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Marlowe straightened up and looked me over. “You’ll do. What about me?”
He still looked a little dusty and a little rumpled, and the guy he’d borrowed the clothes from had been a good deal thinner across the chest. So neither the shirt nor the coat fit properly. Marlowe had solved that problem by letting them both gape open, and by leaving the tie askew under one ear. And by subtly altering his expression.
A minute before, he’d been a focused, furious master vamp jonesing for some payback. Now he was a jolly, slightly inebriated playboy, ready to finish his night of debauchery with a spot of…well, whatever Slava had on the menu. It was actually pretty impressive.
Especially since he wasn’t using a glamourie. The features were the same—the stubborn chin, the too-sharp nose, the dark brown eyes that usually looked small due to being narrowed in suspicion. Now they were big and slightly glazed, the nose and high cheekbones were flushed a rosy color, and the brown curls were artfully unkempt. In a matter of a few seconds, and without any magic that I was able to detect, he’d gone from 007 to Arthur.
“Not bad,” I admitted. “If nobody gets too close. We both smell like we fell into the grill at a barbecue.”
“Not for long,” he said, pulling a flask out of his hip pocket. He took a swig, and then threw a palm full of whiskey all over me.
Great.
He sprinkled some on his coat, and slapped more on his face like cologne. “How about now?”
“Now we smell like a drunk barbecue.”
“Have to do,” he told me, as the elevator slid to a halt.
I started for the door, but Marlowe hit the button, keeping the doors closed.
“What happened to no time?” I asked, as he put out an arm, trapping me in a corner.
He didn’t answer, and his dark eyes were serious. “Remember—no mistakes.”
“Get out of my way.”
I started to push past, but he grabbed my arm. “I mean it.”
“And you think I don’t?”
“I think you are good at killing things. But he’s no good to me dead. I need to know who’s behind this, and it isn’t a two-bit pimp like Slava.”
“His boys will know—”
“He was always a suspicious little shit,” said the Paranoid King, cutting me off. “We can’t know what, if anything, he shared with his people. He dies and we could get sod all.”
“Okay, I get it.”
“For your sake, I hope so. Help me get him out of here—alive—and there will be a nice bonus in it for you. Kill him, I will make it a personal project to see that you never work for us again.”
“Let go of me,” I said flatly, because I didn’t feel like trying to explain to Marlowe that this wasn’t just about the money. “This isn’t just about the money,” I added, because I’m perverse like that.
“Then what is it about?”
“You know what.”
“Must have slipped my mind.”
I scowled. Revisiting personal failures isn’t my favorite thing. Particularly not personal failures that had gotten someone killed.
And all right, yes, I hadn’t actually gotten Lawrence killed. I knew that. He was an upper-level master and they did what they damned well pleased.
But it still felt like my fault.
It had ever since Mircea let me relive it in glorious color in my head. Maybe that was why I couldn’t shake it. I could see it as vividly as if it had just happened: the blue-black dock, the dark red blood, and Lawrence’s bright, desperate eyes as I tried to drag him to the water, to get him out of the line of fire.
Tried and failed.
