Kevin held out his phone to Emily. “We gonna call Mick?” he asked.
“We are,” Emily said.
“In just a moment,” Jules said. “Because Jay Lopez just texted. He’s at Devonshire Place with Lindsey and Jenk—and Lindsey’s LAPD contact, Andre Lennox. They found exactly what we thought they’d find.”
Sam started to laugh. “Un-fucking-believable.”
“Yeah.” Jules turned to Emily. “So. Emily. That boatload of crazy in the Devonshire Place gardens...? It’s how we’re going to get Harper. And Spencer. And whoever else is involved. In a nutshell, the situation is this...”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Present Day
Palm Desert, California
Mission Day Three
Mick’s phone rang as he was getting out of the Uber outside of the house his father had “bought” to play golf with Ernest Harper in Palm Desert.
He’d walked out of the Palm Springs neighborhood where Rod had brought them for safe-keeping, waving to the guard at the gate. The Uber was nearby and the driver had picked him up mere moments later, dropping him here in Palm Desert a mere ten minutes after that.
The number calling him wasn’t in his contacts list—area code 203. What was that? Something back east, New Jersey maybe? He sent it to voicemail, but almost immediately a text came whooshing in from that same phone number.
It’s Emily. Pick up.
When it rang again, he moved off of the open street and into the shadowy darkness of the carefully landscaped yards around him before he answered.
She didn’t even let him say hello.
“What are you doing? Get your ass back here.” She was angry.
“I told you I’m going to fix this,” he said, keeping his voice low.
“How?” she demanded.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Yeah, it does,” she shot back. “My guess is that you’re going to confront the assholes who are watching your car in the hotel parking garage.”
That was a damn good guess—and Mick would’ve done exactly that if he’d arrived here to find the house dark.
But not only were the lights on, but Harper’s car was parked in the fancy, pink-pavered driveway. It had to be his. It was a newer model Lexus, but it bore the same vanity plate that the man had had for forever: GR8LWYR
What an asshole.
“Unless you stop this bullshit,” Emily continued, “and tell me where you are so we can pick you up, we’re going have to drive through the entire garage, since I have no idea where you parked. And since the best I can do to describe your car is the color—it’s white with four doors and four wheels—I’m going to have to go with Jules and Sam so I can point to it and sayThat one, I think.”
Christ, that would be dangerous, essentially putting her into the gunmen’s sights. “Emily?—”
“Please just stop,” she interrupted him. “I know what you’re doing. You think if they kill you it’ll be over, but it won’t be. They’ll still come after me. Jules and Sam—the teamyouhired because they’reverygood at what they do—found out all this crazy shit that Harper and Spencer and God knows who else have been doing for years. Mick, Jules thinks they just found proof that your father died three years ago.”
Mick’s brain stuttered and he heard himself laugh a little. “What?”
“Bones, Mick,” Emily told him. “Human bones. In the garden at Devonshire Place. Harper’s been committing some hardcore fraud for years—pretending your father was still alive to keep control of the estate. We need you to come back here. Jules needs a DNA sample from you and I need...” Her voice broke. “I need you to walk away from the gun on the desk.”
Mick couldn’t help it. He started to cry. “You’re the only person in the world that I care about,” he told her. “And I don’t know how else to make sure you’re safe.”
“Well, that won’t happen if you die for me, asshole,” she said sharply. “You really think they’re just gonna give up if you’re dead? No, these fuckers are gonna find some long-lost Devonshire relative and control the estate through them—after they kill me, which you won’t know about because you’ll already be stupidly dead.”
