“What?” Junior said, reading me like a book. A book with lots of pictures, if we were going to be honest.
I slid the phone across the desk to him. He picked it up and squinted. Then his face broke into a mask of horror. “Oh, hell no! You couldn’t have warned me first?” He slammed the phone face-down onto the oak and slid it roughly back to me. “Gross, dude.”
“What is it now?” Summerfield said with a sigh.
I slid the phone in his direction. He picked up the cell, and his face immediately darkened at what he saw. Unlike Junior, he scrolled up at the series of messages…
…and pictures.
Summerfield placed the phone down gently and slowly lifted his eyes to Marcus.
Marcus started to stand, a sickly expression and pallor visible even under his cracked noseguard and busted face. “Mr. Summerfield…” was all he said before the three bullets smacked into his chest.
The slugs burst out of Marcus’s back and shattered the glass overlooking the dance floor. He toppled through the frame and dropped the thirty feet to the parquet, his neck crunching loudly as he hit the floor with the back of his head.
Kelly screamed. Junior dove to the side. Cornrows’ and the Lineman’s eyes bugged out. Ginny shrieked underneath the tape. Alex fainted.
“Well, that answers that,” Summerfield said, opening his coat and putting the gun back into his shoulder holster. “And now you know that I’m not fucking around anymore.”
Everybody was motionless, silent in the impact of Marcus’s straight-up execution. I still had questions. He sure as hell couldn’t ask them now. The who-what-where-when and why had died along with Marcus. I guess all the answers that Summerfield required were in the phone.
The photos of Marcus and Byron in flagrante delicto. Or to put it in terms Junior would understand, dicks ahoy!
Peppered between the pictures were the desperate and threatening texts. Warnings about what Byron would do with the graphic photos if Marcus didn’t help him. Help him with what was still a question, but it wasn’t too hard to connect the most obvious dots. Byron wanted Marcus on his side, one way or the other. What he got was his head caved in. Both of their heads.
I was doing a lot of assuming, since the brain from which the details could be extracted was slowly leaking out of an ear onto a dance floor.
“You two,” Summerfield said to his now ashen-faced goons, waving a hand toward Alex, “put him downstairs on a bloody couch or someplace where I’m not going to trip over him. Then clean that mess up.”
The two looked at each other. This was clearly more than they had signed on for. If they were anything like me and Junior, they’d simply taken a gig, nothing more. A little muscle work, a little threatening. But from their expressions, it was clear they were in conflict about what to do next.
“The cleaning supplies are in the basement closet next to the walk-in,” Summerfield said.
They were two guns against one.
They could choose to end it right there.
I tried as hard as I could with my mental powers to convince them to come around to our side.
“You got it, boss,” Cornrows said. The two walked out of the VIP lounge, each shooting me a solid glare as they exited.
Dammit.
So much for my mental powers. Maybe I shouldn’t have kicked the crap out of them quite so much in our previous encounters.
“Let’s make this fun for you, Mr. Malone,” Summerfield said, taking his gun back out and waving it languorously between Kelly and Ginny. “I’m going to let you choose which one of these women I shoot in the stomach.”
Ginny’s eyes went wide.
Kelly glared at me with more anger than fear. Fear was there, though. A lot of it.
The hell was she glaring at me for?
“I came here for you. I just want you to know that,” I said to her.
Kelly looked back to me. “I’m not sure this is the time or place.” She scrunched up her face in an exaggeration of thought. “No. Scratch that. I’m positive this isn’t the time or place.”
Hell. I tried.
Junior chimed in before I could respond. “Wait a minute. I have some questions before we go get your money.”
Oh, dear Christ.
Junior held up a finger. “Let’s say we go get your loot, and hand it over to you. You gonna let us go? Just like that?”
Summerfield mulled over the question for a second. I didn’t like the options he was considering. “Yes.”
“Now, how does that make sense?” Junior asked.
“Excuse me?” Summerfield said.
“I mean,” Junior said. “What’s to stop us at this point from calling the cops once we’re gone? There’s no way the mess you’ve left with Marcus’s body is going to be cleaned up by the time they get here.”
“Junior…” I said.
“Hang on, Boo,” he said. “I mean, what sort of guarantee do you have that we’re not going to get on the horn to the peedee the second we’re outside? They’ll have you for murder, at least. With the other witnesses, you’ve got kidnapping,” Junior counted off the offenses on his fingers, “assault, menacing, felonious haberdashery…”
Summerfield looked at me.
I hoped Junior was going somewhere with this. Otherwise, he was just handing Summerfield every reason he’d need to drop our ground-up corpses into the Atlantic.
“And I’m willing to bet that your nice and shiny club has all kinds of highly illegal goodies hidden in clever places. Am I right?” Junior lowered his face and smiled in a way that I was sure he thought was Clooney-esque. “Amirite, Ian?”
“You’re not helping, Junior,” I said.
“Oh, but I am.” Junior stood at the end of the long table, fingers crooked in the lapel of his pea coat like he was the hardcore version of Atticus Finch. “I’m stalling.”
“Uh…why?” I said.
“Stupid weather. Traffic is a bitch, I’m figuring.”
A crashing boom echoed through the empty club.
Summerfield raised his gun, unsure where to point it. “What the fuck is that?”
“Put the gun down, ya big scrote,” Junior said. “That there is the motherfucking feds.”
Summerfield’s eyes went into panic mode.
From the club’s entrance, the sound of metal doors being rammed reverberated through the cavernous nightclub. Voices yelled, “On the floor! On the floor!” I guessed that Cornrows and Lineman would be getting on the floor toot sweet.
Junior grinned his widest, most irritating smirk. “This a bad time to tell everybody that I’m wearing a wire?”
Every mouth in the room fell open at the exact same moment. Even Ginny managed a low-hanging chin underneath the duct tape.
“Why didn’t you tell me this?” I said.
“I didn’t want you to judge me,” Junior said.
Through the broken mirrored glass, I saw a half dozen SWAT dudes storming the club, automatic weapons raised and scanning the room. “Up here,” I said, raising my arms, for the first time in my life, deliriously happy to see men with guns.
I turned back to the room. “I think everybody should raise their hands and drop any weapons, if they have them.”
Junior and Kelly both held their hands high.
Ginny mumble-grumbled more of what were undoubtedly colorful damnations of both me and future generations of the Malone bloodline. “You’re excused, Ginny.”
“Uh, Boo?” Junior said, lifting his head toward Summerfield.
Oh shit.
He hadn’t dropped his gun.
He’d gone ash-white and his breathing was ragged, panting.
Junior lowered his hands.
I lowered mine.
Remember that sixth sense I was talking about?
Summerfield was about to do something really, really bad.
He raised the gun at Junior’s chest and fired.