Burch drove. Between that and the Yakuza putting a midnight deadline on my pulse, I felt pretty confident I was going to die in a fantastic suit. It would be an epic mystery to Gil and the boys.
Eddie was on his phone talking about the Elite Combat deal, getting documents sent to him.
I stared out the window and tried to act like I didn’t want to jump out of the limo every time it got below twenty miles per hour.
Eddie finished and dropped the phone on the seat. He looked like he was getting ready for horrible news. “Okay. What did you guys find?”
“Somebody broke in and emptied the freezer,” I said.
“Was it the cops?”
“No.”
He let out the air he’d been holding. “All right. Wait, how did they know he was there?”
“Nobody went through his pockets. Maybe he had a tracking device on him.”
Eddie scanned the interior. “You think he put anything like that in here?”
“All the killing he was trying to do, you see him stash anything under your seat?”
“No.”
“Your ass hurt?”
“That’s enough.” Eddie spent a few seconds frowning. “Well, this is good, right? Saves us the trouble of getting rid of him.”
“Good for you and Burch. My fingerprints are all over the place, the body, the sword.”
“Oh yeah. If it makes you feel any better, I doubt they’ll go to the cops. My guess is they’ll use it to blackmail you into fighting Zombi.”
“So the same thing you used it for.”
“Different intent,” Eddie said. “I want you to win.”
“My hero.”
He tried to bow sitting down. It came off looking like constipation. “So that was it? They just broke in and took their buddy?”
“That’s it.” The only part I didn’t like about lying to Eddie was it had been Burch’s idea.
Eddie stared at the side of my head. I thought he was scrutinizing me for honesty, but he must have been waiting to see if I’d catch him.
“Wait,” I said. “How does the Yakuza know I might fight Zombi?”
“Busted. We announced it this morning.”
“But that’s only if the Elite deal doesn’t happen. You buy them, Zombi fights a scrub in that promotion and I get somebody else in Warrior.”
“Well, here’s the thing.” He glanced at the closed privacy panel between us and Burch. “Will you put your seat belt on first?”
“Why?”
“This sucks. I’m more scared of my security than the Yakuza. Just stay over there, okay?”
“Tell me.” I got to the edge of my seat and leaned forward.
Eddie tried to slip back into a crease in the leather. “I need you to fight Zombi. Whether it’s for Warrior or Elite.”
“No. Elite is a huge step back.”
“But a leap forward from where you were before.”
“Yeah, that was before. And I wouldn’t call it a leap.”
“When I scouted you at the Porter fight for Burbank, one of the ring girls was six months pregnant.”
“No, she was just tubby.”
Eddie kept quiet and let me make the rest of his points for him.
“Gil will never go for it.”
“I’ll make it worth his pain. Yours too.”
“Is this how you train to be an asshole? Max reps of making and breaking promises?”
“I’m just surviving. This is what needs to happen.”
I scowled out the window and thought about the photo and note Burch had in the front seat. The Yakuza was giving me an out. Walk away from Eddie before midnight, and I’m off their radar. Stick around, I end up in a freezer, my blood frozen solid in my eyes, nose, throat.
If by some chance I happen to survive, I get to go back to fighting for a musty promotion against their secret weapon.
And here was Eddie, doing everything in his power to make me come across the limo and stomp his ears together, save them the trouble.
“Think about Gil,” he said. “This is one step back so you can take three forward. He’ll see that. We need to hold each other up.”
Hold me up. Right. First an arm, then a leg, one piece at a time until I see the big picture and realize it’s a spiderweb.
“Get me everything you can on Zombi.”
We walked Eddie into his home office, down the hall past the security room, the far wall overlooking the pool. Vanessa was out there in a black bikini floating on an air mattress, one foot hanging off and dipping in and out of the water. Even a man walking to the electric chair would have noticed. We stared until it felt like we should put money in a slot to keep watching, then Burch opened the closet to make sure the Yakuza hadn’t hired the boogeyman.
The walls were covered with faded battle flags and battered pieces of armor, dented shields, chipped swords. There was a small cannon pointed at the glass wall, which seemed irresponsible. Eddie’s desktop was a map of North Africa under glass, lines and military icons sketched across it with red grease pencil. The date on the legend said it was from 1940.
