“You ready?” Val waited impatiently, keys in hand and one foot out the driver’s side door. The rain beat down around us, an unrelenting pounding on the car. She had her hoodie pulled tight over her head.
It was eight thirty-five, and we’d just arrived at the yacht club for the big stakeout with Ava-Rose. The rest of my day had been uneventful. Too uneventful, without even a return phone call from Grandpa about the notebook message. No sightings of him, either. I had this fantasy of him hiding Leopard Man out somewhere, keeping him from the police. Regardless, I’d torn the first floor apart but didn’t find a trace of the mysterious notebook.
And it was bugging me.
“Yep.” I pulled my own hoodie up and zipped my coat all the way to my chin. Of course we had to pick the dark and stormy night for this grand scheme. “So what’s the plan? We going to hide under the porch or something? Or are we going in and hiding in closets?”
She gave me a look, which I couldn’t see too well since her face was mostly hidden under her clothes. “I’m not sure of the plan,” she admitted. “I was leaving it up to Ava-Rose.”
“Because she has so much experience with this stuff?” I rolled my eyes. “Let’s get inside and we’ll figure it out.”
We ran across the main road. I could feel my clothing being soaked through already. Luckily, the weather and our desire to get inside prevented me from looking for any lingering effects on the road from the incident. Tire tracks or whatnot. I didn’t really want to think about the whatnot. I wondered if there’d been a lot of blood or if his injuries were mostly internal.
We reached the safety of the front awning and I paused to shake some of the water off me.
“This way,” Val instructed, motioning me around the side of the building.
I followed her to a side door I didn’t know existed. Val looked around furtively, slipped a key in the lock, and pushed open the door. I followed her inside. It looked like we were on the lower level. Only a very low light burned somewhere off to the side. I could make out a room with glass windows in front of us that appeared to be designed to look like a ship’s quarters. I assumed it was used for smaller functions or something along those lines.
“Wow. This really is a stealth operation.” I pushed my hoodie off and straightened my messy ponytail. It was a good thing I’d put my hair up, otherwise I’d have had to wring it out. “Is Ava-Rose here yet?” I asked as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.
“I don’t know,” Val said, closing the door behind us and jiggling the handle to make sure it was locked. “The idea is not to draw attention to ourselves.”
“And I think I’m doing a pretty good job of it if you had to ask,” a voice said almost in my ear. I jumped about a foot. And almost screamed. Next to me, Val cracked up. I turned and saw Ava-Rose standing about two feet away from me. She’d switched on a flashlight, and the beam gave her face a bony, eerie quality. Kind of like a walking skeleton. She had always been a small woman, but now she looked like she’d been on some fad diet gone wrong. Despite her age, she still dressed trendily. I could tell even in the dim light that her black jeans were Lucky Brand (I was a sucker for a good pair of jeans). Her metallic gold North Face parka probably wasn’t the best choice for undercover work, but her furry UGG boots had helped her footsteps remain silent. I glanced down at my own plain, boring UGGs and wondered if I was the one who needed a fashion lesson from Ava-Rose.
I offered a weak smile, hand still pressed to my chest. “Hi, Ava-Rose.”
She just glared at me. I figured she blamed me for the police thing. “We should take our places,” she said, turning away.
“So what is the plan?” I asked.
Val elbowed me. I guessed we weren’t supposed to ask things like that. I ignored her.
Ava-Rose’s pencil-enhanced eyebrows arched perfectly into her sleek, white hairline. “We need to strategically position ourselves so we can see who is coming in here and what they’re doing,” she said, as if I were an idiot she had been stuck training during a critical war exercise.
“Right,” I said, trying not to sound condescending. “But what are you planning to do if someone who’s actually doing something bad shows up?”
Ava-Rose pursed her lips. “Why, I’m going to stop them, of course,” she said.
“And how do you plan to do that?” I asked. “If this stuff is worth money, it could be dangerous.”
“Of course it’s worth money!” Ava-Rose exclaimed. “Why do you think I’m concerned about it?”
“Shhh,” Val cut in, holding up a hand. “Did you hear that?”
We all paused. And somewhere above us, a door clicked slowly shut.