The Gentlemen's Hour (Boone Daniels #2)

Except what if the stupid twat doesn’t? What if she panics? Or gets greedy?

And now she won’t answer her phone. She’s looking at caller ID and blowing me off. Where the f*ck is she? he wonders. Okay, where is she usually at this time of the day? Out getting shit-faced with her buddies.

He leaves the building, crosses the street, and goes into the bar.

Sure enough, the nightly bitch session of the Aggrieved Secretaries’ Club is in full swing. They’re not all that happy to see him when he approaches the table. F*ck them, he thinks, and asks, “Have you seen Nicole?”

“She’s off the clock,” one of them answers.

Mouthy bitch.

“I know,” Bill says. “But have you seen her?”

The mouthy one giggles. “Have you looked between the sheets? There was this really cute guy giving her the eye and he followed her out of here, and I think girlfriend was open to a hookup.”

Bill goes back to his office building, looks in the parking lot, and doesn’t see Nicole’s car. Calls her cell again, then her home, but she doesn’t answer. Great, he thinks, I’m dying here, and the bitch is out getting laid.



121

Monkey hangs by his arms from chains thrown over the steam pipe.

The man gives him another gentle nudge in the chest, and Monkey swings back and forth. It’s hot down in the building’s boiler room, but the man wears a suit, button-down shirt, and tie, and doesn’t sweat at all.

Monkey does. He’s dripping all over the floor, and the man is careful not to let it get on his leather shoes as he steps close, shakes his head, and says, “Marvin, Marvin, Marvin. They call you ‘Monkey,’ don’t they?”

“How do you know that?”

Jones smiles and shakes his head. “Monkey, I need you to talk to me.”

His voice is soft. Cultured and gentle, with the slightest hint of an accent.

“I did everything you wanted,” Monkey says.

True enough. After he arranged the meeting they came to his place—this gentleman and some Mexican gangbangers—put a gun to his head, sat him down, and had him erase all the records pertaining to Paradise Homes from the databank. Then they took him down to the basement, hung him from the steam pipe, and asked him how he came to be so interested.

“You haven’t told me what I want to know.”

“I did,” Monkey says. “I told you all about what Blasingame did. I told you all about Daniels.”

“But you haven’t told me with whom Mr. Daniels is working,” Jones says. “You seemed to indicate that he is a rather stupid man, unlike yourself. He could not have put this all together the way you did.”

“He works alone.”

“Oh, dear, Monkey.” Jones shakes his head again, then reaches into his trouser pocket, pulls out a pair of surgical gloves, and carefully fits them on. “You are very clever with records, Monkey, and very thorough. You made one tragic error, though, in placing your faith entirely in them. You didn’t realize there are people whose names never appear in records.”

Then he reaches inside his jacket pocket and removes a thin, metallic rod, flicks his wrist, and the telescopic baton slides out to its full, one-foot length. “I believe it’s more or less a commonplace for a person in my situation to say something along the lines of, ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’ Bad luck for you, Monkey. You see, I do want to hurt you.”

He does.



122

Mary Lou Baker goes off on Johnny B.

“Did your boy Steve run the witnesses through the microwave?” she asks Johnny after summoning him to her office.

“What—”

“One of my star witnesses, George Poptanich, otherwise known as ‘Georgie Pop,’ came to see me,” Mary Lou says. “He says Harrington twisted his arm to identify Corey.”

“What, he had an attack of conscience?”

“He had an attack of terror-induced constipation!” Mary Lou yells. “It now seems he’s scared shitless about having maybe fingered the wrong guy. Yeah, he’s going to make a great witness, John—a two-time loser who goes back on his story.”

“You still have Jill Thompson,” Johnny says.

“Burke doesn’t think so,” Mary Lou says. “Burke says she’ll recant. Who interviewed her?”

You or Harrington?”

“Steve did.”

“He gets f*cking cute with me,” Mary Lou says, “he’ll take you down with him.”

Johnny nods. About all he can do. Harrington has a reputation for taking the straightest line between two points.

“What about you?” Mary Lou asks. “Did you tune Corey up on the confession?”

It pisses Johnny off. Mary Lou is no fresh-faced kid, but an experienced, many-laps-around-the-pool prosecutor who knows how things work. Knows that all confessions are orchestrated to some extent or another.

“I played nice with him,” Johnny says. “Look at the tape—there are no gaps.”

“I didn’t ask if you hit him. I asked if you tricked him . . . led him in any way.”

Of course I tricked him, Johnny thinks. I grabbed him by the nose and I led him. That’s what we do, Mary Lou. That’s what you pay us for. He didn’t say that, though. What he said was, “The confession will stand up, ML.”

“He’s going back on it.”

“F*ck him. Too late.”

“What about your witness statements?”

“What about them?” Just to buy a little time and pay back some of the annoyance.

“Are they finessed?”

I should hope so, Johnny thought. Finesse is a job requirement. But he says, “Did I show Trevor, Billy, and Dean a crystal ball of what their futures would look like if they didn’t come to Jesus? Sure. Do they have ample motive for throwing Corey under the bus to salvation? You bet. But this describes, what, eighty-five percent of our witness statements in a good year.”

Mary Lou stares at him and taps her pencil on the desk. It’s amazingly annoying. Then she says, “I’m going to cut a deal.”

“Oh, come on, Mary Lou!”

“Don’t give me the hurt, indignant shit!” she yells back. She calms down and says, “It’s for your sake, too, Johnny. Alan threatened to nail you to the cross on the stand.”

“I’m not afraid of Alan Burke.”

“Put your dick back in your pants,” Mary Lou said. “I’m only asking, does he know something I should know?”

“If he does, I don’t know what it would be,” Johnny said.

“You took Blasingame straight to the house, right?” Mary Lou asked.

Johnny heard the implied question. They both knew Steve Harrington’s reputation for tuning suspects up before they sing on tape. But this wasn’t some Mexican from Barrio Logan or a black kid from Golden Hill; this was a rich white boy from La Jolla, and Steve knew better than to mess with that potential lawsuit.

“It was all by the book, Mary Lou.”

She stares at him again and decides he’s telling the truth. Kodani’s reputation is straight-up. “Alan has Daniels working for him on this, doesn’t he?”

“What I hear.”

“Daniels was a good cop,” Mary Lou said. “What happened to him wasn’t right.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“You’re surfing buddies or something, aren’t you?”

“Not so much anymore,” Johnny says.

Since Boone went to the Dark Side.

“So I don’t have to worry,” Mary Lou asked, “about leaks coming out of the detective division?”

“I resent that, Mary Lou.”

“Just checking, John,” she said. “Don’t get your back up. There are eyes on you, you know. The powers wouldn’t mind an Asian chief of detectives. The diversity thing. I just don’t want to see you f*ck yourself up out of a misguided sense of friendship.”