“Which side do you pretend to be?” I asked him.
“Huh?” He was looking at a stack of papers churning out of a printer. He lugged it all to the desk and fell into his chair.
Burch said, “What else do you need, boss?”
“Tell Vanessa lunch.”
We closed the office door and went to the kitchen. The view was the same through the glass wall.
Burch sighed. “Perks, eh? Almost worth the risk of life and limb.”
“I’ll let her know about lunch.” I wanted some privacy to call Gil. I needed to call Marcela back too, tell her what I could without making her worry. I didn’t want to lie to her. I hadn’t done it yet—and suspected it was linked to me still having an enclosed skull—but the truth would get her on a plane to Vegas. Usually my way and harm’s way are the same one-way street, but this time I had a choice. I would lie to her to keep her safe and resolved to make up for it by turning my back while Vanessa got out of the pool. I moved toward the glass doors.
“Sit,” Burch said and pointed at the slab table. “We have time. He’ll be lost in those papers for hours, forget to take a leak, let alone eat. We need to talk about this.” He dropped the brown envelope on the table and got two bottles of water from the fridge.
We sat across from each other. He slid a bottle over and pressed his water against his right temple, waiting for me to say something about it. I rubbed my bottle over my left knuckles.
“Fair enough,” he said. “Who took this photo?”
“Great question. When we find out I’d like to ask him why he didn’t just kill us and Eddie and be done with it. He had the drop.”
Burch removed the photo, shook his head at it. “If the lads ever saw this, they’d take the piss ’til I’m dust and bones. In my defense, I was having too much fun watching you grimace with that blood bag slopping all over you.”
“I was busy looking for a chance to kick your teeth in.”
“Shame on us, Mr. Wallace. We’re supposed to be professionals.”
“That is my profession.”
“One of them, eh? I’m having a hard time labeling you.” He cracked his water and drank half the bottle. “What’s this photo tell you?”
“It tells me you no longer have blackmail evidence framing me for a murder that I didn’t commit. That evidence now belongs to an international crime syndicate, and I can stop them from using it and/or killing me by walking out the front door right now.”
“Let’s expand a bit, yeah? Try to think of other people.”
I spun the photo, me and Burch eyeballing each other across the garbage-bagged corpse. “They have that same evidence on you too. I can drop you off at the airport.”
“When that clock strikes midnight I’ll be in Eddie’s hip pocket. Where will you be?”
I stalled, spent some time studying the photo. “You know what this tells me? They don’t give a shit about us. Live or die, whatever, but they’d rather not deal with the hassle. And they followed us the whole night but didn’t just blast the limo, wipe us all out. The man they sent to kill Eddie made a ritual out of it. Eddie’s death has significance to them.”
Burch was a statue.
“This isn’t about money, is it?”
Burch walked over, rapped on the glass wall, and waved Vanessa in.
I slid the photo into the envelope. “We’re done talking about this?”
“What’s left to talk about?”
“If this isn’t about money, what’s it about?”
“Keeping Eddie alive. Simple as that.”
“Simple. Even when we show him the photo and the midnight deadline.”
“Yeah, we’re not doing that.” He glanced at his watch, then at Vanessa taking her time paddling to the pool’s edge.
“Bad call.” I tapped the envelope. “This’ll scare him, and he needs to be scared right now. Keep him from doing something stupid.”
“Mate, he was almost strangled and stabbed last night. If that don’t temper the impetuous streak, naught will. We ain’t showing him.”
We slapped eyes across the kitchen. The pans hanging off the wall made soft gonging sounds, chanting us on to meet in the middle. I felt the table under my forearms. It would make a nice chopping block.
Outside Vanessa stepped onto the baking concrete, hustled toward the house on her tiptoes.
I let my shoulders relax. “For now. He decides to roll out for tacos at 11:45, it’s going on the fridge.”
Burch curled a lip at me. He looked confused, like he’d ordered gravity to release me into space, yet there I sat, yawning. “It’s my call. You keep your mouth shut ’less I say otherwise.”
“All this fucking secrecy. I have to lie to Marcela and Gil, we aren’t telling Eddie about this, and you won’t tell me what he pulled in the first place to bring it all down. What did Eddie do?”
