by CJ Birch
Her sigh was loud enough Neil heard it through the radio. “I promise.”
“No Rambo shit.”
“When have I ever?” There was another long pause. He knew she’d do what she needed to do, and that’s what scared him. “You worry too much. Keep me posted if you see her.”
He had a right to worry. But he didn’t say that. All he said was, “Will do. Neil out.”
He checked in with the staties on loan before changing his position to another vantage point. It was going to be a long night.
* * *
Elle crouched behind a tree. It wasn’t comfortable, but then she hadn’t expected that when she decided to stake out Jennifer’s bike. She’d had Kate return it to where she’d found it earlier in the week.
With the crowd swarming around the sheriff’s office, they had very little chance of spotting Jennifer sneaking in to grab the money from the safe. But Kate had assured her there was no way Jennifer would leave this bike behind. It was loved beyond measure. Kate said there must be over a hundred grand in custom parts. So that’s how Elle found herself hidden in the brush trying to avoid poison ivy at dusk on Independence Day.
She didn’t have much to go on for murder, but stealing a hundred grand from the sheriff’s office was a class one felony and carried a max of fifteen years in prison. And who was to say she couldn’t find evidence to add two murder charges to that.
The approaching storm electrified the air. Her anticipation was thick.
* * *
Jennifer stood on the outskirts of the crowd. She was less than fifteen feet from her goal. The window in the back of the sheriff’s office was always left open. At least it had been every time she’d scoped it out. All she needed was to hoist herself up and squeeze through the small opening. Easy for someone her size. With the festival going, they’d locked up the sheriff’s office, and everyone was either enjoying themselves or working the crowd.
Usually if she was breaking in, she’d wear something dark and simple, but in this crowd, black would stand out, so she’d opted for jeans and a blue tank top. If anyone noticed her, it would look like she was there for the festivities.
She had her Beretta Nano concealed in an ankle holster just in case the place wasn’t as empty as it appeared. Elle had to have discovered that her key was missing by now. She couldn’t be sure how much Elle knew, but in her line of work, it was always better to err on the side of worst case scenario. She was alive because she never underestimated anyone, especially a small-town sheriff. Even if Elle looked like she should be sitting behind a desk in the Loop, it didn’t mean Jennifer should treat her like that. She was so close to finally getting out of this fucking town. She wasn’t going to let impatience screw it all up.
She watched as a man wearing baggy jeans and a tight Confederate flag shirt stretched across his beer belly stumble past. He was holding a tallboy in one hand and a half-eaten corn dog in the other. Every time he tried to take a bite of his corn dog, he missed his mouth. There were gobs of mustard smeared around his lips. Jennifer backed up as he passed. It was now or never.
She kept an eye out for anyone watching, but everyone was too busy shoving their faces with pie to notice. When she reached the back of the building, she met with a dense stretch of trees. She didn’t know why this surprised her. Elle was right. You could throw a stone in any direction and hit forest.
In the cooler shadows, the mosquitos began to swarm. Whatever Elle had given her the other night hadn’t worked for shit. They still found her skin tantalizing. She trudged to the back window, swatting at any exposed skin. The sooner she was out of there, the better. She groaned when she saw the window. From the inside, it had looked bigger.
“Fuck me.”
As she stood there, looking up at the window, weighing her options, she couldn’t think of a worse way to spend Independence Day. She’d had some shitstorms, that’s for sure. There was the year Bobby invited her out to his yacht party on Lake Michigan and she’d spent the night hiding in one of the heads because some asshole had torn the strap on her dress. Four hours in a space the size of a postage stamp. Or there was the year she’d been coerced into road-tripping with her girlfriend at the time. Stuck in a car with a woman who felt showering ruined the fun of a road trip was not Jennifer’s idea of a vacation. Give her a hot shower and room service. Instead, she’d gotten a cold lake and burned hot dogs on a stick. She’d broken up with her the second they got back.
