“Give me the guy’s other phone,” Maya said. “I want to see it: the smartphone.” John-Michael took the object from his pocket and handed it over the front seat to Maya. Her fingers moved nimbly over the keypad. “Hmm. Classic hackable password. Huh.” She paused, shocked at what she found. Within the next two seconds she was shaking with rage and disbelief.
She turned to face them in utter dismay. “Are you guys actually this stupid?”
The other three stared at her. John-Michael sputtered, “Maya, what is your problem?”
“FoneTrackr?” she said, eyes bulging. “Why didn’t you mention right from the beginning that his phone was running that app?”
John-Michael gave a helpless shrug. “I have no clue what you just said—I have an iPhone.”
“This brand of phone has an app you can use to locate and manage any of its devices from a remote location. This smartphone,” she pronounced heavily, “has been GPS-tracked the whole time. What did I tell you about cell phones? So, the other guy? He already knows that Mr. Shooter went to Venice. He knows he parked near the house. He knows he stalled awhile in Malibu Canyon. And now,” she finished, “now he knows where we are, too. Paolo, stop the car. We gotta go back.”
Anxiously, Lucy said, “Go back? I thought you didn’t want to go back.”
“To replace the money, no. But now we have to,” Maya said shortly. “Right away.”
“Maya.” John-Michael struggled to stay polite. “You gotta explain why you want to go back.”
“Seems pretty obvious to me,” came Paolo’s voice from the front. “The second guy is coming for us.”
“For us, or for the cash,” agreed Maya.
“Good,” Lucy said. “You’re finally seeing sense. Put the money back and let’s get out of there.”
Maya continued to check the phone. “There’s a voice mail,” she said, putting the device to her ear.
“It must be from when that call came in,” John-Michael said, “when we found the phone.”
She listened to the message. “Omigod.”
Lucy said, “What?”
Maya played the message again, after switching on the speakerphone function.
“I’m at the house. Our friends seem to be out for the evening. You want me to wait? What is going on with your location? Why aren’t you here, man? Getting a little concerned about our special delivery. Check in as soon as you get this.”
“You hear that?” Maya demanded. “He’s at the house. Our friends are out for the evening? That means Grace and Candace didn’t get home yet. The special delivery?”
“The money!” murmured John-Michael.
“We have to get back to Venice!” Paolo cried. “Grace! Candace! They’re in danger!”
“They are if he stays there,” Maya said.
John-Michael spoke quickly. “So we get him to leave.”
“And do what?” Lucy said.
No one answered at first.
“I can think of one solution,” Maya said mildly.
“Which is?” John-Michael said.
“Like I said to Lucy a while back. We strike back first,” she replied, still perfectly calm.
Lucy snorted. “Seriously? You want to kill him?”
Maya looked over her shoulder at where Lucy sat with her back pressed to the rear passenger seat. “No—I don’t want to kill anyone, Luce. But I don’t want a dude with a gun to hang out at our house, waiting for Grace and Candace and eventually us. I’d do pretty much anything to stop that from happening.”
“You’re not shooting him,” Paolo warned.
Maya observed bluntly, “I’m the only one who knows how to handle a gun.”
Sardonically, Lucy said, “So, this is what’s happening right now, is it? We’re driving back to Venice and shooting a guy. Well, I gotta say, this sure has turned into an interesting evening.”
“We’re not going back to the house,” Maya said. “There, he has the advantage over us. He can lie in wait. We’re going back to where we left Mr. Shooter, Mr. Hit-and-Run Victim.”
Lucy shook her head. In the wildness of her eyes, Maya caught a glimpse of desperation. “Okay,” Lucy muttered. “This isn’t making any kind of sense.”
“The second guy is at our house—probably,” John-Michael said. “Or at least he was when he made that call. We have to get him away from there.”
“Exactly,” Maya said. “I say we lure him to the Oldsmobile. When he sees the car, and his dead friend, he might believe he finished the hit on Lucy, then started to drive home or wherever and got taken out by the hit-and-run.”
“Really,” Lucy said skeptically. “He’s gonna believe that? He’s not gonna wonder what his friend is doing driving around in the middle of goddamn nowhere?”
“Maybe he’s disposing of a body,” John-Michael said. “I mean—we were.”