Burch stared at me until Vanessa came through the glass doors, wrapping a sarong with orchids on it around her waist. “Holy crap, the pavement is a million degrees. What’s up, boys? You playing nice in here?”
“The boss needs lunch.”
“I’m hungry too.” She opened the fridge. “Chicken salad with fruit?”
“Fine,” Burch said, still giving me the ball bearings.
I was beyond staring down anybody for free, and Vanessa’s exposed tattoo was more interesting than Burch’s flaring nostrils. It covered her back and looked half-finished, the vibrant colors at the top fading to hollow black outlines above her sarong. The red, purple, blue, and orange flowers started tiny at her neckline and grew down her spine and across her shoulder blades. Perched on those was a willowy white butterfly that looked like it could take flight at any moment.
She moved her arm and the scene shifted. I realized the flowers weren’t growing out of a stem—the scaled green tendril behind them was a snake, its slitted yellow eye peering out from between the petals. It was watching the butterfly, and I couldn’t tell if it wanted to keep the delicate thing safe or eat it.
Vanessa turned and caught me looking. She went pale and I thought she might vomit onto the food in her hands, then she clenched her jaw and glanced at Burch.
He shook his head.
I scooped up the photo and envelope and headed toward the hallway.
“Where you going?” Burch said.
“You two can stay in here and whisper to each other. I get to fight a guy named Zombi in two weeks, and I have thrown exactly one punch in preparation. Now, it happens to be one of my favorite punches ever, but still. Just the one. So I’m going into the gym. Wanna come?”
The kitchen was silent until Vanessa clanked some plates onto the counter and cleared her throat. “Is there any way you two will grow up before I serve this?”
I walked out. I don’t like to disappoint women, but I’m used to it.
I went outside and past the pool to call Gil. I could feel the hot concrete through my shoes. The Jacuzzi rolled and bubbled. I tried to ignore the worm it put in my belly and gave it the finger.
The sun pressed an ember into the back of my neck until I got under a pergola covered with a dense vine that put shade over a long marble table and eight chairs. I sat facing the glass wall and couldn’t see anything inside—just a reflection of the pool area and me sweating into my suit. Behind me the statues and landscaped walking paths rose high enough to block the walls and desert beyond.
Burch was on the other side of that glass somewhere, squinting at me and thinking British insults. I countered with American indifference, put my feet on the table and got my phone out.
“Tell me you’re on your way here,” Gil said.
“Sorry. What’s the word on Zombi?”
“Cryptic.”
I waited. “Okay, and? I know what it means. You don’t have to demonstrate.”
“Found some video of his judo competitions, typical Japanese stoicism, but this guy takes it to another level. His face never changes, whether he’s bowing, tossing somebody over his head, or getting his elbow dislocated.”
“Who did that to him?”
“Some Ukrainian in the World Judo Championship from a few years back. Guy’s pulling like his kid is drowning; Zombi’s arm goes the wrong way. They scramble. Zombi ends up using the broken arm to choke the guy out.”
“Jesus.”
“And that’s without being able to strike. I got some grainy footage of his first MMA fight. It’s from two years ago and his stand-up was shit, but he won. Fought a kickboxer, waded right through the guy’s offense and put him to sleep.”
“This is starting to sound bad.”
“Well, the kickboxer’s neck was longer than yours.”
“The hell does that mean?”
“More neck, easier to choke.”
I pulled my shoulders up to see if it made sense. “So what’s the verdict?”
“From what I’ve seen, he’s a bad matchup for you. Got a head like a cinder block and takes punishment for days looking for a window, then he pounces. Basically he’s you, only with much, much better grappling and he doesn’t bleed all over the joint.”
“So if you throw in the towel now, will the ref see it?”
“Don’t be a baby. There’s a way through him. I just need more information. And that’s the fucked-up part. I do a search for Japanese catch wrestlers and get video on everything from professional matches to teenagers jumping off garage roofs onto each other but hardly anything on Zombi.”
“Huh. I told Eddie to get me everything he can. We’ll see what he comes up with.”
“And tell him and that Burch prick I’m training you in Eddie’s bathroom if I have to. There’s no way you’re going against this guy without me.”
