“Your sister is terrifying,” Kyle admitted in a whisper.
“She is. But no one wants to go toe-to-toe with your sister either. So don’t do anything that’s going to piss them both off. For all our sakes.”
“But my work sucks.”
“Because Shen’s sister says so? Who is she anyway?”
“She is art.”
“I don’t know shit about art, Kyle. I don’t care about art. The closest thing I ever had to art was my boy-band poster collection in junior high.”
“Not sure that’s something I’d brag about.”
“I thought it was awesome.”
“You do know there are amazing singers and bands and artists that are”—he waved his hand in her direction—“you know . . . Asian . . . right? Music based on the culture of your people that you can really be proud of as opposed to”—he cleared his throat again—“boy bands.”
“What’s wrong with boy bands?”
Kyle gave a quick shake of his head. “Forget it.”
“Look, I can’t help you with this problem you have. Mostly because I don’t care. But I also can’t afford for my big sister to be annoyed by you right now. And I also don’t want to deal with you. It’s nothing personal.”
“No. I get it.”
“So I’m going to pass this shit off.” She turned her head and yelled up the stairs, “Stevie! Kyle wants to destroy all the fancy art he has in the garage!”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Stevie yelled back.
Max nodded. “There you go,” she said to Kyle, patting his shoulder. “Now you can deal with her. Honestly, you’ll be better off in the long run. Because if you keep talking to me, I’ll just bury you alive. Literally. I will literally bury you alive.”
“I have to say, Max, I enjoy your directness.”
Max snorted. “Yeahhhhh . . . I’m pretty sure you’re the only one. See how unique you are, Kyle? Like Mozart or John Carpenter.”
“John Carpenter? The movie director?”
“The brilliant horror movie director.”
“Wow.” His eyes blinked wide. “Mozart and Carpenter in the same sentence . . . okay.”
* * *
It was as if they were debating on the works of Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. But they weren’t. They were debating about phones.
Phones!
For the last hour Max had discussed every phone in the goddamn store with some teen kid who seemed way too young to be legally able to sell anything. This intense, deep, ridiculous conversation on phones.
Zé didn’t understand it. He just wanted to get a phone. Any phone that could make calls and receive calls.
He just wanted a phone!
“Now tell me about this one,” Max said, pointing at another phone that looked just like all the other phones they’d looked at. Sizes might be different but that was it! That was it!
Zé grabbed a phone that he thought wasn’t too expensive but also wasn’t ridiculously large. He dropped it on the counter.
“This one.”
“Wait. We still haven’t looked at—”
Zé slammed his hand on the counter, making all the people in the store jump. All except Max, who only smirked at him.
“This. One.”
“Yeah, let’s go with that one,” she said to the teen.
As the kid went through all the steps necessary to get the phone set up for him, Zé glanced down at Max standing next to him. She was just standing there, not speaking. She didn’t seem upset or hurt or annoyed or anything. She was smiling but he’d already learned that smile told him absolutely nothing. So he asked.
“Have you just been fucking with me for the last hour?”
When she burst into a round of snorted giggles, bending over at the waist, Zé rolled his eyes and tried to say, “Not cool.” But what came out was . . . a growl. A low, rumbling one that came from deep in his gut and worked its way up and out of his throat.
It startled him and the poor kid but just made Max laugh harder, which he did not appreciate.
“Would you like a cover for the back of your phone?” the kid asked.
Annoyed the kid was still bothering him with bullshit, Zé snapped, “Just pick one.”
The kid went around the counter, grabbed the first thing he found, and rang up the sale. He took the new phone out of the box and put the case on it. He told Zé what his new number was and gave him the phone while pushing the box with the charger toward Max.
They went out of the store and onto the street. Zé stopped and stared at his phone.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t remember Kamatsu’s number.” He shrugged. “It was in my phone.”
Zé rested the top of his phone against his chin, trying to remember which of the phone numbers in his brain belonged to his team leader.
When Max started laughing again, he glared at her. “What now? ”
“Unicorn,” she gasped out.
“What?”
She took the phone from his hand and turned it around. The color of the case the kid had picked out for him was bright pink glitter, which Zé had noticed but not cared about. But the white unicorn with rainbow-colored wings that decorated the back was too much for him. Just too much.
“Goddammit,” he snarled, snatching the phone from Max and returning to the store to scare the kid into changing it for a simple black protective case. He didn’t have to try too hard to scare the kid. Apparently just staring at him did the trick. The whole exchange took only about three minutes but when Zé got back outside, Max had been slammed over the hood of a cop car and her wrists zip-tied.
“What the hell’s going on?” he demanded, not really thinking about the fact he was mouthing off to cops.
A big, blond, uniformed male pulled Max off the car.
“Out of the way, house cat,” the blond ordered as he pushed past Zé.
“Whatever you do,” Max told him before she was unceremoniously shoved into the back of a police van, “do not tell Charlie. Understand?”
Of course he understood . . . but he wasn’t going to listen.
There was just one problem: he didn’t have anyone’s phone number or any money. He’d been planning to get all that together back at the house when he had access to Max’s computer.
Zé looked up at the corner street sign, and that’s when he remembered where they’d planned to go after they left the phone store.
* * *
Nelle was in the middle of a wonderful massage while her teammates got mani-pedis when the front door was battered open and cops came charging in with weapons out.
The full-human women giving them the in-home spa day screamed and dropped to the ground, most of them sobbing in fear.
But Nelle and her girls . . . well, they were honey badgers. They weren’t hard to startle but they were hard to scare.
Big NYPD lions and bears grabbed each of them and as they zip-tied their wrists in front, one of them warned, “We’re being nice here, badger. Don’t make us regret it.” Female cops got Nelle clothing from her room and let her put it on since she’d been naked under the sheet while getting her massage.