“Have a seat, Jameson Rook,” he said, and gestured to a wooden stool across the table. “Oh, come on. I knew it was you when you boarded in Croatia.” Rook sat but didn’t speak. “Call me Gordy.” Then he laughed, and added, “But I guess you damn well know that already, don’t you? Huh, am I right?” He slid a tall glass across the rough timber to him. “Drink up, it’s the best fucking Caipirinha on this whole fucking continent. Both my bartender and my cacha?a are flown in from Brazil.” Maybe he was too drunk to remember his guest’s hands were cuffed behind him and he couldn’t reach his glass.
“I read all your stuff. Not bad. Bono and Mick. Bill Clinton. Well done. But come on, Tony fuckin’ Blair? And Aslan Maskhadov? I’ve damn sure got more going than that bollocks you wrote about the damn Chechen. Maskhadov, hah! Only regret is I didn’t sell the grenade that killed him.” He tilted his glass back and some of it sloshed down his face onto his Ed Hardy shirt. His barkeep replaced the glass with a fresh one, and he continued, “Hey now, bottoms up. This is your last drink.”
And then he stood, pointing the biggest handgun Rook had ever seen, an Israeli Desert Eagle .50-caliber, right at him. But then he pivoted, sighting to the left, firing into the night. The thunderclap report of the Eagle was followed immediately by hissing and a white-hot glow that filled the grounds with the brightness of frozen lightning. Rook turned to look behind him. In the searing brilliance he could see magnesium flares lined up along the fence posts across the great lawn. McKinnon fired again. His bullet struck another flare, which sparked to life, huffing and fizzing as it spun off the fence into a pasture, illuminating fleeing horses and a pair of Gulfstream IVs parked in the distance.
The arms dealer raised both fists in the air and war whooped to the Liberian sky. He polished off his drink and said in a hoarse voice, “Know what I love? Rockin’ my own life. Did you know I have enough bloody cash to buy my own country?” Then he laughed. “Oh, wait, I already did! Are you aware, Rook, I have been given—are you ready for this?—diplomatic immunity? They made me minister of some shite or other here. Truly. I do what I want and nobody can touch me.”
He brought up the Desert Eagle and stepped closer, training it on Rook again. “This is what happens when you poke it where it doesn’t belong.”
Rook stared into the gaping muzzle and said, “What was it that I rode up here in, a Range Rover? Have your valet pull it back up. Think I’m ready to go.” McKinnon jerked his hand to menace him with the gun. “Put that damn thing away, you’re not going to shoot me.”
“No? What makes you think so?”
“Because you would have done it back in port and left me floating out to the Canary Islands. Because you put on this whole . . . show for me. Because if you kill me, who will write your story, Gordon? That’s what you want, isn’t it? Of course it is. And you gave me some great quotes. ‘Rocking your life’? ‘Minister of some shite’? Brilliant. It’s tough to be a bad boy and have no fan club, isn’t it? You didn’t bring me here to kill me, you brought me here to make you a legend.”
McKinnon rushed up to Rook, locking his elbow around his neck. “What’s with you? Do you have some fascination with death that makes you think you can tease me? Huh? Huh?” He pressed the muzzle against his temple and stared at Rook with wild eyes dancing with the mad light of devil fire from the flares.
Rook sighed and said, “Still waiting for that Range Rover.”
McKinnon set the gun on the table then pushed Rook backward off his stool onto the stone patio, where he landed hard on his handcuffs.
In the time it took Detective Heat to walk from EJ’s on Amsterdam to the sidewalk in front of the precinct, Lauren Parry had called her back. “I just checked the photo of the bruise. It definitely could be from handcuffs. I’ll do a test but hinged cuffs would definitely account for the ladder-shaped bruise at the small of his back.” Then she asked, “What do you suppose it means?”
Heat said, “It means we hope it means something.”
* * *
Captain Montrose told her he was busy when she knocked on the door frame and said she needed to talk with him. Heat came in anyway and pulled the knob behind her until it clicked. He looked up at her from some printouts. “I said I was busy.”