“I know.” I moved the phone away from my ear, just in case. “Oh, and we might be fighting him at an Elite Combat event instead of Warrior.”
The line hissed. “Of fucking course. Listen to me. It doesn’t matter where the cage is or whose name is on the canvas. What matters is the man across from you. Let me handle everything else.”
“I appreciate that. Listen, what would you say if I walked away?”
“From what, Eddie and his drama? I’d say hip-hip and you know the rest.”
“It would mean I’m done in Warrior, no matter what happens to him.”
“That doesn’t mean you’re done fighting. Plenty of other promotions out there.”
“Yeah. But this contract will put us over the hump. I don’t go for it, I’ll get eaten up wondering what if.”
“Don’t do any of this for me or the guys here. You never have to ask what if about us. You want to come home right now, do it. You decide to become a professional juggler, we’ll wash your balls. That came out wrong.”
“I hear you.” The pool area was blurry. I wiped the sweat and other things out of my eyes. If Gil wasn’t worried, neither was I.
About that, anyway. I caught movement in the reflection of the landscape behind me and watched one of the statues step out of the shrubbery and follow the path toward the pool. He was young and Japanese, and he carried a four-foot samurai sword.
“If I don’t call you back in ten minutes, tell Marcela I love her.”
I’d never fought a guy with a sword before, holding or facing. I don’t count the little bulldog from Eddie’s limo—he wasn’t fighting me.
I picked up one of the chairs and walked along the table from the guy’s right as he came off the path onto the concrete. The chair was much heavier than I’d expected, some kind of weighted base. I put in the work to make it look light.
He held the sword at a forty-five-degree angle toward the ground. Relaxed, just out for a stroll. He wore wraparound black sunglasses, black pants, and a white tank top. A full spectrum of fish and feudal Japanese scenery tattoos covered his arms and chest.
What do you say to make a guy like that stop in his tracks, rethink what he’s doing, scamper off into the weeds?
“Hold up,” I tried.
He didn’t even glance at me. “You got our note. Why are you still here?” His English was unaccented. Locally grown or an early transplant. He wandered to the edge of the pool, stuck a hand in the water and slapped it against the back of his neck.
“Put the sword down.”
“Or what, you’ll chair me? That looks heavy.”
I ran through it: throw the chair, watch it go two feet and bounce toward him. Maybe he jumps into the pool, cramps up, and drowns.
“It is heavy.” I put the chair down. Took my jacket off and draped it over the back. The sun evaporated the sweat on my thin white shirt and started making more. Where the hell was Burch? “What are you doing here?”
He looked at the sword in his hand, the mirrored wall of Eddie’s house. Turned to me with a little smile. “Selling Girl Scout cookies.”
“Hey, I’m just trying to stall.”
“I know. Doesn’t matter. I’m still wondering why you’re here. Our message wasn’t clear enough?”
“It said midnight.”
“Let the others wait. I want this now. And it’s midnight somewhere.”
I didn’t know if that was true. “Was that your buddy in the freezer?”
“My brother.”
“As in gang brother or real brother?”
“Blood brother.”
I still wasn’t sure. “I can’t let you kill Eddie.”
“You don’t really have a say in it. You should go. Now.”
“What about the other ten guys in there?”
He smiled again. “You mean Burch? He thinks he’s worth ten. He should stay. And the woman. We don’t want to chase them, waste more time.”
Vanessa’s inflatable raft bumped against the pool’s edge at his feet. He looked down at it and touched the tip of the sword against the vinyl. It went through like a torch through cobwebs. The raft sagged.
Burch was on their list too. Explained why he didn’t consider leaving Eddie; it wouldn’t change a thing for him. “Why do you want them dead?”
He watched water seep over the raft. “They didn’t tell you? No surprise. You knew, you would have left already. Maybe killed them yourself on principle.”
“My principles don’t align with most.”
“We know. We also know you understand dishonor. If I tell you why Eddie and Burch have to die, you’ll know of my family’s dishonor. Then I’ll have to kill you too. Which is fine, but unnecessary. So go.”
“You’re so ashamed, why don’t you kill yourself? What’s it called, seppuku?”
He turned from the raft. I had a good idea how his eyes looked behind those sunglasses. “Watch what you say to me.”
