Page 33 of To Kill a Badger (The Honey Badgers Chronicles #6)

A fter a couple of quick stops in the city, CeCe and her friends arrived at the New Jersey safe house.

She thought her kids would be here, but they weren’t.

No one was here. Most mothers would be worried, but she wasn’t.

She knew her kids could handle themselves.

Besides, they had a lot of safe houses all over the world.

A few of them, the four had had for decades.

She followed Trace into the big, sunken living room right off the hallway from the front door. CeCe watched her best friend drop face-first onto the couch before letting out a long, dramatic sigh into the cushions.

“It’s really not that bad,” she told her fellow She-badger.

“It is! It is that bad!”

It amazed CeCe that Trace could still go from grown adult woman who handled her life and businesses with the iron paw of a dictator right back to the fifteen-year-old girl whose bedroom walls she used to paint murals on.

Ox dropped onto a second couch and kicked her heels off. She’d been wearing heels with jeans since she’d moved to the States in the eighties and, like then, she still managed to make it work. All CeCe ever wore were Doc Martens. Even now—once broken in, of course—they were just so damn comfortable!

“You should let me kill that MacKilligan badger,” Ox said, rubbing her toes. “She is the one upsetting my friend.”

“Not only does Mads not have a lot of friends, these friends actually like her and are willing to play basketball. The most boring sport. We can’t kill Max MacKilligan.

Besides, we really need her sisters to be focused on something other than seeing you walking around with that girl’s head as a hat. And stop smiling, Ox!”

Steph came into the room and sang, “Let’s get this party started!”

“I don’t want to party.” Trace sat up and brushed her hair off her face. “Don’t you see? They’re right. We’re old and useless. We might as well just get in our coffins now.”

“Don’t forget, I want to be cremated,” CeCe reminded her friends. “And don’t let anyone piss on my ashes.”

“Why would anyone . . .” Steph shook her head. “Forget it. I can’t.”

“We are just old ladies,” Trace continued to whine. “That no one loves. We are loveless.”

“Oh, my God.” Steph dropped to the floor next to a big, wooden coffee table, crossing her legs under it. “You need to get over this.”

“She doesn’t even want my help! My own niece. I’m an embarrassment to her!”

CeCe shrugged. “We’ve been an embarrassment to the United States government for the last forty years, and that never bothered you.”

“Because they deserved to be embarrassed!”

“Look, my friend, you can sit here feeling sorry for yourself—”

“Which is so much fun for us,” Steph tossed in.

“—or you can go change into your grubbies, pull your hair out of your face, and get ready to enjoy yourself at any age.”

Grinning, CeCe held up the bags of weed they’d purchased in the city before heading here. “Remember how we used to have to get this?”

“You mean our brothers buying it for us?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I mean.”

“Since there are no children to judge, I will get vodka from car,” Ox said, jumping off the couch.

“I’ll get snacks!”

“Aren’t we too old for this?” Trace asked, really wallowing in the moment.

“Trace Rutowski . . . one is never too old to get high on primo weed.”

“You do have a point.”

* * *

Keane could hear his relatives on the usually quiet street.

There was music and laughing and barbeque smells.

Worried they were going to do nothing but piss off the grizzlies, which would lead to a tiger-bear fight—something that should only happen in the wilds of Siberia, not in the middle of Queens—Keane went outside to order them to turn the noise off.

But the bears were part of it. It was like a street party.

Although, seeing the sides of cow that were being barbequed, he could kind of guess why the bears weren’t putting up much of a fight.

Keane grabbed the back of a lawn chair, dumped one of his cousins out of it—much to the cat’s annoyance—and set it up on Mads’s lawn.

He would keep watch.

Because everything was great now, but it could easily turn. He wanted to prevent that. So he sat and he waited. Ignoring the cousins that kept trying to wave him over or the one who roared at him for five minutes for taking his seat.

About an hour in, he realized that someone had pulled up a chair and was sitting next to him. Nelle had her arms resting on her knees and her scowling gaze scanning the crowd. It took him a moment to figure out she was simply imitating him. Rude!

“Very funny.”

Her scowl cleared, and she laughed. “You should see your face.”

He didn’t need to. When he was fifteen, his mother had taken a picture of him at some random moment and later showed it to him.