“The thing is,” Maya said, “the guy doesn’t have a clue what happened to his friend, apart from that he was at our house. He knows he left the house—I’m gonna assume he thinks his friend was alive and well when he did.”
“Why’s he gonna come running?” Lucy said. “Didn’t he ask, on the message, if he should wait at the house?”
“That’s why we have to lure him away,” Maya agreed.
“Send a text,” Paolo blurted. “Something vague. Like ‘need help with the cash.’”
“No,” Maya said decisively. “Let’s go with John-Michael’s idea. Let’s imply that Mr. Shooter is out dealing with a body. Maybe more than one.”
“Good point. He was about to kill all four of us,” John-Michael said. “If his buddy gets the chance, I’m sure he’ll finish the job.”
“Okay,” Maya said, typing on the phone’s keyboard. “How’s this? All done. I got some heavy lifting to do. Could use some help. The package is safe with me.”
“It’s good,” decided John-Michael.
“Yes,” Paolo said. “Send it right away. And then we need to call the girls. Stop them from going home.”
“Oh, how’s that gonna go?” Lucy said. “Hey, Grace, Candace, don’t go home, m’kay? There’s a killer on the loose.” She took a huge breath. “Or, hey, you know what, guys? We could call the frikkin’ police!”
“And say what, exactly?” demanded Paolo, furious. “Yeah, so, we, like, totally killed this guy who was in our house with a gun and everything, but we decided to make it look like he’d been hit by a car up in the hills, and, like, now he’s sent this real salty dude to kill our friends so, like, could you kind of take care of all that for us, m’kay?”
Out of the corner of her eye, Maya could see Lucy seething, arms crossed tight across her chest. “You believe you could actually shoot someone? Until he’s dead?”
Paolo exhaled through his nose. “It’s him or us. And we are not the ones who started this.”
“I’m not okay with going to prison for killing a guy who tied up me and my friends and threatened us with a gun in our own house,” John-Michael said. “That’s for damn sure.”
“You can’t be sure that would’ve happened,” Lucy shot back. “You both could have gone for Stand Your Ground.”
“Lucy, nothing’s been sure since that dude walked into our house,” Paolo said in a harsh whisper. “That was then. This is now. Things. Change.”
Silence. Maya took a few breaths. Paolo was right—their options looked bleak.
“Lucy,” John-Michael said soothingly. “We’re all scared. But we have to deal.”
“Let’s get this clear now,” Maya said to Paolo. “How far to where you left the car?”
“Six or seven minutes,” he replied.
“We have to act fast,” she said, watching the screen of the smartphone. “The other guy will get the message. Hopefully he’ll start out for Malibu Canyon right away.”
Lucy leaned against the window and looked over at Maya. She seemed vague and lost. “This all happened because of me,” she muttered.
Maya closed her eyes, turning to face the front of the car. If she’d followed up on her suspicions about Ariana, this might have been avoided. She might have been able to persuade Lucy that her rehab buddy was a spy and gotten her to kick Ariana out of the house a week earlier. Then she wouldn’t have known that Lucy had finally gotten to the point of questioning her own memories of the night of Tyson Drew’s murder.
If only the offer of investment from Alexa Nyborg hadn’t happened when it did. But Maya had to admit that the investor’s offer had entirely consumed her attention, from the minute the prospect had entered her life. She should never have spied on her friends. She should have acted sooner on her suspicions of Ariana. She shouldn’t have let her work take absolute control of her life.
Why was everything going so horribly wrong? It was so unfair, Maya wanted to cry. All she’d ever wanted was to work hard, to create something extraordinary, and to make enough money that she and her mother would never again be under the thumb of a person like Dana Alexander. And she had worked—like a slave. Almost every waking minute she was either in school, studying, or coding.
But for what?
To end up going to prison for conspiracy, at best? Or even worse—to be killed by Dana Alexander’s hit man?
Maya drew a ragged breath. There’d been a ton of bravado in what she’d said about killing the second hit man. Words spoken before she’d really thought them through. And yet—there was an implacable logic to it. What other solution was there that wouldn’t land all six friends dead or four of them in jail? Now they were hurtling forward to a destination from which she knew there would be no return.
The smartphone in her hand began to vibrate. Maya read the text and looked up.
“He’s on his way.”