It took three calls, Burch driving around with a closed moonroof and the lights in the backseat off. Four if you count the one to Gil to tell him we weren’t picking him up.
“Why not?”
“I’ll explain later.”
“Oh, fuck me.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Are you still with Eddie?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t say or do anything else. Just get dropped off and let me deal with him tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to sleep. Please, please don’t let me wake up to bad news.”
“Sweet dreams.”
“I mean it. Don’t trust him.” Gil hung up.
Burch said, “You’ll explain this later, huh?”
“I’ll come up with something.” I looked out the window and caught a weak reflection. We were both disgusted and looked away.
Eddie was glazed, staring through the windshield and rubbing his throat.
“Need me to dial?” Burch said.
I poked the first number in and wondered what would happen to Burch’s head if I punched and kicked it at the same time. The phone rang while I considered the shape of his skull, where it might come apart. The first two calls were a few minutes each of catching up, apologizing, convincing that I was actually very sorry for whatever it was I did.
Really, I mean it.
The third went to Walt Burrell, head of Vegas operations for Gauntlet Security. Gauntlet specialized in close-quarters VIP protection—moving sheiks and princes and celebrities around without any grubby civilian fingers getting near them. Walt was close to fifty, a retired Marine with lines on his face from years in the weather and thinking just about everything he said was hilarious.
I apologized to Walt, then went through the dialogue that drew a blank from the first two calls. “You know I’m fighting for Warrior now?”
“Yeah,” Walt said, “congrats on that. You got the face for it, might as well.”
Eddie watched me. He knew the next line.
“Heard some talk they might be under new management soon.”
Walt spent a few seconds breathing into the phone. “I heard that too. Pisser, huh? All our jobs are going overseas.”
“My phone’s about to die. You at the office?”
“You’re coming by?”
“I can be there in twenty minutes.”
Burch held a finger up.
“Make that one hour,” I said.
Burch nodded.
Walt’s breathing stayed slow and level through the phone. “You and who else?”
“I’m with a couple buddies. They won’t break anything.”
“Where’ve I heard that before?”
“I said I was sorry.”
“See you in an hour.”
I put my phone away.
Eddie sipped his water. “Who’s this guy?”
“I worked security for him. Off the books, protecting assholes his company wanted to bill but didn’t want to be seen with.”
“Which company?”
Eddie kicked the dashboard. “Fuck that.” It sounded like skin was flapping inside his throat. “I called them after the whole thing with Kendall. Did everything but beg them for security. They said they couldn’t help me.”
“Not even off the books?”
“No. Same shit as all the other companies.”
“Man. All the scumbags I had to protect—one of ’em turned out to be wanted for genocide—and Walt won’t come near you.”
“Hey, fuck you and fuck Gauntlet.”
“All right. I’ll call back, tell him to forget it.”
“No,” Burch said. “Mr. Takanori, if it helps me keep you alive, we need to talk to this man.”
Eddie pouted into his water. He closed his eyes and worked on breathing through his bloody nose.
I leaned forward and looked at Burch. “What are we doing for an hour?”
“You like riding around with your felony? We’re stashing him.”
“I know a place just over the side of the Hoover Dam. It’s perfect.”
“Sorry. We’re keeping your boy nice and handy.” He smiled and winked.
I imagined squeezing his face through the steering wheel and doing donuts in the street, so I smiled back. We were miles off the Strip, rolling through an industrial complex tucked away from the tourists and cameras in the northwest corner of the city. Lots of food prep and suppliers, some fabrication shops. I saw blinking neon and perked up at the sign of civilization, but it was only a blinking neon sign manufacturer.
Burch wasn’t searching for a spot; he knew where he was going. He pulled into a short asphalt drive that ended at a chain-link gate ten feet high. There was a hooded steel keypad next to his door. He snapped a latex glove on while his window slid down, then punched in a number, the keys clacking like an old pay phone.
The gate shook and rolled to the side. Burch drove through and idled between the long, low storage buildings with narrow garage doors set a few feet apart. Buzzing overhead lamps and boxed fixtures along the walls knocked all the shadows out of the place and gave everything a cold, alien facade.
Burch went to the end, about a hundred yards from the gate, and cut left across two more aisles before taking another left. He eased toward the doors on the right and watched the numbers, stopped the limo halfway down the row.
“Here we are.” He put the other glove on and got out, walked around the back of the limo.
I said to Eddie, “Have anything to say?”
He scowled. “Hurry up.” His voice was crusty. He sipped his water.
I slapped it out of his hand.
He scrambled to save it from glugging empty. “Come on. Asshole.”
