Delinquents Turned Fugitives - Ann Denton Page 0,111
about your petty threats.”
I laughed. “Yeah, you do that.” If it wasn’t a sport, Z couldn’t stand it. The boy had to move all the time. He had a case of the wiggles worse than most puppies.
“Tell us what we’re really doing,” Evan requested.
“We’re going to give Detective Muller a taste of his own medicine.”
Z looked skeptical, his eyes flickering once to Andros in concern, before they came back to land on me. Once he’d heard my intended target, his playfulness had immediately morphed into hesitation. “How?”
“It’s easy to trick a Tock when you know what makes him tick.” I winked at Z and he wagged a finger at me.
“Punny. But really?” he pushed.
“Z, have a little faith. We’re gonna fuck Muller so hard he’ll scream my name for years to come.” I couldn’t help the evil grin that spread across my face as I said, “And here’s how we’re going to do it.”
Limousines lined the middle-class business district, parallel parked along the sidewalk; they formed a dashed black line on the side of the road and blocked paying customers from the shops. Up the hill were the wealthy people who’d come to be seen mourning my mom. Not to actually mourn her, but to be publicly photographed being a “good person.”
The line of cars made me sick.
My stomach twisted as I walked up the block alone. I still wore the black leather jacket, black tank top, blue jeans and heeled boots that I’d worn to meet Lysa for coffee this morning. That felt like the Cretaceous Period compared to now. It felt like my entire life had evolved and changed eighty million times since then.
I tossed a shadow over my jeans to cover the rip at the knee and to make them funeral appropriate. Or as appropriate as I was going to get, considering I was about to turn Mom’s goodbye into just as much of a pageant as the trophy-wife former beauty queens already sitting up there had.
For a second, a wisp of a thought of Muller in a bikini, wearing a sash and smiling at a crowd flashed through my head and amused me.
But that kind of fun wasn’t going to happen. I could either humiliate Muller or I could break him. And after seeing Andros’s face, I knew which one I wanted. Of course, breaking someone could always involve a little humiliation along the way …
That thought and the sound of a faint buzz overhead added a little skip to my step as I made my way up the hill, eyes scanning from side to side, wondering where Grayson had holed up to fly his drone.
The skip fled as soon as I saw the gleaming white casket and the hole dug beside it. Both the casket and grave were surrounded by massive bouquets of flowers that were just as beautiful and just as dead inside as the chess pieces and trophy wives who stood making small talk around them. The sculpted women on the hill knew my mother’s favorite brand of champagne, but didn’t know that she’d actually aced all of her spell writing tests during her final year at Medeis. These assholes didn’t know that Mom had given up her dream of working as a norm physician when she’d gotten pregnant with Matthew so young. They didn’t know that she liked exactly six marshmallows in her hot chocolate or that she thought the idea of a Tooth Fairy was horrific because people’s mouths were dirty places and no one should ever want to live in a palace of teeth. They knew nothing. And they didn’t deserve to be up there.
I had to reel back the memories and emotions that surged up inside me like a storm wave. I took a deep breath and forced myself to focus. This had become another job instead of a chance to say goodbye. I had to treat it that way. I spotted Claude hovering near two Pinnacle council members.
Motherfucker. Blowing up his damn house hadn’t killed him. Hadn’t extinguished his light. That was going to make things more complicated. Because as soon as that asshole saw me, I knew he’d attack. I’d have to be careful …
I slid off the path and between two trees and pulled up my phone. Since this was a bit of an improv gig, we didn’t have earpieces.
“Voldemort is between Gert Holland and Preston Koger.” I said, before hanging up.
“Voldemort?” a brusque male voice behind me had me spinning on the grass as I