it would be pretty shitty of me to not see Dell to the door. I would offer to walk her to her car, but she had a gun, and between the two of us, a mugger would be better off attacking me. That way, they could probably survive the experience. I knew Dell. She fought dirty and with an intent to kill.
In a lot of ways, she reminded me of Neko.
“Call me after you get over there tomorrow,” she said from the front stoop. The porch light wasn’t doing her any favors, but I also knew offering her a bed would get me a middle finger and a snort. “I’m going to see if we can get into the Brinkerhoff apartment through Marlena first. If your theory is right, then maybe there’s a record of who’s picking up the paintings and where they’re going. Maybe even a big red sign that says here’s the murderer.”
“Let me know whenever that happens.” I laughed at her flipped-up hand.
“Thanks for understanding about the guns,” O’Byrne murmured, slanting a glance toward the kitchen, where Jae was rattling about. “I hated asking you for them. I just didn’t have a choice.”
“No. I get it. It’s okay.” I poked at the edges of my emotions, looking for any anger or discomfort about O’Byrne’s requests and the stupidly necessary need to eliminate me as Ivan’s killer. While the timeline of my afternoon pretty much excluded me, it was always better to make sure I was above reproach. At least she had enough faith in me not to take me off of the case. “Not like I was carrying them around anyway. I tried for a day after Ivan came after us in the alleyway, but the weight felt wrong. I’m probably being naïve, because we talked it all out and Jae was fine with me carrying, but I don’t think I am yet. This way I’ve got an excuse to just take a pocket knife and my sharp wit with me.”
“Well, at least the pocketknife will be useful,” she shot back with a wink. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Mac. And thanks for the grilled cheese and the beer.”
I closed the door and stood in the foyer, debating which conversation I was willing to take on. To the right of me was the kitchen and Jae. I could go in there and talk to him about O’Byrne removing the guns from our house to exclude me for murder or I could go to the left and sit down with my younger brother, maybe even smooth over the crinkles between us. What wasn’t an option was to head straight up the stairs and hide until everything went away. I did enough of that in my life before Jae, and I wasn’t going to go back to that as my default reaction.
Even if I really wanted to.
Honey made up my mind for me, because she tottered over to the threshold of the living room, cocked her head, and gave me a silly goofy grin, barking once as if to scold me. Her tail was going a mile a minute, furiously wagging in a circular motion with nearly enough torque to lift her ass off the ground. If I didn’t go into the living room, the dog was going to helicopter her way up to the ceiling, and I probably was never going to hear the end of it from Jae.
Or at least that’s what I told myself as I scooped up the canine rag mop and went to beard the lion in my den.
“Do you want something to drink?” I jerked my head back toward the kitchen. “There’s beer, bottles of water, and some iced tea. Both green and black. I think the green is actually popcorn, but it’s pretty good.”
“Tea would be good. Any kind.” My brother’s words were heavy with his Tokyo-Japanese accent, clipped and formal. I could nearly hear the gears in his throat grind as he finally spat out, “Thank you.”
“He’s as bad as Mike,” I muttered at my husband, retrieving a couple of bottles of popcorn green tea from the drink fridge. Jae barely looked up from the massive amounts of vegetables he was chopping, but he spared me a small smile. “Did he tell you anything? He’s still pissed off at me. He and Mike hold grudges. I don’t know why I bother trying to talk to either one of them.”
“You turned a man’s hands into scrapple using an old phone. So I