“Yeah, asshole.” Parker sneered at the Jag’s trunk. “You’ve got maybe two feet of chain. See how far you can fucking run.”
The house smelled musty, and after shutting down the alarm system, he moved slowly through the place, soaking in its rich furnishings and expensive art. It was too fussy for his tastes, although he liked the surrounding forest. The cold was a factor against it. His Southern-bred bones longed for a warmer clime, and he was fond of hunting, not something encouraged in the San Francisco hills.
He stopped in the kitchen long enough to fill a glass with water and pop another painkiller. While the swelling in his face was down enough for him to see, the tenderized skin throbbed every time he took a breath, and his stitches yanking every time he turned reminded him of what Mitchell’s best friend did to him. Another twinge took him, and Parker clutched the glass, riding it out. The pain was a good thing. He’d use it to push himself when he had time to deal with his ex-boss. With any luck, the man would eventually understand the suffering he’d gone through for such little reward.
With the pain pill swallowed and washed down, he resumed his tour. The chateau’s lower floor could have fit at least ten of the single-wide he’d grown up in, maybe more if he had time to figure the space out. There were parts of the house he’d not gone into. Avoiding the wine cellar had seemed like a good idea. He didn’t want to tempt himself to sit down and play house, but it seemed like a sin to let the place molder.
A wet bar in the study was another temptation. No crystal decanters with cheap-ass booze lingered on faux silver trays. Instead, a selection of prime and rare liquors took up three shelves behind the bar, each bottle spaced out and washed by a row of track lights set into the ceiling. He spotted an old Irish whiskey sitting among the others, and his tongue moistened at the thought of its peaty roll.
Murmuring to himself, Parker left the bar behind. Mixing a shot with the pill would be stupid, but the aching in his body wasn’t backing down from the painkiller. Spending an hour slung low in the Jaguar hadn’t helped his side any, and moving through the slightly chilled air in the house was making his face hurt more. “Maybe I’ll empty that before I go. Seems stupid to waste it.”
The floors were either high-gloss wood or polished marble, and the furniture ran to light hues or flashy embroidered spindly chairs he would be afraid to sit in. Overhead spots lit up the artwork on the wall, most of the canvases merely ugly splotches of color stacked under long darker lines or chopped-up segments of text overlaid with silkscreen prints of famous buildings. He stood in front of one square piece set in an alcove and stared at a duck constructed out of pieces of flags and covered in a heavy yellow shellac. Parker picked it up, liking the heft of its base if he had to bash someone’s head in, but the papier-maché quality of the duck was iffy at best.
“Nope, not my cup of tea at all. God, this crap is ugly. Why do rich people spend their money on this shit?” Parker put the duck back and sniffed, finding a familiar hint of chemical in the air. “Ah, smells like soup’s done.”
Taking one last look around, he decided the large-screen television was fairly nice, and there were enough flashy knickknacks around that no one would notice if a few went missing. He made a mental note to get a rental truck from the city and strip the house when he was done, then walked upstairs to the chateau’s master suite.
The chemical scent was stronger there, nearly overpowering Parker. He worked a few of the windows open and headed into the suite’s bathroom, where he’d left his experiment.
He’d lucked out that his employer’s taste ran to the extreme, because the four-person hot tub in the master bathroom was exactly what Parker needed. The waterline in the tub had dropped some since he’d been there last, but it’d been set on a low heat, and he’d wondered if the temperature would be hot enough to do the job.
By the long shank bone bobbing up and down on the surface of the chemical soup he’d left behind, Parker decided he had to declare his project a rousing success. After rolling up his sleeves and tugging on a pair of pink rubber kitchen gloves, he reached into the tub and dug around in the smelly liquid. He grabbed at something round floating by, hooked his fingers into an edge, and pulled it up slowly, careful not to splash any of the frothy water onto his bare arm.
And stared down into the empty eye sockets of Phillip Damien Mitchell’s skull, his former employer’s older brother and his first San Francisco kill.