Hostile Takeover (Vale Investigation Book 1) Read online

  I took it grudgingly. “Yeah.”

  “You better, hotshot,” she said. “Otherwise Detective Lieutenant Jeremy Morgan will need to start making popcorn.”

  She reached forward, sliding her lithe body halfway over me to pluck the card from my hand and put it in my breast pocket. I still had the gun trained on her but she didn’t seem to mind.

  She drew closer still, distractedly rearranging my collar with one hand. Her long, wavy blonde hair cascaded over me and the smell of lilies engulfed me.

  “By the way, I grew up with three older brothers and learned to shoot a rifle by age ten,” she told me, her lips an inch from mine. “It’s gonna take more than a bleeding, banged-up PI to scare me … a whole lot more.”

  She pulled away, then slipped out of the car and tossed the keys back to me with a flourish. I watched her go, not quite sure what had just happened. But it felt as if the invisible noose I had around my neck had just tightened an inch or two.

  It took everything I had left to drive back home, where I collapsed on the couch. No making it all the way to the bedroom tonight. No looking at the wound in my side either. It looked like it was going to be one of those weeks …

  ***

  I woke up as the sun rose, feeling considerably better. The bleeding had stopped overnight and I was able to stand without the world blurring around me. I took a shower, downed some coffee, and I more or less resembled a human being when I looked at myself in the mirror. It was another perk of being Lady McDeath’s errand boy—I recuperated quicker than your average Joe. The swelling in my sore eye was almost gone, even though I had a patchwork of yellow and purple bruises around it.

  I moved to the bookcase in the living room and pulled out a book on Norse mythology. Flipping through the pages, I found what I was looking for: Berserkers.

  These Norse warriors were old creatures, but documentation on them was sparse and often contradictory. One text presented them as humans who drugged themselves with magic mushrooms before going into battle, during which they fought in uncontrollable trance-like fury. Others recounted the tales of ruthless, wild soldiers who fought with such rage that they lost all humanity and became the creatures whose pelts they wore. One text even described them both as “fire-eating” and “possessing an immunity to edged weapons.”

  All the stories seemed to agree that the Berserkers’ fame grew until finally, they joined King Odin’s personal guard. This confirmed where my lone wolf killer came from: Valhalla. No illegal crossing of the border to report, the Conclave had said—yeah, right!

  Massaging my sore neck, I flipped the book closed. The beast I’d fought the previous night may have been a man a long time ago but it sure wasn’t anymore. There’d been no sign whatsoever of any humanity in its eyes. I wasn’t sure where to stand on the fire-eating issue but there was no arguing that my blade had wounded it.

  I passed a weary hand over my face and glanced at the pile of documents I’d brought from the Indigo. The killings weren’t random. This man-thing was working off some kind of list and I had to find the connection. It was the only way to pick up its trail again.

  “Let’s see who’s pulling your strings, Fido,” I muttered, reaching for Zian’s documents with a second mug of coffee in hand.

  PI manuals say there’s no such thing as too much information. Well, I beg to differ. Zian had printed everything the victims had on file, from phone records and bank statements to Netflix accounts and dentists’ bills. And it was all written in very small print.

  An hour in and all I had to show for it were burning eyes and a headache. The first two victims and the Thricin family led very different lives. I could sometimes find connections between two of them, but never anything linking all three.

  Candice Kennedy had had it right when she said both Nicole Thricin and William Mallory had ties to real estate. She was part of the city council, which granted construction permits, and he was a municipal worker on some development plan committee. This was the strongest link I could find between any two of my victims, but Ethan Nicholls and his little cinema didn’t seem to fit anywhere in this.

  I looked into Nicholls’ life more closely. It came as no surprise to find that he was close to bankruptcy. His little cinema was no match against the giant multiplexes with their 3D releases and curved screens. It was a wonder he hadn’t sold the building yet.

