Chapter 41
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Present Day
Palm Desert, California
Mission Day Three
Mick’s phone rang as he was getting out of the Uber outside of the house his father had “bought” to play golf with Ernest Harper in Palm Desert.
He’d walked out of the Palm Springs neighborhood where Rod had brought them for safe-keeping, waving to the guard at the gate. The Uber was nearby and the driver had picked him up mere moments later, dropping him here in Palm Desert a mere ten minutes after that.
The number calling him wasn’t in his contacts list—area code 203. What was that? Something back east, New Jersey maybe? He sent it to voicemail, but almost immediately a text came whooshing in from that same phone number.
It’s Emily. Pick up.
When it rang again, he moved off of the open street and into the shadowy darkness of the carefully landscaped yards around him before he answered.
She didn’t even let him say hello.
“What are you doing? Get your ass back here.” She was angry.
“I told you I’m going to fix this,” he said, keeping his voice low.
“How?” she demanded.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Yeah, it does,” she shot back. “My guess is that you’re going to confront the assholes who are watching your car in the hotel parking garage.”
That was a damn good guess—and Mick would’ve done exactly that if he’d arrived here to find the house dark.
But not only were the lights on, but Harper’s car was parked in the fancy, pink-pavered driveway. It had to be his. It was a newer model Lexus, but it bore the same vanity plate that the man had had for forever: GR8LWYR
What an asshole.
“Unless you stop this bullshit,” Emily continued, “and tell me where you are so we can pick you up, we’re going have to drive through the entire garage, since I have no idea where you parked.
And since the best I can do to describe your car is the color—it’s white with four doors and four wheels—I’m going to have to go with Jules and Sam so I can point to it and say That one, I think. ”
Christ, that would be dangerous, essentially putting her into the gunmen’s sights. “Emily—”
“Please just stop,” she interrupted him.
“I know what you’re doing. You think if they kill you it’ll be over, but it won’t be.
They’ll still come after me. Jules and Sam—the team you hired because they’re very good at what they do—found out all this crazy shit that Harper and Spencer and God knows who else have been doing for years.
Mick, Jules thinks they just found proof that your father died three years ago. ”
Mick’s brain stuttered and he heard himself laugh a little. “What?”
“Bones, Mick,” Emily told him. “Human bones. In the garden at Devonshire Place. Harper’s been committing some hardcore fraud for years—pretending your father was still alive to keep control of the estate.
We need you to come back here. Jules needs a DNA sample from you and I need.
..” Her voice broke. “I need you to walk away from the gun on the desk.”
Mick couldn’t help it. He started to cry. “You’re the only person in the world that I care about,” he told her. “And I don’t know how else to make sure you’re safe.”
“Well, that won’t happen if you die for me, asshole,” she said sharply.
“You really think they’re just gonna give up if you’re dead?
No, these fuckers are gonna find some long-lost Devonshire relative and control the estate through them—after they kill me, which you won’t know about because you’ll already be stupidly dead. ”
“Oh, shit,” Mick said, because she was probably right.
“You really want to fix this?” she asked.
“I do,” he told her. “I really do.”
“Then you start,” she told him, and he could tell that she had started to cry, too, “by trusting the extremely competent people you hired to help us figure this out.”
Us. Emily had said us. Help us.
“Em, I’m so, so sorry that I didn’t tell you the truth right from the beginning,” Mick said.
“Jules told me about the money,” she said.
What money, he stopped himself from saying, because he’d just apologized to her for not telling her the truth. He didn’t want to lie to her again, but... God.
“Were you just never going to mention it?” she asked.
“Yes,” he admitted. “It gave you such comfort, thinking that your mother—”
“But she didn’t,” Emily countered. “There was no insurance policy. That was just another lie.”
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered.
“I don’t blame you for that one,” she said. “I blame my grandfather—”
“Don’t, God, Em, he really loved you!”
“...but really, I don’t blame him either, because, yeah. I know he was doing the best he could. And... I think, maybe... you were, too.”
Mick closed his eyes. “I wish I’d done better.”
“Good,” she said. “Do better now. Tell me where you are so we can come and get you. Jules wants to take us back to Los Angeles, where there’s a whole team of people who’ll make sure we’re safe.”
“I’m in Palm Desert,” Mick told her as he looked at Harper’s car parked in the drive of the house that Emily now owned.