Breaking into a sheriff’s office to steal a hundred grand, while exciting, wasn’t the excitement Jennifer needed in her life.
Jennifer was thirty-five. Too old, in her opinion, to be scaling walls. After this job, she was planning a much-needed retirement. Bobby had promised her a 10 percent cut of what she recovered, plus her fee. And he didn’t even know about the extra twenty-five thousand sitting in that safe. Her take on this would be considerable. She’d also managed to sock away a good nest egg for herself over the years. She planned to take that and get the hell out of the country. The farther the better.
She’d met Bobby at a poker game when she was in college. It was one of those underground high-stakes games where the blinds were a month’s rent. He was playing. She was waitressing. One of the regulars had tried to stick his hand up her skirt and she’d broken two of his fingers. Years later, Bobby told her the only reason she’d made it out of there alive that night was because he’d been losing to the guy she’d maimed. If he’d been winning, she’d have ended up in Lake Michigan.
That was Bobby. One day you were in his favor, the next you could be dead. That night, before he’d left, he handed her a business card and told her to call him. At the time, there were only rumors about Bobby Sedona, and they were all dangerous. But she needed to pay rent. The second her parents found out she’d flunked her first term, they’d yank her out of there and she’d be back in Evanston, Illinois. And there was no way in hell she was going home again. The city was everything the suburbs wasn’t. Exciting, compact, dangerous, packed with people who looked different, talked different, smelled different. She wanted to be a part of that, and the only way to do that was to make her own way. Bobby was that way. She wasn’t naïve enough to believe that it wouldn’t have its problems. Jennifer always made sure she stayed in Bobby’s favor. Always. It didn’t matter what had to go down to make that happen. There was no failure when it came to Bobby.
Through the years she’d worked her way up. She started running errands for him. Little things. Things a personal assistant would do, like getting him takeout from his favorite deli, or dropping off his dry cleaning. When he felt he could trust her, he pulled her in deeper. She began deliveries. She worked with a guy named Frisky. He’d do the driving, she’d to the actual delivery. She assumed it was drugs. Sometimes the packages were significant. Frisky said they weren’t supposed to know what they were delivering, but they both knew it wasn’t legal.
When Bobby found out Jennifer was in her high school’s clay target league he wanted to see how good she was. Turned out she was very good. He took her and a couple friends out on his yacht and they sat around drinking while watching Jennifer shoot down clay pigeons over the lake.
It wasn’t long before he had her doing small jobs. Just scare tactics. They were all pretty easy compared to some of the things he’d asked her to do over the years. But by far, this had been the hardest job. Usually, when you do a job you get to leave. You don’t stick around to watch the aftermath. It had been unsettling.
Another reason to get out now, while she still had a sliver of a soul left. Forrester hadn’t been a big deal. She’d dealt with guys like him for years. If you were stupid enough to fuck Bobby Sedona’s wife, then you got what was coming to you. Even the bookie had been an acceptable risk. But that kid in the cruiser was bad luck.
She’d never had to watch what her work caused. Seeing Elle after that had almost convinced her to leave before it got any worse. She’d always considered Jason the screwup in the family, the way he could
never hold down a job, keep a place. But seeing how close she’d come to screwing up herself, she’d realized the only difference between her and Jason was that she knew to quit when she was ahead. And that was exactly what she planned to do as soon as this job was over.
The buildings and trees muted the noise from the festival. She could actually hear herself think back here, although the soundtrack had changed to whizzing mosquitos. Jennifer slapped her arm. When she pulled her hand away there was a big glob of blood. Her blood. She didn’t take another second to think about it, she began to climb. There was a ledge halfway up that helped get her most of the way, but the window was one of those ones that opened outward, which made it harder once she actually made it up.
It was dark inside. Only every third light was on, giving the place a faded, unused look. With the old computer on the back desk and the shit-brown carpet, it almost looked like she’d time warped back to the early nineties.
