Back in Black (McGinnis Investigations Book 1)

by Rhys Ford

  “He came into our house. With a gun. You could have killed him then. Why would you wait?” Jae muttered, following with a bit of Korean, which of course I didn’t understand. “You can’t even wait to get home before you open a box of cookies we just bought at the store. Her reasoning makes no sense.”

  “Is that a rousing endorsement of my unwillingness to murder someone in cold blood? Because I eat cookies in the car on the way home?” I shot him a cocky grin, hoping to tease the gold anger from his eyes. “And it’s not O’Byrne’s reasoning. It’s just standard detective work. Eliminate all of the possibilities and what you have left or who you have left is your suspect.”

  “Aish, you know what I mean.” He actually tugged at my armpit hair, making me yelp and pull away a few inches, but I maintained my embrace. Sometimes holding Jae was like dealing with a cat. He wanted to be held, but it would cost me a bit of my dignity. “We both need showers, and I’m going to be late if I don’t hurry. Are you sure you’re okay with O’Byrne? And with her taking the guns?”

  “I would trust her if she told me to jump over a fiery pit,” I said, making small circles across Jae’s spine with my thumb. “I’m still kind of trying to decide how I feel about carrying a weapon. It’s not like I’m doing anything dangerous today, and I think now that Ivan is dead, there isn’t anybody to come after us. He was probably killed to silence him.”

  “And what about the person who killed him? You don’t think they’ll come after you?” Jae bit his lip and stirred against me. “I know we’ve gone back and forth about you taking a gun with you, but I just want you to be safe. Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “I think I’ll be fine. O’Byrne will be with me—eventually—and she’s got a gun in case we get attacked by a rabid llama,” I murmured, leaning down to kiss his neck. “Now, how about that shower, and exactly how late can you be?”

  I CALLED O’Byrne and got her voicemail. After leaving a message on her phone, I told Claudia where I was headed and got another reminder about replacing her rotary phone. We made a quick deal on the spot. I would let her find one on the internet and buy it with the company card, and she would get a new phone out of it. Like most of my deals with Claudia, I took a hit to my wallet, but she was going to be happier for it, and when it was all said and done, that’s all that mattered. I was just grateful she hadn’t been there when Ivan broke into the office, because she was usually there an hour before I was and… what he would’ve done to her would have broken me. I would pay for a hundred ugly avocado old-school phones just for a single smile from her and to hear her call me son.

  Not that I was going to tell her that, because those phones were freaking expensive and there would be no place to put them all.

  I also snagged a praline turnover from the plastic container she’d brought in from her car to put into the office fridge. The treats were for her afternoon church group, a gathering of strong-minded women who spent a couple of hours every so often lamenting about their children. I’d dropped her off at the church once on my way to Bobby’s and spent half an hour being told by these women about how much Claudia adored me and why her advice was so important. For all her schooling, Claudia loved me unconditionally. It was an odd feeling after so many years of my dad and stepmother. Her own sons were grateful for my presence in her life because it took a lot of pressure off of them. It seemed like, in a family of capable men raised by a powerful woman, my de facto adoption into their clan meant my fuckups were front and center and a source of great amusement among the Dubois boys.

  “Are you going to remember to eat lunch while you’re out?” Claudia called to me, stopping me in midstride out the front door. “Or do you need me to call you about it?”

  “Why? Do you want me to bring you something back?” I felt at my back pocket, making sure I had my wallet.

  “No. I brought leftovers from home, but you need to eat. Have O’Byrne take you out for some damn tacos. The least that girl can do is feed you after dragging you all over the place.” She stabbed me with a steely glare sharpened with years of raising eight sons. Ancient sword masters would never be able to rival the sharpness of Claudia’s maternal judgment. I felt thoroughly stabbed through, even checking my belly button to see if my intestines were on the right side of my skin. “Just take care of yourself, okay? I appreciate you bringing in a cleaner for the office. Those hazmat people did a good job. Better than our normal people. Might want to hire them full-time.”

  “Honey, I love you, but I’m not paying for a crime-scene cleaner to come take care of the office every other week. You’re just going to have to be happy with the service we have now,” I told her, saluting her with the turnover. “And I promise I’ll get something to eat. Give me a call if you need anything. And if O’Byrne can’t make it, I’ll come right back. We’re just going to take a look around. Nothing to worry about at all.”

  “That’s what you always say,” she yelled at me as I closed the screen door behind me.

  And that’s what mothers do. Get in the last word right before you do something incredibly stupid.

  It was late enough in the morning for traffic not to be like circling a Hellmouth black hole, the suck and push of lines of cars to get to anywhere else in LA but where you were. I thanked my lucky stars I didn’t have to go anywhere near the 405. Then I was forced onto the 10 by some idiot in a sports car who decided to play chicken with a fire truck.

  “Glad we didn’t decide on a time. I would be late as hell,” I muttered to my phone as I texted O’Byrne about my estimated arrival time at the Brinkerhoffs’ building. Traffic was at a standstill, and while California frowned on anyone looking at their phones while behind the steering wheel, I literally could have busted out an oven and baked a cake while waiting to move forward an inch. Still, I kept my eyes out for any CHiP roaming through the lines. “Shit, at this rate, I’ll get there at about the time it would be for me to turn around and go back home.”

  Something unfucked itself ahead of me, and the congestion began to break up just as O’Byrne answered. She was stuck on the other side of the fuckery, and after a quick reassurance that she’d meet me there, the car in front of me began to lurch forward. I followed, glad to be finally moving and not breathing in any more gas fumes.

