Mal’s phone rang. He frowned. “Calliope.” He swiped to answer and put it on speaker. “What’s up?”
“Incoming. Get out of there unless you want to have an awkward conversation with Frankie,” she warned.
“ETA?” Mal asked.
“Five minutes, at most. I would have warned you sooner but I had an emergency.”
“What kind of emergency?” Mal asked, concern leaching into his voice. “Is Casey okay?”
“Oh, yeah. It was a chicken emergency,” she said.
Nico could feel his own frown intensifying. “What the hell is a chicken emergency?”
What was his life that he even had to ask questions like that?
“Bang Chan stole an avocado,” she said.
“Oh,” Mal replied, like that made perfect sense.
It probably did make sense to Mal and his big brain, but Nico couldn’t for the life of him imagine how a chicken with an avocado was an emergency. Or even how a chicken could steal an avocado in the first place. They didn’t even have opposable thumbs.
“Was the avocado important to you?” Nico asked.
Calliope tsked. “No, sweetie. Avocados are toxic to chickens.”
Huh. Who knew?
Nico gave Mal a curious look. “What if we did want to have an awkward conversation?”
Mal frowned. “Huh?”
“Searching their places was a bust. We talked to Jason. Let’s just talk to Frankie and find out what his deal was with Amy. There’s no way the pig and the ox were anyone other than Jason and Frankie, right? And Jason’s apartment was boring enough to make the Amish weep. The pig has to be Frankie. Right now, we have the element of surprise. Well, unless Jason gave him a heads up, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take. The Dai Lo said we could talk to them. And, honestly, we’re running out of options.”
Mal narrowed his eyes like he was considering. “He said we could talk to them, not break into their houses.”
“Tomato, tomahto,” Nico said, waving his hand. “Let’s just ask Frankie whether he had a thing for her or not. Someone’s got to give us a fucking hint ‘cause I’m baffled.”
Mal snorted. “You think he’ll just tell us?”
Nico pulled his gun. “Given the right motivation?”
They’d both decided to carry just to be safe. It hadn’t proved necessary for Jason, which was good because Nico wasn’t keen on brandishing a weapon in public. But if Frankie was about to walk through that door any second, being armed seemed like a good idea.
“We’ll call you back if we need you,” Mal told Calliope.
“Good luck. Don’t get dead.”
With that, she was gone. Mal also pulled his gun, and the two of them stood behind the apartment door. They stood there just long enough to feel kind of silly before they finally heard the sound of someone entering the door code.
Frankie was whistling as he entered, seemingly without a care in the world. When he closed the door and found two men with guns facing him, he stopped whistling but stared at them with dead eyes.
“Who are you?” he asked, looking them both up and down. “Where’s my dog?”
“In the bathtub,” Nico said, not sure why he felt the need to put the man’s mind at ease.
Not that he looked uneasy.
He looked…bored or irritated, like they were Jehovah’s Witnesses going door to door, not two men with guns pointed at his head.
