Murder and Mayhem (13 page)

“You’re a good boy,
mijo
. Even if you’ve just turned my hands black like a beggar.” Manny snorted despairingly at Dante’s distress. “I’ll rub the leftover dye on it when we’re done. It’ll come right out. Should have done that with my nose that time. Finish up, and I’ll feed you. When was the last time you ate?”

“Okay, in some ways, yes, you are becoming Grandma.” Dante reached for the brush again when his cell phone chirruped from where he’d left it on the table. Frowning, he stared at the unknown number as he tugged off a glove. “Hold on, Manny. Let me get this.”

“I’ll put dinner on simmer. Phone calls usually mean you go out and I end up watching bad telenovelas,” his uncle grumbled.

“Montoya,” Dante barked into the phone.

A woman husked a breathy whisper, barely audible above the traffic noise on the other end of the line.

“I’m sorry. I can’t hear you. You have to speak up. Who is this?”

“God, I can’t believe I’m calling the
cops
,” she rasped, lifting her voice up loud enough for Dante to make out what she was saying. “You’re that detective that arrested Rook, right? Do I have the right number?”

“Yes, this is Detective Montoya.” His brain clicked, adding Rook to a column containing a woman wary of authority. “Charlene Canada? Did Stevens tell you to call me? I need to talk to you about a couple of people Stevens identified as the Betties—”

“Here’s the thing, Detective,” Charlene replied in her half whisper, all-sex-kitten voice. “Rook’s gone. Like gone from the hospital, vanished. He just walked out when no one was looking. That gargoyle he calls a grandfather is having puppies over it, and I don’t know where Rook went. So if you want to talk to me about the Betties, help me find Rook. Before that guy who shot him finds him first.”

Leaving the hospital seemed like a good idea at the time. Standing in the chilly wind whipping through downtown Los Angeles wearing only a thin T-shirt and a battered pair of jeans made Rook rethink his life choices, especially after the painkillers in his system went the way of the dodo and he was left feeling battered from head to toe.

Los Angeles rumbled a sleepy growl from its perch on the California coast. There were parts of the city that churned and bubbled no matter what time it was, and Rook was walking right into its belly. The Fashion District was the best place to get lost in, or at least on its edges where it ran into Little Tokyo. Long spans of empty, weed-choked lots lay at Downtown’s feet, land too valuable to give away but too expensive to develop. Even parking structures, a much-desired commodity in LA, weren’t worth the effort. Nothing viable or profitable was nearby, and until Little Tokyo took another yawning stretch to absorb another few blocks, the worn-down area wasn’t going see gentrification any time soon.

It was the perfect place to get lost until he was ready to be found again.

“Fucking Montoya. Seriously, yelling
duck
works. No need to relive old football days.” Rook rubbed at his bare arms. “Okay, Stevens. Get the fuck going and go under.”

The fight with Archie had been quick and brutal, a slash of words and anger. Rook found a dark place within him, and he’d flung them out with a deadly aim. His grandfather fought back, hemming Rook in until he felt like he couldn’t breathe. Advice was one thing. Having his life taken over by an old man with an agenda was something entirely different.

Suing the cops for a fucked-up arrest was out of the question. In Archibald’s world, doing something that stupid was apparently like shooting a warning shot off someone’s bow. For Rook, it was slapping the wolf in its face after he’d missed the first time. All it did was piss the wolf off, and it would be right back on his ass, right after it was done sharpening its teeth.

Nothing whetted a wolf’s appetite for Rook-ass like a long round of sharpening teeth.

His cell phone was practically dead, and since most of his things were at the Castle Martin, Rook had to be conservative with what little energy it had remaining. Calls from Charlene went unanswered, as did the numerous jingles from Archibald’s house.

It was late. Or early, depending on how he looked at things. Breaking out of a hospital was harder than he’d thought it would be, but then Rook had little to no experience with health care. Living on the show circuit meant skirting too close to the bone on money, and by the time he’d found a use for his flexibility and quick fingers, he’d already learned how to walk off a broken arm.

The rippling anguish from the gunshot wound was a sign he was getting soft. Confessing to Montoya he’d pulled fake diamonds on a job was another chink in his armor. He’d been an idiot to turn to Archibald and a moron in thinking he’d be able to control their relationship as he’d done countless others.

