Piper leaned over the glass jewelry case and peered at the cards.
“Oh,” she said, frowning at the cards. “Not the devil. The Tower. And a dude getting stabbed in the back.”
“Seven of Swords,” Mel managed to say around her tight throat. She swore she could taste blood.
“And that means...” Piper began. She tapped the side of her head, a pensive gesture. “Wait. I’ve got this. The swords are about thoughts. Brain stuff. Seven is delivery. Arrival. So the arrival of brain stuff.”
She didn’t wait for Mel to correct her. She powered on to the next card.
“And the tower...” her voice trailed off as her face screwed up in concentration.
Mel gazed down at the tower silhouetted against a stormy sky. Noted the body twisted and falling through the darkness. “The end of life as we know it.”
19
King sat on the balcony overlooking Royal Street. The ferns waved in a gentle breeze. The sweat on the back of his neck chilled and offered some relief from the heat of the day.
Sometimes when the heat was too much, his apartment felt too small. He had to open all the apartment windows and let in the breeze. And if that wasn’t enough to loosen the crushing hold the walls had on his heart, he went out onto the balcony. The sunlight, the people, the elevation, and open space—that usually did it. With a melting glass of Mel’s sweet tea balanced on his knee, he felt more than fine.
King reviewed his notes.
He reviewed everything Paula Venetti had given them, which amounted to five and a half pages in his tight script on his yellow legal pad. It was quite a haul.
As Venetti told it, on a warm night in late September, she witnessed the murder of Daminga Brown. She also assumes a third girl on the boat that night, Ashley DeWitt, was also dead.
Or worse.
He was getting ahead of himself.
King took a deep breath and put down the glass of tea.
He settled back in his chair and laced his fingers over his belly. He closed his eyes and reconstructed the scene Venetti had given them.
He replayed it step by step, slowly. He wanted to see what questions arose. What needed clarification. He wanted to turn this puzzle over in his mind and see its shape clearly.
And doing so began with this step by step reimagining.
He saw Venetti stepping out of the shower and into her closet, selecting a tight red dress. He imagined how the thin material must have cupped the curve of her ass. Watched her remove a blue dolphin ecstasy pill from a cigarette case and dissolve it on her tongue. He spared no details. The water droplets dripping from the end of her hair as she combed it out. The floral design of the cigarette case.
It was pure imagination, based only on the details the girl had provided, but it was incredibly effective in helping his mind see what the witness may have missed.
She was feeling better than good by the time Ryanson’s private car turned up at her apartment. A silver luxury car, the lights reflected in the polished exterior.
Two other girls were already in the back seat, drinking and rubbing their bodies against Ryanson’s. Venetti didn’t mind. It was hard to mind anything when you were on X. She joined right in and started nibbling the red lipstick off the closest pair of lips, bucked against the hand slipping under her dress.
The group traveled twenty minutes from the Baybrook Mall area down I-45 to Tiki Island where Ryanson had his Rizzardi CR 50 docked and ready for their arrival.
They all got on the boat—Ryanson, two guards and three girls—joining a captain already on board. Seven in total. The captain took them out on the water until the lights of the city were like pinpricks on the horizon. Far enough away the music and loud voices wouldn’t disturb other seafarers. Ryanson kept the cocaine and alcohol flowing. The captain, a gold-toothed man with a crow and crossbones tattoo, slapped Venetti’s ass when she leaned over the rail with a bout of nausea. She wanted to slap him. Instead, she smiled.
There was only one rule on this boat: no matter what, everyone had a good time.
Venetti sucked in the fresh salty air, trying to steady herself. When she opened her eyes, she saw a light burning in the darkness. Not in the direction of shore, but in the direction of the unbroken horizon. She stared harder, trying to comprehend the floating orb bobbing in the night.
“What is that?” Venetti pointed at the light, and the captain left his hand on her ass as he peered around her to see for himself.
His hand fell away. “Sir? There’s another boat.”
