Back in Black (McGinnis Investigations #1) - Rhys Ford Page 0,65
rattling my keys near the phone’s speaker so she could hear them chime. “Why?”
“I found out they let our guy go yesterday morning,” O’Byrne growled. “Some lawyer showed up, and I don’t know what judge he blew, but I come rolling in this morning to question him and they tell me he was cut loose. The bastards are still trying to run his prints for identification, and I’ve got no idea about where this guy is. He could be in the wind or circling back toward you.”
“That is not what I need to hear this morning,” I muttered back. Wedging my shoulder against the screen door to hold it open, I went to fit my key into the knob when the heavy wooden door swung open an inch.
“I’m going to send a uniform over,” she informed me through a crackle on the phone. “I really don’t know what the fuck is going on, but the first thing I need to do is find this guy.”
“Yeah, about that….”
I pushed into the main room, not bothering to turn on the lights. There was enough sun to wash through the filmy curtains Claudia put up a few weeks ago, pouring a bit of heavy cream into the light brown shadows pouring over the walls and furniture. Sitting at my desk was the man whose face I’d beaten in, his head shaved down to a gleaming dome and his generously bruised nose sporting a wide X bandage across his bridge. Stitches ran across his right cheek, and I took a small delight in seeing another row of stitches running from his jaw up nearly to his ear. He was dressed in an expensive suit, or at least it looked expensive in the semidark, much like an old whore who plied her trade under a flickering streetlamp so her Johns didn’t know she was old enough to be their grandmother.
There was no sign of his expensive Italian loafers, but I did get a very good look at the gun in his hand—a gun he was pointing straight at me.
“Hello, Mister McGinnis,” the man said with a clipped preciseness I’d only heard from fabric scissors Scarlet used while constructing one of her evening gowns. “Come in and close the door.”
There were a lot of things I admired about Scarlet, performing when the need struck her and living her life as a kathoey whose powerful Korean lover kept her happy and safe. At that moment, what I most admired about her was the constant presence of squat, serious-faced Korean men whose jackets often bulged with guns and whose only job was to make sure she was safe.
I really could have used one of those men at that moment, but all I’d brought with me was my phone and a little bit of anger I had at finding a killer sitting not far from where my husband worked at the back of our house.
“Seems I found your guy, O’Byrne,” I said, not breaking eye contact with the asshole in my chair. “He’s here with me in my office, and for some reason, he seems to think I’m not going to kick his ass like I did the last time, just because he’s got a damned gun on me.”
Fifteen
JAE WAS right. I hold grudges. I’ve never seen a need not to, since the times I did get pissed off at someone, it was usually for a good reason. I think a guy coming down an alleyway intending to kill me would be a pretty good reason to hold a grudge, but some people might not see it that way.
Those people would be wrong, but who am I to judge on their lack of common sense? God knows, I’ve made some pretty shitty decisions in my life, but getting shot in the middle of my office wasn’t going to be one of them, not if I had anything to say about it.
“Close the door behind you, McGinnis,” the beaten-up asshole ordered me. “I don’t want any witnesses. Especially since you’ve been hard to kill. I’ve already missed you several times, and well, now game time is over. Because of you, my girlfriend is dead and my reputation has taken a bit of a hit. The girlfriend? I can get another one. Women are easily led into doing all kinds of things if you give them a little affection, but a reputation as good as mine isn’t so easily brought back to life.”