  I frowned. Maybe there was something to that. I flipped through more pages and found he’d received several buyout offers, all of which he’d declined. There was a newspaper article from last year in which Nicholls declared that he saw his job as his duty to preserve history and that the day hadn’t yet come when he would watch his beloved movie house be transformed into tacky, useless condos.

  I paused after that last sentence and re-read it. Was this the link? Was there a new real estate project involving Mr. Nicholls’ property? I kept reading and found several mentions of a project called Orion. The name rang a bell so I went back to Mallory’s file, turning pages until the name popped up again. There. Orion. It was in his mail box. His office had reviewed the project and given it the green light.

  I jumped to the third pile and rummaged through Nicole Thricin’s documents until I found what I was looking for: Construction Permit request number 100152-BC/ORION. Skimming through the details, it became obvious that the project, in order to go forward, would have to include the cinema that Mr. Nicholls had devoted his life to. Another interesting fact: this project was opposed by Nicole Thricin, who seemed to be working towards getting Cinema Leone historic landmark status. It looked like a good motive for murder for anyone who happened to be betting all their chips on the project coming through. Something about the appearance of Thricin’s name in the record started nagging at me. I couldn’t put my finger on it, though, so I shoved it aside. If it was important enough, it’d come back to me.

  On the surface, Project Orion looked about the same as all the other condo proposals that Mr. Nicholls had spent his last year turning down. Sure, maybe it was a bit ritzier than the others—the sketches and blueprints looked like it stole most of its design ideas from ancient Greece—but still …

  My thoughts stopped cold. Ancient Greece! Hermes would surely still have an intimate connection with the old country, even after all these centuries of slumming with us mere mortals ... was this how he knew what I was up against? He had intimated that he could not talk to me because of the old compact he had with Aurelian, but could the real reason be that he was involved?

  I stared at the name of the project, Orion … It was one of the better-known constellations but not one of the better-known stories from Hermes’ heyday. Like everybody who’s ever done a basic astronomy class, I knew Orion was a hunter, one of the best. He was also a stupid, arrogant prick who made the all-time mistake of pissing off Hera, step-mom to Hermes. Vengeful bitch that she was, Hera sent a scorpion to deal with him. Orion was too good a hunter not to see it, however, and squash it … but not before Little Poison Tail had his own fatal say.

  After that, for reasons never explained, Orion went on to become a constellation of stars. Hera made sure her tiny assassin got the same honor and it, in turn, became the constellation Scorpio. The rest of Olympus didn’t take any chances, though. The two constellations were sent to opposite ends of the sky.

  Armed with my new information, I dug back through the piles of paper. It didn’t take long to find the victims’ final connections through the phone records. Mr. Nicholls had been in regular contact with Mrs. Thricin right up to two days before his death. Our intrepid councilwoman had also been pretty chatty with the late Mr. Mallory on a near-daily basis. Add in the emails that had been traded back and forth between all three parties and it was obvious that they were working night and day to keep that old movie house standing.

  But it was obvious from the tone of the emails that they were fighting a losing battle. Mr. Nicholls had suggested
that he could find a way to get some reinforcements but he was vague about what kind he meant. Since there was nothing else in the emails that could tell me what he was talking about, I went back to the phone records.

  By the time I put down the papers, I realized that it was half-past noon. Right on cue, my stomach started growling. With all the shit that’d been thrown my way in the last three days, I hadn’t had time to get groceries. Hells, I couldn’t even remember when I had my last real meal. It was a good thing I knew a decent greasy spoon just around the corner.

  I was just putting my shoes on when that nagging feeling told me why it was bugging me in the first place. Zian had given me a complete work-up on all three people attacked: Mallory, Nicholls, and Thricin. But … he’d given me that information just before the Thricins were home-invaded by Grizzly Adams’ psycho Norse cousin. That was the real reason why his dad had paid him an unfriendly call. Insider trading is frowned on by more than just the FCC in that world.

