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“What price, Brigitte?”
Too late. The line is dead. Once a killer, always a killer.
I DITCH THE Charger by the Whisky a Go Go and walk the rest of the way back to the Chateau.
When I get back to the room, Candy is just waking up. She rubs the sleep out of her eyes and stretches like a panther. She blinks when she sees me.
“Oh. I thought you were off bringing me coffee in bed. What are you dressed for?”
“I was out talking to Manimal Mike. I tried waking you.”
“Try harder next time. Where did he shoot you?”
I hold up my arms so she can see me.
“No blood. See? I made it back unmolested.”
She runs her foot up my leg to my thigh.
“Maybe we should do something about that.”
I close the bedroom door and turn up the new Skull Valley Sheep Kill album on the stereo. Kasabian doesn’t like to listen when we smash up the furniture.
AN HOUR LATER and we’ve only broken one side table. The gunshot and the blast took a little more out of me than I like to admit. I light up a Malediction and look for some Aqua Regia, but the bottle is still in the living room.
Candy is lying next to me in one of the absurdly plush hotel robes.
“So what did you and Mike talk about?”
“The 8 Ball. He says he knows who made it.”
“Great. Let’s go pay Dr. Frankenstein a visit.”
“Can’t. He didn’t have a number for the guy, so I called Brigitte.”
“She knows the guy?”
“No. But she can probably track him down.”
“Clever girl.”
“They’re the only kind worth knowing.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
We wander out to the living room. I pour some Aqua Regia into a coffee mug and Candy picks at the remains of last night’s food. We always order too much and leave the food carts along the wall buffet style. I wish we could squirrel away all the leftovers. We’re going to miss them when they kick us out.
Kasabian calls us from across the room.
“Check it out. My first client.”
“Congratulations,” says Candy.
“I didn’t even know you had the site finished.”
Kasabian is on the landing page for Aetheric Industries Psychic Investigations.
“The wonders of the cyberspace and desperate suckers,” he says. “I put the site up an hour ago and already have three inquiries and one bona fide, already-got-his-credit-card-number customer.”