I got out of the limo and closed the door. The night air still made sweat pop on my forehead.
Burch said, “What’s he saying in there?”
“He said I’m in charge now.”
“Keep your sense of humor. It’s important in situations like this.”
He pulled his coat aside, the butt of his pistol hanging there, reached toward a stainless steel disc on his belt, and came away with a single key attached by a cable. The key fit into a heavy padlock on the storage unit’s overhead door. He opened the lock and let go of the key. It zipped back to the disc on his belt, gone. The lock sounded like an anchor when he set it on the asphalt.
Burch rolled the door up and hit a light switch for the single bulb in the middle of the ceiling. The storage space was bare plywood walls and exposed rafters, maybe twelve feet wide and twenty deep. There were three things inside. Near the light switch and close enough to smell were a stained box spring and mattress set.
Burch gave me a face I was getting used to. He walked to the back of the space toward the last item.
I wanted to throw another dig at him, make him stop and turn around—anything to stall—but I couldn’t breathe. My throat was clamped shut, and my ribs wouldn’t expand. I couldn’t pull my gaze off the floor to look at what was back there.
I’ve won fights during the stare down. Bored into the guy’s soul, measured him up, found him lacking. He knew it, then fought like it.
I wanted to stare at what was at the back of that storage unit, beat it into a corner of my mind, and stomp it out.
My eyes stayed on the floor.
“Are you fainting?” Burch’s shoes were at the edge of the frame in front of the thing taunting me. The shoes turned. “Catching up to you, eh? Deep breaths, get that blood smell out your nose.”
I straightened up, stared at the rafters, the walls, the bare bulb that left a spotlight when I blinked and forced air into my lungs. Then I looked at the back wall.
A white box freezer as big as a sofa squatted there.
I don’t mind freezers. They sometimes hold ice cream and I appreciate that. But it reminded me of Tezo’s bathtub, that stained trough in an obscene room used for drowning beasts who failed in his death pit. Looking at that freezer, I heard the faucets open above me, saw the black spots creeping in, felt the cold walls clamping my arms while the filthy water sloshed into my mouth and nose.
I didn’t want to be anywhere near it.
Burch shook his head, used the belt key to open another padlock. He lifted the lid and tipped it against the back wall. Frozen vapor folded over the lip and came toward me, then disappeared in the heat before I had to kick it away.
Burch tugged the box spring out and leaned it against the unit’s door frame, set one end against the limo’s rear fender just behind the back door. He pointed. “Mattress.”
I thought I would enjoy looking in that direction, even at the dorm Dumpster mattress, then realized that was exactly what the freezer wanted. It crouched behind me and waited.
“Today,” Burch said.
I cleared my throat. “Gloves.”
“One of the points of this exercise is to get your fingerprints on as much as possible. So that’s a no on the gloves.”
I studied the shades of brown and yellow on the fabric. When I squinted, the pattern turned into hieroglyphics of the history of the plague. I made a pact with it: if I have to cling to you in order to stay out of that goddamn freezer, don’t fall apart and I’ll spread your spores to the seven continents.
I stiff-armed the floppy mattress to the other side of the garage door. Dust and mold coughed from the seams, saw my new suit, and drooled. The tang of damp cat urine lashed out, and the dust and mold bowed with respect. I kicked the mattress into place against the limo, just in front of the back door, and let it sag against the storage opening. Now we had a narrow chute that kept us hidden from eyes at either end of the aisle. If there were eyes above us—say in a helicopter—I could throw the mattress into the rotor and destroy the earth.
Burch opened the limo door. “You take the head.”
“When did you set this up?”
“What, the freezer?”
“Yeah.”
“Soon as I got into town. Let’s go.”
“Which was?”
Burch pushed his tongue against his bottom lip. “Mr. Takanori called me seven weeks ago.”
“Let me guess—I’d just left him standing outside the Golden Pantheon.”
“Don’t know about that. He called. I got on a plane.”
“Why?”
“Take the fucking head.”
He stepped aside so I could duck into the limo. It smelled like hot wet pennies and shit.
“Get under his shoulders there. Don’t let the bag burst.”
Burch grabbed the ankles and pulled, spun the body, got the legs through the door. The trash bag sloshed between my feet. I tried to lift the shoulders and shuffle the torso out, stepped on the bag, and almost tore it.
“Nope,” Burch said. “Out here. Now.”
I had to straddle the body getting out. My next shower needed to be two things: soon and long. We each took a leg and slid the body until we could get our arms under the lower back, then the shoulder blades. I gripped Burch’s forearm to make a sling, squeezed as hard as I could, and felt a wave of satisfaction when he clenched his jaw.