  That led to another unwelcome thought … the tip from Ramirez that had put me on the scene just when the shit was hitting the fan. “You didn’t hear this from me.” Maybe it was someone’s way of saying that the voice on the other end wasn’t Ramirez at all. I’d been too wiped by the fight with the Berserker to put it all together before this. Now I recollected that Ramirez had been as surprised as the rest of her fellow cops about the attack, never mind the fact that I was there. Trust me, if she was that good an actress she wouldn’t be working for a prick like Morgan. So who tipped me off?

  The more I thought about it, the more my gut burned from the lack of food. The hells with it … I needed to get down to the Tombs for a bite to eat if I wanted a head clear enough to do this job.

  Chapter nine

  Fatherly advice

  The Tombs has been around since the early 1980s. Everybody I’ve ever talked to about it tells the same story. One day, the place was just a vacant lot with a For Sale sign in front of it, the apartment building that had been there having long since become a victim of the wrecking ball. The next, a magnificent old school diner out of Dash Hammett appeared seemingly from nowhere like a mutant vegetable, doors open for business. It even had a catchy slogan: “Where hunger goes to die.”

  Cold City dirties up every building within the city limits eventually, except for the Tombs. Even now, the outside was all gunmetal chrome and neon lights, a train car from the Orient Express that took an inter-dimensional detour through Vegas. The inside was all posh seating, bar stools, black-and-white checkerboard floors, and ceiling fans. No matter what time of year, the inside always provided its customers relief from the elements. During summer, the chill was just enough to take the edge off the heat. During not-summer, you’d swear you were around a campfire. Add to that the novelty of it being squashed between two towering apartment complexes and word about the place was guaranteed to get around.

  The place did brisk business in any given week but it wasn’t a hangout joint. It was your classic diner pattern: full up during regular meal hours and dead—as I should have been by now—in between. I was catching the tail end of the lunch hour when I walked in the front door.

  The last batch of customers was finishing up their meals as I went to sit in my booth. I mean, other people sit in it when I’m not around, but I like to think of it as mine. Somehow, it always winds up being empty every time I come in the door. That’s why I have meetings with some of my clients here, like the Townsends when they asked me to grab Marion from that Mafiosi piece of shit Vitorini.

  I heard barked instructions in Cherokee behind the counter, another rare treat exclusive to the Tombs. More than English is spoken in Cold City these days. Spanish, of course, but there’s also been a recent increase in less typical native tongues like Indonesian, Croatian, and Korean. Contrast that with any language originally spoken by what we call Native Americans these days—they’re near extinct. Maybe because they’d had a written language to go with it, Cherokee is one of the few that has survived into modern times and the owner makes a point of making sure all his employees know it. I’d even heard one or two of them talk about how he’d insisted on teaching them how to read the written version.

  Speaking of the owner, the man himself came out from the back with one of his typical big grins on his cracked leather face and a glass of water for me. We shook hands, then he set the glass down on the table and himself in the seat opposite. The stained whites of his chef’s outfit were a stark contrast to the dark bronzed tan of his skin.

  “Bell,” he said with that always hard-to-place accent, “how are you, son?”

  “Been a rough three days, Tommy,” I said with a sigh.

  “So I heard.” Tommy ran a gnarled hand through his thick, still-black hair. “A bunch of flowers giving their lives so that you might live …”

  “God, is anybody going to let that one go?” I snapped. “It’s not like I get to choose what happens when my death insurance kicks in.”

  Tommy gave me one of his hearty chuckles, which always sounded about an octave higher than his normal speaking voice. “Not trying to give you grief, son … well, maybe a little. You need to think about investing in a Shiatsu massage sometime. You get way too tense.”

  “Consider the way I live, Tommy,” I said, picking up the glass of water. “You blame me?”

  Tommy’s face darkened a bit as he shook his head. For all his good-natured clowning, this old man—nobody seemed to know how old—was as tapped into the world she had thrust me into as anyone in Cold City. What Zian was to raw data metrics, Tommy was to street contacts. Everybody knew him, respected him, and even hired him to do a discreet job or two. I had enough sense never to pry into that last part, by the way.

