Gathering Dark Candice Fox (e reader TXT) 📖

gopher. I pointed at Hugh Jackman, and for a long moment Sneak and I could do nothing but stare at the creature perched on its hind legs, its front paws fiddling with a button on the remote. My friend and I broke into laughter and fell into each other’s arms.

Sneak said she wasn’t going out, but there was another four hundred dollars missing from the cash pile, which I’d hidden between papers in a box of personal files in my bedroom. She twitched and paced and pretended to watch the television while I dressed for work, then caved and said she was going to take a walk around the block to clear her thoughts. She didn’t come back. It seemed somehow important to keep the gopher near me, my relief at his reappearance forbidding me to leave him alone. So that night I stood behind the register at the Pump’n’Jump and tried to ignore Hugh Jackman’s scuffling and scratching about in the ice cream container under the counter while I served customers. Business fell away near midnight, as it always did, and I pulled a stool toward the register and filled in some of the day’s crossword in the newspaper.

My phone rang as I was watching the headlines scroll across the bottom of the television above the Coke fridge. Jittery footage of stairs in a beautiful house, a hallway, a red room, some sort of table flipped on its side. A naked woman crouching, her hair covering her face. LAPD officer caught in the act!

I answered the call distractedly.

“They haven’t found your car,” Jessica said down the phone.

“Damn it.”

“There are a few cars on the list, however, which haven’t been examined,” she said. “Burned-out shells in the mountains, in the desert, one in Malibu. I’ll go check those out. Some of them I can rule out right away. They’ve been sitting there for months waiting for the municipal council to come get them. But this one in the mountains was only reported three days ago. I’ll start there.”

“That’s great,” I said. “Well, not for me. Not for Dayly, either, if it is the car. But a good lead.”

“There’s no activity on Dayly’s phone, bank accounts, or social media accounts,” she said. “She’s completely blacked out. Tasik is pursuing the angle that she might have some Crips after her to take a bullshit charge on a bag of guns.”

“What?” I watched a cat skitter across the empty parking lot, pursuing a cockroach. Jessica told me the story she had heard from Tasik. “But what about the guy? Flat-Top? Sneak and I have him with Dayly at the San Jasinte airfield looking at hiring a plane.”

“Not everything means something in an investigation like this. Sometimes things are just parts of the puzzle. All I’ve got on Flat-Top is a vague lead about an officer out there,” Jessica said. I heard papers shuffling. “I searched the internal database, the personnel files for the San Jasinte police department. Marcus Lemon is your guy, I think. Weird name. Badge number 994901. Officer Lemon is a newbie straight out of the academy, just posted into San Jasinte in January. He’s pretty clean. Young and square. Has that stupid haircut.”

“Sneak and I can check him out,” I said. “Did you ask Tasik why he went for me like he did?”

“I didn’t need to, Blair. You’re a criminal. You should be used to being treated like shit.” The silence hung for a beat. “He wanted you to back off, that’s all. That doesn’t matter. If Dayly has pissed off some Crips then she’s either dead or she should be hiding under a rock on Mars, because they’ll come after her. Killing Dayly to get two of their lieutenants and one of their footmen off a guns charge would be no problem for them.”

“Great,” I said.

“It would make sense for one of them to bust into your apartment and try to grab you. It probably means they don’t have her yet, and they’re looking for anyone who might know where she is, and you stuck your hand up when you went into the police station, or maybe when you turned up at her apartment.”

“So where do we go from here?” I asked.

“Tasik will probably be working on confirming the Crips angle. We should work on something else. Three weeks ago we have a weird payment into Dayly’s bank account. I can’t figure it out,” Jessica said. “Eight hundred bucks. The money came in from one of those crypto websites that keep the payer anonymous. It’ll take some tracking down. Tasik doesn’t seem to be onto it.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Dayly also flew to San Francisco two months ago,” she said. “Landed at five a.m. on a Saturday and hired a car from the airport. Dropped the car back six hours later and flew home.”

“Six hours?”

“Yeah.”

“Why the hell would she do that? What can you do in San Francisco for six hours?”

“No idea,” Jessica said. “You can ask your friend Sneak. See if she knows what her daughter was up to.”

“Look,” I said as I sensed her tone easing toward the end of the call. “I want to say thanks fo—”

“Don’t.”

“I’m serious,” I said. “It was a big ask. I don’t know what’s going on with you right now, but—”

“Why would what’s going on with me be any of your fucking business?”

“—but things seem to be a little hectic in your life, and you were good to listen to me, to us, when we came knocking.”

There was silence on the line. The tautness of it made me restless. I looked out the window and saw a huge black Escalade pulling in to the lot, parking without stopping near the gas pumps. I recognized the license plate and a bolt of fear sizzled through me.

“Blair,” Jessica said. “That night. In Brentwood. Why didn’t you—”

“Oh, Jesus, I’ve gotta go. I’ve gotta go.” I ended the call and hurled the phone into the messy space beneath the counter where Hugh Jackman’s container lay. I tossed