Dani looked to her mother and then to her future mother-in-law, not sure they’d shut up long enough for her to get a word in edgewise. “Head downtown, Marcus. The Houston Convention Center, please. I think that way.” She pointed.
“Yes, miss,” Marcus said, and swerved across three lanes to the ramp that would take them off the bypass and head downtown. Horns blared. They only just missed getting flattened by a semi.
“Really?” Maria blinked. She looked to Elaina. “Well, I’m an emotional wreck after that—how about you?”
“It did get chilly in Houston,” Elaina agreed, shooting her future daughter-in-law a look.
Dani lowered her eyes. Her jaw clenched. Maria sighed, and relented. “All right, can you at least tell me why we’re going there, and what was on the flyer that nearly stopped your heart?”
“The address.” Dani spoke softly, and looked at the women rather pointedly, waiting them out. Elaina and Maria looked at each other, and mimed taking out a key, locking their lips, and throwing it away. Dani rolled her eyes.
“The convention center?” Elaina asked, apparently forgetting she’d only just promised her silence. “That should be a standard address; it’s hard to misplace a building big enough to house a convention.”
“No, not the FROM,” Dani said, giving her a look. “The TO. It was sent to the same address as the house we broke into—”
“I broke into,” Maria clarified.
“...and we entered,” Elaina reminded her. Maria nodded, conceding the point.
“But the name was wrong. It was addressed to Great Cakes. I looked it up on my phone and there is a Great Cakes in Houston.” She pulled out her cell phone to show them. The webpage showed a confection as large as a VW, and mostly created out of sugar and air. The text over the image read: “Great Cakes—We Bake for All Occasions and Occasionally.”
“Ew.” Maria handed the phone back to her daughter, and shook her head. “Tell me you’re not seriously considering that.”
“Okay, they’re not marketers. They’re bakers. Anyway, since the address was to her house and she’s not home, I assume she would be there.”
“That doesn’t get us closer to the stick, my angel.”
“Don’t you see?” Dani was warming to the topic. When the expressions of the other women maintained a double look of absolute mystification, she grew more candid. “Mrs. Pinal overnighted the statue to her daughter!”
“Ohhh.” Marcus met her eyes in the rearview mirror. “Oh, very clever indeed.” He looked so much like a proud parent, Dani found herself unable to continue to talk for a moment past the sudden lump in her throat.
I can’t think about that right now.
Maria hit Marcus’ shoulder. Hard. “Well, go on for the sake of the rest of us who don’t share your rising intellect!”
Marcus glanced at Dani and filled in the details. “The reason Mrs. Pinal spent the time and money to overnight a statue, a small, lightweight little statue, is because her daughter couldn’t wait to get it in the regular mail. She needed it today.”
“When Uncle... when Benny arranged for my faux wedding, he had the cakemaker do ‘whatever’. It was ghastly, but I do remember that it had a pair of little doves shoved into the frosting.”
“Sounds lovely.”
Dani shot her mother a look, not entirely sure if that was sarcasm or not. She suspected it was.
“Well, it didn’t do much to break his fall either. He landed on top of it,” Dani said, and shook her head.
“Landed?” Elaina asked, eyes growing wider by the minute. In a moment they’d take over her entire forehead.
“Fell out of a helicopter,” Dani added, just to see if they would.
“After a perfectly thrown bottle of Champagne connected with his head,” Marcus added.
Maria turned to her daughter. “You?”
Dani nodded. Maria sighed. “My dear angel. Bullets are for killing, Champagne is for sipping. We really must work on your charm school basics.”
Elaina turned back and faced the front. “I think I’m going to like being a part of this family,” she said to no one in particular. “It almost makes up for all those years I wasted married to Luke’s father.”
“Well, we obviously don’t need them!” Maria said, leaning forward to look out the front window. “Let’s go get that damn stick and show them what women can do! How far are we from the exit?”
“Uh, I’m hoping for a sign...”
In the awkward silence that followed, Dani started to giggle. It became infectious, and soon all four of them were smiling.
Maria hit his arm again and shook her head. “Men!”
Chapter Twelve
“Is this the helicopter that brings the president to Air Force One? Or is it the helicopter that Howard Hughes paid Frank Lloyd Wright to design?”
“You really have quite the chip on your shoulder,” William said, shooting Luke a nasty look that showed he was about at the end of his patience. They ducked, and ran bent over toward the helicopter, the spinning blades of the aircraft already cutting through the air, and every piece of debris, every rock every stick was now a missile heading for them at breakneck speed.
Even William was silent until they boarded and put on their headphones.
“Where are we going?” Edwin asked, jumping into the question before father and son could restart the argument. Luke shot him a grateful look, honestly tired of fighting, but unable it seemed to let it go on his own.
“The police tracked down Ms. Pinal,” William informed him. “She runs a bakery called—” He had to think for a minute “Good Cakes, something like that. I have a couple of cars heading there now for her protection.”
They headed across the skyline in silence until Luke asked, “So, this bake shop has a helipad?”
“No!” William was getting rather good at rolling his eyes at this point. “But an office building nearby does. We’re appropriating it.”
And they couldn’t have driven? It was hardly likely a woman who owned her own business would live far from where she worked. Something was up, something William wasn’t telling them. “Why the rush?” Luke asked, glancing out the window, noting they were following a main thoroughfare. A cluster of strip malls and office buildings lay just ahead.
William looked at Luke and at Edwin then turned to the pilot and said, “We’re going to the other channel; stay on this one and get there asap.” The pilot nodded. Luke could tell he was less than interested in the conversation. William made a big show of changing the channel on the control for the headphones while the other two mimicked him.
“We got word,” William said, once communications had been secured, “there are two other players in this game. Possibly more. Right now, we have the British moving in, and a Middle Eastern concern.”
“I get the Middle East not being on our side, but aren’t the British supposed to be our allies?” Edwin said, sitting back in surprise.
Luke glanced over at him, wondering since when Edwin had placed himself on the side of the good guys. Hadn’t he been about to use that information entirely for his own gain?