Page 2 of Always Murder (The Last Picks #9)

Millie’s request hung in the air.

Possibilities of exactly how Millie might need our help flashed through my mind. She knew I didn’t have any money. And if she wanted Bobby to have a stern, manly talk with Keme about something, she wouldn’t have roped us into this awful evening. I had the sudden, gut-wrenching notion she was going to ask me to fight her sisters.

“I really don’t think—” I began. “My conditioning, see—”

“It’ll only take a minute,” she said in that same awful, scratchy voice, and she wiped her eyes. “Please?”

I didn’t say anything, and neither did Bobby. She must have taken our silence for agreement because she turned and headed down the hall.

And since this was Millie, and I would literally do anything for her (except let her pierce my ears, which had been a real bone of contention between us until Bobby had put an end to it by saying he liked my ears the way they were), we followed.

We caught up with her as she was knocking on a door. Keme slouched against the wall next to her, his face a dark mask. I had been down this hallway before; this was where all the bedrooms were located, which I knew because on a previous visit, Millie had showed me the bedroom she shared with Kassandra and Angeline. I figured this was Paul and Ryan’s bedroom, and my theory was confirmed when an angry, “Go away!” came in answer to Millie’s knock.

Millie pushed the door open and marched inside.

My first impression of the room was boy . The walls were the same off-white as the rest of the house. The carpet was the same brown. A black, particle-board bedroom set looked like it was at least twenty years old: a dresser, two nightstands, two twin beds. One of the comforters was blue; the other was gray. A desk was covered with loose change and receipts and those little paper event wristbands and open (presumably empty) energy drinks. The top of the dresser had more of the same. Everything was organized around a massive television, from which various game consoles snaked out across the floor: a new Xbox, a new PlayStation, a Switch, even one of those VR systems that looked incredible and were way too expensive. (Although I’d dropped a lot of hints for Santa.) The closest thing to decoration, if you didn’t count all the bags of corn chips on the floor, was a pegboard festooned with hats and jackets. It smelled—just one guy’s opinion—like they needed to keep the door open.

Paul sat in one of those on-the-floor style gaming chairs. His face was blotchy, and although he wasn’t crying, his eyes were red. An energy drink sat on the floor next to him. He was playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild , which—no joke—might be the best video game ever created. Paul’s gaze flicked from me to Bobby to Keme and then back to Millie, and his color darkened.

“I said go away—”

“Be quiet,” Millie said. “Dash is going to help you.”

Zelda music played softly in the background.

“Uh,” I said. “I am?”

“I don’t need anybody’s help,” Paul said. “I’m fine. Now get out of here.”

“Paul got fired,” Millie said.

“Millie!”

“For stealing packages.”

Paul’s jaw dropped.

“And they’re considering legal action,” Millie said. “Pressing charges.”

“Shut up!” Paul scrambled to his feet and shut the door. In a marginally quieter voice, he said, “Do you want Mom and Dad to hear you?”

“Pressing charges?” I said with a glance at Bobby.

He shook his head. “A company can’t press charges, but they could make a formal complaint. I haven’t heard anything.”

“He works— worked —for CPF,” Millie said. “Clatsop Parcel and Freight. It’s seasonal work; normally, they do commercial freight, but around this time of year, they hire extra workers to help with all the holiday packages. But they said if Paul did a good job, they might hire him full-time.”

“I’m fine,” Paul said. “It’s not a big deal. I didn’t steal anything, and they can’t prove I did, and it was a stupid job, anyway. I’ve got better things to do. I’m going to do e-sports and go pro.”

The look on Keme’s face said what we all thought about that.

A question popped into my head, and I asked it without thinking about it. “What have you been doing since you got fired?”

A fresh wave of color mottled Paul’s face, and he gave me the lamest “Huh?” ever in the history of huhs .

“Your mom thinks you still work there,” I said. “She was talking about it at dinner. So, that means you’re not hanging around the house all day. Where are you going? What are you doing?”

“It happened yesterday,” Paul said. He dropped into the gaming chair and picked up the Switch controller. “And I was going to hang out with Ryan at Pirate’s Cove, but I couldn’t find my card, and he’s being a butt-munch about it.”

Pirate’s Cove Laser Tag and Mini-Golf was what entrepreneurial types called an adventure park , or an action park or a plain old entertainment business . It was the only location of its kind in Hastings Rock, and from all appearances, it was doing quite well—not surprisingly, since we were talking about a significant tourist destination with unpredictable weather.

