Dare You

  She was still.

  I was breathing hard, my hand and ribs and head aching. Detective Martinez, distracted by the sudden silence, paused, giving Jones just enough chance to rear back and smack him a good one. Martinez’s head jerked from the motion and he stumbled backward a few steps.

  Jones and I locked eyes. For a second, I thought I recognized the person behind those eyes. The Jones that I thought I knew. One who would do anything for me. One who would never think of joining Luna. One who would never dream of holding a gun at all, much less against my head. But that Jones was a lie. That Jones was gone.

  Maybe Jones was just like Dru, was just like Dad, was just like Mom. Maybe he was a stranger and a liar, too. Maybe I was so easily played it wasn’t even funny.

  “You can stop this,” I said.

  But he took off before I could say any more, barreling the way Rigo had gone.

  Martinez stumbled a few steps after him, but decided against it, electing instead to stay near me.

  “You okay?” he asked. My muscles twitched. I wheeled around in circles, sure Rigo was poised to slam into me at any moment. “Nik? You okay?”

  I nodded, gulped, tried to catch my breath. “Yeah. Fine. I don’t know if she’s breathing, though.” When I dropped Luna, no crimson had faded into my periphery, but my mind had been a July Fourth finale at the moment, so I might not have noticed even if it did.

  “We’ll worry about her in a second. Get the gun.”

  “I don’t know where it went.”

  “Find it.”

  Still gasping, I followed the general direction where I thought the gun had gone, squinting in the darkness, trying to make out shapes, jumping at every tick and click and scrape along the concrete. Finally, I saw it, a black blob nestled between two boxes. I picked it up and jammed it into the back of my waistband, absolutely hating the feel of the cold metal against my skin.

  There was a noise and both of us jumped, just in time to see Rigo, hurrying along with a length of rope, as he’d been instructed. Detective Martinez lunged for him, knocking into him full force, both of them ending up on the floor, with Martinez on top. The two struggled, but it really wasn’t much of a fight. Rigo wasn’t young and muscular like Jones. Martinez managed to flip him to his stomach. A pair of handcuffs appeared out of nowhere, and Martinez had them tight on Rigo’s wrists before I could even focus on them.

  Sweat was dripping off his forehead and chin in rivers, and it was only after he’d secured Rigo that he finally let out a breath. But only for a second, because next thing I knew, he was dragging Rigo into the living area, so he could see him in the light.

  “Go ahead. Arrest me,” Rigo was saying, his jaw set with defiance. “I’ll get out. And then I’ll be looking for you, cop.”

  “Quiet,” Detective Martinez said, shoving him back down to the ground. “You killed Peyton Hollis, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

  “Fuck off,” he sneered. Sweat lined his forehead, too. He didn’t look like someone you would think to be afraid of. He looked like someone’s kindhearted uncle. Which was sort of what made him scariest of all.

  For a moment, I was transported back to that abandoned parking lot. It was windy and I could hear the rattle of leaves and trash skittering around in the loading dock. This was the face Peyton had last looked at. A face she knew, and probably never thought would hurt her.

  “Peyton trusted you,” I said.

  He made a mock crying face. “Aw, now I feel so bad.” He finished with a glare.

  “How could you? How could you do that to her? Someone you knew. How could Dru?”

  “Pssht. That little fuck couldn’t do nothing. Changed his mind at the last minute, just like the little pussy he was, trying to get in my way, beating the crap out of me and taking my cane. He turned on me without even thinking twice, and he knew as long as he had that cane he had the upper hand. I couldn’t do nothing to him until I got it back from him and got rid of it. Little shit hid it from me. Everything would have been different if I’d killed him instead. Everything. I’m glad Miss Fairchild did the job for me. I put the dent in the princess’s head and she put the hole in the prince. Nice to get a break.”

  I spit on him. It landed on his cheek and slid down. His face grew red and serious.

  “That was my sister,” I said.

  “Work is work and family is family. Lock me up. Won’t be the first time. And won’t be the last. You’ve got nothing but circumstantial evidence. Nothing physical.”