  “Hear you had a bad one last night,” Tommy said, suddenly serious. “A man of the bare shark.”

  “Huh?” I grunted in confusion as I sipped from the glass.

  “What you call a Berserker,” Tommy explained. “Subtle as a cannon, mean as a rattlesnake … you’re lucky to be alive.”

  “If I hadn’t been there, he would have gotten his third kill that I know about.”

  “So you’re on a case?”

  I hummed in the affirmative as I took a deeper pull from the glass.

  “You getting paid?” Tommy asked.

  I put the glass down. “It’s … not that kind of case.”

  Tommy gave me a disgusted groan as he leaned his head back and looked upwards. My guess was that he was asking the Great Spirit or whoever why I had to be so bad at business.

  “So this one’s for her,” Tommy said, the disgust in his voice getting even stronger.

  “Yeah, well, Tommy, it’s like this,” I said, sounding a bit more defensive than I would have liked. “For the amazing privilege of having guns jam in my face and flowers break otherwise fatal falls, I have to do this. I buck, she reminds me who’s the boss.”

  “No wonder you and Ramirez can never stay in the same bed for too long,” Tommy murmured.

  “What was that, Pops?” I asked, using the nickname to signal to him that I didn’t appreciate him prying into that part of my life.

  “Nothing worth repeating, Bell,” Tommy responded, the bemused grin returning to his face. “But you’d think that someone with her connections would hook you up with a sweet pile of cash every once in a while.”

  “Hey, she gave me the car.”

  “That was for her, not you.” Tommy got up. “Okay, I’ve fussed over you enough for now. Want your usual?”

  “You know it,” I said. My usual is a burger done Philly-Cheese-sandwich style with salt-and-pepper fries. “Salad for an appetizer too much to ask?”

  “Since when? This kid I just hired, he’s got a healthy alternative to Italian dressing I’d like to try on you.”

  I frowned. Before Tommy unleashed a new culinary feature on the public he always tried it out on me first. Sometime
s it was great, like that fantastic soy burger that had been made up to taste like turkey. Sometimes, however, it was an ordeal, like that ungodly blend of different juices that Tommy had the gall to call a drink. But considering he ran a tab for me between paydays, it was a small price to pay … some days.

  The dressing that the kid in his kitchen had whipped up qualified as one of the great ideas. Tommy just gave me a knowing chuckle when I told him as much.

  “All right, now that you’ve had time to settle in, you ready to tell me why you dropped by today?” Tommy asked finally after he had finished chuckling and sat down opposite me once more.

  “The food, of course,” I said with a shrug before stabbing a tomato slice with my fork.

  “If that was all you wanted, McDonald’s drive-in could have handled that problem,” he pointed out.

  “C’mon, Tommy. The corporate board of McDonald’s would sacrifice several quarts of human blood to get what you have.”

  Tommy shot me a stern look. “If you’re done with the suck-up routine …”

  I sighed. “Sorry, Tommy. I don’t mean any—”

  “You’re just being you, Bell,” Tommy told me with an offhand wave. “But goddamn if it ain’t like pulling teeth to get you to tell me how I can help you.”

  There was a reason for that. Tommy was one of the few people in my life who was constant, steady, and somebody I knew would help me out of a jam if it got too hot. But I never wanted to rely too much on him. There was always a fear in the back of my mind that one day I’d ask for too much … and that would be that.

  What I said to him was, “I need to arrange a meet with Vitorini.”

  “Holy shit,” Tommy said as he buried his face in his hands. It was a good ten seconds before he came up again. “You take away a payday from him, you kill three of his people, and now you need to talk to that little Frank Nitti wannabe?”

  Between bites of salad, I said, “Pretty much, yeah. It’s to do with the case. I think he might know something that could help me.”