Mission road - By Rick Riordan Page 0,72
front door. Our favorite mafia boy Alex Cole had just come inside, carrying a Sunday paper, his car keys and a box of Krispy Kremes.
He was moving fast. Red-faced and scowling, he marched toward the stairs like he absolutely had to get his doughnuts somewhere important. He froze when he saw us.
“You bitch,” he said to Madeleine. “What are they doing out?”
Madeleine blinked. “What did you just—”
“It was on the car radio.” Alex pointed at Ralph. “It was him. The police have DNA. Arguello killed Frankie. That’s why he shot his wife. She was about to bust him.”
Madeleine looked like she’d taken an uppercut to the face. She turned toward me.
“It’s a frame,” I said. “Madeleine, we wouldn’t be here—”
“Hey, wake up!” Alex shouted at the house. “Security! Wake the fuck up!”
Madeleine’s fists clenched, but her eyes were brittle, the way they’d looked when she was ten, running under the high school bleachers to get away from her brother. “How. How could you—”
“It wasn’t me, chiquita,” Ralph told her. “I tried to help Frankie. You know that.”
“Wake up, somebody!” Alex yelled. “Aw, the hell with it.”
He dropped his keys and doughnuts on an end table and started up the stairs toward us. Footsteps behind us—at least two guys, running from the upstairs hall.
“Vato,” Ralph yelled, “vámanos!”
We pushed past Madeleine, who didn’t try to stop us. We ran toward the bottom of the stairs and Alex.
Two guards were coming behind us. Both were armed, but looked half asleep, baffled by what they saw.
“What are you waiting for?” Alex yelled. “Shoot them!”
One of the guards: “But—”
Alex started to say, “Shoot, godda—” when Ralph and I crashed into him. Not the most graceful takedown, but it worked. Alex crumpled backward in an unintended somersault.
Ralph and I burst through the kitchen doorway just as the guards opened fire.
• • •
RALPH RAN STRAIGHT FOR THE SERVICE exit. A bullet came through the window and shattered a bottle of brandy on the counter.
He hit the floor, put his back against the door.
“One more guy outside.” He reached up, threw the deadbolt.
The interior door had no lock, but it was right next to the refrigerator. I dragged the fridge in front of it. With all the adrenaline coursing through my body, I probably could’ve stacked a stove and a couple of cars, too.
Alex was cursing in the living room. He told one of the guards to wake up Mr. White. Madeleine said something and he yelled at her to shut up. Somebody battered on the interior door. The beer bottles rattled in the fridge.
The wall phone was right next to me. I thought about calling the police, but I decided it wouldn’t do any good. We already had enough people on the premises who wanted to kill us.
Maia was my only other option, but I hesitated. As much as we needed her, as much as I wanted to hear her voice, I didn’t want to put her in danger. I had a bad feeling that if I called her, it might be our last conversation.
A guard’s face appeared in the back window. I shot at the pane just above his head, then scrambled over to where Ralph was sitting.
“We need a third exit,” Ralph said. “Maybe a distraction.”
WHUMP.
The interior door shuddered. The fridge moved a couple of inches.
Brandy from the broken bottle was dripping off the counter. There were maybe a dozen more bottles left over from the party. Right by the gas stove—and the window above the sink.
An insane idea started to form in my head, but Ralph was way ahead of me.
“Check that drawer by the oven,” he said. “Find me some matches.”
As Ralph was lighting what might be our funeral pyre, I gave in to desperation. I picked up the phone.
SUNDAY MORNING THE STREETS WERE DESERTED, which was not good for Maia’s safety. When she was angry and nervous, she drove as fast as traffic would allow. This morning, that was very fast indeed.
As so often happened for her, the answers had woven together in her mind at 3:00 A.M. Unable to sleep, dreading the onset of morning sickness, she had followed Ana DeLeon’s thought process through to the end. Maia knew who had shot Ana. An 8:00 A.M. call to the hospital front desk, a few questions about the police security detail had confirmed Maia’s fears about what he would do next.
Etch Hernandez.
Two things had decided her. First, the look on Kelsey’s face last night had not been the look of a guilty