“Isn’t somebody supposed to help, slice your head off after you disembowel yourself? I’ve never tried that, but I’ll do my best.”
“Would you leave if I told you we have people in Brazil, watching Marcela?”
The sweat on my back froze. “You don’t.”
“I’m sure your woman will understand why she has to suffer so you can try to protect these doomed men. These ghosts.”
“My woman. That’s enough to get you a broken arm, she hears you say it. Send your boys in. She’s surrounded by the entire Arcoverde clan. It’ll make for a nice family reunion.”
Maybe we were both bluffing. The phone was heavy in my pocket, tugging me to call and warn her.
“Her family against the Dojin-gumi.” He shook his head. “What’s Portuguese for ‘They’re slaughtering us’?”
“They don’t have a word for that. What’s Doe Gin Goomi? It sounds spicy.”
His knuckles turned white on the sword handle. “You’re exceptionally stupid.” He squared his shoulders to me.
I picked the chair up again, jacket and all.
“I am going to tell you why they have to die. And right after, I’m going to cut your fucking head off and take it with me. So I can always look at the expression on your face: regret for defending dishonorable men. Your last thought will be, ‘My life was wasted.’” He slid his left foot forward, brought the sword up, and held it vertically behind his right shoulder.
I lifted the back of the chair frame level with my neck.
He said, “You’re going to die because Eddie—”
The shot sounded like a cough. The black sunglasses split in half above the bridge of the guy’s nose and flew away from his face. The skin on his forehead and around his eyes flapped out and snapped back like a fish’s mouth. He dropped the sword.
Two more coughs as Burch strode out of the sculpted shrubs between the patio and the wall along the side of the property, a long, dull gray suppressor attached to his pistol. He wore a long-sleeve tan shirt and suit pants, dirt on the knees.
The guy was already dropping when the two bullets hit center mass, went through and past me into the backyard. His knees cracked against the concrete. He fell face-first into the pool, landing on Vanessa’s limp raft. It wrapped around him and they both floated toward the middle of the pool with red ribbons spreading underneath.
Burch still had the pistol up, scanning the area. “He’s alone, correct?”
I put the chair down. It had beaded drops of blood on it. So did the lapels of my new jacket.
“Woody.”
“Fuck you.”
That brought him around. “Say again?”
“That asshole was here for you too, not just Eddie.”
“Looked to me like he wasn’t discriminating. I believe that sword was headed for your spine, no?”
“It wasn’t going to touch me.”
He glanced at the chair, the sword. I don’t think he did the same math as me. He kicked the sword into the pool. “Regardless, you’re welcome. Goddamn ingrate. I need to sweep this area. Go inside and get the boss and Vanessa ready to move. We’re not safe here anymore.”
“I’m not doing anything until you tell me what he was about to.”
“I think you heard most of it.”
“Don’t worry about it. Go inside and get them ready.”
I didn’t move.
Burch pointed the pistol at my left knee. “Go.”
“I will remember this moment.”
“Please do. Every time I give you an order.”
I lifted my jacket off the chair and walked between the pool and Burch, who backed toward the path and kept the gun on me. I watched him in the house reflection. When I was close to the kitchen door he turned and drifted off the path into the landscape and disappeared.
I stepped into the coolness. Vanessa was by the table, staring past me with her hand over her mouth.
“There’s blood on my jacket.” I left it hanging on her shoulder. “Where’s Eddie?”
“Burch put him in the panic room.”
“Where?”
“It’s, ah, it’s off the master suite. That man is dead.”
I headed for the stairs. “Keep those words handy. You’ll need them again.”
I chewed up the stairs and cut left, saw Eddie’s double doors closed. Maybe they were unlocked, but I had a good thing going and put a foot between the knobs shaped like sword pommels. The doors split open, and something metal flew off, tumbled across the room, and hid under the bed. I got two steps into the room and froze.
Statues stood along every wall except the glass that overlooked the pool and garden. Twelve of them, geared up in everything from Spartan greaves and helmets to a Knight Templar with longsword and banner, starched in mid-ripple. The walls behind them were draped with dark fabric, making the room feel like a commander’s tent. The soldiers were all posed at ease, and in the periphery they seemed to be nudging each other about what they were looking at, which was Eddie’s barge of a bed.
