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

feel the rise of the mountain roads under them. He knew these roads, took the corners lazily, the headlights now and then picking out luminescent eyes in the shrubby undergrowth, shining on sheer cliff faces. He was fully relaxed now. Mr. Coyote going home to his den on the rocky ridge, where the poison creosote guarded his secret, safe place.

“It was just like I told Sanchez.” Tasik gestured to her. “I picked Dayly up by chance in a car full of idiot Crips. She hasn’t been living the life like you, Emily. I could see that. She was still a little fresh. High on cheap crack and scared out of her mind. She didn’t know the bag with the guns was there. I pulled her away from the crowd and asked her what the hell she thought she was doing. I was really giving it to her. Maybe I trumped it up a bit, her situation. I told her she was facing jail time, that was a certainty. I told her the type of guns they had in the trunk had been classified as weapons of terrorism, so she was facing thirty years on the inside, minimum. She was crying her eyes out. Panicked. Like a shaky little puppy.”

Sneak now held the wire mesh screen between them, the cuffs stretched between her wrists.

“I was hoping for a blow job at best,” Tasik laughed. “And then suddenly Dayly started pouring out all this stuff about hidden money and a killer on death row and her junkie mother. I couldn’t follow it at first. It was so crazy. I was shocked, you know? She had to calm down some before she could give it to me straight. She said she knew where millions of dollars was buried. If I helped her out on the gun charges, she would let me in on this thing she had going to dig up the hidden money. I didn’t believe it, but I cut her loose anyway, just to see. Just in case she was onto something, you know? It was worth the gamble. If I came back and it was all just some story, I was going to get my blow job, one way or another.”

“Was she right?” Sneak asked. “Was the money there?”

“I sure hope so.” Tasik smiled. “There’s no way she can check this thing out. You know why? Because this Fishwick guy, he says he buried the cash in the late eighties. Back then the place was a big open field with a fence on it and nothing else. Now it’s got—wait for this, this is just classic—a fucking police station on it. Can you believe that? The only way she can find out if he’s lying or not is to dig to the spot, under the station.”

“And she wanted your help?” Jessica piped up.

“Nope,” Tasik said. “Luckily for me, Dayly already had everything set up. She’d sourced a young cop from inside the station to make sure nobody who worked there got wind that someone was tunneling under the building. Then the two of them got together and recruited this plumber with a rap sheet for digging holes under jewelry stores and casinos, a guy who knows how to make a tunnel and get under a place on the quiet. I’m hearing this and I’m thinking, what the fuck? This girl looks like she’s barely old enough to hold a job, and when I go check out the cop he’s the same. A baby. But that’s it, you see? That’s what I was trying to tell you, Sanchez. These people are born like this. They have criminal minds. Scavenger instincts. They’re built in.” He tapped his temple.

“So the two other guys don’t know about you?” Sneak asked.

“No,” Tasik said. “It was her fuck-up. My cut was supposed to come out of her end. Dayly tells me that all I have to do is wait for pay day, when the two boys break through to the spot where the cash is supposed to be. Could be tonight, if everything’s still on track.”

“So what went wrong?” Sneak asked. “It sounds to me as though everything was running like clockwork.”

“Your greedy-ass daughter went wrong,” Tasik said. “That’s what.”

BLAIR

Everything was blue. The white moon cast the side of Ramirez’s truck a pale, icy blue. The dark blue mountains rising beyond us, reaching into a blue-black sky. Ada switched off the engine, parking right outside 17 Redduck Avenue, behind the truck, only feet from the driveway. She was not a woman who parked discreetly, who crept through back gardens, who scaled fences and ducked under windows. Fred screwed a silencer onto the barrel of his gun. I listened to the metal-on-metal grinding sound of the device in the silence.

Ada and Mike got out. I reached toward my backpack.

“Leave it,” Fred said, shuffling toward me across the seat. I popped the door and got out. The air was cold and thin. I thought about running, until Fred’s hand landed on my shoulder. The hand stayed there all the way up the driveway to the front door. Ada and Mike had their own guns out, held close to their chests, pointed upward. I stood off to the side with Fred while Ada slowly turned the knob. The door came unstuck from its jamb with a crack sound that was almost wet, sticky. Ada and Mike disappeared inside and Fred shoved me forward.

“Look”—I half turned to him—“I don’t want to be a part of this.”

“The time to make that decision came and went a while ago,” he said.

“Just let me walk away.”

“Shut up.”

A narrow passageway. In the darkness, things were brushing against my arms—the gentle slicing of magazine and newspaper pages from volumes stacked as high as the ceiling. There was a light on in one of the back rooms, illuminating a wild forest of items crowding in from every corner. An undergrowth of paint buckets, bicycle parts, rubber tubing, stuffed toys. A waist-high maze of plastic