Never give away the upper hand. A bitterly learned lesson. One he’d learned before and one he certainly wouldn’t be repeating with Montoya. No matter how much the man pushed every single one of his buttons and made Rook want to spend a lot of time doing filthy, sticky things to him.

“Hey, man, you got a dollar?” A grimy man stepped out of the shadows when Rook passed by a slim alley.

He shook his head and kept walking, keeping an eye out to the side as he turned the corner. The beggar’s profanities chased him down the street, and as if on cue, another man, larger and dirtier, slid out of a dress shop’s doorway.

The element of surprise shifted on Rook’s side, because he evaded the man’s initial grab with a spinning twist that took him one step onto the street.

“Got no time for trouble, man.” Rook held up his hands, more dismissive than apologetic, as he kept walking. “I’ve got nothing on me.”

His long legs gave him enough distance away from the second man before he had time to recover, not sticking around to hear if the man decided to play the sympathy card or would have strong-armed him into giving up his wallet.

A wallet holding a few burner cards, just like the ones he’d given Charlene.

They were the sum total of his temporary independence and the pieces of plastic Rook had no intention of giving up. He needed space to think—time to breathe. Hurrying past the Angel’s Flight station, he spotted what he was looking for, an old W-shaped brick-and-concrete hotel sitting on the corner a block and a half away. Bristling with fire escapes and broad windows, the four-storied hotel was the perfect place to set up shop and hunker down.

If his arm hadn’t been killing him, Rook would probably have seen the tiny speck of a car screaming up the hill as he crossed the street. The red domestic was barely a thimbleful of glass and plastic, but its driver caught the slope at the right speed because it jumped off the asphalt and careened toward the sidewalk. The car grazed him, its passenger-side mirror clipping Rook on his hip, and the momentum of the hit spun Rook about, slamming him to the street.

The blacktop gouged at his palms, and his knees screamed in pain when his jeans were torn open on the rough street. Twisting, he rolled over onto his shoulder and tucked himself into the curb. Another car passed by, the wind knifing a stinging kiss to his torn-up hands and raw knees, and Rook covered his head, trying to avoid getting hit again.

Off in the distance, the tiny red car continued to careen through the street, its wee engine screaming with the effort of climbing the hill.

A heart-pounding eternity later, he creakily got up and stared out at the empty dark street. If he’d hurt before, he’d gone into full agony. Lurching down the sidewalk, Rook made it to an all-night convenience store. A few minutes and many odd looks later, he headed to the hotel, trying to keep scraped-up hands from sticking to the plastic shopping bags he’d packed with what he needed.

At some point in the six months since he’d spotted the hotel and buried its existence in his memory, it’d undergone a semirenovation. Brighter and cleaner than the last time he’d walked through its doors, the place was still staffed by smiling people who seemed oblivious to the fact Rook hobbled into their lobby dressed in road-rashed clothing and whose only luggage was four plastic bags smeared with a bit of blood.

The room was everything he expected, musty and a bit worn around the edges. Stripping the bedspread off the mattress, Rook resisted the urge to fall face-first into the pillows and sleep off his pain. His hands were shaking by the time he got four ibuprofen out of the bottle he’d purchased at the store, and a glance in the mirror was enough to convince him bribing the clerk to let him buy a bottle of whiskey had been one of his better life decisions.

Lack of sleep and food dragged his skin down to a pasty gray, and the bandage on his arm was beginning to lift up at the edges, probably from when he’d rolled around in the gutter to avoid getting hit by another car. After stripping as quickly as his injured body would let him, Rook twisted his shoulders to get a good look at the triangular bruise forming over his rib cage. It was a glorious splash of watercolor purples and blues with a promise to go full spectrum in a matter of hours.

“Well, at least not another scar.” He examined the area again. The skin was tender and a little bit hot, but bruising he could take. His hands and knees were another matter.

His body definitely wore its time on his skin. Living in a roaming trailer park with temperamental carnies was an experiment in Darwinism best looked at with
Lord-of-the-Flies
spectacles. Small nicks marbled his hands and feet, bits of meat chewed out by equipment, ropes, and boards. Training to be a knifer, he’d sliced his hands and arms more times than he could count, and spending his childhood lacing and working the midway hadn’t helped.