A custom piece, built in place because no door in the house would have let it through. The headboard was white marble, carved into tiers of miniature benches with arches and sunshades made of wood and canvas at the top. It curved around the corners of the bed and blended in a smooth slope down to rounded nightstands on each side, bronze gauntleted hands rising out to hold torches with LED flames. It was a very accurate model of the Roman Colosseum, right down to the sand-colored pillows and bedspread with the Warrior logo embroidered in rusty blood.
“Eddie.”
No answer. There was a closed door in the far corner. I booked a flight around the bed, opened the door to Eddie’s bathroom. It was bigger than it had looked on the security camera. Eddie wasn’t in the shower or on the toilet.
I stood in the doorway and wanted to smash something, but everything in the room was built to smash back. I settled for messing up Eddie’s bedspread and must have tripped a sensor—a raucous crowd cheered me from hidden speakers, then faded.
“If you don’t come out right now, I’m going to tell people about that.”
Nothing.
Burch hadn’t said anything about a panic room during the tour. Operational security, he must have figured. But he did say there was access from his room to Eddie’s through a closet. I went to the corner where the glass wall met the wall shared with Burch’s room. There was space to walk behind the statues. I knocked through the fabric—solid, solid, hollow—and pulled the cloth aside to reveal another door, plain wood stained a dark cherry. It was locked.
“Eddie, if I have to break this door down, I’ll use the pieces to make your funeral pyre.”
Silence.
I pushed the fabric away from the wall, hooked one side over a grim centurion and the other over a wild-eyed Zulu, stepped between them, and set my feet. Took a breath and tensed my core and stopped.
Something was off. I stared at the door for half a minute before I got it.
I’d never seen a panic room door made of wood before. They were all slabs of steel with recessed hinges and overlapped edges to keep crowbars out.
I took the fabric off the Zulu and kept knocking past the double doors with the shredded hardware and found solid wall until I got next to the headboard. It went from a sharp rap on drywall behind the fabric to sounding like I’d hit the side of a submarine. I draped the fabric over the headboard and studied the flat gray door. No visible hardware or access keypad.
“Eddie, I know you can hear me. Probably see me too.”
His voice came through a speaker somewhere above me. “Why’d you mess up my bed? And where’s Burch? He’s not on any of the cameras.”
“He said you can come out now, false alarm. I’ll help you make your bed.”
“I can see the dead body floating in the pool, asshole. And I’ve seen you upset before. I’m not coming out until you calm down and Burch says it’s safe.”
“I’m going to find out what you two did.”
The statues leaned into the silence, waiting.
Eddie said, “If I find out you’re digging even one grain of sand, I’ll cut you out of Warrior for good. You and Gil can rot. If Burch finds out, he’ll kill you.”
“Damn right,” Burch said. He stood in the doorway, the pistol and suppressor pointed at the floor. He stared at me and spoke to the panic room. “You can come out, boss; it’s clear. But we need to move to the secondary location.”
There was a clunk and a hiss, and the door eased open. It was six inches thick with steel cylinders that would extend into the jamb to make it all one piece. Impenetrable, sans artillery. Eddie still looked small in the small room, which had flat-screen monitors above a narrow table, a stack of bottled water, and a toilet. He held a chunky satellite phone and aimed the antenna at me. “Step back.”
I moved to the foot of the bed. If Eddie and Burch huddled up, maybe I could clunk their heads together and pile the statues on top, set the whole mess on fire. I tugged the bedspread. The crowd cheered the notion.
“Stop that,” Eddie said. He walked out of his vault, looked at Burch. “You’re sure we have to relocate?”
“Afraid so. We move in five.” Burch got out of the doorway and nodded for me to exit. “Get your clothes. Or don’t. Take Vanessa out to the limo and wait for us.”
“That guy outside said Marcela’s name.”
“A bluff.”
“Doesn’t matter. They know about her, so they know about Gil. His wife, Angie. The guys at the gym. I can’t let anything happen to any of them. I’m leaving.”
Burch and Eddie shared a look.
Eddie said, “You’ve had a hand in killing two of them. It doesn’t matter where you go now. You’re on the list, just like we are.”
“Best to stay with us,” Burch said, “so when they do come for you, all they find is you.”
