Hook and Shoot (12 page)

“Getting killed used to be free,” I said.

Eddie went back to the phone.

Burch walked out of a matching archway on the left toward a set of wide marble stairs in the middle of the far wall. He climbed them diagonally to a landing, cut in front of a bronze fountain, and disappeared behind a thick column. A second later he popped out on the balcony, walked around opening doors and ducking in and out of rooms. Eventually he stopped and leaned on the thick marble railing. “All clear. Leave my case there. You can put everything else away.”

I started dropping bags.

“Careful,”
Eddie said. “Jesus, here.” He grabbed one of the rolling suitcases from me and handed it to Vanessa, then pointed at the archway on the left. “Through there, the master suite. You can't miss it.”

Eddie headed for the one on the right, told me,
“Bring everything else.” He held his phone aloft. “I'm putting a meeting together for tonight. We're gonna lock in the deal with Lou, get you and Zombi in the cage for Elite.”

I followed with the bags and cases and had to walk under Burch, who was on his phone.

“Dorian, I need an ETA on those suits. Our boy hasn't taken the first one off yet. It's starting to smell like a bog.”

I trailed Eddie through the archway, thinking that if things got any better I'd have to set my head on fire.

Eddie set up shop in the penthouse's full conference room—desk with dual monitors, a blocky copier/ scanner/fax machine, and an oval table with eight high-backed chairs pushed under it. The table had some kind of electronics hub in the middle with a multiline phone and a projector pointed at a screen on the long wall. The windows opposite the door faced the Strip.

The only piece of Roman-themed decor was a stone plaque above a table piled with hotel stationery:

Verba volant, scripta manent.

Spoken words fly away, written words remain.

Eddie was busy opening laptops and spreading papers on the conference table. I headed for the door.

“Have a seat,” Eddie said.

“You signing my contract?”

“Will you relax with that? No, just keep me company.”

“I'll send Vanessa in.”

“She's getting dinner together. Sit down.” He was hunched over, the top of his blue faux hawk pointing at me.

I glared at it on my way to the far end of the table, dropped into a chair, and watched him and his papers get closer. He'd pull from one pile and add to another or make a new one. I looked at the paint to see if it was more interesting. A push.

Eddie straightened up. “There.” Whatever he saw in the paper chaos, it made him happy. He sat down, checked something on a laptop, grunted. He leaned back in the chair and spun around to look at me. “I had to hire a new marketing department because of you.”

“No, that was because of Benjamin.” Benjamin Walsh had been Warrior's head of marketing as well as twisted in with Tezo and Kendall. He hadn't done well when Jairo and I pulled him and Eddie into a locked room for answers.

“Regardless, I have to keep an eye on all this shit now because the new people don't know what the hell they're doing.” He rubbed his throat through the turtleneck, glanced down and plucked at the front of it. “I look like my Stanford business econ professor.”

And then I'm supposed to say, “Oh, you went to Stanford?”

Fuck him and fuck college.

“Tell me about Zombi,” I said.

“I already told you. Catch wrestler, kind of a shoot fighter. Gold medal judoka, backed by the Yakuza. Probably chews bones for fun. What else?”

“You got any video?”

“What for?”

“There's this thing called a game plan. Some call it strategy, but that's a Stanford word.”

“Please. Gil has you thinking you actually use a strategy? Is he watching the same fights as me?”

“He had a good seat for the Burbank fight. Seems like that worked.”

“You know what you did to Burbank?”

“Kicked him in the face.”

“That was the nail in the coffin. Before that, when you finally settled down and fought your way. What did you do?”

“I avoided the takedown best I could, stayed away from—”

“Stop. You're reciting Gil. This ain't a press conference. What did you do to Burbank? You fought like your fucking life depended on it. You tried to kill him.”

I shifted, couldn't get comfortable. It wasn't the chair. “Kendall had Marcela.”

“And that made you desperate. It didn't make you fight like you did. Like you
do,
like some wolf with a fresh moose carcass, and here comes the next alpha. Don't you know this?”

I stared out the windows.

