“What did you tell him?”
“That he’s the commissioner, and he serves at the pleasure of the mayor’s office, which means he’s to do as I say and not ask questions. But I put that in much nicer words. I’m going to be out of touch after tonight, getting ready to head to the conference.”
“I really wish you wouldn’t go,” I said. “Not until I’m absolutely certain it’s safe.”
“It’s fine. Earl is coming with me, we have Tall Pines on security detail, and Metro is giving us a full escort to and from the hotel. I’ll be safer than I am at home.”
I wasn’t so sure. A bunch of civic-minded mayors coming together in one place to discuss how they were going to tackle the ink epidemic—and with it, the Network’s cash cow—felt like a disaster waiting to happen. But Seabrook had a cast-iron backbone and she wasn’t going to bend for me or anybody. I wished her luck.
“Anything useful?” Caitlin asked me. I was flipping through the scattered files Seabrook’s assistant had sent over. It was a haphazard collection of scanned documents, some of them nearly two decades old, tracing the edges of a hard-knock life.
“The Wellness House was just the start for this kid,” I said. “In juvie, out of juvie. In county jail, out of county. Graduated to an assault with a deadly weapon charge two days after his twenty-first birthday. State pen for that.”
In between the lines, a pattern started to form. Allegations, lists of known ties, suspicions. Everything came together to point a red arrow in a too-familiar direction.
“I know what he wants,” I said. “And I know who sent him.”
33.
The proof of intent came from all the crimes Harry Grimes didn’t go down for. He’d been seen at the scene of a Smaldone family hit, two members of the “Mountain Mafia” gunned down in the middle of dinner, but the feds couldn’t make a concrete connection. He was linked to the death of an heiress who committed “suicide” by diving into her soaking tub with a plugged-in toaster, but his hands were cleaner than the water. Then he’d been questioned in the disappearance of a Teamster boss. His alibi was airtight for that one, just like the construction drum that the boss’s tortured corpse turned up in two years later.
“He’s an assassin,” Caitlin said after I read some choice excerpts to her.
“Pay for play,” I said, “and considering these are just the killings they think he had a hand in but can’t prove, I can’t guess how many he’s gotten away with. Forget all the BS he spouted at the party, it was a smoke screen. Harry Grimes is being paid to kill me, pure and simple.”
She frowned. Her hands flexed on the steering wheel.
“And you believe you know who sent him?”
“He’s a cambion, so even if he doesn’t have formal ties to the courts of hell, he’s aware of them. He moves in both underworlds—infernal and criminal.”
“With you so far,” she said.
“He’s legally a transient with no fixed address, but check the pattern for the last five years. Every time he’s been hauled in for questioning, it’s been in Colorado. Aurora, Fort Collins, Pueblo…”
“Denver,” Caitlin said. She’d already put it together.
“And who do we know in Denver? Same person who just happened to show up at the party, and threw me off-balance just in time for ‘Hunter Grimm’ to make his grand entrance.”
“Naavarasi.” Now her knuckles were turning white. She swerved onto an off-ramp, too sharp, leaning into the wheel.
“Which might…well, not explain all this other weirdness, but it’s Naavarasi. We can figure ninety percent of it was just there to confuse us or throw us off the scent.”
“Or there are more layers to this,” Caitlin said. “As is likely the case—we know that from hard experience. I suppose your attempt at mercy, in your teens, won’t be enough to stay this man’s hand.”
I shook my head. “Nah. Murder for hire is a sociopath’s game. I can’t expect him to sit down with me and laugh about old times.”
Then the idea hit me.
“Cait…if we can prove Naavarasi hired him, what does that do for us?”
“It makes her fair game.” Her lips pursed in a grim, determined smile. “Dispatching an unlicensed assassin to kill a member of another court—if we can prove she did it, which is always the challenge—is just as bad as using her own hands. Prince Malphas will have no choice but to cast her to the wolves. What did you have in mind, pet?”
“Forget what I just said. I want to sit down with him and laugh about old times,” I said. “And then I want to flip him. I was thinking about something Royce said to me, back at the party: ‘defection is always an option.’”
*
Grimes was out there, somewhere, hunting me down in the urban wilds. I couldn’t sit around waiting, so I decided to make it easier for him. He didn’t know where I lived, or he already would have hit my place, and he couldn’t track my ride now that it was a smoking piece of wreckage. The one place I knew he could watch for me—would watch for me—was where we’d first met. Winter.
Caitlin called ahead. A pair of bouncers met us near the nightclub’s unmarked double doors, pushing the line back so we could get right up to the bare brick wall. One handed me a can of cherry-red spray paint. I shook it up, aimed, and wrote my missive in big, curling letters.
CALL ME – DJF
One of the partygoers in line shook his head. “She ain’t gonna call you, bro! Give it up.”
“Aw,” his date said. “I think it’s romantic. For an old guy.”
A streamer of paint drooled down the bumpy brick off the bottom of the F, darkening as it dried, like a rivulet of blood. We left. I wanted him to see my message, not to actually take a shot at me on-site. Caitlin and I were driving around, thinking about grabbing a bite to eat, when my phone rang twenty minutes later.
“I can read the writing on the wall,” Harry Grimes told me. “Can you?”
“Sure. It says, ‘you picked the wrong target this time.’”
“I never pick wrong. And I never miss.”
“What if I could convince you otherwise?” I asked.
“I’m listening.”
“Listen to me over a drink instead. There’s a bar on the casino floor at the Monaco. Nice and public and well-lit, and nobody shoots anybody there.”
“First time for everything,” he said.
“The Monaco is CMC Entertainment property,” I said, “and you aren’t going to start shit on CMC Entertainment property.”
“How do you know?”
“Because your name isn’t Hunter MacGregor Grimm. It’s Harry Michael Grimes, and you’re only pretending to be crazy.”
He went silent for so long I thought he might have hung up. Then he said: “The Monaco. Twenty minutes.”
*
I always came back to the Monaco. That innate masochism again, I guess. Back in the day, I’d exorcised a stubborn ghost from the penthouse floor. Well, not exorcised so much as relocated. Then, when I was scrapping with the Redemption Choir, I’d brought a supposedly innocent priest here to keep him safe while I tried to line up an escape plan. That night had ended in a betrayal and a vicious beating. Basically, I didn’t have a lot of good memories to keep me coming back. Maybe just the ramen dishes at Umami—and as I passed through the smoked-glass doors into the casino, moving from the desert night chill to the perfectly regulated air-conditioning, I realized that entire side of the casino floor was covered in heavy sheets of plywood. Everything was shut down, the resort under heavy renovation from its hairline down to its toes, wiping away the old to bring in the new.
And I had worked up an appetite for ramen on the way over. Some nights, I just couldn’t win.