hellish backdrop to our little drama.
“What charge, Detective?” Elisa asked coldly.
“What charge?” Sikorsky snarled at her. “Pick one. Child endangerment, resisting arrest, assault on a police officer, terrorism—even a dressed-up mouthpiece like you won’t be able to pry him out of this one.”
“Frank,” Arthur called to Sikorsky. Checker had joined Pilar in holding him back, though Arthur wasn’t really trying anymore. It was probably a good thing he was still too injured to walk. “Frank, if this is about you and me, don’t go taking it out on them—take me in if you want to; don’t—”
Sikorsky drilled Arthur with a stare and started reading Diego his rights while manhandling him toward one of the black-and-whites.
The partner tried to get statements from the rest of us, then. Juwon and the twins were distraught on the level of incoherence. Elisa made a clipped, contentless response and then immediately called a car to take her down to the station to meet Diego. Arthur, Pilar, Checker, and I managed to give brief, consistent accounts that implied we knew nothing and had only spotted something suspicious, prompting our run for safety, and then had missed the police lights at first in our panic. The partner let us go with stern warnings to stay where we could be contacted easily.
I used the Cassie Wells IDs with her again. She looked at the two halves of the PI license and then back up at me, unamused.
“Your partner objected to it being in one piece,” I said, as neutrally as I knew how, and she handed it back to me without changing her expression.
By the time they let us leave, a lot more cop cars jigsawed the street. The firefighters had mostly put out the blaze, and were now hiking through a street flooded with water and crisscrossed with hoses.
The barest black bones of the Rosales house stuck up from the ruins.
thirty-one
WE PILED into the van and lurched past the roadblocks being set up on the corner. “I’ll give you an address to go to ground at. Try to lose any tails,” I said to Arthur. If Pithica was behind this, it wouldn’t be enough. Everything was triage right now, fractured and bleeding. “Checker and I will work on getting you all IDs out of the country—you take the van—”
“Russell, I can’t…” Arthur’s inflection bent with pain. “I got to—can’t just sit. Not when…”
“You have three other kids who need protecting,” I said.
Four if we could get Elisa to join them in hiding, though with Diego needing a lawyer now, I rated that as only slightly more likely than impossible.
Until D.J. came after them too. Shit, shit.
If they were all about to disappear anyway, maybe we should just break Diego out. That’d make this a one-way trip. But that might be what was happening anyway.
“Can’t just do nothing,” Arthur whispered.
“You will be doing something. For them. Leave Tabitha to us.”
Arthur didn’t answer. His face had gone closed and hard.
I had to pull over and see what I could do about the van’s tire. I swung into a nearby park and obscured us between a line of trees and a span of tennis courts and baseball diamonds. The hour was still early enough that they lay flat and empty.
My ankle and knee both flared when I jumped down onto the pavement, but I determinedly ignored them and hiked around to the back of the van to hunt for a spare. Before I could open up the back, my eyes snagged on the snarls of wood and metal stabbed deep into the panels of the vehicle. House bones made shrapnel. If those had hit a window …
“Russell.”
Arthur had gotten down out of the passenger side and was limping back to confront me, leaning on his crutch with one arm and the side of the van with the other.
I hauled open the rear hatch and started searching for a jack kit. The cargo area behind the seats was piled in semi-ordered detritus—umbrellas, blankets, reusable grocery bags. I pushed things aside and found a side panel with the tools. Pilar twisted from the back seat as if she were about to offer to help, but I waved her off and busied myself with cranking the spare tire down out of the van’s undercarriage.
“Russell,” Arthur said again, a little louder. It sounded like it took every ounce of energy he had.
“Give all your phones to me,” I said to him mechanically. “I’ll have Checker forward them to VOIP in case the cops call.”
He