Marlena was your girlfriend, then? Her death isn’t on me, buddy. I didn’t kill her. And if you want the door closed, you’re going to have to do it yourself,” I replied, walking toward him. He lifted the gun another inch, following my central mass as it drew nearer to him. There wasn’t any mistaking his intent. There was no way I was going to get out of the room alive if he had anything to say about it. Luckily, he was only one part of the conversation. “LAPD is looking for you. It seems Detective O’Byrne has a couple of questions she’d like you to answer.”
“So I heard.” His smile glittered, nearly as white as the bandage across his face, and I almost asked him who his dentist was. Although I imagine assassins probably live as healthy as they can, avoiding coffee, red meat, and cameras. “I imagine the boys and girls in blue will be showing up shortly, so we’re going to have to make this quick. Which makes me kind of sad, because I would like to spend a lot of time with that pretty little husband of yours. I’m not into men, but how do they say? Any port in a storm?”
The arrogant often posed themselves in ways they learned from television or perhaps from studying despots. I’d seen it on the street when carrying a badge—young children fronting with an attitude far bigger than their bodies. And as I moved through the upper reaches of society on cases, the poses changed, but the bravado remained the same. There was very little difference between a thug snarling at me with a glittering gold grill, swearing he’d collect my eyeballs as some twisted participation trophy, and a powerful graying-at-the-temples CEO with a corner office overlooking Downtown Los Angeles and a phalanx of shark-toothed lawyers standing behind him. They all affected a loose-shouldered posture, draping limbs over chairs, desks, and sometimes the occasional mailbox or car if the situation called for it.
Apparently they taught the exact same course of attempted intimidation at assassin school, because the bruised son of a bitch affected a nonchalant air, one leg flung over the arm of my executive chair, his elbow resting on his thigh to aim his gun at me while his other hand lay on my desk, a monstrously carved, elegant stretch of tiger oak I’d restored to its original glory. The openness of their limbs was meant to convey their lack of fear, almost as if goading their prey to attack them, secure in the knowledge they could respond with deadly force before the other person could get near.
I was already near enough.
Bobby might have taught me the elegant brutality and finesse of boxing, but I’d learned how to fight in Chicago. More importantly, I attended a school where my partially Asian features made me a target and my naïve, not-so-hidden speculative glances at other boys hadn’t gone unnoticed. I often wondered how my father didn’t know I was gay until I told him and my stepmom that horrible, never-ending day. Trips to the principal’s office were a weekly thing, and sometimes I was even joined by Mike, my squat powerhouse of an older brother, who looked even more Japanese than I did. I’d been called faggot and homo nearly as soon as I picked up my first pencil in kindergarten, so either my father was a master of denial—not something I could discount—or little kids were a lot more astute than the adults around them.
I was hoping this asshole was one of those stupid adults, and it seemed like he was, because in the middle of his need to psychologically dominate me and threaten Jae, he left himself way too open.
“That’s far enough,” he said, his curled-up smile tightening the skin across his face, and I knew that had to hurt, having broken my own nose more than a few times. “Time to say goodbye, McGinnis.”
What a fucking cliché.
I wished I had a snappy rejoinder on deck, but truth was, I really didn’t have time to banter in the style of action heroes and film-noir detectives. What I did have was the massive square avocado-green rotary phone Claudia insisted on keeping at her desk. I’d tried to talk her out of it, explaining I was going to have to angle her desk against the wall in order to feed the phone line to her sickly green beast, but when I’d unearthed it from the bowels of the Craftsman’s