Murder and Mayhem (24 page)

“Nah, he was stalking me. I went outside for fresh air, and one of his goons grabbed me.” Rook sat back against the headboard, rolling his shoulder. “Literally, the fucker grabbed me. Archie hires some real assholes. And before you get all pissy, I’m okay. Mostly scared the shit out of me.”

“I don’t get….” Talking to Rook about staying in didn’t seem to be doing either of them any favors, but he was going to give it one more try. “
Cuervo
, someone is trying to
kill
you. You can’t just go take a walk outside until we figure out who the hell is doing all of this.”

“Once. Tried to kill me once. And hey, maybe they were aiming for you. You know, a vengeful admirer from afar who caught me staring at your ass.” He tried to shrug the whole thing off, but Dante caught the worry in Rook’s expression.

“I’d rather be doing other things to your body than picking up its pieces.” Dante cupped Rook’s chin, forcing him to look at his face. “Is it so hard to believe I don’t want anything to happen to you?”

“It’s kind of hard to believe someone wants me dead.” Rook let himself get manhandled for a second longer, then pulled away. “Why now? I mean, I’ve done some shitty things in the past but nothing someone would want to kill me for.”

“Dani? What did you do to her?” Dante angled closer to Rook. “Why would she be in your shop? You’ve never answered that. Not really.”

“I don’t have an answer.” Rook’s shrug was a study in minimalism, barely enough of a movement to be called a gesture. “Unless she was there to rip me off, but I don’t keep the high-ticket items there.”

“What are those?” He frowned, thinking back to what he’d seen at Potter’s Field. “Some of the things you’ve got in that place ran to the high hundreds. I know you paid stupid money for that decoder ring, but that checked out to be worthless, charity on your part. How much higher can that shit go?”

“Dude, I’ve got a few Lugosi and Karloff one-sheets that if I dropped them onto the open market would go for over three hundred thousand each. That’s just the tip of it.” Rook chuckled when Dante huffed in astonishment. “The thing is to go find stuff that’s worth something, buy as low as you can, and sell high. You’d be surprised at what people have in their attics.”

“Jesus,” Dante whispered. “What the hell can be worth that much? And who buys it?”

“Comics, cereal box toys they had to send away for… hell, even the right decoder ring can be worth thousands. My buyers are people with a lot of disposable money who like stuff from their childhood or even just a genre. Horror is big. So’s sci-fi. Fantasy’s making a comeback, though.” Rook patted Dante’s cheek. “See, I don’t do nickel-and-dime shit, Montoya. The shop’s so I can get rid of the piddly-ass crap and a nice place for me to live once I dumped a few dollars into walls and kitchen. But the good stuff’s in a warehouse in WeHo, behind a shit ton of steel, locks, and under temperature control.”

“What do you have that someone would want to kill for?” Dante got up to retrieve his notebook, needing to make notes. “Would Dani have known that? Or the Betties?”

“You talked to Pigeon, right?” Rook inched over to make room for Dante when he returned. “She’d know something about the Betties. I don’t know about Dani. They weren’t talking last I heard.”

“She gave me some background. I’ve got to tell you something. About one of the Betties.” Dante filled Rook in on the townhouse and the woman he’d found dead under the rubble. “She’d been killed at least two days before the place went up. That’s the official guestimate. Pigeon was in Chicago.”

“Jane. Who’s the other one in that pair? Madge?” Rook frowned. “Charlene. They were Charlene’s friends.”

“Charlene, who has access to your inventory,” Dante pointed out. “Would she have set you up?”

“Dude, Charlene can barely remember her bra size. She’s not exactly a criminal mastermind,” Rook snorted back. “She might have said something to one of them, but she doesn’t have access to the warehouse. I don’t think she even knows where it is. Or even if I owe it.”

“Someone else wouldn’t know that. They’d think you had that kind of stuff at your store.” The room phone rang, and Dante glanced worriedly at Rook. “Did you give anyone this number?”

“’Toya, it’s probably the front desk kicking us out. Archie was an asshole to the room service guy when he came up with the popcorn. I had to give him a fifty-dollar tip on the room charge to keep him happy.” Rook slid across the bed and grabbed the phone, groaning when he stretched. “God, this shit’s getting old. Hello?”

