Page 10 of Frenemies
“Just because you called the interstate a concrete miracle does not mean you have a good vocabulary.” I stopped to scan the cookie in his hand. “What are you eating?”
Tanner’s lips curled into a large smile. “Ava made cookies.”
Great.
“Did you ask her what she put in them?”
“No. Wait,” he tipped his gaze down to the chocolate chip disk in his hand. “Is that why I can hear colors?”
Oh, for the love of…
“Ava,” I yelled down the hall.
A second later, she jumped out from the kitchen, dressed in a frilly Care Bear apron with a wooden spoon in her hand.
“What?”
“Stop drugging people.”
Last week I had to stop Derek from trying one of her ‘brownies.’ I don’t know what got her started on this baking kick, but I’d be glad when she moved onto something else. Like sheering sheep or tattooing frogs. Anything but this.
Ava waved the wooden spoon through the air. “A little LSD never hurt anyone,” she said, and disappeared back into the kitchen.
“Excellent,” Tanner, the moron, simply nodded and chomped down on the rest of the cookie.
Beast, who was sitting on the other side of the room with his wife in his lap, dropped his face in his palm and groaned, “Jaz will be taking your ride back.”
“No giant walrus is going to tell me what to do.”
There was no way of knowing whether Tanner was actually seeing a giant talking walrus or if that was just the nickname he decided to give him for the day. It wouldn’t be the worst thing he’d called Beast. Either way, no more cookies for him. That man could not spare any brain cells.
Whatever.
I sighed and turned my attention to Beast. “I’ll assume you’re not here for the drugs?”
“No.” Beast tapped his wife’s butt, who slid over, allowing him to stand up. “We found something.”
That’s when I noticed the file in his grasp. A file he held out to me. The first thing that caught my eye was the Wainscot Police Department stamped across the outside. Wainscot was a small town about three hours away.
I knew this because Ava was obsessed with Giovani’s, a little bakery situated in the middle of the town that made the most amazing cannolis.
“Did you guys see that? Tinkerbell just flipped me off.” Tanner jumped up and pointed at a corner of the ceiling. “I see you, you little fairy bitch.”
Jaz giggled while Beast and I arched a brow at one another. “Where’d your friend get that LSD?”
“Who knows.” I shrugged.
For all I knew, Ava robbed some government testing facility—wouldn’t be the first time. Took Preston about a week to clean that mess up, and did she shed a single tear about any of the bodies her brother piled up? No.
Then again, I hadn’t seen Ava cry since that day in Logan’s dad’s basement.
As if things couldn’t get any weirder, Ava ran by with a metal strainer on her head while waving a wooden spoon.
“Get back here,” she called and rushed out the door. “Those cookies are not for dragons.”
“Wait,” Tanner ran out after her. “You have to be careful. Dragons breathe fire.”
“Anyways,” I shook my head, gave Beast a pointed look, and opened the file.
