Back in Black (McGinnis Investigations #1) - Rhys Ford Page 0,95

told him to. I told her to hand over the goods, and he said something stupid. It was supposed to be a handoff, a lot of diamonds from her past jobs, but he knew they were fake as soon as he saw them. He recognized the bag they were in.”

“So what? He called her a liar and just shot her?” I shook my head at the stupidity of the whole thing, inching closer, but Marie wasn’t buying it. “Those fake diamonds? They’re still worth a hell of a lot of money. Apparently even when diamonds are fake, if they’ve got a big name attached to them, people will still pay through the nose for them.”

“Stop right there, asshole,” she growled at me in her high-pitched voice. One thing was certain—Marie couldn’t swear for shit, because she sounded more like a voiceover from a kid’s show than a hard-nosed criminal. But by my count, she had at least one killing under her belt, maybe even more if it wasn’t Ivan who’d gunned down the fake Marlena that day. “She tried to cheat me and paid for it. After I get rid of you, Arthur’s next. Then I’m going to work on their granddaughter and help clean out all of their shit. Ivan said Adele had a big nest egg, and I’m going to find it. No more living with that asshole upstairs, listening to him talk about how good he is. I might even kill him after I kill you, fucker.”

She squeaked on the last syllable, and I would’ve laughed, but once again, gun.

The elevator rumbled, and to give the woman credit, she didn’t even glance behind her when the doors slid open. That told me a lot of things—she was very confident about her ability with the gun, and she’d been expecting backup. It looked like I was right on at least the second guess, because as soon as the main doors opened, a mountain of flesh ambled out.

At some point, a bit of sperm and an egg kissed and began life. The developing cells lodged into a woman’s soft flesh, cradling the growing bits of bone and tissue until it developed a brainstem and then enough solid mass to be on its way to sentience. From that microscopic spark, this man emerged as a tiny baby, and then, from what I could see, he absorbed everything around him until he was the size of a small elephant.

His thinning blond hair was cut into a pageboy I’d only seen on a film character named Rocky who preferred to grunt and run around in a gold lamé Speedo. There was muscle underneath the flab. There had to be in order to move his enormous body, because if he wasn’t nearly seven feet tall and four hundred pounds, I was a rubber ducky. Wearing a blue Watson Gallery T-shirt stretched over his broad chest and ample belly, he shuffled forward toward the van, working at the string of his gray sweatpants as he walked. The look of surprise he gave me when he spotted me standing in front of Marie’s gun was nearly as comical as her swearing, but that expression quickly fell away to an intense irritation, focused directly at me.

“You hired someone else?” the shambling flesh grumbled at Marie. “I’m doing it.”

“No, this is McGinnis. The asshole Ivan was trying to kill.” Marie still hadn’t gotten the accent right on the word asshole. “Grab him so I can shoot him in the head and we can get him into the van to dump him someplace. We can move the rest of the paintings later, dumbass.”

My sneaker squeaked as I moved my right foot back, digging my toe down to pivot on. Marie was still a problem, but the overgrown Dutch Boy paint kid was a much bigger one. I don’t know what he was pissed off about, but the red flushing through his cheeks wasn’t because he was shy and I’d tossed him a seductive come-on. He was angry—bull-in-a-china-shop angry—and something I’d done got him to that volcanic level as soon as he heard my name.

“I liked Ivan.” He cracked his knuckles, sending the sound of rolling dice through the tension between us. “You shouldn’t have killed him.”

I didn’t get a chance to tell him I didn’t kill Ivan, because he was on me like Honey went after a swampy tennis ball. He moved quickly for a large man, which honestly wasn’t all that surprising, because there was a lot