Venetti could see it now that it was close enough to fall into the light of their own vessel. The boat was smaller but still beautiful. Venetti didn’t have a better description. I don’t know boats.
King didn’t know boats either, but for this exercise, he imagined a sleek speed boat with wooden side board. It didn’t matter if this was accurate. King was more interested in the men who’d boarded.
They had matching tattoos. It was some kind of animal and a flag.
Five men got off the other boat and came onto Ryanson’s. King did the math in his mind.
Now we have twelve people who know what happened that night.
As soon as they stepped on to the boat, I knew we were in trouble. Ryanson’s mood had changed when the fifth man boarded. He was wearing a pinstriped suit and hat.
Before anyone spoke the captain pulled a gun. One of the men put a bullet between the captain’s eyes. The girls started screaming, a natural reaction to seeing brains spill across the deck of a boat, and the men turned those guns on the girls.
If you don’t want to die, you better sit down and shut your fucking mouths.
All three women sat down on the padded cushions of the bench and shut their mouths.
Ryanson was pistol whipped straight away, as if to set the tone for the interrogation that was to follow. Where is it? Tell me where it is. If you don’t tell me where it is, I’m going to put a bullet in her head.
Venetti looked away. The violence only made her nausea worse. When she could bear to open her eyes, she saw a scuba tank hanging on a hook beside her. She knew the tank would be heavy because she’d dived with Ryanson before. And she wasn’t sure she could grab it and a buoyancy compensator before someone put a bullet in her head. But a little farther away hung a scuba tank with an attached BC.
I’m ashamed to admit it but I knew Ashley or Daminga would be shot, if I jumped overboard. But I didn’t care. I wanted off the fucking boat.
Where the fuck is it, Ryanson?
Ryanson didn’t answer, and Daminga’s brains were splashed along the Rizzardi’s deck.
The warm spray of blood and bone matter on Venetti’s own feet made a scream boil in the back of her throat. But somehow she’d managed to swallow it down, until Ashley bolted. She was up and trying to throw herself into the water.
Two laughing men pulled her back into the boat. All eyes on her like predators attracted to movement. Venetti saw this as her only chance to escape. She leapt up, grabbed the tank with its attached BC, and rolled over the rail of the yacht.
A bullet grazed her shoulder, and the cut ignited in the salt water. White hot pain bit into the flesh of her upper arm.
With the tank, she dropped like a stone. She tried to equalize the pressure on her way down, but her limbs were sluggish from pain and fear. Then, at last, she managed to find the BC’s release button in the dark water.
She stopped sinking and began to swim.
She held her breath for as long as she could, already swimming underwater toward the direction of the shore. When her lungs were about to burst, she took sparing sips of air from the regulator. She had no idea how much oxygen she had, because she couldn’t read the air gauge so deep in the dark, nor see how far she was from shore. So she sipped and swam until she thought she was going to die.
She never thought she would make it, swooping her arms out in front of her in the pitch-black dark. She couldn’t be entirely sure she was moving at all. She was certain
sharks would get to her long before she reached shore. Her bleeding arm would attract them, and everyone knew they fed at night. And if not some underwater monster, then a bullet to the back of the head would finish her. But nothing took a bite out of her. No bullets came.
She surfaced and saw the lights of a distant pier. She finally made it to the pier and pulled herself out of the water, collapsing on the planks with shaking arms. Her whole body shook. She didn’t dare check Ryanson’s stall on the marina’s far dock to see if he returned. She went straight to the marina’s entrance and hailed a taxi. She cut in front of a line of patrons leaving a restaurant and commandeered the first cab.
People shouted. She didn’t care. The driver took one look at her and didn’t seem to care either. He pulled away without even asking her where she wanted to go until they were on the interstate.
Venetti didn’t go home. Her body hurt. She was cold and wet. But she wasn’t stupid.
