I blinked through my tears and saw a short, slender figure knock Rumpled to the ground. A second, larger figure stepped up close to me. “Well, well,” he drawled. “If it ain’t old Ray Lilly himself. Howsdoin’, Raymond?”
“Bud?” I asked, suddenly recognizing his voice. “Someone just tried to kill Arne. I didn’t see who, though. Is he around?”
“I don’t see Arne,” Bud answered. “He musta lit out.”
Again.
I could almost hear a smile in Bud’s voice. I blinked to clear my vision, and it worked a little. The slender figure moved toward us. “He’s gone,” she said. “We should go, too.” That was Summer, another member of Arne’s crew.
Bud and Summer each grabbed one of my sleeves and steered me down the alley toward the sidewalk. I let them. While I could see—barely—I couldn’t see well enough to drive. And my tears were still flowing, my nose was running, and I was still trying to blink the pain away. If the cops found me here, they’d snatch me right off the street.
I heard Bud reassure a passing pedestrian that I’d just had my heart broken. I didn’t know where we were going. “Someone tried to kill Arne. We have to look for him.”
“Oh, we’ll look for him, all right,” Bud said.
Something was wrong. Bud and Summer were part of Arne’s crew, just like Lenard, and just like I used to be, and right now they were being too casual.
A bad feeling came over me. I turned toward Summer. She’d let her hair grow out so that it almost reached her shoulders. Her face was broad and tanned, her pale blue eyes sullen in the heat. Her sleeveless jogging shirt was damp with sweat and hung untucked over a pair of shorts with an elastic waistband. Had she been one of the shooters? She could certainly conceal a gun at her back, but a gas mask, too? I didn’t believe it.
Bud was the same. He had a loose T-shirt over belted shorts, and while he’d cut off his mullet, he still wore that stupid bolo tie. He could have hidden a gun at the small of his back—or maybe under his growing beer belly— but not a gas mask.
Arne had taught them better than to dump something like that right at the scene of the crime, so I figured they weren’t the shooters. Of course, they could have been lookouts or backup. “Where are we going?” I asked.
“Tear gas is toxic,” Summer said. “There’s a Ralphs up the street. We’ll pick up some stuff that will help there.”
“At a supermarket?” I asked. “How do you know—” A fit of coughing cut off the rest of my question, and a rolling drop of sweat suddenly blinded my right eye.
“Are you seriously asking me how I know what to do about tear gas?” I’d forgotten that Summer’s hippie parents—her hated, hated parents—had marched in dozens of street protests over the years, and Summer herself had probably been dosed with the stuff several times.
“Then we’ll get out of here,” Bud added. “Robbie is going to want to talk to you.”
Robbie was Arne’s second-in-command, and we had always gotten along well—better, in fact, than I’d gotten along with anyone. I wanted to talk to him, too.
But first I needed to get away from Bud and Summer. Arne had said Wally King’s name, and that meant bad things were happening. He was the reason I was mixed up with the Twenty Palace Society. The spell book he’d stolen, the predators he’d summoned, and the deaths he’d caused almost two years before had ruined my life.
I needed to call the society, and I needed to do it in private. Those bastards take their secrecy seriously. And I needed my boss. I needed Annalise. I didn’t want to face Wally King without her again.
“We’re parked just up here in the lot,” Bud said as we turned a corner. I blinked my eyes clear again and saw a field of colored metal gleaming in the sun. They led me to a white pickup and let me sit on the gate.
Summer stepped away from me. “Bud, go inside and get what he needs.”
“You sure?” he asked, as though nervous about leaving her with me.
“Go.” She sounded irritated. He went.
I squinted in her direction. I wanted privacy to make my call, but she didn’t seem ready to give it to me. “I’m glad you and Bud are still together,” I said.
“We’re married now,” she answered, her voice flat.
“That’s great.” There was nowhere for the conversation to go after that, so it just sat there. Now that we had stopped moving, my eyes began to sting even more. I raised my hands to rub them but thought better of it. “I need to make a call,” I said. “In private.”
She didn’t move. “To who?”
“Nobody you know.” Since she wasn’t moving away, I hopped off the gate and walked along the side of the truck to the wall. Then I started toward the sidewalk.
She trailed behind me.
“Wait by the truck, Summer,” I said. “I’m not kidding. This is a private call.”
“You’re calling the cops, aren’t you?”
Out of reflex, I cursed at her. If that’s who she thought I was now, she couldn’t be trusted. It was the same as saying
My reaction must have mollified her a little. She sulkily stepped back, but not because she was afraid of me. I’d never known her to be afraid of anyone.
A young mother came toward me, navigating her baby stroller through the narrow space between the whitewashed wall and parked cars. I stepped around her, then looked toward the truck.