“Ryan’s a manager there?” I asked; I was fairly sure that was what Christine had said, but I wanted to be sure.

“And he can get the cards for free, and it doesn’t cost him anything! I don’t know why he’s being such a butt-munch about it.”

“Right, well, let’s save The Mystery of Why Ryan’s Being a Butt-Munch for later. Why don’t you tell us what happened?”

“Nothing happened,” Paul said, and he unpaused his game and started to play again. “Ms. Hernandez is a jerk.”

My gut was telling me a few things. First, that (apparently) I had little patience for an overgrown man-child, even though I might be one myself. Second, that Paul’s lack of concern was genuine—which, in my book, made him an idiot. And third, that I should agree that Paul didn’t need my help and get the heck out of there.

Millie looked so distraught, though.

“Paul,” I said, “can you stop playing your game for a few minutes? I want to ask you a few questions.”

“Why is everybody being a dill hole tonight?” he said. “I told you, I don’t need—”

That was when Keme unplugged, well, everything.

The TV went dark. The lights on the Switch turned off. In the absence of Zelda music, the silence suddenly felt thick.

Then Paul screamed, “What’d you do? I didn’t save my game!”

Keme stood there, arms folded, a power cord still hanging from one hand. He looked about as satisfied with himself as an eighteen-year-old can.

“Are you kidding me?” Paul’s voice continued to rise. “What is wrong with you—”

“BE QUIET!”

I’m not joking: I staggered .

Keme took a step back.

Even Bobby swayed, although he caught my arm and kept me upright.

And Paul rocked back in his gaming chair like he was about to go tail over teakettle.

“STOP TALKING,” Millie continued, hands on her hips as she loomed over Paul. “You’re being a—a brAT!”

A ringing silence followed. I checked my ears for blood.

“Now sit up straight and answer Dash’s questions,” Millie said.

Paul sat up straight. The movement wasn’t all that coordinated, and his eyes were a little glassy.

“And be polite,” Millie snapped.

Paul’s head jerked in a nod.

“And if you ever say ‘dill hole’ again, I’m telling Mom, and she’ll wash your mouth out.”

In the wake of all that, you could have heard a pin drop (if your eardrums hadn’t ruptured.)

“All right, Dash,” Millie said. “Go ahead.”

“Right,” I said. “Uh, right. So, they fired you yesterday. Is that correct?”

Paul nodded.

Millie put her hands on her hips again.

“Yes,” Paul squeaked.

“What did they say?”

“They said I’m fired.”

I tried not to sigh.

“He means,” Bobby said, “what explanation did they give?”

“Oh. Um, that I was stealing packages?”

Keme snorted, but when Millie glanced at him, he clammed right up.

“What exactly did they say?” Bobby asked.

Paul’s face screwed up with concentration; the controller sagged in one hand. “Well, Ms. Hernandez asked me if I knew why she called me in, and I said no, and she said she ‘found that hard to believe’”—Paul even did the air quotes with one hand. “—and then she said they knew I’d been stealing packages, and I said no way, and she said it was only my packages, and I said I wasn’t stealing anything, and she said I was fired and she was going to personally make sure I went to jail.” He thought about it and added, “She was super rude.”

“It was only your packages?” I asked.

Paul waited, as though expecting more, and said, “Yeah, my packages. That’s why I’m the thief.” And with a level of scorn that would have made a middle-schooler proud, he added, “Supposably.”

“That’s weird, isn’t it?”

Paul shrugged.

“Not necessarily,” Bobby said. “If it’s someone stealing packages from a specific neighborhood, and they happen to be operating at the same time as Paul’s deliveries, it would make sense for all the packages to be ones delivered by Paul. We’ve had the usual uptick in reports of porch pirates.”

“Okay,” I said. “Yeah.”

Bobby didn’t quite smile. “But?”

“I don’t know.” I frowned at the man-child. “Did they say it was all the packages in one neighborhood?”

Paul bounced his controller against his thigh; apparently, this was taking too long. “I don’t know.”

Keme snorted again.

“I mean, no,” Paul said. “I told you what she said. That it was only my packages.”

“See,” I said, “I think that’s weird.”

“It’s just Ms. Hernandez being Ms. Hernandez,” Paul said.

“What does that mean?” Millie said.

“She’s super mean. And she hates me for, like, no reason.”

The adults—and that includes Keme—exercised our collective willpower for a moment so one of us wouldn’t throttle Paul.

