The Little Death (11 page)

“I’m just starting to realize that.” I didn’t even bother to knock before opening Kyle’s bedroom door. Even if Sloane was naked, it wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen before. “Sloane, we need to—” I stopped as my gaze swept the room. The covers were rumpled, but the bed was still made, as if someone had slept on top of the blankets for a while, then got up and left.

Kyle came up behind me and looked over my shoulder, touching my arm and pressing up against my back. A little pang of desire rode my nerves, although it was faint. I probably would have had more of a reaction if I still wasn’t kind of numb and hungover and shocked by what I was seeing. “Where is he?” Kyle asked.

“He’s gone,” I said. A stupid, obvious thing to say, but I was too busy wondering what was worse—if Sloane had done a runner because he was afraid, or because he had totally fucked me over.

That little bitch.

13

K
YLE
wouldn’t let me go alone, no matter how tired he was, so he drove me over to Sloane’s condo. It was unlikely he was there, but it was the first place he would have gone. I doubted he left a trail to follow, but I had to try.

His door wasn’t open, but it wasn’t difficult to pop the lock since the door still resembled Swiss cheese. His place was the gaudy crapsterpiece it had been the first time I was here, with little of the bullet-ridden mess from the last time I was here cleaned up, and while it was kind of hard to tell, it didn’t look like much was missing. He’d taken off in a hurry… or he never had much here to begin with. Could this place have been part of the setup? I was feeling more and more like an idiot.

I looked in his fridge for some booze and found a half-filled bottle of vodka in the freezer. I took a few swallows, the coolness of the liquid going down my throat making me shiver. Because vodka didn’t have much in the way of taste, I could have kept drinking it forever, but I was afraid of brain freeze and capped it up and put it back. A good thing, because by the time I shut the freezer door, Kyle was lurking at the doorway. “His door was just open, huh?”

“If you don’t want to know the answer, you shouldn’t ask the question.”

He fixed me with one of his dozen scolding looks, and I wondered what he would do if he couldn’t correct me like a naughty schoolboy. Ooh, if I was naughty enough, would he spank me? I was definitely going to have to find out. “I’m still a cop, you know. I could bust your ass anytime.”

I gave him my best smile. “You could do much nicer things to my ass.”

He grimaced and looked away, making a dismissive gesture with his hand. “Get your mind out of the gutter.”

“You brought it up.”

“Not in that way, and you know it.” After a pause to swallow a smile—I just knew it; his face was flushing dark, a blush he’d been doing his best to hide—he went back to the safe topic. “We can check out the bus station and the train station.”

“Not the airport?”

“New security regulations and budget cuts have pretty much guaranteed there’s no such thing as a quick flight out anymore. If he’s there, it’ll be hours before he’s headed anywhere.”

“Unless he’s got a private plane stashed somewhere.” That was when something clicked inside my thick, alcohol-addled brain. “Oh fuck, we gotta get to Sheppard’s Field, now.”

Sheppard’s Field was an airstrip for smaller and private planes. You could even hire a plane to take you on an aerial tour of Echo City, although why anyone would want to see this shithole from above was a mystery to me. Did it look like less of an ashtray from overhead? Somehow I found that hard to believe, unless you were allowed to drop acid before the flight. The whole time I was hoping I was wrong, mainly so Kyle didn’t discover I was as stupid as I obviously was.

No such luck. Sheppard’s Field was sprawling, with separate runways for the local flights and the puddle jumpers coming in from other cities, but it really wasn’t as big as it seemed to be. It was an optical illusion, fostered by its proximity to a swamp and a landfill downwind of them. It was the only bit of paved civilization in this abandoned pocket of nothingness. Any plane funded by Tricky Dick, no matter how small, would have to be nice; therefore it would stand out like a tarted-up stripper in a dead cornfield. I spied it almost immediately upon entering the small, drafty hangar that passed as a terminal. But since I had a view of the window and Kyle didn’t, I was able to successfully suggest we split up to cover more of the area. I sent him in the opposite direction, so I was able to approach Tricky Dick’s plane on my own.

Sloane was waiting in the shadow of one wing, hands buried in the pockets of his coat, hunched up against the cold. “Your pilot running late?” I asked. “Or are you catching a bus?”

