A Good Day for Chardonnay (Sunshine Vicram #2) - Darynda Jones Page 0,118
all on her own because she’s a true-crime aficionado. You have no idea how many times I’ve had to drag her away from the Investigation Discovery channel. She knows more about hiding a body than I do.”
“We’re sorry either way, Sunny,” her dad said. “If we could change what happened—”
“I would do it, too. And as many times as I’ve plotted your deaths for something that actually was your fault, this is not one of those times.”
“You’ve plotted our deaths?” her mom asked.
“So many times.”
“Like, how recently?”
“Remember Carver?” she asked, giving attitude.
“Oh, yeah.” Her dad scratched his chin. “Our bad.”
“Your bad?” she asked. “You set me up with a hitman and it’s your bad?”
Her mom shrugged. “He seemed okay at the time.”
She leaned in and kissed her cheek, then gave her dad a bear hug. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
She had to get to Del Sol to check on the progress of the Kent and the Fairborn cases. Billy Press’s family was on the way from Amarillo, and they apparently wanted that damned necklace. They were about to be sorely disappointed. Sun decided right then and there to hold that thing in evidence as long as humanly possible. As soon as she could find it.
She promised to be back by nightfall and left Quincy in charge, only because he refused to leave. She took Levi with her. He had a business to run, after all, and he needed to get some rest that did not involve a plastic lounger that reclined about as much as a seat on a jetliner.
On the drive home, her mind spiraled in a thousand different directions. The irony was not lost on her. Kubrick Ravinder stabbed her rescuer fifteen years ago before her rescuer won control of the knife and slid it into Kubrick’s chest.
And now Cruz. The saying that truth was stranger than fiction had never been more accurate.
Her thoughts, as they always did, eventually circled back to the man sitting beside her. The way he cared for Auri. The way he held Sun in the shower, completely unfazed by the fact that she was soaking him through. And the way he looked in the red T-shirt she bought one size too small, swearing it was all they had. It showed every muscle. Every dip and every curve. Every ounce of perfection.
Rojas called and snapped her out of her musings. The Bluetooth in her cruiser automatically picked it up and blasted the ringtone throughout the speakers. Levi had been just as lost in his thoughts as she was hers, but it was impossible for him not to hear the conversation.
“We got this, boss,” Rojas said. “You do what you need to do. We have everything covered. Also, Randy set fire to the station.”
“Damn it,” she said, only half paying attention to him and more paying attention to the way Levi’s biceps stretched the hem of the sleeve. “He didn’t set off the suppression system, did he?”
“Only in the locker room.”
“Okay, good. Who’s Randy again?” She loved saying that. It was too bad Carver turned out to be an assassin and not a pest control technician. And that he was dead. She could’ve used him to trap the little guy.
Not thirty seconds after she ended her call with Rojas, her phone rang again.
“Hey, Sunny Girl,” Royce Womack said.
“Hey yourself. What do you got?”
“So, you were right. My contact looked into one Mr. Carver Zuckerman. He wasn’t so much a famous hitman as a wannabe famous hitman.”
“Which, who doesn’t want to be the top in their field?” she asked. “Goals, Womack. We all need them.”
“We do at that. I did look into his Russian hit. It really happened, but it was by one of the most famous snipers in Russian history. Your guy has never even been out of the country.”
“Ah, but maybe that was his genius. He was a hitman, after all. Surely he had multiple identities.”
“Yeah, no. He was on absolutely no one’s radar. How’s the kid?”
“Better. Thank God. Thanks for looking into this, Royce.”
“Any time. It looks like Matthew Kent is going away for a much longer stay than he’d planned now that his ties to the Delmars have been exposed and the money he had hidden all these years has been found.”
“Good,” she said, hoping Addison filed for divorce first thing that morning.
“How ’bout I buy you coffee again soon. We can watch the sunrise together.”
She couldn’t help but notice Levi tense just ever so slightly. “What’s with this