  “The cane,” I said. “Is it in that safe? Your family bought it at an auction.”

  He made a face. “And if you think it wasn’t immediately destroyed, this is going to be even easier than I thought.” He raised his eyebrows, all innocence. “What cane? I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I don’t know what’s in the safe, either. But it ain’t the cane. I know that much.”

  Detective Martinez and I exchanged glances. Not having any physical evidence would pose a challenge, but it didn’t make things impossible, did it? Detective Martinez was a good detective. Respected. If he told his colleagues—if he told Blake—that this was their guy, they would believe him, right?

  Right?

  But how many bridges had he burned to help me? That, I didn’t know. I suspected there might have been many. Would Blake even listen to him anymore? Or would her broken heart get in the way?

  “What’s the combination?” Detective Martinez asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Bullshit,” Detective Martinez said. “I’ll give you another try. But only one more. What’s the combination?”

  Rigo glared hard, his nostrils flared. “I don’t know anything about that safe.”

  The word safe lit up in my mind, just like it always did, in gorgeous cottony peach. Instantly, I thought of Peyton. Her face, looking right into a camera, her cheeks pink, her eyes nervous. Safe. Cottony peach that made me want to curl up inside of it. Safe.

  I think it would be safe to say that we’d be a great combination, she’d said. We probably have all kinds of strange things in common. Like, the last two digits of your locker number and the digits of my birthday month both add up to eleven or something. That kind of stuff that only sisters care about.

  I had thought nothing of it at the time. I hadn’t even bothered to do the math. She was wrong. The last two digits of my locker number—bronze, sea green—were nine and six. Added together, fifteen. And Peyton Hollis’s birthday was such a big damn deal at school, everyone knew it was in October—brown, black—one plus zero. Also not eleven.

  Safe to say . . . great combination.

  Safe. Combination.

  Peyton had so much faith in our synesthesia. Clearly hers had been much nicer and more reliable to her than mine had been to me. Still. She knew she could send me messages—so many messages—and I would be the only one to get them. She’d told me, plain as day, what the combination was.

  “I know it,” I said, rushing toward the safe.

  I knelt in front of it, twisting the lock a few times. My hands were shaking.

  “You don’t know shit,” Rigo was saying from the other side of the room.

  I tried 9-6-15. Nothing. Okay. I took a breath. 1-0-1. Still locked. 9-10-10. God, this was going to take forever. Think, Nikki, think. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, let Rigo’s jeers disappear into the background. She’d said if you added the numbers, you came up with eleven.

  She couldn’t have made it simpler.

  I rotated the knob a few times to clear it and then tried again. 15-1-11.

  The safe unlocked.

  “Holy shit,” Rigo breathed.

  I pulled the door open. Stacks of money tumbled out at me. Inside, bills were crammed to the top and then some. I pulled out a few. Hundred-dollar bills. Every single one of them.

  A fortune.

  A fortune of Hollis money.

  The drugs, the escort service, Dru’s bank statements, the fake receipt book at Tesori Antico. It
was all starting to add up now. The Hollises were taking in a shitload of illegal money and funneling it all through the Basiles’ businesses, which just happened to be Hollis-backed. The Basiles marked up the sales in their books, and then paid Dru for a dummy job to get the money back to the Hollises, keeping a portion for themselves. In return for a hefty paycheck, the Basiles did the Hollises’ bidding, including using Rigo for their dirtiest deeds. Rigo was as cold-blooded as someone could get, and he was really fucking good at hiding. Bonus, Rigo was friends with Dru. Or had been until Dru had double-crossed him.

  I sat back on my heels, wiping my hands on my jeans. They felt dirty from just touching the money.

  “Get a picture of it, Nikki,” Detective Martinez said, and I numbly went through the motions of pulling out my phone and snapping several photos of the safe and its contents.

  “Guess who’s going to prison, Rigo?” Detective Martinez said. “Here’s a hint. It’s not me. And it’s not Nikki.”