He stiffened, as if I just tased him in the nuts, and his head whipped around toward me so violently I thought it might sail off into the propeller of a nearby plane. “Jake! What—how did you find me?”

“I finally put two and two together, sweetheart,” I admitted. I was an idiot. I wanted to blame the booze, but that wasn’t all of it, not this time. “So tell me, doll face, what was the plan?”

For a moment, he looked haunted, his expression naked and genuine. But then a shadow seemed to pass over his face, and he gave me his sexy off-kilter smile. “I’m sorry, Jake. I got scared. After everything that’s happened, I thought maybe it really was time for me to go. I couldn’t tell you; I feel enough like a coward as it is.” He put a hand on my arm, sliding it up toward my shoulder. “But now that you’re here—”

I yanked my arm away, giving him the evilest look I could muster. “Can the balloon juice, Sloane. What was the scam, huh? Why did Tricky Dick put you up to this? What’s in it for you?”

He widened his eyes and thrust out his lower lip ever so slightly, trying on an oh so innocent look that didn’t quite work on a smoking hot guy like him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Kyle’s with me. I’ll have him arrest you for prostitution. Now be honest with me. Why the hell did you hire me? What does Tricky Dick have planned, huh?”

As soon as he realized I was serious, his pout morphed from sexy to sullen. “I just wanted you to find my brother.”

“No you didn’t. Cut the bullshit.”

“Look, I was paying off his debt, okay?” he snapped, suddenly angry. “Sander couldn’t completely afford his habit. He got in over his head…. This was the only way to get him released.”

“Released?”

Sloane nervously fussed with his hair. It made it messy but still attractive. “Sander’s at Dick’s cabin. He can’t leave until I pay off the debt. It’s paid off now. I’m going to get him.”

This didn’t sound right at all. “So Dick has been holding him hostage?”

“No, it’s just… it’s complicated.”

“Really?” Was Sloane this stupid? Maybe. He was pretty as hell, and he didn’t rely on his smarts to get him through life. “How do you know he’s still alive?”

That seemed to startle him. “What? Of course he’s still alive.”

“You’ve talked to him.”

“Yeah.” He paused briefly. “We’ve exchanged e-mails and texts. I just texted him that I’m on my way.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle. Yeah, Sloane really was that stupid. “All shit that can be easily faked. What about the earring? What was that?”

“It was his earring but not his ear. It was from someone else.”

“Who?”

He shrugged, unconcerned. “Some guy. I dunno. Didn’t ask.”

“What the fuck is the point, Sloane? Why me?”

He clicked his tongue in exasperation. “I dunno, all right? Ask Dick. All I know is, he wanted me to hire you to look into my brother’s supposed disappearance, and I was supposed to drop Nick’s name. Dick said you had to pay.”

“Pay for what?”

He both shrugged and shook his head this time, trying to add a little variety to his stupid menu. “He didn’t say. He just said you should have been taken out a while ago, but no one can get you. You’re a bad penny who keeps turning up.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“I think it’s an old saying—”

“That was rhetorical,” I told Sloane with a frown. Why would Tricky Dick be after me? It didn’t make sense.

“What were you supposed to do? Frame me? Lead me into a trap?”

He shook his head and shrugged again. “I don’t know. Something went wrong with the Nick thing, so I was supposed to get you poking around based on the earring, but… I don’t know where he thought it would go. I didn’t know Tyler was gonna get hurt or that gunmen were gonna shoot at me.”

“But you didn’t care,” Kyle said, suddenly coming around the far side of the plane. I wondered how long he’d been there listening. He looked pissed off, and damn, he was hot when he was angry. “You knew this asshole was trying to kill Jake, and you strung him along.”

“My brother—”

“Is either working with Blunt or dead! You can’t be this stupid.”

“You’re a dead man as soon as you get off this plane,” I told Sloane. “Or Dick’s gonna make you wish you were. You’re a liability now.”

Sloane’s pouty look returned, but now it was bratty and annoying, nowhere near as sexy as it used to be. How had it ever seemed sexy? “I’m gonna go get my brother. He said you’d lie.”