She went to Merry Maids, a housecleaning business on the north side of the city. She convinced one of the housekeepers to enter her apartment and pack up her essentials—some clothes, jewelry, toiletries and a stash of cash all packed inside a pink backpack. The maid hid them in her cleaning cart.
Venetti hoped this act would avoid suspicion, since Merry Maids entered her apartment once a week anyway. They would only be entering the apartment two days early and they could be doing it for any number of reasons.
Before noon, she was on a bus from Houston to San Diego without looking back. She’d chosen San Diego at random from a travel guide. She’d been inside a bookstore café, eating a sandwich and an orange juice. She bought the bus ticket next door. Next thing she knew, she was in San Diego with a rented room and a job.
Venetti had done more than recount the traumatic event which sent her running for the West Coast. She gave them details about Ryanson’s habits and connections, everything she could think of.
For all her faults, King thought as he surveyed the massive amount of information scribbled on his pad, she’s a good witness. This was more than he would have been able to wring out of most witnesses.
Of course, he would have to do some fact-checking on dates and times to see if the girl’s memory was as reliable as it was detailed. He also had his doubts that all the details were precise, given Venetti’s own admission to drug and alcohol use.
But if Venetti’s memory was half right, they had a lot to go on. And they had other leads. Ashley DeWitt for one. If she was alive, Lou would find her and they would have a second witness to interview. If it didn’t pan out, they had the boat at Tiki Island. It could be swept for evidence. King knew the bodies were long gone, but it was hard to remove all evidence of a murder unless the murder was performed in a certain environment.
He wondered how Lou had managed to be so thorough in her own cleanups.
On second thought, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
King hoped DeWitt was alive. It was the men King was interested in and she would have spent the most time with them. He could set Piper on the task of researching the animal and flag tattoo. Who were they, and what was their interest in Ryanson?
Who was Ryanson working with and to what end? Either Ryanson was involved in a turf war or made a shady deal with a gang.
It was clear Ryanson hadn’t been killed. His pretty-boy face was all over the news, as he was the face for Don’t Legalize Marijuana in his party. So despite the hardballing from the pimp in the pinstripe suit, as King had come to call him in his mind, he’d survived the night Daminga Brown had not—how? With promises? Was a deal struck? How many pies did Ryanson have his thumbs in?
The fire escape rattled as someone from the street started to ascend.
King leaned over the railing fingers twitching above his gun. Piper was climbing up the ladder. He relaxed with a muttered curse under his breath. Less than two days on the job and he was jumping and starting like a rookie.
“Shouldn’t you be opening the shop?” he grumbled.
“Mel sent me up. She said she’s pimping me out to you.” She paused on the ladder and looked up at him. “Is that right?”
“Yeah, come on up,” King shuffled his papers in a way so that nothing important could be read at a glance. Then in a wave of paranoia, he turned the notebook over so only the cardboard backing of the legal pad showed and placed his cell phone on top, to pin it in place.
Piper appeared, clutching her side, chest heaving. “Whew! I think I deserve a Snickers bar. I’m so athletic!”
King arched an eyebrow. “You’re too young to be out of shape.”
“Not all of us have exciting jobs chasing bad guys. I pay my bills by stuffing candles into bags and sweeping glitter off the floor.”
King remembered the glittered raver and grinned. “I knew he’d pissed you off.”
She scratched the back of her head and then shrugged. “It’s fine. I get it. Sometimes you’ve got to sparkle. So what bitch work do you have for me?”
“Do you have a problem helping an old man?”
“You’re not old.”
King compressed his lips. Of course, he seemed old to someone who was barely old enough to buy alcohol.
“Is Mel going to fire me? Is this like a He’s Just Not That into You hint? She’s been talking about that book a lot lately.”
King tapped his pen on the folder. “She doesn’t want to fire you.”
“Yeah, but she might have to. It’s been dead around here. And not the kind of dead that sells.”
King gave a weak half smile. “Business is slow. It’ll pick up.”