We walked the body through the mattress chute into the storage unit. I tried to turn so Burch would have his back against the freezer.
He stopped walking. “You think you can shove me in there? Lock up and be on your way?”
“Sounds even better out loud.” I was sweating way too much for the work. The freezer opened wide for me.
Burch popped his forearm out of my grip and slid down the body toward the feet. I had to get under the shoulders, the trash bag sagging over my arm and wrapping it in a lukewarm sleeve. I quit breathing again. We eased the body into the freezer, and I stepped back like it was made of cobras. Burch tucked the feet in so everything would fit.
I looked at how the bag of blood was folded around the guy’s face, how it would freeze and lock his head in, cover his mouth, nose, eyes. I took a deep breath for him. “How’d he find the limo?”
“Followed us from the restaurant,” Burch said.
“You saw him?”
“No, but what’s the other option? He dangled from a light post hoping we’d drive by? My guess—and I’m fucking tired of guessing—is this wanker was following Lou, hoping he’d bump into Eddie. The Elite deal’s been in the works awhile now. Somebody talked.”
“So we need to talk to Lou. If they kill him, the deal’s off and Eddie’s stuck with Zombi.”
“You mean you’re stuck with Zombi. Can’t worry about everybody on the planet. Lou’s on his own.”
Burch got the sword out of the limo. He showed me my palm prints and finger smudges on the blade, smiled, and dropped it in the freezer. Closed the lid and locked it.
“I don’t need that key to get in here,” I said. Sounded like I actually wanted to.
“No, you don’t. But as of right now, the only way you’re getting out of my sight and coming back here is if I’m dead. So I won’t give much of a fuck, will I? How far are we from your mate’s office?”
“Half hour, if you can avoid traffic and people falling through the moonroof.”
“We might be a bit late. Been starving since I saw Lou tearing up all that bread. Need to get something down my neck. You hungry?”
I glanced at the freezer, the mattress and box spring chute, the open limo with the stench of death still floating around in it. “Yeah, I could eat.”
Burch and I got burgers and fries, Eddie a vanilla milk shake. He alternated between spooning it into his mouth and pressing the cup against his swollen nose. He didn’t want to ride in the back even with the moonroof shut.
I told Burch where we needed to go. He did a decent job skirting the edge of traffic to get us onto the 215 Beltway, which we took almost to the Las Vegas Freeway. Just before the cloverleaf we cut north into a business complex and parked in front of a gray corrugated metal box about the size of a football field. The only access we could see was a windowless steel door with a tiny plaque mounted next to it and a small roof above.
I opened my door. Almost midnight and could still smell the hot tar from the parking lot. “Wait here.”
I hit a button under the plaque, which had Gauntlet Security, Inc. etched into it.
Walt’s voice came through a speaker somewhere in the overhang. The cameras were everywhere. “Let me see you smile first.”
“I am smiling.”
“You look like you have to take a shit.”
“Make sure your desk is clear.”
The same tepid script from years ago. I’d found it boring the first time; he was probably falling out of his chair.
Walt said, “Who’s in the limo?”
“Eddie Takanori and his bodyguard, guy named Burch.”
“Burch. Never heard of him.”
“He’s British.”
The speaker hummed. “Well, bring him in anyway.”
I waved at the limo. Burch and Eddie joined me at the door. We stood there feeling stupid, then a low buzz came from the wall and something heavy clicked. I opened the door and let Burch lead the way.
The lobby was painted light gray and had recessed lighting on the artwork. Plush couches framed a glass table with bottled water and a bowl of mints on it. Eddie took one for his throat. An open hallway in the back wall led into the building. I saw three doors on the left and one at the end of the hall, all closed.
There was one door along the right side, open, and Walt stood in it with his left hand hidden by the frame. “Hola.” As soon as he smiled I remembered his eyeteeth were too big.
“Walt, this is Eddie Takanori and Mr. Burch.”
“Nice to meet you. Mr. Burch, what are you carrying under your left arm?”
“Sig Sauer P226.”
“Good choice. Am I an idiot if I let you keep it while you’re here?”
“No.”
“Good. I hate taking guns away from friends. Very demeaning. Mine’s going to be on the desk, so let’s not make any sudden moves toward that holster. Mr. Takanori, it’s a pleasure. And you.” Walt stepped into the hall and held his arms out toward me, palms up. The chunky .45 in his left was pointed somewhere along the wall. “Look at you. Jesus. Last time I saw this guy, he had a shiner and one ear about cut off. And that was before he clocked in for the day.”
