Page 4 of 2 Sisters Murder Investigations

“It’s our bust!” Baby exploded. “There’ll be tens of thousands of dollars in reward money!”

“Well, boo-hoo, Ace Ventura.” Ramirez sneered at Baby. “I’m not in the business of handing over evidence so that wannabe bounty hunters can make some cash.”

“Look,” I said. “You’re a newbie, right? I mean, you must berealnew. That badge is so bright, I’m getting a headache from the glare. Plus, even though two detectives have already interviewed us, you’ve been sent over to do it again. They’re not worried they didn’t get the story down. They just think you need practice taking statements.”

Ramirez’s jaw tightened. I put my hands up, letting it go.

Baby jumped in. “All Rhonda’s saying is, maybe you don’t realize the opportunity you have here.” She jerked a thumb at me, then herself. “My sister and I, we’re also just starting out. For the next six months, our business is going to be making connections, doing intel. Learning about various bail jumpers and drug-addled kleptomaniacs. Maybe we can all help each other here.”

“She’s right. You’ll want to prove yourself.” I riffed off Baby’s energy. “The first year on the job is hell. They’ll hand you impossible cases, cleanup work, bullshit security gigs. But imagine if you had PIs on speed dial, investigators who could tell you where some parole-dodging loser was hiding.”

“Or where there was an apartment full of stolen animals,” Baby added. “Or which gangster’s wife was cheating on him and with who.”

“I get it,” Ramirez said. “I get it.”

Baby and I waited. The rookie looked back at the officers taping off the stairs to the apartment building. Then she sized us up.

“How’s your hand-eye coordination?” she asked.

CHAPTER6

BABY AND I WAITEDin the darkness of the alley, side by side. In my peripheral vision, I could see the flickering blue lights of the police cars at the front of the apartment building, but the two of us were transfixed by a small lit window on the third floor.

“Fifteen hundred bucks.” I heard the smile in my sister’s voice. “Not a completely wasted night.”

“Don’t count your dog before you catch it.”

“I got this. I was on the JV basketball team.”

“You’re pretty confident for someone who made the mess we just had to clean up,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about how the whole point of us staking out that apartment was so we could figure out how those assholes operated,” I said. “Learn their habits. Enter the place while they were out, when it would besafeto do so. Now one of them is in an ambulance and the other one’s in a body bag, and we almost were too.”

“They’re animal thieves!” I could feel Baby watching me. She’d completely forgotten the window above us. “They steal people’s pets! How was I supposed to know that one of them was going to — ”

“Youdon’tknow,” I said. “That’s the whole point, Baby. Youwaitand youwatchand youlistenuntil youknow.”

The third-floor window slid open. I braced myself.

“You mean I should do whatever you say, even when it’s my damn case,” Baby snapped.

Hands holding a skinny gray dog emerged from the window. L’Shondra shook violently as she eyed the distance to the ground.

“Can we talk about this later?” I said to Baby.

Ramirez let go. The dog fell. I caught L’Shondra in my arms in a tangle of bony limbs, and both the animal and I yelped in terror and relief.

When I turned around triumphantly, my sister was gone.

CHAPTER7

WHEN THE MAN EVERYONEin America suspected of killing his wife walked into the 2 Sisters Detective Agency, I was up on a ladder, painting over cigar-smoke rings on the ceiling.

The office was slowly transforming in the wake of Earl Bird’s death six months ago. Baby and I had decided to take over our father’s business, Early Bird Private Investigation, after an earlier case had forced us together only hours after we’d met for the first time. Despite having different mothers, no previous knowledge of each other’s existence, and a twenty-plus-year age gap, we’d somehow managed to track down a hit man, a group of murderous youths, and a drug-running gang. The experience had left our brand-new relationship tattered in some places but sewn tightly in others.

My kid sister and I were deeply, deeply different. Aside from troubled histories with our shared father, we had almost zero in common. When I was thirteen, Dad ditched me and my mom; when Baby was a toddler, her mom left her with Earl and never returned. I look an awful lot like our father, if he’d had extensive tattoos and pink hair; Baby acts like Dad, but she’s tall, Black, and gorgeous — she clearly got her looks from her mother’s side of the family. But Baby (aka Barbara) and I had had heartfelt conversations as we’d tackled the horror show of Earl’s messy office together, and we’d busted up laughing over emails from bizarre potential clients. I’d felt the purest sense of motherhood or sisterhood or whatever it was while staring down the barrel of a gun with Baby by my side. We were, somehow, a team.

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