Page 47 of The Kat Bunglar

Laila looked down at her phone and the caller ID that had appeared on Instagram. “Are you impersonatingKat_Kares, the YouTuber?” she asked incredulously.

“Lifestyle Influencer!” the voice shot back hotly. “And um...no. I mean yes. I am. Okay, bye!” A seagull squawked in the background before the line went dead.

Laila looked at Gabriel. “Do you have a pen? I need to write this down.”

Gabriel continued to gaze at her cleavage in a stupor until he realized she was speaking to him. “Hmm?” He lifted an eyebrow in question.

“A pen, Gabriel. I need a pen,” Laila repeated slowly.

“Right,” he nodded and smiled, a dimple flashing in his right cheek. She laughed softly in response. When he returned with a notebook and pen, he gave her a quick kiss on the nose, causing her to blush. There was something about the way he looked at her. It made her feel things. Things she didn’t have names for. Things she’d never felt before.

“Focus,” she said sternly, more to herself than him. “We have a lead on who took our things, but more importantly who hurt you.”

“Fine,” Gabriel grumbled, sitting on the stool beside her. “Okay. Your stuff is in LA. And the name she gave us was Joseph Cherry or something. But preciosa, I am man enough to admit that I was accosted by two very vicious young women who were definitely in their twenties. One had a Caribbean accent and the other had that LA girl accent.”

Laila reviewed the caller ID on her phone only to realize the profile came back as unknown, and the picture was greyed out. “I could have sworn it said Kat_Kares a second ago.”

Gabriel’s eyes widened. “That’s what her friend called her—Kathmandu! What if it’s the same girl?”

Laila looked at him perplexed. “The girl’s name is the capital city of Nepal?”

Gabriel pulled out his phone and looked up Kat Kares. His screen flooded with multiple pouty images of ‘The Bengali Baddie’ who was hawking everything from a Vitamix to natural deodorant. His stomach turned at the memory of how she had attacked him. “Yup, that’s the girl who broke into your house. She was with a friend, though—Christmas something. Why would she rob you? Is she a cousin? You all look a little related.”

Immediately annoyed, she elbowed him. “Not all brown girls look alike,” she said while peering over his shoulder to get a look at this Kat Kares.

“I’m brown too,” he protested.

“You’re not brown, you’re like a golden, delicious truffle,” she retorted without thinking.

Gabriel swiftly turned around and pinned her back against his kitchen island. “Oh yeah, how delicious?”

“Very,” she whispered softly.

As he bent down to kiss her, the phone rang again. Gabriel groaned, “I’m going to chuck that phone into Lake Michigan.”

Laila also wanted to fling her phone away and hurtle herself into his arms. Instead, she reluctantly looked down at the caller ID and saw that it was her office. “I have to take this. I’m sorry, it’s Carol.”

Gabriel hung his head and sighed before giving her a quick wink. “Tell her I said hi.”

Laila swatted him away.

“As I live and breathe, if it isn’t Laila Malik,” Carol’s grating voice blasted through the phone, piercing her eardrums.

Laila winced. “Yep, here I am.”

“Well, pardon me, Madam. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to get hold of you with your holidays in LA and Jamaica. It’s like watching Cher go on a world tour,” the sarcasm dripped through the phone.

“Anything I can do for you, Carol?” Laila asked through clenched teeth, drumming her fingers impatiently against the kitchen countertop.

“Well, since you asked, if you could be so kind as to grace us with your presence at some point today, I do have two depositions waiting for you that Alex wanted an answer on,” Carol paused to rattle out a wheezy, emphysemic cough before reiterating in a more threatening tone, “right away.”

“Oh, if that’s regarding the Badawi and Okonkwo cases, he sent them to me last night. I glanced over them briefly—” Laila started to say.

Carol hung up before Laila could finish her thought.

Laila glanced at Gabriel. Gabriel glanced toward his bedroom and wiggled his eyebrows. Laila suppressed a small smile, shook her head, and glanced toward the front door.

“Fine,” Gabriel groaned. “You go to the office. I’ll go to the police station with our lead. And then we’ll meet back here, is that understood?”

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