Page 5

CHAPTER 5

BABY PACED THE PARKING lot, 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 said RAMIREZ . 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.”

“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 be real new. 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.