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“You’re a saint. Thank you.” I hung up and tucked the phone away. A popping noise startled me. It sounded like a muffled gunshot, except one look across the street told me it wasn’t.
Kevin Swarthmore was no longer standing beside his Mercedes. He was now in pieces on the driveway.
Gun clamped a hand over his mouth. I’d never seen him speechless before. I couldn’t decide which view was more unsettling.
Gun slowly removed his hand from his mouth. “He blew up. You saw that, right?”
I nodded. “Should I call Chief Garcia?”
“And tell her what? A lion stalked past him and then he exploded from fear? You and I will find ourselves in a holding cell getting drug tested.”
“We can’t leave him like that for someone else to find.”
Gun sighed. “I have experience with this sort of clean up, but I don’t like the idea of a lion on the loose. At least call animal control.”
I pulled out my phone to make the call and remembered Hailey. “Shit. I need to go to the library.”
Gun gaped at me. “We’re kind of in the middle of something here.”
“Oh, I know. I mean after this.”
“There’s a deadly lion on the loose, Lorelei. There might not be an ‘after this.’”
I turned to look at him. “How many times have you been at death’s door?”
“More than I can count.”
“Exactly. Do you really think a lion will be the way you leave this world?”
He seemed to mull it over. “I guess not. On the other hand, we’re not dealing with an ordinary lion. You saw what happened to Morgan Stanley.”
“I don’t think that’s his name.”
“Fine. Chase Manhattan.”
“You really dislike the financial services profession, don’t you?”
“They’re the scourge of humanity.”
“Says the assassin.”
“Exactly. That’s how you know it’s bad.”
“Your feelings on capitalism aside, I don’t know that your neighbor deserved to explode in his driveway.”
“Do you think it should’ve happened on his front step for easier cleanup?”
I glared at him. “We’ll have to test your ward another time.”
“Yeah, no kidding.” He gazed down the street. “Maybe one of us should go after the lion.”
“Not without somewhere to keep it.” Even if I managed to subdue it, I had nowhere to store a potentially magical lion.
Gun pulled a tarot card from his pocket. “Let’s get this over with.”
I emerged from behind the car and hurried to my truck in case the lion decided to walk this way. “I’ll talk to you later, Gun.”
“Give me a couple days,” he warned. “After cleaning up this mess, I’ll be too traumatized to talk.”