“I’ll... get myself back to the main road and drop you a pin.
” No way was he letting them pick him up within shouting range of the man who they all believed was behind the plot to kill her.
“What’s in Palm Desert?” Emily asked.
“Harper’s here,” Mick said. “At the house in the golfing community that he allegedly bought for my father, who hated both Palm Springs and golf.”
Jules Cassidy’s voice cut in, and Mick realized he’d been talking to Emily on speaker, in front of them all. “Get out of there, Mick,” Cassidy ordered him tersely. “Do not confront him, do not go near the house!”
Emily spoke over him. “Please just go, Mick. Now!”
“As you wish,” Mick whispered, but when he turned to do just that, he realized that two men—one of whom he recognized as being the man Emily had identified as the shooter from the black SUV—had come seemingly out of nowhere, the light from the driveway glinting off their guns.
“Oh shit, two guys,” he said, grunting in pain as the closer man elbowed him in the face and swatted the phone from his hands, crushing it in the street beneath one large booted foot.
Head ringing, he spun to try to run, and the other man raised his weapon.
But instead of firing it, he used it as a cudgel to hit Mick even harder in the head.
And the night around him popped and sparked and went black.
And... here Jules was again, mired in a situation that abso-fucking-lutely wouldn’t have happened if he were still in the FBI.
Emily wanted to go with them, to ‘help’ rescue Mick.
Were he still a federal agent, Jules would’ve had the authority to insist that any and all civilians immediately stand down—and be placed in protective custody, against their will, if necessary.
But here, in this strange new world he found himself, they were all civilians, himself included. So as Jules used Google maps to look at Devonshire’s Palm Desert house and the properties around it, he tried a simple, “No.”
“I’m not your client,” Emily told him what he damn well already knew.
She’d grabbed a pair of jeans and a shirt from Connie’s closet and was now tying the laces of a pair of cross-trainers that she’d no doubt found in there, too, crouched down on the tile kitchen floor.
Everything was a little too big for her—Emily was tall, but Connie had been taller—but it worked.
“The best you can give me is advice. You think I should stay here. I hear you clearly, thank you so much. But the choice is mine. You can leave me, but I’ll just call an Uber and follow you anyway. ”
“Not if Rod and Hob stay back with you.”
“Well, that’s stupid,” Emily argued as she straightened up, clearly ready to hit the road. “That means it’s just you and Sam against who knows how many of them—presumably the men in the black SUV.”
“Yes,” Jules said. “Exactly. Presumably the men in the black SUV, for whom you are their target. Besides, Sam’s the equivalent of a four-man squad.”
Sam was currently on the phone with Lindsey Jenkins, who was still at Devonshire Place with Detective Lennox. It was time to call in the local Palm Springs police for backup, but Jules wanted a human contact and hoped that Jenkins or Lennox could provide that for them.
“I seriously doubt Sam can be in four places at once,” Emily countered. “Good as he may be.”
That was true. Still.
“I’m in partial agreement,” Rod chimed in as he came into the kitchen with Hobbit.
Rod had outfitted Hob with one of his spare sidearms, opening his gun-locker to supply them both with plenty of ammunition, too.
“I say I go with you, leave Kevin back here with Emily. He’s a better shot than both of us. ”
That, too, was true. But.
“You said this location—Rod’s house—was compromised,” Emily continued to argue, pointing out that of which Jules was acutely aware.
“I’ll be safer if I go with you—and Kevin will, too.
Also? Kevin’s a medic and you’re going to need one.
Mick’s gonna need one—” her voice got louder and louder “—assuming he’s still alive so can we all! Please! Just! Go!”
“If you’re leaving this house,” Jules told Emily, purposely keeping his words vague as he turned and looked hard at Rod, “Rod, I want you with her.”
Rod narrowed his eyes slightly—he didn’t like the assignment Jules had just given him, but he nodded. “Affirmative.”
“FYI,” Hobbit told Jules, “I’m ready to help—however you think is best.” He, too, had clearly heard what Jules hadn’t just said as he stood looking from Jules to Rod and then back to Jules. “But Mr. Krabs ain’t wrong. I am a better shot than you.”
Yeah, it was just the other countless years of training that he’d skipped. “You couldn’t bring yourself to kill a deer,” Jules pointed out. “Lot harder to put a bullet in a human being.”
“Not if I’m defending someone I love,” Hobbit countered.