I stood in the living room and watched Burch drag the body out of the pool and go to work with the garbage bags and duct tape. The pool’s filter and chemicals already had the blood broken down to a hint of pink here and there. Eddie and Vanessa were banging things around on the second floor, rolling luggage onto the open bridge at the top of the stairs. If they expected me to take it the rest of the way, they’d need some cobweb repellent.
My phone buzzed. Gil.
“It’s been more than ten minutes. You still want me to call Marcela?”
“No. I’ll do it.”
“She’s worried about you.”
“If I talk to her, that will get worse.”
“Thanks for practicing on me. See, you tell me to send your love to Marcela, then hang up. I gotta wonder what’s happening. Conjure up all sorts of scenarios, and not one of them involves smiling.”
“That’s a rarity right now.”
Gil said, “You need me to bring the cops in?”
Burch dragged the body under the pergola so he could work in the shade. He had to backtrack and pick up bits of skull.
“Nah, they wouldn’t be interested.”
“You might be surprised by what law enforcement finds interesting.”
“I know their number. Don’t worry about me. But I need a promise.”
“Yes. Ah, wait. Give me a hint first.”
“If I call and tell you to run, don’t ask questions. Send everybody home, and you and Angie go somewhere I don’t know about. Stay there until I get in touch.”
“I won’t make that promise. Don’t you dare tell me to run. Time comes to make that call, tell me where you are. That’s where I’m going. And I know what you’re thinking: ‘Then I won’t make the call.’ Fuck you. Call me. You got it?”
“Yeah.”
“Woody.”
“I got it.”
Burch finished with the body—identical to the wrap job on the limo guy—and flopped it onto a rolling beverage cart he’d rolled from behind the outdoor bar. He pushed it toward the garage end of the house. I couldn’t hear through the glass, but it looked like he was whistling. I tried to imagine pulling Gil into the scene and felt my guts twist.
That would not happen.
“My phone is with me,” he said.
“Thanks. Talk to you soon.”
I got Marcela’s number up, took a breath, and called. Tried to convince myself it was to reassure her, but the selfishness scoffed at me. I needed to hear her voice.
“Woody, hello.”
Woo-dee. I had to turn away from the glass wall and sit on the wooden ledge that framed the room. “Hey, how you doing?”
“Shut up with that. What’s going on? Gil’s worried sick over you.”
“I just talked to him. He’s fine.”
“Oh, you talked to him. Did you listen?”
I felt better already. “Everything is fine.”
“This is when I start to pray. Where are you?”
“I’m with Eddie.”
“That one.” She snapped out some Portuguese. It didn’t sound like praying. “When his mouth opens it’s a lie. Leave now. Go back to Gil.”
“I’d like to.”
“So? Are your legs not real? Are they painted on? Go.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It’s always that simple.” She talked rapid-fire to someone away from the phone. Incredulous needs no translator.
“Who’s that?”
“Jairo says you’re stupid to help Eddie after everything. He wants to smack some sense into you.”
“Tell him no thank you.”
After the shootout at Chops’s, Jairo had vowed to pull Eddie’s ribs out. One of the reasons Marcela and I had hustled him and his brothers onto a plane to Brazil.
If Marcela came to Vegas, I’d worry about her.
If Jairo came, I’d worry about everybody.
“What does he have you doing?”
I told her all of it, except the dead bodies. No need to indict either of us on an open line.
She said, “If I come up there to kick his face, would you stop me?”
“After a hundred or so. But please don’t.”
“I hate these people. They look at you and see a tool—a hammer or a wall.”
“Are walls tools in Brazil?”
“After I finish with Eddie, I kick you for a while.”
The line hummed until I said, “I miss you.”
“Come see me.”
“I will.”
“Now.”
“You sound like your head is down.”
I lifted it, saw Burch staring at me from the foyer, covered in sweat and holding a fresh suit on a hanger. “I have to go. I’ll call you.”
“This hurts my stomach.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” I put the phone away.
Burch stared for a few more seconds, then walked into the kitchen. I heard him go through the doorway in there, probably on his way to the security room. The cameras had evidence of him shooting a man three times and preparing the body for disposal. He had some erasing to do.
I looked at the black cube table and wondered how much I’d give to have that button implanted.