Jennifer reached in and adjusted the lever to open the window as far as it would go. She grabbed onto the ledge above and maneuvered her feet through the opening. Before dropping in, she pulled the balaclava she’d brought with her down over her face. She hadn’t seen any cameras, and it was unlikely they could afford such a luxury, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She landed softly on the faded carpet and crouched down, waiting. Nothing stirred. She circled the desks, keeping low in case someone peeked through the front.
When she reached Elle’s office, it was locked. She pulled out her little leather case of picks. She selected her torsion wrench and a pick and went to work. It took all of one minute to break in.
The safe was a different matter. If she didn’t have the key and the combination she would’ve been shit out of luck. As it was, some helpful person had printed the combination on the key.
As soon as she opened the door, a whiff of Elle’s perfume smacked her in the face and she stopped. She looked around in case Elle had decided to stake out her own office. But there was no one there. Everything was the same as the last time she was there. A desk piled with stacks of files, a radio charger, and a phone. There was a shelf stuffed with books and an old love seat that had seen better days decades ago.
She approached the safe, still apprehensive of how easy it had been to get in. There had to be a catch somewhere, but she couldn’t see it. Maybe they had a spare key and had already taken the money out. It wasn’t the first time she’d thought of this.
But when she opened the safe and unlocked the large box, she was a little surprised to see the money sitting in an evidence bag. She lifted it out and examined it for dye packs or any other booby traps but couldn’t see anything. She shoved it in her bag and retraced her steps. It didn’t pay to stick around after you’d committed a crime. She could worry about how easy it’d been when she was back on the road heading toward Chicago with Bobby’s money.
* * *
Elle’s feet were going numb. She’d been crouched in the same position for over an hour. The sun had set a little over thirty minutes ago. Only the faintest hint of orange lit the west. The east was filled with brooding clouds that obscured the stars.
Her radio crackled and she nearly jumped a foot.
“Elle, come in.”
“I’m here. You see her?”
“No, I haven’t seen her yet, but I thought you’d want to know I saw EJ heading after the Baker kid. You want me to follow them?”
“No. Stay where you are. I need you at the festival. Shit. I told him to stay away from Dan. He never listens to a word I say. As soon as I get my hands on that little shit, I’m going to ground him for life.” She looked over the field. There was no movement. What if she’d been wrong and Jennifer wasn’t after the money? What if she wasn’t the killer, even, and she’d built this case on nothing? It was possible she’d lost the key earlier.
“He probably thinks he’s helping somehow.”
“He’s going to get himself hurt is what.” It only took a second for her to decide what to do. “Which direction were they heading?”
“Elle, you’re not going after him, are you?”
“I have to. Dan may not have killed, but that doesn’t mean he’s not capable of it. I’m convinced he’s the one who mutilated Jessie’s body. Which direction?”
“The Maverty house.”
“Thanks, Neil.”
“Be careful. And message me the second you get there.”
“I will.” Elle clipped her radio and ran to the bike. Kate had managed to cut a new key for the bike by removing the ignition lock and filling a blank. She’d given Elle the key in case the person she was staking out never showed up. Elle hadn’t ridden in years and only ever dirt bikes, but there wasn’t much difference between the two. With her cruiser parked over a mile away she’d never get to it in time. Plus, this way she could cut across the field and take a shortcut.
She straddled the bike, checked the shifter was in neutral, squeezed the clutch, and pushed start. The engine roared to life. There was a good chance this decision would mean she didn’t catch Jennifer, but she couldn’t live with herself if anything happened to EJ. Not when she had a chance to stop it. Maybe if her bike was missing, Jennifer would stick around long enough for them to pick her up.
As she tore off into the night, she didn’t see the silent figure standing at the edge of the clearing, hidden by a copse of trees.