Eddie said, “Don't tell me you're ashamed of it. It works. You take a guy like Burbank and fight him so hard he goes into survival mode, throws his game plan out of the building. I've kept tabs on him since your fight. He's slow, thinking too much. His trainers don't know what's wrong. I do, but I ain't telling. You broke him.
That's
what you do. You keep it up, I'll start calling you Social Security. The reason motherfuckers retire.”

“Sorry.”

“Bullshit you're sorry. You love it. Sitting here, maybe it scares you how much you love it. You can't look at it straight on. A lawful way to be what you are when what you are is outlawed. So you can tell your mom—if you have one—you're sorry and wear your citizen camouflage, but I know better. All this is just holding your breath, waiting to go again. In the
cage, man. That's where you breathe.”

I did a slow spin in the chair, checked out the ceiling.

Eddie said, “I took psychology at Stanford too.”

“So if I go through your company breaking all your toys, you'll be happy?”

“Whoa. You knocked Burbank off his game for a couple months so far. Let's not crown you Jesus the Hun just yet. How many fighters you seen saying they can't be broken, they'll never give up, then they go out and get shattered? Nobody breaks until they do. All you are is a guy who hasn't met his hammer yet.”

“You're wrong.”

“Yeah? What fight?”

“It wasn't in a cage.” I got up and walked out.

Eddie didn't say anything.

Stanford education.

Vanessa found me sitting in the foyer by the elevator and handed me a plate of grilled chicken over a bed of fresh greens and fruit, a thin dark glaze drizzled over all of it.

I made a silent preemptive apology to my suit and the white couch and dug in.

Vanessa hovered. “Burch is watching TV if you don't want to sit here by yourself.”

“I'm fine. You should go.”

Her eyebrows went up. She spun on one bare foot toward the fake courtyard.

“No, I mean the elevator. You should go somewhere safe.”

“Oh. I was like, okay,
that
was rude.”

“I'll tell Eddie and Burch I made you leave. Might save your job if Eddie makes it through this.”

She sat on the couch across from me. “Burch told me I'm safest here with him. And you, I figure, but he didn't say that part.” She pushed her palms into the couch, put one foot on top of the other, curled her toes.

I ate a piece of fruit that was new to me. It was good. “When you aren't with Burch, how often do guys with swords get shot and dumped into a pool?”

“None so far.”

“Well then. My opinion, whatever it's worth, is he wants you around because you're one more person to put between him and them when they break through the door.”

She eyed the elevator. “So let's go. Both of us.”

“If Eddie had signed that contract, you'd already have a postcard from me. Someplace nice. Maybe a bomb shelter in Nebraska. Now I'm sitting here wondering if it's worth risking my neck to keep him alive just so he can own me.”

“It's not. Being owned never is.”

I gave her a closer look. “How did you and Eddie meet?”

Vanessa stood. “You need something to drink.”

She got to the opening into the courtyard and slid to a stop to avoid a collision with Burch. Eddie was behind him, a laptop bag bulging with papers hanging off his shoulder.

“On your feet, soldier,” Burch said. He had a new gun, a stubby black MP5 with an integral suppressor hanging from a rig across his chest. It looked pretty light; that hard plastic case must have plenty more to offer.

“What for?”

“I said so.”

Eddie said, “We're meeting Lou.”

Vanessa ducked around them and was gone.

I carried my plate to the elevator. “Why doesn't he come here?”

“Negotiations 101,” Eddie said. “He wants neutral territory, even though the goddamn deal is done.”

Burch nodded at my plate. “Leave it. Need your hands free.”

The plate was still half full and my stomach was still three-quarters empty. I started packing chicken into my mouth.

Burch yanked the plate out of my hand and spun it into the courtyard. The plate shattered. Chicken and greens and fruit and the delicious glaze scattered over the floor. Eddie pursed his lips and hustled his phone out so he could stare at it. Burch punched the elevator button and the doors opened. Eddie tiptoed
on board.

Burch watched me chew. “All finished?”

“You ever fought in an elevator before? It's more fun than it sounds.”

