Page 15 of Road Queens
“Get the fuck out of town.” Manners seemed determined to stick to his script. Wise. It’s not like he had the mental acuity to take any one of them on. “I see you again, and ...” He snapped his pale, delicate hands into baby fists while Amanda giggled.
Then he spun on his tiny heel and marched back to his Honda NX650 Dominator, one of the worst bikes in the history of bikes. Shifting through the gearbox felt like shifting through gravel; the uncomfortable seat made long rides borderline torture; the teeny tank and soft suspension were an embarrassment. Couldn’t top one hundred miles per hour, had a laughable forty-one miles per gallon, and needed servicing every other month. And good luck finding parts in a reasonable timeframe.Ha. Ha. Ha!
“What kind of a dumbass buys a bike just for the name?” Sidney speculated as they watched Manners scamper back to the parking lot.
“That kind,” Cass replied, then giggled, which got Amanda going again. Cass was so big, her high-pitched Tweety Bird giggles always set Amanda off.
“He wasn’t worried about me at all,” Detective Beane observed, bemused. “I can’t decide if that’s irritating or emasculating.”
“It can be both.”You didn’t identify yourself as a cop either. Just watched. Himandus. Hmm.“And did you notice, he not only didn’t talk to Sid, he didn’t even look at her? Possibly because she’s repeatedly handed him his ass?”
“Pussy,” Sidney muttered, and speared a cherry tomato. She looked up at Cass, pointing the tomato-laden fork at her. “What’s the plan?”
“I—”
“Because now that Manners is outta here—”
“Don’t say his name out loud!” Amanda yelped. “He’ll reappear like Voldemort. Or Chrestomanci.”
“—we need to get back to the important stuff.”
“We do?”
“Yes, Cassandra,” Sidney replied with unusual patience. “And you should definitely have a fucking plan.”
Cass tried again. “Well—”
“What with the whole arrest thing.”
“I wasn’t—”
“And the whole murder thing,” Amanda added. “Not that we think you did it.”Most likely. Or at least not without good reason.
Cass reminded her of her grandpa’s old coffee pot: Worked fine, though it took forever to get hot, and if you weren’t careful, it would suddenly start spitting hot liquid everywhere. You took it for granted all the times itdidn’tmake a big mess, so on the rare occasion it went up, the chaos was considerable, and it was like you were seeing it for the first time.That’s a reasonable metaphor, right?
Eh. Needs work.
“Can we even talk about this in front of ...” Sidney jerked her head in Sean’s direction.
“Don’t mind me,” he replied, smiling.
“Let’s go back to my Hole,” Amanda suggested, then nearly giggled again at how the cop’s eyebrows arched so high they looked like they were trying to crawl off his forehead.
“Oh, Amanda.” Cass looked at her with warm affection, and for half a second, it was like the last five years had been an awful fever dream. The kind that makes you scared to go to sleep, because what if you wound up back in the nightmare? “Still?”
“I’ll never, ever get tired of it,” she declared. Then, to Sean: “You can come, too, but the second you hear something incriminating, you have to leave.”
“Done,” he replied at once.
“Be it on your head. Okay, everybody, my Hole is nigh!”
“Jesus Christ,” Sidney muttered, but didn’t turn her face away quickly enough, and the others saw the smile.
CHAPTER SIX
The Hobbit Hole was perched on downtown’s eastern edge in an incongruously bright-blue Victorian home a few blocks from Prescott Beach. Like most Victorians, it looked like a dollhouse made real, with turrets to spare and stick work galore.
Amanda, who’d lived in trailer parks and Air Force housing until she was seventeen, always had the niggling feeling that the place wasn’t really hers. The treacherous part of her brain would whisper that she was an impostor, and the cops would one day be waiting for her. “Sorry, this isn’t really your life. Come along quietly, squatter.”