Chapter Thirty
EJ found Dan stomping through the living room of the Maverty house swearing something fierce. EJ pulled back behind the wall. He’d seen Dan like this before, so angry he’d destroy everything in his path. The last time he’d seen him like this, he’d been whaling on Randy. This was not a Dan he wanted to confront.
He turned to sneak out the same way he’d come—the kitchen window—when he stumbled on a crumpled beer can. He may as well have rung the doorbell.
“Who’s there?” Dan shouted.
“It’s just me, man. Elle let me go this afternoon.” EJ poked his head out of the kitchen entryway. “What’re you so angry for?” He shoved his hands deep into his pocket, trying to appear casual. Inside, warning bells were going off.
“It’s nothing. I had some pot stashed. Now it’s gone. Why’d she let you go?” He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. There was an uncaged energy about him, like a tiger prowling.
“Holy shit.” EJ noticed the hole in the living room floor. “What the hell happened?”
“Don’t know. It was here when I got here. There’s a whole room down there. You didn’t know about it?”
“No way.” EJ crouched near the edge and peered inside at the cellar below. Moonlight streamed down the stairs leading to the backyard.
“Your sister didn’t tell you about it?”
“If she knew, you think she’d tell me about it?”
Dan nodded like this was a good point. “So what are you doing here?”
“I came looking for you.” EJ wasn’t sure what he’d been planning when he followed Dan out of the square. But if he’d had something to do with Jessie’s murder, well, EJ didn’t think he should get away with it. And what the hell was Elle doing? Just letting him go? “You said you were getting out of town and I want to come with you.”
Dan puffed on his cigarette, leaning against the tattered chair in the living room, flicking ashes onto the ground. “Well, I was planning to sell that pot to fund my departure.” He shrugged. “Now that’s gone.”
“How much pot did you have? An ounce wouldn’t even get you to the state line.”
“I had enough, okay?” Dan flicked his cigarette at EJ. It bounced off his shoulder, spilling sparks onto his T-shirt.
“Hey, watch it.” EJ swatted at the sparks. “What were you really here for? I know it wasn’t pot.”
“How do you know? You spying on me? Keeping watch over everything I do?”
“No. But I know there’s only two people to buy pot from in Turlough and both of them fucking hate you. That’s why I always had to do the buying and you know
it.”
“Who says I got it in Turlough?”
“Fuck off, Dan. Stop fucking lying. I know you don’t have any pot and I know you had something to do with Jessie’s murder. And you were going to let them pin it on me, weren’t you? Some fucking friend. Elle was right about you. You don’t give a shit about anyone but yourself.”
“That right? Your sister’s one to talk, isn’t she? Like she gives a shit about you? She locked you up, for fuck’s sake. On what? Nothing. She did it to get you out of her hair so she could screw that reporter who’s been hanging around town.”
EJ went cold. “What are you talking about?”
“I went by your house when you were locked up. That woman’s car was parked outside. At three a.m. Seems a little late to be working don’t you think?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Your sister’s a fucking dyke. You don’t think it’s strange she never dates? She likes pussy, man. Get over it.”
That was more than EJ could stand. It was one thing to talk shit about him, but his sister was off-limits. He lunged at Dan, ready to rip that smug look off his stupid face. But Dan had been ready for this. Hoping for it. He stepped to the side and redirected EJ’s attack toward the banister. His head bounced off the newel post and he collapsed in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, dazed.
Dan grabbed EJ’s collar and hauled him to his feet. “You fight like your sister. Like a little bitch.”
“Fuck off.” EJ swung at Dan’s ribs but was easily swatted away.
Dan pulled him toward the hole in the living room. “Come on. Put up a better fight than this.”
EJ dug his heels into the warped floorboards. He pulled at Dan’s T-shirt, looking for a hold, an anchor of some sort. But Dan had momentum on his side. He shoved EJ toward the hole, and with nothing to grab on to, EJ pinwheeled, falling backward. It was the scariest ten seconds of his life as he slowly fell and landed on the stone floor of the cellar.