“So you know about Rowan and the pharmacy, do you?” With her free hand, she flicked her hair away from her face, and waves of color wafted from her fingertips. “He was always a bunch of flash and no substance. It was so ridiculous that his father owned Gangland and Rowan and Nash paraded around as godfathers. They thought they were quite the pair of rulers, but they were wrong. If you want to rule, you have to be ready to do anything. And I mean anything.”
“I’m not kidding.” Randy leaned over and clamped his hands to his knees. “I’m going to puke any second now.”
I chuckled at that. Somehow, the idea of puking struck me as funny. I wondered if I might have to puke too. At the moment, it seemed like an interesting topic to explore, but I had to squeeze it out of my head and get back to the situation at hand.
I fixed my gaze on Ashton’s eyes. The blue in them vibrated to the tinkle of invisible wind chimes. “You were just playing with people’s lives, weren’t you? Everybody was a chess piece that you moved where you wanted so you could beat Nash and Rowan.”
She sneered. “They were small-time.”
“Sure,” I said. “Small-time. They only wanted to humiliate people and steal from them. They didn’t have what it took to actually kill someone.”
“Wait a minute,” Tres cut in. His little turtle face appeared to be melting into his shirt collar. “We didn’t set out to kill anybody. That was just a side effect of the plan. We were just about the pharmacy thing. That’s all.”
“Right,” I said. “But Hector didn’t want to go along with it, did he? He thought he was in love, but he was too honest to pull something like that, so you drugged him.”
“Hey,” said Ashton. “I just thought if I got him a little high, he’d loosen up and see we were just having fun. But he kept insisting he couldn’t go through with any kind of robbery, not even for me.”
“Then you kept on dosing him with that Dragon Ice crap.”
“Everything would’ve been all right if he’d just gone along with the plan,” Ashton explained. “But he started freaking out, said he saw the devil in my eyes. It was pretty funny until he started turning blue. They really should include better instructions with that stuff. But when you’re playing to win, sometimes you end up with a little collateral damage along the way.”
“So this whole thing was just a game,” I said.
She shrugged. “Isn’t everything?”
“You’re one cold bitch,” Dickie told her.
Ashton laughed. It came out of her mouth in silver swirls. “Why am I a bitch?” she asked. “You wouldn’t say that if I were a guy.”
“No,” Dickie said. “If you were a guy, I’d say you were a cold bastard.”
I pressed my hand to the desktop to steady myself. “But why the phony kidnapping? Why drag Beto into it if you weren’t trying to hide from Tres?” I didn’t have to wait for the answer—it flashed in my mind like my own personal true-crime-show reenactment. “Oh, wait, I get it. Beto knew you were with Hector that night. He would’ve given you up to the cops if you didn’t come up with some phony story—like that the North Side Monarchs had threatened Hector. And you probably threw in a few other suspects to confuse things. I can see it—you run into Beto’s arms, sobbing, telling him he’s got to hide you because whoever killed Hector would be after you next, and that’s when the kidnapping plan kicked in. If you made people think Beto kidnapped you, you could probably blame him for Hector too.”
“You know what?” Ashton smiled. “You’re pretty good. You should take Dragon Ice more often. But sadly, you won’t get the chance.”
“What I don’t get is why you stayed with Beto for so long. I would think even you wouldn’t want to make your friends and your parents go through something like that.”
She laughed. “Friends? Don’t you know there’s no such thing as real friends? There are only competitors. That was one of the funniest parts of it—fooling my so-called friends into thinking I had suddenly developed some kind of warm, fuzzy social conscience. And as for my parents—it was pure pleasure watching them come on the news and pretend they cared what happened to me. I mean, they don’t even know who I am. One of their cars or paintings could’ve been stolen and they would’ve cared just as much. It was hilarious watching my father play the suffering parent who lost his golden girl. I figured I would hide out until he raised the reward to a half a million dollars or so. But did he ever do it? Not a chance.”
“A half million?” Dickie interrupted. “And you were only gonna cut me in for ten grand?”
“So that’s it.” It took all my concentration to stay focused on what I needed to say. “Instead of robbing a pharmacy, you were going to rip off your own parents without even having to bother with a phony ransom. You’d just get someone to collect the reward and then pay them off. But you knew you couldn’t get Beto to go in on that part. You had to recruit Dickie to pretend he found you, and you knew the cops would never believe Beto’s story over yours.”
“Beto had a terminal weakness—he wanted to help people.” She sneered. “He wouldn’t rest until he found out who slipped Hector the overdose. It was Hector this, Hector that. All the while I was in that cramped apartment or over at his ridiculous friend Oscar’s or his stupid little grandmother’s place. That’s really why I dyed my hair black—so I wouldn’t stand out too much around that filthy neighborhood. Still, I could’ve held out a little longer to see if the reward would go up, but you had to come along. You were a real pest. When Tres told me about Nash’s plan to trick you into fighting in the rumbles, I thought, Hey, we’ll just get rid of you by having Beto beat your brains out. Then he got back from Gangland that night and started going on about how you and he were big buddies now, and I knew it was only a matter of time before you found me.”