Jex Malone (13 page)

A nanosecond later, the front door slams hard and I nearly jump out of my skin.

Any more of this stress and I'm going to just pass out.
Then I hear my overly cheerful father shout out his greeting.

“Hello, is anybody home?”

I feel like shouting back “no,” but he probably wouldn't get it. Just then, he materializes in the doorway, his muscle-bound body filling the entire space and blocking any chance of our escape or any fresh air entering the premises.

He's that large and imposing.

And annoying.

“Oh, hey … oh wow, hi girls,” he says, a broad grin flying across his tan face and his green-brown eyes suddenly merry. “Nice to see you. I see you've met my daughter. Hey, that's great. You can all be friends.”

He says it like it's suddenly a done deal. Like we're five-year-olds on a playdate at the local park. He has now granted his long-lost daughter the gift of out-of-town friendship. It's settled. Just like that … because Daddy says so.

Cissy nods adoringly in his direction. I feel my stomach actually lurch because while he's standing there, the envelope is sitting on the floor between us. I can't tell if he spots it or not, but I know if I make a sudden movement in its direction, he will spot it with his eagle cop eyes. How can he resist something that says Patty Matthews on it?

My heart pounds like a drum at a heavy metal show because I know if he spies it, we're in deep, deep trouble of the unexplainable, other-dimensional kind.

“So what have you been up to today, honey?” Dad asks me, being a little too cheery for someone who just stepped off the day shift of who knows what murder and mayhem. He stands there in jeans and a plaid shirt indicating it might have been an undercover type of day. I notice a bloody cut across the knuckles of his right hand that wasn't there in the morning.

“Oh nothing. We've been up to nothing. Just girl stuff. Female things,” Deva jumps up and stands between him and the rest of us.

She instinctively knows that's going to stop his line of questioning. Girl things can mean anything from bras to tampons to the dreaded talk of monthly periods. I'm sure he would rather face a room full of escaped convicts than talk about menstrual moments. He's so not going there.

He's out of the conversation.

Denied by genetics.

Quick as a flash, Nat moves her body ever so slightly and sits on top of the envelope. Somehow during that little Dad entrance, she has managed to put the notebook back into the envelope. Score one for Miss CSI. In one fluid motion, I squeeze closer to Nat so there is no space between us and he can't see anything underneath her. We throw our arms around each other.

“Oh, well, that's nice … ” Dad stammers and then smiles as Nat reaches over and gives me a little hug. Yeah, nothing will stop a guy in his tracks like a little female bonding.

They. Just. Don't. Get. It.

Deva smiles. One more second and she looks as if she was prepared to bring up leg waxing and moisturizing just to ward him off a little bit more.

These girls are good.

“Well, then I can promise we're going to have a very fun evening,” Dad blurts out in a nervous, slightly throaty voice that doesn't imply any fun at all.

“Jex, we're picking up Sandy in an hour and then we're off to the strip. The famous Las Vegas strip. Why don't you go get dressed and washed up? You're so rumpled, you look like one of my robbery suspects,” he says, laughing briefly. “What have you been doing all day? Breaking and entering?”

The good detective smiles at me with a nervous grin, waiting for some sort of reaction. I think that's his attempt at a joke.

If he only knew. Okay, Dad, I did spend the day almost breaking into that murdered girl's house, and then I searched her basement for clues … clues that are a few inches in front of your face right now … clues you never found all those years ago and clues that actually might have helped you solve a murder case.

Perhaps if Nat did not have a dead girl's last written words stuck to her sweaty thighs just moments ago, I might react.

“Good one, sir, I mean, Detective,” Cissy says, looking lovingly at her OGC—older guy crush, or maybe that should be crash.

Gosh Cissy, rein it in a little bit.

Deva is already up and headed for the door when she grabs my dad by his arms and turns him around, leaving his back to us. “So, tell me, Detective Malone, I've heard our local police force is getting new uniforms. Please tell me they're changing their colors. All that khaki is so last season and creates unneeded bulk.”

My dad stammers as he hunts for an answer to a topic so obviously unimportant to him. “Well, I don't know—you know I'm a plain-clothes detective, so it's not exactly something I'm following,” he retorts.

His voice is now clearly down the hall, so Nat and I roll off the envelope and she quickly tucks it inside her sweatshirt.

I can hear Deva walking my dad back toward his own front door. She clearly has her PhD in throwing parents off the trail of whatever she's up to and has the practical experience to pull off her theories on this subject.

“Nat,” I whisper. “I'll call you when I get back tonight. Don't open that notebook without me. Swear on the life of Jack Bauer.”

“Swear I won't or Jack is six feet under,” she says, smiling and nodding her head. I know it's going to absolutely kill her to not look in there while I'm gone, but I also think she doesn't want to be alone when she reads whatever Patty wanted to keep secret.

It turns out a ghost doesn't get to keep secrets—especially not if you find her paperwork.

“I would so love to hurt you right now.”

—Gracie Hart,
Miss Congeniality

I had no idea it was such a long drive from his house to the Las Vegas strip.

Real time: Twenty minutes.

Time stuck in a car with my father's girlfriend: Eternity.

Dad puts on some '80s rock tunes from a band called The Cops or The Police—how appropriate—and drives through the Vegas suburbs past all the Super Targets and Walmarts onto Highway 215 while Sting is screaming out for
“Roxanne, Roxanne … ”

The sun has given up on the day. Now, a purple-pink sunset casts violet shadows over the ominous Black Mountain, named because the jagged mountain walls look like they were permanently painted the color of night.

