Wild Sky 2 by Suzanne Brockmann, Melanie Brockmann Page B

told us, but then cut himself off to say, “Get down. Now.”
    Rochelle’s car was approaching, and we all scrunched way down in our seats so Cal’s car would look empty if she happened to notice it there.
    But she pulled into her driveway without stopping, and I inched back up so I could watch as the automatic garage door opened. The car pulled inside, and the door went back down almost immediately.
    I reached for the binoculars, hoping that she’d go into the kitchen, maybe open the sliders to allow the fresh ocean breeze into the house. It wasn’t as cold today, so that was a real shot. Truth was, I was dying to get a look at her.
    “Next place Rochelle went was…” Cal prompted Milo.
    “A pawn shop near Harrisburg,” Milo told us.
    “What?” Cal said as I said, “Seriously?”
    “Yes,” Milo said. “She walked in wearing a lot of jewelry and walked out without it—carrying a thick envelope filled with cash.”
    “Why is she pawning her bling?” Cal asked. “If she has access to Garrett’s dad’s credit card…?”
    “But she can’t use his card to buy drugs—at least not anymore,” I said. “So she uses the card to buy jewelry, which she then pawns for cash to buy Destiny. Boom! ”
    Milo nodded. “In theory, yes. That’s what I was expecting. But then it got weird. After the pawn shop, Rochelle headed back across town for a…uh…” Milo held his hands out and pretended to paint his thumbnail with an imaginary brush.
    “Mani-pedi?” I helped him out.
    “That!” Milo exclaimed. “It was at a place called Beauty-holic Spa.”
    I listened intently, clutching the binoculars as I scanned the house again. So far Rochelle hadn’t opened any of the doors to the deck.
    “Before Rochelle went into the spa, after she parked in the lot out front—and first of all, there was a spot right near the door, but she didn’t take it, which was odd, because earlier she nearly got into a knife fight with a woman over a prime parking spot,” Milo told us. “This time, she parked way at the edge of the lot, and then she got out of her car and looked around. Hard. I had to duck behind an SUV, but she didn’t see me. She pulls that envelope out of her bag—”
    “The cash from the pawn shop?” Cal asked.
    “Yes,” Milo said. “And she’s chewing gum, but she takes it out of her mouth, all of it, and puts it onto the envelope, and then sticks the envelope up inside the front tire well of her car and goes into the spa.”
    Cal scrunched his eyebrows together. “I was absent from school the day we studied Drug Deals 101, but what you just described sounds a lot like illegal activity to me.” He shrugged. “I mean, cue the drug dealer, and…action!”
    “Good guess,” Milo said as he looked from Cal to me. “A few minutes later, a man pulls into the lot and parks next to her car. Mid-forties. Short, dark hair. Dark sunglasses. Dark suit. Nice suit. Nice car, too. Everything about him screamed money. He sat there for about ten minutes, checking to see if anyone was watching.”
    “Which you were,” I pointed out with a mix of disbelief and irritation. “And you were worried about me, sitting here staking out a whole bunch of nothing ?”
    “There was a bus stop right across the street,” Milo defended himself, “and Dana’s e-reader was in the bike’s storage compartment, so I pretended to read. Luckily the bus didn’t come.”
    I stared at him, aghast. He was so casual about the fact that he’d been in serious danger.
    “I’m a normie, Skylar,” he reminded me quietly. “No one wants my blood.”
    “Yeah, but they might kill you for being a witness to a felony,” I countered.
    “That’s not gonna happen,” he said so absolutely that I almost believed him. Almost.
    Calvin interrupted. “So our Man-in-Black, did he take the cash and leave the drugs? The suspense is killing me. Or maybe that’s starvation I’m feeling—it’s all starting to blur… Come closer, my children.