“You’re right. You shouldn’t have.” Arne was long gone. I sighed and turned to Wardell. “Where’s your car?”
He led me to it. It was just around the corner, parked beneath an old oak. It was an older Nissan Pathfinder, and it had probably been his run-around-town vehicle before he went inside. He asked me if I wanted to drive.
I did. Traffic was heavy on the way back to the Bigfoot Room. Wardell talked most of the way, mostly about what he was doing now that he was outside and people we’d known inside. An unsurprising number of them had gotten themselves out and gotten themselves thrown right back in again. Wardell was of the opinion that that would happen to him soon, too.
He also told me that Linen’s real name was Steve Francois, and that he’d inherited his money from some South American paper mills and banks in Texas. Mostly banks. Steve liked having badasses around, and Wardell was an ex-con and ex-NFL, so he was hired.
I couldn’t even begin to guess why Arne was running errands for a guy like Francois.
I liked Wardell better when he wasn’t desperate to be alpha male, but not much better. Even with his aggression cut out of him, he was still arrogant enough to think he should dominate the conversation. I was tempted to make him turn himself in to the cops until he said he had a wife at home who was sticking by him—so far. “She wants me to go to anger-management classes,” he said.
“Why haven’t you?”
“I didn’t want to,” he answered. “I’m sorry about the buttons on your shirt. Do you want me to ask her to sew them back on? She would, I think.”
I looked down. He had popped off a button from my shirt, second from my top. “No, thanks,” I said, being polite because of the ghost knife, and I didn’t feel like taking anything else from him. “Do you beat on her?”
“No! I would never hit my lady.” He sounded honestly surprised that I’d asked.
“Good. You should take her advice.” I remembered waking from nightmares in the middle of the night. “If your shit isn’t under control, you should get help.”
I pulled up to the curb at a corner near the Bigfoot Room and climbed out. My legs and back were getting stiff and achy from sitting so long. I was glad Potato and his men had landed most of their punches on my chest and stomach, where I was protected. My car was still where I had left it.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said.
Wardell climbed into the driver’s seat. He was a big guy, but he was limber enough to make it without knocking the stick shift out of PARK.
“Thank you,” Wardell said. I shut the door. He hit the turn signal and pulled into traffic.
I watched him go, wondering what I could do if my own stress got so bad I lost control of it. Not therapy; as soon as I talked about predators, the therapist would think I was delusional. And if the therapist found out about the people I’d killed …
It didn’t matter. None of it mattered.
Wardell disappeared into traffic, so I crossed the street and entered the Roasted Seal. The sawdust was still on the floor and the rumpled guy was still sitting at the bar, a beer and a cup of coffee beside him.
And Arne was sitting in the same booth. He was tapping at a different laptop.
I moved toward him, holding out my hand to block Lenard as I came around the wait station. “Are you going to pat me down again?”
Lenard slammed a little locker door shut and spun the combination lock. Then he glanced at Arne. Arne shrugged. Lenard backed toward the booth, and his body language told me not to approach.
“I hope,” Arne said, “you’re not pissed that I took off without telling you what’s what or caring one shit what was going on with you.”
“Of course not. What kind of petty bastard do you think I am?” And it was true. I wasn’t pissed. In fact, I’d expected him to abandon me somewhere—that’s why I’d held out my hand for the Land Rover keys when Arne asked me to drive it. It’s one thing to be stranded in Bel Air and another to be stranded in the middle of the desert. “Bought yourself a replacement already?”
“Oh, no. This is my real computer. The other was the one I take on jobs, just in case.”
“Arne, what happened to Melly? What happened to you?”
“Just a minute. Busy.” He turned back to the computer and started typing.
“Busy with what?” My voice sounded sharper than I’d intended. I wanted to say more, but everything I could think of sounded ridiculous.
“Destroying a man’s life,” he said. “Ray, what do you know about porn on the Internet?”
“There’s porn on the Internet?”
Arne laughed loudly, and I could feel some of the tension going out of the room. I needed him on my side, but somehow I’d lost the knack of winning people over.
“My favorite is where people make their own and put it up online. It’s crazy popular, even if most of the content is videos some dude made with a hooker or revenge postings by the recently dumped. Sometimes it’s even weirder. Check it out.”
He turned the laptop toward me. A video was playing, and it took me a moment to realize it was the same video I’d seen in Francois’s house. Except that someone had added a timer to it.
“Why is there a …” Then I saw why. By the time the counter reached 27, Francois had finished.
“See, Francois has a wife somewhere—Park Avenue or something—and she is a litigation powerhouse. Her whole clan is. Once word starts to spread about this video, he’s going to have a very expensive divorce on his hands. Plus the twenty-seven-second thing.”
He turned the laptop toward himself again. There was a jangle of keys, and I noticed that his big key ring was hanging off the side of the machine. Arne pulled at it, unplugging a memory stick, and pocketed it. He must have found the DVD in the Bugatti right away, copied the file during the drive back to the city, and put the disc back.
But that was his deal. I had other problems.
“Arne, Melly said you were dead. She said you’d been killed and it was my fault.”
Arne gave me a steady look. This was it. He was about to break down and give me what I needed. “Well, he was your buddy, wasn’t he?”
I didn’t have any buddies. Not anymore. “Who?”
“Wally King.”
Oh, God. Wally Fucking King.
CHAPTER THREE
Lenard touched Arne’s shoulder as though he’d just seen something they’d both been waiting for. “Hold that thought,” Arne said.
I heard a foot scuffle behind me. Arne glanced at the floor behind me. I turned, but there was no one there.
A heavy metal canister clanged near my feet and let out a wet hiss. A plume of tear gas billowed around my legs.
I turned to shout a warning to Arne, but he was no longer in his booth. I shut my mouth and clamped my hand over my nose before I caught a whiff, then soccer-kicked it toward the front door. Damn, it was hot already—I could feel the heat of it against my ankle. It struck something on the floor I couldn’t see and skittered sideways toward Rumpled Guy.
I shut my eyes just as the stinging started. Something moved very close to me, and the gunfire started.
I dropped flat onto the floor. The tattoos on my chest and the outside of my forearms are bulletproof thanks to a spell called the closed way, but my head, back, legs, and sides were completely exposed. The guns sounded very loud and very close, but nothing hit me.
I crawled blindly toward the fire exit. Sawdust stuck to my skin, and my chest felt tight. I hadn’t caught a good breath, and my oxygen was running out. Fortunately, the gunfire had already stopped. It takes very little time to empty a magazine.
I heard the sounds of clips being ejected from pistols and slammed back in. There were two gunmen, at least, and now I was sure they were close. Someone was hacking and choking on the gas, but it didn’t sound like anyone near me. Were the gunmen wearing masks?