Saul leaned loose and relaxed against the rear bumper and watched as I cleaned the trunk with Formula 409. He was the second person to watch me do it. The first had been Sevastian, who’d growled low in this thick throat when I’d shoved a handful of crimson-stained rags stuffed into a plastic grocery bag at him with the emotionless command to dump them. Profoundly disappointed that he couldn’t report back to Konstantin any news that would’ve permanently removed me from sight, he’d left me in the condo garage with a wad of spit beside my shoe. Less than five minutes later Saul showed up with take-out sweet and sour tofu that included a sauce the unhappy scarlet of fresh blood.
It was not one of my better days. Raising curious eyebrows, Saul bounced a fortune cookie in his hand as I continued to scrub. “Should I even ask?”
“No,” I answered shortly in a tone that had made lesser men think twice. Saul, unfortunately, was not a lesser man.
“So much for scintillating conversation,” he said dryly. Cracking open the cookie, he extracted the small slip of paper and gave an audible growl. “Do you believe this shit? It’s a hard sell for some time-share scheme. It’s not bad enough we get this crap in bathroom stalls. Now they’re screwing with our cookies.” At any other time his outrage would’ve been amusing, but not too much was tickling my funny bone today.
“You want a fortune? Here’s your fortune.” I slammed down the lid of the trunk. “Life is short, so get to the goddamn point.”
His eyes dropped to the wad of paper towels clenched in my fist. I’d cleaned up most of the blood with the ones I’d pawned off on Sevastian, but there was still a faint splotch of red fading to wet pink on the one I held now. A ripple of unease passed through the mobile face before disappearing under a smooth mask. Saul had a definite nodding acquaintance with violence himself, but the implications here . . . a bloody trunk . . . might be more than even he cared to consider. “How about we go upstairs and eat while we talk? Having a picnic in an underground garage isn’t my idea of class.”
Giving his green, blue, and purple kaleidoscope silk shirt a disparaging glance, I drawled, “Yeah, you’re all about class.” I shrugged and led the way to the elevator. Upstairs I let us into my place, tossed the paper towels in the garbage, and washed my hands. As the warm water washed over my skin, I let it also carry the morning’s events with it. I couldn’t afford to be distracted. If that meant mentally burying the vision and consequences of what I’d done, that’s what I would do. It wasn’t as if they wouldn’t be in good company. I might have to look into a bigger box. It was getting tight in there.
“Bring me a beer, would you?” Saul called from the living room.
Seconds later I tossed him a cold bottle with a jaundiced growl. “Don’t you hate it when your ass gets superglued to the couch? Lazy bastard.”
He caught the bottle and disregarded the barb with aplomb. “Hope you can use chopsticks.”
He couldn’t have told me that while I was still in the kitchen with the forks. I had many skills, some of which involved pointed objects, but wielding chopsticks wasn’t one of them. It didn’t matter. Hunger was the last thing on my mind at the moment. “It’s all yours, Skoczinsky. Eat up.”
“Your loss.” He put his feet up on the coffee table and opened a carton of rice. “Don’t come crying to me that you didn’t get your daily dose of MSG.”
I knew better than to think I could go toe-to-toe with the perpetual motion machine that was Saul’s mouth. “Did you get all the equipment?” I didn’t sit, instead walking over to the window to take a look at a view with which I was already intimately familiar.
“Everything but the weapons. You said you would handle that.”
We’d been planning for five days now. In that time I’d managed to gather enough guns to give the NRA an orgasm. I’d also obtained Tasers, tear gas, and stun grenades, all police quality. My friends of the semiofficial capacity weren’t exactly in high places, but they didn’t have to be to get their hands on what I needed. “I took care of it.”
“Sure you got enough?”
The side of my mouth crooked. “You’d better bring a back brace.”