“What’d you do?” Millie asked.

“I didn’t do anything—”

“PAUL!”

“I was just looking at it!”

Keme said a word under his breath you can’t whisper in Papa Noel’s ear.

“Looking at what?” I asked.

“ Super Smash Bros. Ultimate . A couple of weeks ago, this copy came through. The package was already open, okay? It was halfway out of the box, and it was a release day drop, and I wanted to do a quick stream of me with it, you know, because literally nobody had seen one yet. It’s not like it matters—if a package gets opened, we tape it up again and deliver it. There was no reason for Ms. Hernandez to go ballistic.”

I caught a look on Keme’s face that was somewhere close to envy. I tried to keep my own expression smooth—a certain young man, if he behaved himself and quit trying to give me a dead leg every time I beat him in Halo , was going to get a copy of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate this Christmas. The game had only come out a couple of weeks before, and it had been one of the most anticipated releases of the year. My gamer self could understand the excitement of seeing a copy in the wild, so to speak, on release day. On the other hand, that didn’t make Paul any less of an idiot for taking it out of the package to live stream himself with it.

“You’re so dumb,” Millie informed Paul.

“I didn’t do anything wrong! Jeez, you’re as bad as Mom!”

“That’s all?” I asked. “They didn’t fire you?”

“Not that time. But she yelled at me. A lot . It doesn’t matter—everybody hates her. One time, she put Jesse on suspension because she said Jesse had a bad attitude. And she gets on Andrea’s case all the time, and Andrea’s her daughter. All she cares about is her stupid dog; Andrea says she spends so much money on it, and she won’t even help Andrea buy a car or anything.” He shot the TV a look, in case his game had miraculously come back on. “Oh man! What if Ms. Hernandez did it? It’s, like, the perfect inside job. She’s in charge of loss prevention. Who’s going to investigate her?”

None of us, it turned out, had an answer to that—although Keme did roll his eyes.

After a moment, though, Millie brightened. “What if it’s a GHOST?”

Those of you playing along at home may not be surprised; Millie’s first instinct, when anything strange happens, is to suspect that a ghost might be involved.

“Is there anyone else you can think of?” I asked. “Someone you noticed on your route? Someone who talked to you? Someone following you? Someone who asked about the packages?”

“Oh yeah, somebody asked me if I knew what was in those packages and which ones were valuable and if I’d mind if he took some of them.” Paul gave me a withering look and added, “Der.”

I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced the sudden knowledge that you’re capable of murder—if you’ve raised a teenager, or worked with teenagers, or know a teenager, the odds are high that you have. I was currently exploring that flash of self-awareness.

Bobby got a surprisingly firm grip on my arm and said, “We’re going to step out into the hall now.”

Millie and Keme followed, and as soon as the door closed, I said, “Der? Der ? How old is he? I’m going to—I’m going to—I’m going to fight him. No, Bobby’s going to fight him!”

“No,” Bobby said, “I’m not.”

I stopped. I glared. “Fine. Whatever. That’s okay. I don’t need you.”

“Excuse me?”

“Keme will fight him for me.”

The boy perked up at this, but then he cast a glance at Millie, deflated, and shook his head.

“I don’t need any of you,” I said. “I’m going to tell his mom!”

“Okay,” Bobby said, grabbing my arm again. “Let’s save that for when you’re not hopped up on sugar bars.”

“Oh, they weren’t sugar bars,” Millie said. “They were sugar cookie bars. With triple frosting.”

In his very Bobby way, he said, “Uh huh.” And then, he added, “Millie, I know you’re hoping Dash can help with this, but I’m not sure what you want him to do. The best thing would be to wait, see if the business files a complaint, and then figure out what evidence they have against Paul. If he’s innocent, they’re not going to be able to make the charges stick.”

Having been wrongly accused before, I wasn’t so sure about that. But one thing you learn about having a boyfriend is to save your fights for the stuff that matters. (Like eating Oreos in bed.) On the other hand, I didn’t disagree with Bobby—Paul’s problem wasn’t exactly life-threatening.

Before I could say this, though, Millie spoke. “I know he’s a jerk. I know he’s immature. I know he’s not taking this seriously. But you don’t understand—Ryan and Paul are, well, you know. And it’s really hard for my mom. I haven’t seen her this happy in so long. If she finds out Paul got fired for stealing packages, it’s going to break her heart.” She had tears in her eyes. Her voice was thick. She actually, literally sniffled. And then she said, “And it’s Christmas.”