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Reset and try another approach. I pull up my sleeve and show him my whole Kissi arm. Rose’s vitals slow. He’s back in his own zone. He’d love nothing more than to dismantle me piece by piece.
“I’ll let you look at it if you want. Examine the hell out of it and see how it works. Just tell me about the Qomrama.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
There it is. The microtremor in his lips when I said the 8 Ball’s name.
“You’re lying. Who was the fake one supposed to kill? Garrett? Or the buyer? Who was the buyer?”
Candy has a diamondback curling around her arm. It looks delicate and pricey.
“Declan Garrett,” says Rose.
The idiot from Donut Universe. Good.
“And who showed you the real Qomrama?”
“I never saw it. Just pictures. And diagrams in books they gave me.”
Shit. Rose is telling the truth. I can feel it. He never saw the real 8 Ball. Maybe whoever commissioned the fake one might never have seen it either. Just knew about it in an old book and had Atticus run him off a mobster clone. If that’s true, then chasing Moseley, getting shot, and almost getting blown to refried beans was for nothing. Still, there might be something to salvage.>“Coming down the chimney.”
“Through a shadow.”
“Yeah.”
“I miss seeing that.”
“You can get an eyeful tomorrow.”
“He’ll hear you and throw us out.”
“Hear me? I’ll be as quiet as a cotton-candy mouse.”
“I’m not so sure about this, Jimmy.”
“Sure you are. It’ll be fun. Dress pretty and bring your gun.”
“A man who knows how to speak to my heart.”
She gives me Rose’s address. I repeat it and Candy writes it down.
I say, “See you tomorrow, Brigitte,” and hang up.
Candy beams at me.
“I hope we get to shoot something. I haven’t had a girls’ day out in a long time.”
BEL AIR IS a neighborhood that lies just west of Beverly Hills and sees its neighbor the way that neighbor sees the rest of L.A.: as a wasteland of upstarts, criminals, and wayward teens with their bongos and jungle music. If the sun ever set in Bel Air, no one would notice because its homes and residents are so luminous they’d light the night sky all on their own. It’s a land where the gold standard never died and the roads are so clean you could perform open-heart surgery on any street corner.
Candy and I emerge from the shadow of a lamppost so pristine it could’ve been put there this morning. We’re on North Beverly Glen Boulevard, across the street from the address Brigitte gave me.
The place is called Clear, an old upscale faux-Gothic hotel rebranded by one snotty nouveau chic chain or the other. The residents of these hotels are always the same. Oblivious executives in town for a day to make another billion because the billions they have aren’t enough. Handsome young lovers so bursting with happiness and privilege that you want to punch the DNA that created them. And old long-term residents baffled by the bright lights and excited plastic-surgeried crowds rushing in and out of the place 24/7. Clear reminds me of palaces I saw in Hell, but in worse taste.
Brigitte is in the lobby. She’s a knockout in a short green sequin dress and pearls and a little silver clutch purse just big enough for her CO2 pistol. She looks like a flapper ninja. Candy is in her usual too-big leather jacket and Chuck Taylors. I’m in a frockcoat with guns. Which two of us don’t look like we belong in the Clear?
Brigitte kisses Candy and me on both cheeks. Candy says something to her that I miss and they both start laughing. They’re giddy at the idea they’re going to see some action. I’m hoping we don’t. And if something happens, fingers crossed that we don’t start it, and by “we,” I mean them.
We ride the elevator to the twelfth floor, go left, and walk almost to the end of the corridor.