Piper snorted. She pulled up a chair and plopped into it. “Man, you suck at lying. And I thought you already had help. I saw you walking around the Quarter with a girl the other night. Dark hair. All black clothes. She kind of has this strut.”
King stopped tapping his pen. “Lou?”
“Lou!” Piper shook in her seat. “That’s her name? Oh god, it’s cute.”
“What about her?”
“Is she your girlfriend?”
King snorted. “I’m not a cradle robber.”
“She’s an adult. It’s not cradle robbing.”
“You know, some men actually see women as partners, not sex dolls.”
Piper widened her eyes in mock surprise. “I had no idea. So, if she’s not your girlfriend, does that mean she’s someone else’s girlfriend?”
King burst into a grin and tilted his head. “Are you milking me for info?”
The grin was accompanied by red cheeks. “Maybe.”
King crossed his ankle over his knee, not speaking.
“Don’t set us up or anything!” Piper said, her face burning brighter. “I’m perfectly capable of orchestrating my own accidental introduction. I’m trying to get a sense of her availability.”
“What if she doesn’t like girls?” King asked. He bit back, sorry kid, but I don’t think she likes anyone.
“Who cares! All the girls I slept with in high school were ‘straight.’” She used air quotes. “And I get this very ambivalent vibe from her.” Piper made a so-so gesture with her hand. “I don’t think she cares about a person’s gender.” Her face lit up. “Maybe she’s pansexual! I’ve never met one of those. It’s kind of fascinating.”
“Do you think you can help me with my investigation, or will you be distracted by the brunette with a gun?”
Piper sat up straighter. “She has a gun? On my god, that’s so hot.”
King wrangled Piper’s attention long enough to give her two tasks, both research-based, and a $50 bill for any expenses. “I don’t want you to use your computer.”
Piper waved the fifty between her fingers. “Paranoid much?”
“Paranoid is my default setting.”
“Don’t get killed and stuffed into a trash bag. Got it.” Piper leaned forward. “Okay, but about Lou. Has she said anything useful?”
“Useful? Of course. She’s very capable.”
“Favorite food? Televisi
on show? Favorite color? It’s probably black, which isn’t technically a color. It’s a shade, but let’s overlook that for now.”
King could feel a headache building behind his eyes. “We don’t talk about colors.”
Piper frowned. “What do you talk about?”
“Dead people, mostly.”
Piper rubbed her chin. “Maybe a ghost tour then. It’s half-off if you go during the day.”
“She doesn’t come out in the day. Pretend you’re trying to woo a vampire.”
Piper nodded thoughtfully, completely missing the joke in King’s voice. “Well, the tours run until midnight.”
“Piper,” King said, rubbing his forehead. “When do you think you’ll have this information for me?”
Piper’s embarrassed grin returned. “Not sure. I’ve never researched street gangs before. While I’m gone, feel free to put in a good word if you have the chance. Play up my best qualities.”
“Maybe Lou isn’t interested in someone with qualities. She’s interested in someone with a special skill set.”
Piper paused at the top of the fire escape. She grinned. “Even better.”
King listened to her descend the steps, the rattle of the latch and the slow squeaking groan as the ladder lifted and returned to its resting position.
The skeleton shrieked and ghosts howled as Piper reentered Madame Melandra’s Fortunes and Fixes below.
Now to buy more time.
King picked up his cell phone and dialed a number jotted at the top of the yellow legal pad.
His old partner Chaz Brasso answered on the third ring. “Brasso.”
“We found Venetti and verified her testimony,” King said.
“You found her? Honest to god?” Brasso said. “Where the hell was she holed up?”
“San Diego. In a vegan fast food restaurant of all places.”
“There can’t be many of those,” Chaz said. “That was a quick trip! Did you fly out there?”
King’s stomach turned, but the lie came easily. “Yeah. I’m still here actually. I won’t get back until tomorrow morning.”
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