Whoa. “You got some sense out of her?”
“No. She’s a liar. Just babbling.”
“Darryl, if she said something about the—”
“She lied. I told you. It’s bullshit. And it—”
“She said the kid shot her up,” Luis provided.
“What?” I repeated. That idea was more ridiculous than… Than what? Darryl admitted Cai did drugs. The kid obviously wasn’t the marshmallow I thought he was. And he was smart. Logical. And fucked up without effective meds.
Luis and Darryl began arguing. I tuned it out. Think like Cai. You’re on the run. He’s smart enough to know the anklet was going to be traced. Maybe even he expected to be caught at any second. How fast was he? I remembered Peter dodging me when I ran after him. That was fast. Not just fast. Efficient. He ran efficiently. He’d be ahead of the cops, but not by much. And Peter ran just like him. He’d wait, expecting Peter, but as time ticked by… “Darryl—” The bickering continued.
“You asshole cops always think the worst. He’s a kid.”
“Who self-medicates and shot up his junkie friend with a heavy dose of—.”
“She’s lying. I told you.” Darryl cracked his knuckles into a fist.
“Shut up. Both of you. Shut the fuck up! This isn’t helping.” Their mouths clamped shut. “I need to concentrate.” My fingers tapped. “He expected Peter to get here eventually. He doesn’t know he’s hurt. He’d leave a message.”
“Cai didn’t leave a text message,” Darryl said.
I nodded my agreement. “Which leaves the ringtone. What is that fucking song?” I hummed a few bars. “Call it again.”
Darryl picked up the phone and shook his head. “Or I could just look it up. Idiot,” he said quietly. He flipped through the phone, finger sliding across the screen until he looked up at me with his nose scrunched. “Last ringtone he added was Come Home.”
I didn’t have to hear Darryl say where he was going to understand he was off to Joe’s. His eyes blew wide as he tried to run past me. I grabbed his hood again. He made a choking sound and twisted sideways, his foot arcing to connect with my stomach.
I coughed, jerked the hood and pushed him into a shelving unit. It took Luis’s gun to get him under control while I doubled over and tried to get my breath back.
“Calm down,” my partner growled.
“I need to get to—”
“You need to calm the fuck down.”
“Wait” I tried to breathe, speaking between huffs. “Just think a moment.”
“You’re going to get him killed. He’s there and waiting for us. Why are you still here? Call the damn cavalry!”
“He’s not there!” I finally had a voice, even with the after effects of what felt like a baseball bat to the belly by a major leaguer.
“You don’t know that.”
“Think.” Luis thumped him in the back of the head. He almost got a punch to the face in response. Darryl pulled his fist back at the last second and hit a nearby box with enough force to send it and several others flying off the shelf. They landed on my earlier pile.
“He didn’t leave his phone so Peter could find him,” I said. “He did it so Peter would find something.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because he’s too high to make it to Joe’s.” I lifted a hand at Luis. “Show him.”
Luis held up the second syringe. “Kid gave her one shot, took the other one.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You two are idiots. Cai would never tell her to shoot up. And he’d never touch the stuff.”
“Darryl, he saved her life by giving her that,” I explained. “He waited here for Peter too long. He needed to be incoherent when they got to him. He needed to make sure they couldn’t question him even if they wanted to. And he made sure Rachel was a useless witness so it would be pointless to kill her.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Maybe I Should Remove the Cummerbund
We left Goth Nation arguing, and we continued doing so while we waited to hit Joe’s place. It was Luis who suggested we avoid Joe’s townhome until we had everything in place. I had a procedural suggestion of my own: throw Darryl out of the still-moving car. It had been five minutes since we exited the shop, and he hadn’t stopped complaining and ordering us around.
“You don’t even know for sure they have him. I told you like twelve places we could look.”
I grabbed the home-monitoring anklet we had found and twisted in the seat to show him it. “Do you see this cut here?”