Gathering Dark, Candice Fox [inspirational books for students .TXT] 📗

both in the house itself and in the street, and some kind of … drag rally happening out front. I’m told most of the house’s windows have been smashed and there are some belongings out on the lawn. Part of the garage has been burned down. No word of any arrests yet. This doesn’t sound like any party I’ve ever been to, Erica, I can tell you that much.”

“Well, it’s not the party that matters, George, it’s the attendance. The aim is to get as many people to come along as possible so that the figures can be shared on social media. The damage, the mayhem, is a kind of scorecard. You don’t organize one of these things at your own house, that’s for sure.”

Long patches of black mountains looming over bare earth. I watched the city become farmland, the temperature in the car seeming to dip the farther we drove from the city. I thought about Ada’s smile in the Pump’n’Jump. The rare sight of it, and the weird, satisfied quality it had.

Another voice sounded in my head. It was Jessica Sanchez this time.

She can smell money. That’s why she’s here.

“We need to talk,” I said eventually.

“About what?” Ada said.

“About our plan,” I told her. Fred was looking at me, his face unreadable in the dark. “Our priority is finding Dayly. Making sure she’s okay.”

“Of course it is.”

“We don’t know what else we’re walking into here,” I said. “If the plumber, Ramirez, and Lemon and Dayly have set up what we think they’ve set up, then it’s possible she won’t even be there. When I saw her, she was running. She was scared. Something had gone wrong, and—”

“I’ve got a plan, Neighbor,” Ada said. “You don’t need to worry about it.”

I wrung my fingers. One of Fred’s hands had moved from his lap to the pocket of his jacket. I thought about my phone in my backpack, which was at my feet.

“My plan is to find Dayly,” I said. “And if there’s anything else going on … I mean. I don’t want anyone to get hurt. Or for us to, you know, to get involved in something that’s, uh…”

My words drained away. Fred was watching me from across the bench seat. Ada was watching me in the rearview mirror. Mike was watching me in his side mirror. A vision flashed through my mind, of a cat in a car full of Dobermans. I eased breath through my teeth and tried to focus on the road ahead.

JESSICA

Jessica sat quietly in the front passenger seat of the police cruiser, listening to Tasik’s breathing beside her, refusing to look his way, to let him sense that she was scared. She was indeed scared. The tension in the car reminded her of the night in Lonscote Place, when she’d lost grip of every aspect of her police training, every expectation she had been given since joining the force. Your partner will back you. Your cries for assistance will be answered. You’ll always have some notion of what the appropriate action is—rarely will something be so bizarre, so left-field, that you won’t have a trained response in your back pocket. But that night she’d dealt with a flesh-eating being and her partner had abandoned her. Her world had been turned upside down, the rules shattered, her trust dissolved. Now she was back there. She should have been on the side of the man next to her, but she found herself constantly checking on Sneak in her side mirror. The plump, downtrodden prostitute and drug addict looked at home in the back of the cruiser. But there was a calm on her face that defied her situation. It was almost as though she expected what happened next.

On Wilshire, Tasik breezed through the intersection, past a Jamba Juice full of people, instead of turning left toward the West LA police station. Sneak didn’t react. Jessica felt a cold bolt of energy hit her veins. Tasik glanced at her, and she knew.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” Sneak said, giving voice to Jessica’s thoughts.

Tasik glanced at her in the rearview mirror. They were heading north toward the mountains. Signs for Glendale. He switched on the radio.

“… having difficulty containing the situation due to strained police resources and the sheer number of people descending on Esperance Drive. Police say at least two cars are on fire in the street, and that the owner of the residence in question is a male LAPD officer who is not, at this time, present on the scene. Police choppers have…”

Tasik switched off the radio.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll bite. What do you think you know?”

“I know you killed her,” Sneak said. Jessica could see Sneak wiggling subtly against the back seat. She could tell the other woman was working her handcuff chain under her buttocks, stretching her shoulder joints to the limits to let the bindings slide down the backs of her thighs to her knees. She’d seen it a thousand times, and Tasik would have noticed it, too.

“I did, did I?” Tasik said.

“You got that bad cop stink about you,” Sneak said. “I’ve known a lot of cops in my time. Some of them are good people. Some are wimps with badges who got picked on in high school and want revenge. And every now and then there’s a real predator, and I can see that in you.”

“Give yourself some credit,” Tasik said. “You’ve got a bit of the old hunter blood in you, too. You’re a scavenger. A liar and a cheater and a thief. But, push comes to shove, you’ve got claws and teeth. I can see that in you. And I saw it in your daughter.”

Jessica put her hand on her gun, but she didn’t draw it. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Needed to wait. To know for sure. To see some physical sign of the danger. Tasik was too comfortable. He eased back in his seat, rolled his window down, and put an elbow out. Jessica could