But Rook couldn’t remember a single damned time when he’d felt as worn and beaten as he did right then.

Peroxide helped clean out the scrapes, and Rook carefully plucked away any bits he saw embedded under his skin with a pair of sharp tweezers. His ribs were beginning to hurt by the time he was done, and his arm was nearly numb from pain. Gently easing off the filthy bandage around his shoulder, he grimaced at the line of stitches marching across the muscle. They pulled when he reached into the shower to turn the faucet on, and Rook hissed at the nearly unbearable sear of pain when the hot spray hit his torn-open skin.

“Fuck, that’s maybe a nick. I’ve been knifed deeper than this.” It was a small consolation but one that bolstered his tender ego. “I probably passed out because you slammed me into the goddamn floor, Montoya.”

He wasn’t sure what drove him out of the shower first, the water turning icier with each passing second or that he couldn’t stand up any longer.

His phone continued to sing and dance its way across a nightstand, happy to be connected to an outlet and getting juice. A few more from Charlene and a string of texts from his grandfather, coldly impersonal and abrupt orders to call the house so he could be retrieved and brought back into the fold.

“Yeah, got one of your monkeys to send those, didn’t you, Archie? Like you’d know how to work a phone.” Rook collapsed onto the bed, grateful for the mattress’s thick padding. Whatever corners the hotel cut to keep costs down, pillow-tops apparently weren’t on the list. “This is damned comfortable. Either that, or I’m so fucked-up I don’t give a shit anymore.”

Cradling the phone in his hand, Rook eased onto his back, naked and welcoming the heat kicking up from the unit next to the bed. He had a half thought about closing the room’s drapes but realized he really didn’t give a shit if anyone saw him.

“Not like I’m filming pornos or something,” he muttered. “Fuck, what the hell is going on?”

Hunger was a fleeting thing. Swallowing the analgesics on an empty stomach guaranteed he wouldn’t want anything for a while, a bitter afterwash climbing back up his throat to sour his tongue. His head hurt where he’d struck it, and his brain seemed folded into layers of cement he couldn’t break through.

“Okay, figure this out, Rook. Who the hell would kill Dani and the Betties? And who the fuck would leave them on your front porch?” There were too many names and faces connected to grudges, but he’d always dealt fairly with everyone he’d run jobs with. Even Pigeon, the Betties’ handler, would
never
kill off two of her assets just to rattle Rook’s cage.

“One thing, that woman’s all
these are my children
. Once a Betty, always a Betty.” Rook stared up at the ceiling, counting the cracks radiating out from one of the overhead pendant lights. “Dani, though. She pissed a lot of people off, but murdering her? Shit, why? And why me? ’Cause she was the one who backstabbed
me
, not the other way ’round. What the hell connects all of us?”

They’d never all worked a con together. He barely knew Pigeon, and he’d given the hive-mind Betties as wide a berth as he could.

“That diamond. Setup on Dani’s part? Did she bring that to plant in my place to fuck me over?” Rook frowned. “She didn’t work doors. Needed someone to trip locks and alarms for her. Who’d she trust to bring into my place? Unless they were looking to rip me off, but shit, none of this makes any damned
fucking
sense.”

The sick hit hard, wrapping around Rook’s stomach and cutting through his body. He tried to roll off the bed, but he only got as far as the edge of the mattress when he lost the battle with his innards. Choking on a rush of bitter water and half-dissolved pills, Rook gagged on his own tongue when he tried to spit out the last dregs. Another wave rose, and he couldn’t hold back, nearly screaming as his retching twisted his abused body. The room dimmed, and Rook felt the bed slide out from under him, but he’d not moved an inch, clinging to the edge of the mattress.

Another burble from the phone in Rook’s hand, but this time he fumbled to answer it, not caring who was on the other end. The world went sideways again, and he finally tumbled, collapsing into a heap on the room’s scratchy, cheap carpet. It was damp on his skin, and for the life of him, Rook couldn’t figure out why, but he definitely knew the voice shouting his name through the phone’s tiny speaker.