“See this?” she’d asked. “This is what you look like. This is why the entire school is terrified of you and you have a meeting with the school therapist next week. Fix that face!”

On that demand, Keane had been unable to help her. But the therapist had said he was “fine” pretty quickly, just to get the glowering teen out of his office and life.

“Do you know why you’re so stressed?” Nelle asked.

“I’m not—”

“It’s because you’re not having sex.”

“Stop talking to me.”

“What are you doing tomorrow?”

“I’m not having sex with you then, either.”

“No, no. I mean what’s your plan for the day?”

“I’m going to practice. Why?”

“What if something else comes up?”

“Nothing else will come up.”

“Perhaps.”

Fed up with the vagueness of this discussion, Keane asked, “What are you talking about?”

“I’ve made a few inquiries, and I’m hoping to hear back tomorrow with information we can use to track down the de Medicis.”

“Really? And then what?”

She shrugged. “Kill them all.”

“See, that’s what worries me. Because that’s not a plan. That’s simply murder in the first degree.”

“What do you think we’re going to do when we come face-to-face with these guys? Have a chat over coffee? Maybe enjoy a strudel together?”

“A strudel?”

“You don’t like strudel?”

“I’ve never had strudel.”

“You’ve never had strudel?”

“Nelle.” He paused. “What I am looking for is retribution. I want to look Paolo de Medici in the eyes and, as one cat to another, rip him apart with my claws. What I don’t want is whatever crazy thing you might be coming up with that will have me waking up in the middle of the night, for the next forty years, sweating and screaming.

I’m trying to get away from that sort of thing. Not make it worse.”

“And if I get their location anyway?”

“Give it to Charlie.”

“You trust Charlie over me?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t even hesitate.”

“No.”

“Why do you trust her more than me?”

“Because she’s calm.”

“I’m always calm.”

“Rational.”

“I’m extremely rational.”

“And has a family.”

“I have family!”

“That she cares about.”

“I care about my family.”

“You won’t even go to your sister’s wedding.”

Nelle’s mouth fell open, and she reared back like he’d just slapped her.

“How dare you say such a thing to me?”

“You said it yourself. You called the wedding ridiculous and said you didn’t want to go.”

“Of course I don’t want to go! No one in their right mind would want to go to that motherfucking wedding!”

Nelle’s sudden—and uncharacteristic—explosion of rage had every tiger and bear on the street focusing on her until she screamed, “What are you all looking at?”

When they quickly turned away from the badger that was ten times smaller than most of them, Keane had never been more delighted!

* * *

Nixie Van Holtz Rutkowski loved, loved, loved her father.

He taught her how to cook food for a pack of people, gave Nixie her first knife set that she still used to this day, and handled all the parent stuff when it came to school for his kids.

He also made sure his daughters knew he loved and respected them as individuals and made sure they did the same for themselves. He was, in a word, amazing.

What her father never did, however, was put a .

45 Glock in her sixteen-year-old hand and say, “If something comes through that door that’s not your father or me, you shoot until the threat stops moving.

Understand?” Then disappear for three months without any of them knowing if she was alive or dead.

Nope. He managed not to do that to any of his children.

It wasn’t that Nixie didn’t love her mother. Of course, she loved her mother. Who didn’t love their mother? What kind of monster would it make her if she didn’t love her own mother?

It was just . . . her mother was a lot. Actually, her mother and her friends were a lot.

When it was just her mother, one-on-one, Nixie mostly enjoyed her company. It was almost normal. So “mom and daughter.” And, even when just one or two of her friends was added, it was lovely. A fun lunch. Or a lovely dinner where normal things were discussed and handled.

Not just full-human normal, but normal by honey badger standards. A small jewelry heist. Or the smuggling in of fine art for a very rich buyer. Normal, normal, normal.

But, when all four She-badgers united in the same space . . .

These four women “meddled”—that was the word her Great-Uncle Edgar kindly used—in world issues like they were Kissinger.

But they weren’t Kissinger. Nixie knew that, because the actual Kissinger hated the four honey badgers and had told them so at a White House dinner to celebrate the arts that they’d attended with Nixie’s father and uncles.

That’s how she’d heard about it. Her father had told her during one of their long conversations.

The pair of them loved to talk about everything.

Books, movies, cooking, hockey. They both loved hockey.