I sit in stony silence in the back of his navy blue Chevy Tahoe. For fun, I pick a hangnail until it bleeds a little bit. Blinking a few times, I notice that suddenly the pink sky has given way to an inky darkness that covers the entire desert floor.

Over it!

Then I glance up again—and my eyes just about pop out of my head.

WELCOME TO LAS VEGAS
reads the visitor's sign.

Suddenly, it's like the sky is blazing with a million neon lights that twinkle merrily like the biggest party in the world is up ahead of us. In the distance, I spot giant hotels that shower the street with brightness so awesome that it's almost blinding. The Luxor Hotel looks like an Egyptian pyramid and a massive white light shoots up from the middle of it, piercing the cloudless night.

Dad hangs a quick right down Las Vegas Boulevard, where thousands of tourists cram the sidewalks in front of another megahotel called Treasure Island, where fake pirates are having a battle complete with cannons and a sinking battleship and girls in halter tops who are “pirate chic.”

He drives racecar fast, so the hotels are a bit of a blur now: One called Excalibur looks like a castle where Harry Potter might live; another called the Bellagio has brightly lit fountains that shoot thousands of gallons of water hundreds of feet into the sky while rock tunes blast from underground speakers. I wince when we pass New York, New York, which features its own mini Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building.

So close to Jersey
. I'm slumping into the leather seat.
I miss home.

However, I can barely hear myself think about home—and it's not the retro music.

The noise is coming from the nonstop talking machine, a.k.a. my father's girlfriend, Sandy, who won't shut the heck up. Ms. Motormouth hasn't stopped jabbering since she came bouncing out of the door of her condo in the Desert Sky subdivision in a skintight pink micro-mini Spanx skirt and a black yes-I-have-big-boobs tank top.

“Gimme a
J
, gimme an
E
, gimme an
X
! What does it spell?” she shouted when we were first introduced. Yes, she even did the hand motions.

It spells don't ever talk to me again.

But at least she can spell small words like Jex.

First, she hands me her card. It reads:
Sandy Derrier, Yoga Teacher
.

“Your last name is derriere like butt cheeks … like sandy butt cheeks,” I can't resist saying, holding back hysterical laughter that's obviously brewing. This earns me a cold look in the rearview mirror from my father.

“No, honey, it's pronounced Der-ray,” she informs me. “Like, Sandy Der-ray.”

Even making fun of her name doesn't stop her as she bounces even closer to my father in the front seat and actually holds his nondriving hand.

Do Chevy Tahoes come with eject buttons?

Even twenty-five minutes later, inside a fancy Mexican restaurant called Dos Hombres in a hotel called Caesars, like the salad, I can't tune Ms. Bouncy out.

My frowning face is met with a side-glance from my tense-looking father, who sips a big frothy beer slowly while holding the frosted mug in a death grip.

“Sweetie, are you a cheerleader at home in New Jersey?” Sandy babbles away, tossing out a smile so vibrant that I almost reach for the knockoff “designer” sunglasses in my purse.

This is what it's like to stare into a solar eclipse and go blind. Burned retina, here I come.

Dad looks at me hard as in, “Please answer.” Yes, the big cheerleader inquiry is still on the table … and the crowd is waiting breathlessly.

“Well,” I finally speak while crunching a very large, crispy fresh taco chip loudly, “I do cheer when I hear school is closed for a snow day.”

Dad takes a gulp of beer and gives me a pleading look while I shove three huge tortilla chips into my mouth.

Sandy gazes at me in horror. It's like she has just seen a monster: Carbzilla.

“I'd love to give you some guest passes to my gym and we could work on you dropping those last ten pounds,” Sandy suggests happily while she sips her water and gazes lovingly at Dad.

Gold stiletto Manolos (hers) tap nervously under the table.

Even the menu divides us. When we order, I go for enchiladas with extra cheese, he orders a huge steak burrito, and Sandy asks for a dinner salad with oil and vinegar.

On the side.

Yes. That. Would. Be. All.

“You would do well in a Pilates class,” Sandy babbles on. “At your age, it would take absolutely no time to get rid of that baby fat.”

Ouch. Can my dad arrest her for body harassment? Or perhaps this is a full-body assault. Even my mom the vegan doesn't comment on my thigh meat.

But there is no time to arrest her because out of the corner of my left eye, I notice a middle-aged woman swinging a serious dirty-blonde power bob, and she's coolly sauntering up to our table. Spotting her from a few yards away, I zero in because people-watching is so much better than listening to Sandy go on about the war against cellulite.

Everyone in the restaurant seems to know the power bob. A few nervous people call out a quick hello, and she even stops at one table to … sign an autograph. Warning lights go off when the woman zeroes in on my father with a laser stare as she makes her way past another gaggle of admirers.

Old girlfriend?

Too hard edged.

The woman is dressed in what looks like an extremely expensive black pantsuit that must have one of the major designer labels tucked inside. Her nails are long and ruby red. I note the seriously tall black pumps, Chanel purse, and the cell phone permanently clutched in her right hand.

“Well, well, well … Detective Malone,” the woman says in a low, powerful voice when she finally reaches her destination. “I'm sure you're thrilled to see Katt.”

It's like someone flipped an invisible switch, because Dad matches the woman for intensity. In a matter of seconds, he goes from nervous father to dead-serious cop. He looks like he could kill, and the way his eyes narrow forces me into a rare double take. A quick chill slips down my spine.

Dad means business.

“Katt,” he says in his hard cop tone. “We can skip the BS. What do you want?”

“Not happy to see your favorite Katt woman?” She pretends to purr, but she's not good at being girly. “Katt is so happy to see you because, of course, and I will cut to the chase, the anniversary of poor Patty Matthews's disappearance is in a few weeks.”