“No,” Jules said, speaking for all of them. “It’s a promise.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Present Day
Palm Springs, California
Mission Day Three
Emily just would not stop walking.
“Please,” Mick begged her as they got dangerously close to their hotel. He’d been talking non-stop, trying to convince her to listen to him. He’d told her his theory that Harper, his father’s lawyer, was behind this absurd-seeming threat to her life, about his chilling suspicion that this man was intending to frame him—the former Milt Devonshire Junior—for her murder so that Harper could continue to control the family fortune.
He told her how surprised—and dismayed—Harper had been to find out that Emily had been named as his father’s heir. He told her how weird it was that the lawyer, who’d always been so overt about his intense dislike for Milt Junior,was suddenly acting his champion, offering to contest the will, essentially suggesting they not try very hard to locate Emily.
It was then that she looked at him—she’d been walking swiftly, eyes focused dead ahead—and said, “Your father was incredibly rude to me—theonetime I met him. You really expect me to believe he left me everything.”
“Not quite everything,” Mick said. “He left me one tenth of one percent.”
She looked at him then—really looked at him with a flash of something akin to sympathy in her eyes. “God, he was an asshole.”
“I didn’t want it,” Mick told her. “I don’t want it. Whatever amount it ends up being, I’m giving it all away. To World Central Kitchen. Every penny.”
Now that look she shot him was pure anger. “What, am I supposed to congratulate you because you’re such a hero? You fucking killed my mother.”
“My father killed your mother,” Mick told her again.
“So you perjured yourself in court with that guilty plea.”
“Back then, I didn’t know the truth. My fucking father roofied me, Em! He stuck me in his car, made a video of him and Helen Davis, our housekeeper ‘finding’ me in the driveway, early in the morning, changed the date and timestamp on the security video to the morning of the accident?—”
“Stop,” Emily said, “juststop!”
And she stopped, too, and at first Mick was relieved because the entrance to the hotel was just a few dozen yards away, but when several cars honked out on the street, he turned to see that a black SUV that had been waiting at the side of the road, flashers on, had suddenly pulled out into the busy stream of traffic, causing the irate drivers behind it to lean on their horns.
It was odd because the SUV didn’t drive away, it just pulled out, but then sat there as the darkly tinted back window slowly went down.
And then, as Sam Starrett’s words from the message he’d left on Mick’s phone—assault-rifle-wielding idiots in a black SUV who we believe are targeting her—popped into his head, everything happened all at once.
Mick shouted for Emily to get down even as he saw the deadly looking barrel of a gun in that half-open window and he realized in that half of a heartbeat that if thatwasan assault-rifle, he was probably already dead, but just maybe if he used his body as a shield then Emily wouldn’t die too. So he grabbed her and pulled her to the ground beneath him as a gunshot rang out—just one, not the rapid-fire ripping sound that he’d expected—and he felt a searing sharp pain in his upper arm.
Emily was screaming—he was, too—and the crowd on the busy sidewalk either flattened or scattered as the black SUV finally pulled away, tires squealing.
“Are you all right?” Mick asked, rolling off of her. He’d taken her down to the sidewalk pretty hard, and he started to panic when he saw that her hand was covered with blood. “Emily, my God, were you hit?”
“Mick...” She pushed herself up to sitting position and he saw she was looking at the right sleeve of his shirt where...
Oh, shit,hewas bleeding. Mick flexed his right hand, moved both his shoulder and his elbow. His arm wasn’t broken, thank God, but yeah, he’d been shot. On closer inspection through his eyelashes—shit, shit, shit, he was squeamish asfuck—he saw that the bullet had merely grazed him. There was no entry and exit wound, just a nasty looking, heavily bleeding two-inch gouge right beneath the sleeve of his polo shirt.
A young woman in camo BDUs came over to them. “Sir, do you need first aid?”
And shit, someone had called 9-1-1, of course they had—those fuckers in that SUV had fired a shot into the crowd. Mick could hear the sound of sirens getting louder as the police approached.
“I’m okay,” he told the earnest young soldier—bless her, she was the only person who came toward them to offer help. He turned to Emily as he pushed himself up to his feet. “Em, we gotta get out of here. If Harper’s somehow behind this, like I think he must be, and God damn it, maybe I’m paranoid, but I know he’s got ties to the LA police... The only people I trust right now are the investigators I hired—Cassidy and Starrett. Please we gotta get out of here so I can call them.” He held out his hand to her and—thank you, Lord—she took it.
Mick hauled Emily up to her feet, and still holding tightly to her hand, they ran.
West Covina, California