The blood drained from Rook’s face, and Dante caught the headset just as the phone tumbled from Rook’s hand. Grabbing at Rook before he catapulted off the bed, Dante spoke into the phone. “Hello? Can I help you?”

“Let me go, Montoya.” Rook struggled against Dante’s arm. “Fucking let me go. It’s Archie. Someone shot up his car close to the hotel. I’ve got to—”

“Sir?” A man’s voice echoed over the line, coolly professional and curt. “You’d better hurry, Mr. Stevens. Your grandfather is asking for you.”

Rook was sick of the smell of blood.

Its cloying metallic odor haunted him, sticking to the inside of his nose and coating the back of his throat. Close by, someone was shouting, a screeching rise and fall of hysterical nonsense he humbly recognized as belonging to one of his mother’s sisters, but he couldn’t find enough energy inside of him to see who it was.

Especially since he was the reason she was losing her shit in the middle of Cedars-Sinai’s emergency ward.

There were cops. There were always cops. This time they formed a wall between him and the rest of the Martin family who’d swooped down on the hospital’s lobby. He’d gotten very fond of the blue-cotton fence cordoning him off, especially when one of his uncle’s wives—a number three, if he remembered correctly—tried to fling a shoe at his head. The stiletto would have hurt if it’d landed, but apparently not as badly as the cuffs one of the baby-faced cops snapped around her wrist when she tried to knee Montoya in the nuts.

He didn’t need their recriminations. Rook had his own to deal with. They clung to him, ghosts whispering of the pain and agony he’d brought down upon his grandfather. Sitting in the cold waiting area, Rook stared into the chaotic hall, riding the noise drowning him. If he’d only gotten into the car when Archie asked him to. If he’d not left the hospital that first night. There were too many ifs for Rook to wrap his head around and nothing loud enough to suppress the guilty echoes bouncing around in his brain.

The cold seeped into him, reaching down into places already iced over in his guts, and Rook looked blindly about, searching for something to anchor to.

And finding it in a tall, strong-jawed cop who’d cradled him in his sleep the night before.

Dante stood talking to one of the other officers, another faceless blue uniform in a sea of navy cotton. He wore his serious detective demeanor, attentive and focused, with a stern expression Rook figured they taught in an academy somewhere in the hills. The idea of Dante Montoya standing in front of a mirror practicing a variety of cop-centric faces made him smile despite the dread pressing up from his belly, and in that moment, Dante glanced his way and Rook felt something in his chest… hitch.

He was caught in the molasses of Dante’s gaze, a delectable heat Rook halfway wished he’d let consume him. The cops finished their conversation, and Dante drifted over, sliding in between the islands of Rook’s relatives, his shoulders firm and taut as he withstood their rapid-fire assault of questions.

“For all we know, he’s the one who did this,” his aunt sniped. It was a classic juvenile ploy, speaking loud enough in a childish singsong, daring Rook to call her out. “He probably arranged for someone to kill Daddy, and now—”

“How are you doing?” Dante crouched down in front of Rook, his fluid roll of accented English masking the rest of the conversation. “Do you need anything,
cuervo
?”

“Nah, I’m… fuck, ’Toya. This is… it’s crazy.” He leaned forward, leeching off the man’s warmth. “Why the hell would someone do this? What happened?
Why
did this happen?”

They’d come downstairs to a sea of sirens, lights, and ambulances. The black sedan Rook’d shared with Archie not more than a B-movie before sat with blown-out tires and shattered windows, its sides pierced through with bullets. Blood smeared the sidewalk and cement driveway, run through with tires and footprints. A pool of vomit lay next to the valet’s station, and Rook remembered stepping around it, as if tracking the remains of someone’s late lunch through his grandfather’s blood would be something Archie would not tolerate.

It’d been the sight of a paramedic struggling to pump life into a young man wearing a hotel uniform that drove him to his knees.

It’d been the man crouched in front of him who lifted him back up again.

A scrub-clad man paced down the hallway and stopped short at the horde of Martins. They descended, a murderous screeching flock pecking ruthlessly at the slender bald man, stabbing him with questions and accusations until he beat them back with a officious sniff.

Clearing his throat, he said, “Which one of you is Rook Stevens? Mr. Martin is asking for you.”

Standing up was the hardest thing Rook’d ever done in his life. Worse than the day he’d pulled his first job and forgot to take his haul and harder than when his mother first climbed onto the back of a motorcycle to go get a pack of smokes, only to vanish for nearly six months. He’d been alone and adrift most of his life, anchored to no one but himself, and there in the linoleum hell of sanitized air and squeaky-voiced blondes, Rook was afraid.