“Thanks for seeing us.”
“Come on back. I like that nickname you got for yourself. Woodshed. Better than what we used to call you.”
“Aaron?”
“Psh. It wasn’t to your face, buddy. We ain’t morons.”
We followed Walt into his office. It was the same gray as the lobby and hallway, with dark wooden bookshelves holding tomes on business and security and a row of small digital clocks showing international times. No photos or personal items. His desk matched the bookshelves and was wide enough for the four chairs in front of it. It had a multiline phone and a blank notepad with a pen next to it. Walt set the .45 on the pad.
Burch sat closest to the door. Eddie went next to him, and I gave them a one-seat buffer.
Walt said, “Mr. Takanori, do you need to clean yourself up?”
“I’m fine.”
Walt looked sad about the way Eddie sounded. “I want to apologize for not taking you on as a client.”
“I’ll let it slide if you can start now.”
“Well, things are still somewhat complicated. Did someone attack you tonight?”
Burch leaned forward. “How do you know about that?”
“All three of you smell like murder. There’s dried blood on his shirt, in his nose, and hand marks on his throat. He sounds like a talking lawn mower. Unless he’s into S and M, somebody got serious with him.”
I said, “A Japanese guy jumped into the limo and tried to choke him. And stab him. Not sure about the order, but you get the idea.”
Walt leaned back in his chair. “You’re sure he was Japanese.”
Burch and I looked at each other. Racism hovered. “Yes,” Eddie said.
“Huh.”
Burch said, “Expand on that, please.”
Walt asked me, “Your ass on the line here?”
“I suppose.”
“All right, then. The way it started, I get a call from a Japanese gentleman who would not give his name. Says we might hear from Mr. Takanori, asking for personal protection, and we should decline. Now, you tell an ex-Marine he shouldn’t do something, guess what he does first chance he gets?”
“But you turned me down,” Eddie said.
“Let me finish, please. I tell the guy we already have client consultants, and he’s welcome to go screw a garbage disposal. He informs me that anyone we put on the job will be killed, guaranteed, along with the client. Meaning you.”
Eddie sniffed.
Walt said, “Again, that kind of statement only pushes me in the other direction. He says that, I’m ready to strap on a vest myself and tuck you in at night just to prove this shithead wrong. Then he says, in addition to keeping its employees alive, Gauntlet will earn ten thousand dollars a day, every day we don’t protect you.”
I could hear the digital clocks tick.
Eddie said, “These guys offered to pay you to stand down? Let me get killed?”
“Offered and paid. Every day ten large goes into our coffers.”
“From who?” Burch said.
“Traced it back through four dummy companies before we gave up. Far as we know, we’re being paid ten grand a day to consult on security for the transportation of floating bath toys.”
“Bath toys,” Eddie said.
“Primarily ducks. That’s what our taxes will show.”
Burch knocked on the arm of his chair a few times. “And you’re okay with this?”
“Me personally, no. Makes me sick. But the folks who sign my checks see free money, no risk. And I’m willing to bet we aren’t the only shop that took the offer.”
“No one will help us,” Burch said.
“Except Woody here. What brought you on board?”
“Blackmail.”
“Ah. Hope they’re covering expenses.”
Eddie started to talk, had to bow his head and rub his throat.
I said, “On the phone we talked about new management for Warrior.”
“This town, you never know what’s pure bullshit or just plain horseshit. But some guys are talking about a debt Eddie owes to the Yakuza. A debt they’ve come to collect.”
“Which guys?”
Walt shrugged. “Just guys. It’s funny—some of them are heavy in the stock market, and they’re hung up on whether to buy or sell Warrior. I tell ’em Eddie dying would be bad for the company, but they aren’t so sure.”
“That’s hilarious,” Burch said.
Eddie slumped in his chair. Blood trickled out of his nose. He left it alone.
“This doesn’t make sense,” I said. “If they want payment on the debt, what good is it to kill him?”
“Maybe they figure his death is worth more than the cash,” Walt said. “A statement.”
Eddie cleared his throat, like unclogging a drain. “Stop talking around me like I’m a goddamn lamp. They want my company, and they’re attacking on all fronts to take it. They sent a fighter to get a man inside, and now they know I’m working a deal to keep him out. So they’re going to kill me and make sure the last thought I have is of them destroying everything I’ve built. Pissing on my legacy.”
Burch said, “Boss, let’s stick with what we know.”
“That’s what I do know. That asshole in the limo told me.”
I said, “What, the prayer? You don’t know Japanese.”
“I know enough. And it wasn’t a prayer. He was reciting my epitaph.”