked very much like a human thigh bone, a half-constructed ransom letter made from cut-out pieces of magazines, and a golf club spattered with blood. It took me three weeks to get the office tidy enough for a person to walk around in it without tripping over a crate of files, a concealed weapon, or the remains of a burrito rotting in aluminum foil. Baby spent most of this time lying on the couch playing with her phone or napping.
I was scrubbing ancient coffee stains and water marks from the surface of the bare desk when a man in a suit knocked on the half-open door. His hair was slicked back neatly, and he wore a leather shoulder bag across his chest. Baby looked up for long enough to calculate the types of things that interested her about men—whether the bag went with the suit, whether his stubble was deliberate, whether his eyes were the right shade of sapphire blue—and then she went back to her phone.
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