  Rigo grinned. “I don’t know why you think it’s me. You bent a lot of rules to find me, Detective. I’m golden. You bring me in, and you got a heap of shit to explain.”

  “I’m willing to take my chances,” Martinez said. He dug into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys, which he tossed at me. “Nikki, go get the car and pull up to the door.”

  I caught the keys but didn’t move.

  He gave me a reassuring nod. “I’ll stay with our friend here. We’ll talk about our next move in the car.”

  “Is he right, though? Is it pointless to bring him in?”

  “Just honk when you get to the door. Okay?” I still didn’t answer. I was swimming in so many what-ifs, not the least of which was what if I just hadn’t answered the phone that night? What if Peyton had been forced to reach out to someone else?

  What if I’d gone with my first instinct and not trusted this cop to save me in the first place?

  I didn’t want to go. I wasn’t done getting answers for myself. There was so much more I wanted to know—what had it been like for Peyton in those last few minutes? Had she suffered? What had Dru done to stop Rigo? What other setups did Luna have waiting for me?

  But I guessed the answers to any, or even all, of those questions wouldn’t change a thing. Peyton would still be dead. Dru would still be involved. And I would still be set up.

  And I would still be royally screwed. Detective Martinez was right. We had to take Rigo with us before he slipped away again.

  “Nikki. Go.” He looked very serious.

  So I went.

  Which meant I had to walk past Luna. Luna who might or might not be breathing. And if she wasn’t, how much shit would I be in this time? And would Detective Martinez be in trouble too? No. I would make him leave. I would take the blame for all of it. After all, it really was all my fault. Without me, he wouldn’t even be here at all.

  But halfway across the showroom floor, I realized that Luna was gone. All that was left behind were a few drops of blood where she had been. My throat squeezed shut.

  My first instinct was to go back to Detective Martinez. But I never got that far. As soon as I turned to go back to the living area, I was blocked by Jones, who had stepped out from behind a stack of boxes, holding the broom in his hand.

  “Sorry, sweetheart,” he said. He swung the broom over his head and everything went black.

  37

  AFTER I CAME to, it took me a few minutes to figure out where I was. The floor underneath me was hard and cold, like metal, with grooves under my back, my head, my feet. It was vibrating, and as I blinked away the fuzz, I realized everything was vibrating because I was moving.

  Slowly, I sat up and looked around. I was inside the back of an empty van. We were heading down the highway. The person driving the van was familiar.

  Jones.

  I crawled up behind his seat and scanned my surroundings, searching for something I could use to defend myself when we stopped driving. I had no way of knowing where that might be. Once, I’d thought I knew Jones. Now it was clear that everything I knew was a lie. A lie that made me feel broken in half on the inside.

  “Where are you taking me?” My voice felt thick, hard to get out.

  He let out a breath and glanced back at me. I thought I saw relief in his face. “Jesus,” he said, and then, “You’re awake.”

  “Where are we going? Stop the van,” I said. As my head got clearer, panic set in deeper and deeper. Where was Detective Martinez? Did he know I was gone? Would he be able to find me before Jones and, God knows, Luna did whatever they planned to do to me?

  “You know, I didn’t mean for it to be this way,” he said. “I was just so pissed. So. Fucking. Pissed.” He pounded the steering wheel with the palm of his hand with each word. “I thought I could make you love me. How stupid was I? You can’t love anyone but yourself.” He glanced back again, hoping, I was sure, to see me react. But the thing was . . . he was right, and we both knew it. He wasn’t telling me anything I hadn’t already told myself a thousand times. I was selfish. I was an asshole. I had done him a favor by not loving him.

  “Jones. Stop the van. You can still get out of this.”

  “Somebody really should warn him, you know? That guy. That cop. Someone should tell him he’s wasting his time with you.”

  “I told you not to,” I said. “I used those exact words.”

  He glanced back again, holding my gaze for so long I started to jolt toward the steering wheel, afraid he would crash and kill us both.

  He turned back and shook his head at the windshield. “It was too late by then. Way too late. I had given up a long time before that.” He shook his finger in the air. “She told me. Said you would ruin my life. And guess what? She was right.”