Burch split time watching me and the elevator doors on the way down.

“I was just teasing,” I said. “Next time I hit you, I'm not gonna warn you first. So relax.”

The meeting was at an RV dealership north of the city near a cluster of golf courses and suburbia, nearly an hour in the limo while Burch pulled fancy counter-pursuit maneuvers and Eddie jabbered on the phone to his people about what they had to do once the Elite deal was final.

We pulled through the stadium-lit front lot of RVs that looked like rolling yachts, past the showroom with its high glass walls, and through an open chain-link gate into the lot that surrounded a service garage. Just a few lights, enough to see the office entrance and airplane hangar doors.

The RVs were parked nose-out toward the building. Burch idled the limo all the way to the back corner. I didn't see any other cars.

“Some cloak-and-dagger shit here, huh?” Eddie said.

I gave him a nod but wasn't impressed. I'd worked
meets at the roaring base of the Hoover Dam, at the wrong end of a live firing range, and in a condemned, dripping mine shaft. The dark corner of a parking lot was for buying bootleg celebrity toothbrushes.

Burch curled the limo around and got it facing the gate, stopped, and lowered the privacy panel. “I don't like this one bit. Too many corners, not enough light.”

“I'll call him,” Eddie said. “Get him to come out to us.”

“Don't like that either. We're fucked sitting here with the high roof on one side and the caravans on the other.” His head swiveled around. “I need to clear Lou's first, but you can't stay here. We all move at once, yeah?”

“Whatever you say.”

Nobody asked me.

Burch got out and shot a very white, focused UV flashlight beam under the last few RVs, took his time with the one at the end. He poked the beam through the giant windshields, the shadows and stillness inside them like a shipwreck exploration. He hopped onto the limo's trunk. I could see the beam dancing over the tops of the RVs, but the angle didn't look good, still plenty of blind spots. He jumped down and stuck the flashlight into a bracket on the side of his gun so the beam would light up whatever he aimed at.

He opened the back door, holding Eddie close to
it until I got out, then stood in front of him and eyeballed over my shoulder, shuffled Eddie a step to the side and planted him there.

I glanced back. Anyone shooting from the service garage roof would have to nail me to get to Eddie. I damned my shoes for not having laces I could stop to tie a dozen times or so.

“Moving,” Burch said. He tucked the gun into his shoulder and stalked toward the RV in the corner.

Eddie and I followed. When the beam wasn't on the RV windshields, they were black caves wide enough for five guys to stand side by side and count down to open season on us. I could feel the day's heat coming off them and the asphalt, a steady pressure that made the space feel too small. The primal instinct in me heard twigs snapping in a thick jungle, pebbles bouncing down from the cliffs above, something long slipping through the muck between my feet.

Burch sliced the flashlight into the alley between the last two RVs, pulled us into it. “Stack up.”

“What?”

He put one hand on the door handle. “You're in first. Anything goes wrong, I'll cover us back to the limo.”

“Is it supposed to be just Lou in there?”

“Supposed to be,” Eddie said. “Hurry. This bag is heavy.”

Burch opened the door and stepped away.

I put a foot on the steel grate step and felt the structure tip a bit under my weight. The door was thicker than I'd expected, actually looked like a real door instead of a flimsy piece of sheet metal. I smelled old cigar smoke, stale beer, and something else under it all, familiar but clouded. I stepped onto the thick carpet and saw the thing wasn't meant for families. It was a mobile private card room, with the cabinets and furniture pulled out to make room for a poker table in the back and a full bar along the wall across from the door. There was a closed curtain between the room and the front seats.

Lou sat at the poker table, another whiskey in front of him. He was looking at me with surprise on that hangdog face of his, just like last time, but now someone had pinned him to his chair with a samurai sword through his chest, the front of his shirt sagging with blood.

“Back to the limo,” I said.

Burch held out a hand to stop me from coming down the steps. “What is it?”

I grabbed the straps across his chest and a handful of Eddie's turtleneck and shoved them toward the limo. “They're here. Go.”