Page 3 of 2 Sisters Murder Investigations

“No, no, no,” he warned. “Step away from the tanks.”

It was exactly what I’d hoped he’d say. It confirmed my assessment of the man: He was a dealer in lives. Every creature in the place had a dollar sign attached to it — except me and Baby.

“Let’s talk. Let’s talk, okay? You just lost your partner,” I said. I put my hands up, rapped a knuckle against the glass behind me. “There’s no need to put everything else you have at risk.”

“Stepaway,” the man repeated. “From thetanks.”

“How’s your aim?” I asked. “Can you drop me like you did your partner without getting one of these guys? Huh?He’spretty.” I pointed to a big green lizard in a tank beside my head. “What’s he worth?”

Movement caught my eye. Baby was running with my idea. She picked up a woolly black puppy that had been cowering at her feet. The gunman swung around, pointed the gun at her, then immediately lowered it so the barrel pointed at her legs, away from the dog.

“Ooh.” Baby’s eyes widened. She was smiling, but her cheeks were hard and tight. “Did you see that, Rhonda? I think I might have one of the big-ticket items here.”

“Okay, don’t be stupid,” the man said. “That’s a twenty-thousand-dollar dog you’re holding. Put it down or I’ll shoot you in the foot.”

“You do that and I’ll throw the puppy to Cerberus over there,” Baby said. She edged closer to the big dog on the chain. “You hungry, boy? Yeah. You want an expensive snack?”

I let my eyes drift down to the tanks beside me. I saw a coiled-up snake. It was acid yellow and black, striped, too pretty to be harmless. The monster dog was almost choking itself trying to get at Baby and the puppy, its growls becoming strangled snorts, claws ripping at the carpet. The gunman was inching closer to them, corralling Baby into the beast’s bite range.

“Put it down.” The man tightened his grip on the gun. “Put the dog down!”

“You put the gun down!” Baby yelled.

“Hey!” I called. The gunman pivoted toward me. I pushed off the top of the tank next to me, grabbed the striped snake, and hurled it at him. The man dropped his gun, and in the microseconds during which he twisted, his instincts warring between catching the snake and cowering from it, Baby seized the chain connecting the dog to the wall and unhooked it.

They say you should never run from an attacking dog. When you act like prey, it sets off its killer instincts, the wolf inside. The man chose to flee from the snake; he turned, and in that single vulnerable motion, he lit a fire in the big dog’s brain. Baby dropped the puppy and grabbed the fallen weapon as the beast rushed at the gunman. The air was filled with human screams. I saw my sister aiming the gun and struggling to decide if she should take the animal’s life to save the life of the man who was trying to kill us. The girl full of bravado was gone, and a scared kid with a deadly weapon and an impossible choice was standing in her place.

I took the gun from her hands and shoved her out of the apartment.

CHAPTER5

BABY PACED THE PARKINGlot, her head down, swiping furiously at her phone, which she’d rescued from behind the palm trees. Nervous energy and excess adrenaline. I leaned against my Chevy, thinking back over the statements I’d just given to a pair of detectives. The LAPD and Animal Control were swarming the apartment. It was after midnight. Now and then, Baby returned to me and shoved her phone in my face.

“The puppy was a Tibetan mastiff. Look. The guy was right. Twenty grand apiece.”

“Uh-huh.” I sighed.

“The snake was a banded krait.”

“Okay.”

“It’s the sixth-deadliest snake in the world.”

“Baby — ”

“Its venom causes paralysis. Liquefies your lungs. Makes your eyeballs bleed.”

“Baby, you’re not helping,” I said.

A patrol officer in an immaculately pressed dark blue uniform approached me for another exhaustive run-through of the murder in the animal apartment. She noted everything down on a small pad while I marveled at how shiny her badge was. Her name tag saidRAMIREZ. In the distance, the gunman who had been mauled by the monster dog was being wheeled out on a gurney, his body swathed in bandages. Ramirez told me that after mauling the gunman, the dog had gone and sat quietly in a bedroom without harming any of the animals in the apartment. I admired the dog’s restraint. The big dog seemed to innately know who was good and who was bad in the world, which was something I wasn’t sure I’d mastered myself.

“When can we get back in that apartment?” I asked Ramirez when she began to wrap up.

“Oh, you two are done here,” she replied. She looked us up and down. “Animal Control’s in there trying to find the snake you let loose. We’ll call you if there are any further questions.”

“That’s bullshit.” Baby pointed at the apartment building. “All those animals up there are stolen. We found them. They’re ours to reunite with their owners.”

“No, they’re not.”

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