  “She wasn’t right, Jones. I don’t want anything to do with your life. You can stop the van and let me go and just . . . get out of town or something. Go to college. I won’t say a word about you being involved at all. I swear.”

  He laughed, high and shrill. “You really think I can just move on now, after everything that’s happened?” He was silent for a minute, and I thought maybe I heard his throat click like he was holding back a cry. “I don’t want you anymore, Nikki.”

  “That doesn’t mean you have to hate me.”

  “I don’t hate you. If I hated you, I would’ve run you down in that parking lot. Instead, I pretended I hit a pothole. If I hated you, I would have let Antony stick that knife in your gut. But I didn’t. I talked him out of killing you. I got him to leave your house. But I’m locked in now. I can’t get out.”

  “What does she have on you?” I asked, finally realizing exactly what was going on. Jones wasn’t afraid that I’d ruined his life; he was afraid that he had ruined it.

  “Nothing!” he shouted. He banged his fist on the steering wheel again. “At first, nothing. She was just so . . . seductive. Sexy. And she hated you as much as I did. And I thought what we were doing was just to freak you out a little, you know? Moving stuff around your house, lifting your cigarettes and jacket, that kind of thing. I wanted you to be scared, so you would come running to me and for once—for once!—I could be the one to turn my back on you. But then it got bigger. Stealing things out of your pockets and drawers while you were asleep. Killing your computer and slashing your tires. And talking to the DA. Pretending I was a witness. It was so easy. Your dad wouldn’t notice if an army walked through your house. I was caught up in it. I didn’t know how to say no to her. And, sometimes, I didn’t want to. And that was your fault, Nikki. That was all you.”

  “Dear God,” I said. “You were the one framing me this whole time?”

  He shook his head. “Not just me. Not at first. There was this other guy. He was helping her. He kept some journal about you, and he planted the Molly in your car. She made me find you at the party to be sure you stayed there until they called the cops about seeing you deal drugs from your car. I kept you busy and the other guy called it in.”

  “What other guy?
You mean Rigo?”

  “No, I don’t fucking mean Rigo. If I meant Rigo, I would have said Rigo. Some dude with white hair. Always wore this huge belt buckle.”

  Candy cane and mustard flashed in my mind. Candy cane and mustard on a belt buckle. Where had I seen it?

  “The photo,” I said. “I saw a guy like that in a photo. Did his belt buckle have letters on it?”

  He shrugged. “Why would I even care?”

  Candy cane and mustard. V-P. At the time, I’d wondered what he might be the VP of.

  Who was he? And why did I feel like I’d seen him somewhere else too? Like I should know exactly who he was.

  “I don’t get it, Jones. If Luna has nothing on you, why can’t you just split?”

  “It’s not Luna I’m afraid of. It’s Hollis.”

  The spot on my head where he’d hit me with the broom suddenly lit up with pain. I pressed my fingers to it; they came away bloody. Again. Damn, I was tired of bleeding.

  “Bill Hollis is in Dubai,” I said.

  Jones shook his head. “No, he’s not. He was just at the warehouse yesterday. He brought all that Molly you saw.”

  I sensed sulfur on summer air before I saw the fireworks this time. They bloomed across the floor of the van, lighting my panic. Blue had told me. Brandi had tried to tell me. I was too stupid to hear it, even though everyone had insisted that it was no coincidence that Luna was out right when evidence started to pile up against me. Crimson edged its way into my vision. The Hollises and death were forever combined in my synesthesia. I swallowed, suddenly struck with a sobering thought. “You’re taking me to him, aren’t you?”

  He ran his hand down the length of his face. “I don’t have a choice anymore. I’ve seen what they can do. I’ve seen what they do to people who talk. Bill Hollis doesn’t like loose ends.” Again I thought of Ruby and Blue. Now I knew for sure that Bill Hollis had made them disappear. “I don’t want to kill you, Nikki.” This time there were real tears in his voice. “But it’s you or me. And it’s not going to be me.”