Sloane made to move around me, but Kyle grabbed his arms and pulled them behind his back, taking out his handcuffs with practiced ease. Yes, he was in plain clothes right now, but he still had his police gear with him. “You’re not going anywhere. You’re under arrest.”

“For what?” Sloane protested.

“For conspiracy to commit murder, and whatever else I can think up and make stick.”

Sloane scoffed in disbelief. “Murder? Who the hell did I try and murder?”

“Jake Falconer,” Kyle told him, and stared at me over Sloane’s shoulder. His eyes seemed to say,
What the fuck have you gotten us into now?

A fair question. At least I was finally beginning to see the light.

14

S
PENCER
’
S
murder was partially unsolved. I say partially because I’d managed to shoot the shooter, a piece of professional muscle named Jess “Mauler” Poulin. But he was for hire—anyone with an extra thousand and a grudge could’ve hired him—and the dead aren’t particularly chatty, no matter what the psychic hucksters down on Canal Street claim. His dealings were all cash, and he left no clue as to who hired him, so the cops never arrested his employer. I had no good ideas either, because who hated Spencer? No one, as far as I knew.

But people hated me. I had an enemies list almost longer than a friends list, and mainly due to my sparkling personality. If I had gained Tricky Dick as an enemy, I was well and truly fucked. It also might explain who hired Poulin.

I was supposed to wait for Kyle in the hangar as he waited for the uniforms to show up and cart Sloane off, but of course I headed straight for the car and started off. I wasn’t stranding Kyle here; he could get a lift from one of his cop buddies. I needed to get going on this now, since if I thought about it and tried to be sensible, I’d probably lose my nerve. I wasn’t a complete idiot—I put in a call while I was driving, just so I had a backup plan if everything went monstrously wrong, which it probably would. This wasn’t smart on any level, and my lack of preparation pretty much guaranteed a clusterfuck, but I was so angry I didn’t care.

I did stop by the office, to pick up my flask and the shotgun as well as some spare bullets. I was preparing to go out in a blaze of glory, but really I would have settled for not being killed within three seconds of arrival. You wanna be macho, but you also have to be realistic.

I left, although not before swilling down half the flask. I needed liquid courage, but rage often made up for it. Right now I needed to calm the rage, because it could blind me as much as fuel me.

It wasn’t an exaggeration to say Tricky Dick owned half the city, because he did. Politically, he just about owned it all, and if he owned people within the police force, it wouldn’t surprise me. In fact, it would explain everything. Why Giardi’s death was brushed under the rug, why Spencer’s murder investigation dead ended right away, why shit had been so weird lately. It all made sense. Maybe if I was a better detective, I’d have figured that out long before now, but you can’t have everything.

In spite of owning just about everything, he had a favorite hangout. It was the tallest and newest skyscraper downtown, informally known as the Tower, formally known as Blunt Tower. I have no fucking idea what he does in there, and I’m pretty sure no one does. If forced to give a name to what he does for a living, he says he’s an import/export man. What imports and exports exactly? As far as I can tell, drugs and sex slaves. But I bet those don’t fit on the business cards.

He was probably there, though. It was daytime, and he made a show of pretending he worked like any regular schmo. I can’t believe anyone bought it, but presumably some did.

Before leaving, I found myself going through Spencer’s old wreck of a desk, until I found one of his glossy girly magazines. I still wasn’t sure what I was doing until I rolled the magazine up into as tight a cylinder as physically possible. It was a trick Lau taught me once, on a slow night at the bar. If I could prevent Dick’s goon bots from shooting at me as long as possible, I might actually get somewhere. I used my belt to make a kind of sling for the shotgun, so I could hide it under the coat and behind my back.

Traffic was fairly light, which meant I might have believed in destiny if I was into superstitious bullshit. I took another slug from my flask for courage and then parked around the back of the Tower. I didn’t want anyone identifying my car before I got in, although that was a slim possibility. I slipped the tightly rolled-up magazine inside the sleeve of my trench coat, glad I remembered to use a rubber band to keep it as tightly rolled as possible. That was the most important part.

I was able to get in through the front glass doors before being approached by two thick-necked goons in matching off-the-rack black sports coats, looking like twin mercenary golems. “Hey, is this the Mutual Insurance building?” I asked, in as cheerful a voice as I could muster.