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

I squeezed my friend’s shoulder as we made our way into the blackness before us. She didn’t answer me. We walked steadily but slowly along.

Ada and her guys must have had trouble getting the cases up the ladder, because when Sneak and I reached the street they were only just loading them into the Mercedes. Under the streetlight I saw Fred dump two of the cases—the toucan and crow cases—into the trunk, filling the space entirely. Mike hefted the tiger case onto the back seat and both men got in beside it. Ada looked back at us as she opened the driver’s-side door. For a moment I thought she would wave, but she didn’t, and I realized how foolish the idea had been. We weren’t friends. We had never been friends.

Twenty-one million dollars. I thought about John Fishwick in his cell, about the kiss with Dayly, the secret note. It had all been for nothing, both his efforts and hers. Dayly was dead and John’s money was now in the hands of one of the baddest women I had ever known. Ada got into her car and started the engine. As she drove away I wondered what John would think of her, what she planned to do with his money.

His unchosen beneficiary.

“Birds only.” I breathed the words at the same time as they flickered through my mind.

“What?”

“His chosen beneficiary.” I was suddenly almost screaming, gripping my head. “Birds only. BIRDS ONLY!”

Ada’s car exploded in a hot, white flash followed by a burst of yellow and red light. The vehicle came to a stop, the windows blasted out, doors thrown ajar, the roof bowed and partially peeled back from the rear pillars like the lid of a tuna can.

I ran. Sneak ran beside me, both our bodies forgetting our injuries completely, shot through with adrenaline and fear. The back of the car was a mess of blood and carnage, Fred’s and Mike’s bodies slumped in their seats, the frame of the car on fire around them. Ada was slithering from the front seat as I reached her. I hooked my arms under hers and dragged her away from the burning vehicle.

She had all her limbs. I silently counted them, like I had once been in the habit of doing when a child appeared on my surgery table just pulled from a car wreck or a house fire. Two arms. Two legs. Ten fingers, ten toes. She rasped a deep, labored breath and fell into coughs. I dragged her onto the wet lawn of a nearby house and batted away the small flames licking at her clothes.

Birds only. John Fishwick’s means of making sure he could choose who got his money. He told Dayly, and only Dayly, that she should open the cases wrapped in patterns of birds and not the one patterned with tigers or any other animals. I guessed it was a hand grenade that had gone off in the tiger suitcase, maybe two of them, but I didn’t know. I held Ada while she struggled to breathe, her lungs filled with debris and smoke. Eventually she rolled on her back and looked at me.

“I wasn’t going to kill you,” she wheezed. “I’m too nice.”

“Shut up, Ada,” I told her.

The sound of a car trunk popping drew my attention away from Ada. People were coming out of their houses all around us. I followed the sound I had heard and saw Sneak across the street, loading the battered and singed but still mostly intact toucan suitcase into the trunk of Al Tasik’s car, where the crow case already lay. The precious contents had survived the blast. I looked back and saw that the trunk of Ada’s burning Mercedes was open and empty.

There was nothing I could do to stop my friend. I was exhausted, wounded, and Ada lay across my lap, drifting in and out of consciousness. Like Ada had done, Sneak looked back at me as she slammed the trunk shut on the suitcases full of cash and went to the driver’s door of her vehicle. But unlike Ada, she did wave. And she mouthed the words “Thank you.”

I watched her drive away as sirens began to sound in the distance.

JESSICA

It was five o’clock in the morning by the time Jessica unlocked the front door of the Bluestone house. Something had brought her here instead of home, when all she longed for was her shower, her bed, the cold caress of her pillow against her cheek. Perhaps it was the decision she had made about the house as she walked down the mountain after witnessing Tasik’s death. She had walked until her feet hurt, until her shoes had rubbed blisters into her heels, her phone only relenting to the influence of reception as she hit the silent city of Glendora. From there she had called her station, asked someone to rouse Whitton and get him to call her. He hadn’t been at the crime scene on the mountain when she was driven back up there to show crews where Tasik’s body lay, the general area in which he had indicated he had thrown Dayly’s corpse to its final resting place. When Whitton called her now she answered the phone standing on the back porch of the Brentwood mansion, stepping quietly through the early marine mist toward the pool gate.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“I just got back,” she said. “They sent me away. Didn’t want me contaminating the scene. I’m at the Brentwood house.”

“Well, get your ass here,” Whitton said. “I want a full explanation of what happened on that goddamn mountain.”

“No,” she said, slipping off her shoes and bloody socks. “Not yet. I’m checking the house here, then I’m going to go home and sleep. This afternoon some time I’ll come in, and I’ll be bringing a stack of affidavits for IAG with me. One on the Lonscote Place shooting. One on my arrest at Goren Donnovich’s house. One explaining my position on the Brentwood house, and