Deathly and deeply afraid to take a step, then another to stare down something he’d not imagined he’d ever face—the death of someone he’d just begun to love.

“Fucking old man,” Rook muttered under his breath, pushing past Dante with a brush of his shoulder. “He… better be okay.”

Their hands met, fingers brushing for a long instant, and Rook nearly pulled back, needing to bury himself in Dante’s chest. There was the promise of warmth and safety there, such an alien need Rook was caught between the want of Dante’s arms and the fear of needing the man so much it crippled him.

The rub of Dante’s fingertips on his palm would have to be enough.

“Do you want me to go in there with you?” Dante edged Rook in, holding him in place. His breath ruffled Rook’s hair, a hint of coffee and mint folded into a sweet whisper.

“No, you hold them back.” The air was poisonous, filled with mutters and accusations. “And as much as I hate guns, I don’t mind if you wing them or something. Because fuck, they’re just—”

“Shitty?” He gave Rook a little push toward the hallway entrance where the nurse stood waiting. “Go on. I’ll be here. When you’re done, the cops will want to talk to him if he’s up to it. Well, if the vultures here leave anything.”

“Can you see about his goon?” Rook walked backward a step. “Guy’s an asshole, but….”

“Just because he’s an asshole doesn’t mean you want him dead.” Dante’s crooked smile did silly things to Rook’s stomach. “I’m on it.”

The room was stark, colder than the frigid confines of the waiting area where he’d left his relatives. In the sea of beige walls and steel rails, a flotsam of machines floated around a single bed, its occupant nearly buried under thick blankets and tubes. Archie lay against the white sheets, parchment gray and stiff, his lean face gaunt and drawn. As Rook approached, the old man’s eyes fluttered open, and they floated over Rook’s face before snapping into focus. Struggling to sit up, Archie lightly cursed the tight cocoon of blankets pinning him to the mattress, and Rook strode over, the weight in his belly lightened at the sound of his grandfather muttering fuck under his breath in a hot, angry stream.

“Do they think I’m going to fucking break loose like King Kong?” Archie feebly kicked at the end of the blankets, trying to loosen them from under the mattress. “Help me out here, boy. Give me some room to breathe under this.”

“They probably think you’re going to do a runner.” Rook couldn’t stop a silly grin from stretching over his face. “The other hospital probably gave them a heads-up about me so you’d be trapped.”

“Probably.” Archie pulled a sour face. “Leeches. If you’ve got money, they want to keep you in as long as they can to bleed you dry, but if you’re poor and really need help, you’re out the door before you’ve swallowed those fifty-dollar aspirins they give you.”

“Do they even give out aspirin?” Tugging the blankets out from under the mattress, Rook fluffed them up so his grandfather could move about. “How’s that?”

“Better. Now find me a hot nurse, and I’ll be great.” He took a breath. “Never mind. You’d go out there and bring me back something with a dick. I’ll get Stanley… shit, Stanley—”

“Dante’s checking on him,” Rook said as he pulled a chair close to the bed. “Doctor said he took a bullet to the lung and thigh, so he’ll be in surgery. You and I—now we’ve got matching scars on our arms, which pisses the family off to no fucking end, because you know, they’re assholes. Your concussion’s bigger than mine, which is kind of impressive, old man, because you know, I was hit by a fucking car.”

“You’re younger. You bounce better. When you’re a sack of bones like I am, we just rattle about like dice in a cup.” Archie squeezed Rook’s hand once, then clutched at the blanket. “Thought you’d gotten rid of me?”

“Right, you and roaches are going to be the only things left after the Apocalypse. Tooling around. Driving old lady Buicks and eating Twinkies.” Studying his grandfather, Rook noted the bandages along his neck and jaw, frowning at the speckles of blood coming up through the gauze. Nodding at the immobilizing cast on Archie’s left hand, he asked, “Broken or shot?”

“Broken finger. Busted the damned thing trying to grab the door handle when Stanley swerved the car. Didn’t think he’d gotten enough speed in, but we nearly went through that driveway rail, and I’ll bet you the car’s a total loss. Damn thing was only a few months old. I’d just worn in the backseat so it fit my scrawny ass.”