  One of the things Marlena Brinkerhoff gave O’Byrne was the key code for the underground garage. Well, as underground as Los Angeles got. In many parts of the city, digging down was not recommended for a variety of reasons. A lot of people who didn’t live in California tended to fear earthquakes. While there have been a few large ones, for the most part, we pretty much don’t get out of bed unless it’s a five or more on the Richter scale. I cannot count how many teeth-rattling quakes I’ve slept through, and since being married, I’ve been woken up for every single one because Jae still hasn’t become acclimated to them.

  And he’d been born in California.

  I’m not too sure what he expected me to do in the middle of a small quake, but I was now awake for them. Thankfully, we usually found something to do after the few seconds of shaking died down. So maybe Jae wasn’t so much unsettled by earthquakes as much as they made him frisky.

  I didn’t mind the lack of sleep.

  Digging down into the Los Angeles dirt usually led to a multitude of complications nobody wanted to deal with. There were old gas lines and sewage tunnels left over from generations of haphazard, slapdash building, but going deeper presented a whole different kind of problem. Depending on where you were in the LA Basin, old infrastructure was the best thing you could find. The worst-case scenario was—believe it or not—fossils.

  Sure, you could hit a pocket of crude oil in parts of LA County, but you’re more likely to find a scramble of stone-encased bones that would bring your construction dreams to a screaming halt. It takes forever to extract the fossil, and where there’s one, there’s usually another two or three hundred. So, to avoid all of that, most high-rises either have a separate structure, or in the case of the Brin
kerhoff place, are dug down just a little bit and use the first one and a half floors as parking.

  In her text during the standstill traffic, O’Byrne told me to use one of the visitor spots, having cleared it with the building long before I ever woke up. The code was unnecessarily complex, a long string of numbers followed by two pound signs, then another number and an asterisk. There was a call box next to the keypunch, and from the significant lack of paint on the Help button, I imagined the security desk got a lot of calls from the senior citizens living in the building. Thankfully the light turned green and I didn’t have to go through summoning Beelzebub on the punch pad again.

  I don’t know what I was expecting. No, I knew exactly what I was expecting. It was difficult getting older sometimes, because at some point, there’d been a generational shift, and old people—especially Los Angeles’s seniors—didn’t follow the elderly person template we’d all been raised up on. Sure, there were still stereotypical grandmothers with a collection of crucifixes on their living room wall and a crystal dish of strawberry candies sitting on the coffee table someone made in their shop class fifty years before, but nobody apparently told the residents in this particular building, because as I drove through the long lines of cars, there wasn’t a land shark among them. Instead of aging Cadillacs and hard-finned Buicks, I counted at least seven exotic sports cars, five high-end Teslas connected to their charging units by thick umbilical cords, and six chrome-heavy Harleys. The rest of the offerings were slightly more practical—a lot of SUVs and a couple of Smart cars that should’ve been painted yellow and red like those pedal-powered plastic vehicles kids rode around in. I was happy to say Lisa never saw the inside of one of those, because as soon as she showed any interest in moving forward, I bought her a miniature red Ferrari to tear around in.

  It was good being an uncle. I got to be cool and never the bad guy. Mike hated it, and for the most part, Maddy just shook her head and spent a lot of time in negotiations with her mini-me. I personally think Mike was just jealous because he’s too short to see over the dashboard of a real Ferrari.

  I found the visitors’ parking easily enough, sliding the Rover into a spot next to a Mini Cooper. The parking levels were dead quiet, and only the hum of the elevators moving up and down pierced through the echoing silence. Whoever maintained the property was diligent about keeping the grounds pristine, because the floor was clean enough to eat off of and I made no noise as I walked toward the lit-up entrance door.

  I had my fingers on the handle when I realized the parking levels were much more than just a place for the residents to leave their vehicles. I hadn’t seen the doors as I was driving, but they were clearly visible from my spot by the entrance. Set into the wall in front of two parking spaces marked for a single apartment, the rolling metal doors were painted the same color as the wall, obviously blending them back from notice. The doors were marked with black letters painted above the upper frame, corresponding to the parking spaces and apartment they belonged to.

  “Shit, all this time we’ve been thinking they had a storage unit someplace, and it’s right here in this damn building,” I muttered to myself, walking away from the entrance and searching for the Brinkerhoffs’ spots. “Marlena should’ve known about this. Why the hell didn’t she tell O’Byrne?”

  Based on how the first floor was laid out, I guessed I would find what I was looking for in the far corner of the parking structure’s lower level. My cell phone reception was spotty, and I had to go back to the ramp to get a strong enough signal to text O’Byrne about my suspicions. I got back a few words that she’d been tangled up on a call while driving but would be at the building in about half an hour. Depending on traffic, of course.

  “Well, I’m just going to take a look,” I muttered as I texted back. “If she meets me down on the second level, we can start there first.”

  I estimated the location of the Brinkerhoffs’ parking spaces pretty well. Set as far back into the corner as possible, it was a lot darker than the upper level, the overhead lighting flickering on and off in some bad rendition of a horror-movie setting. The lower level had a loading zone and a freight elevator, its wide doors shut and empty of a lift car. It obviously was for residents to use, because there was no way a moving truck would be able to negotiate through the parking area, and someone was obviously doing something because they’d left a white van across the marked-off space, its doors firmly shut.

  It wasn’t until I came around the side that I noticed the business name on the van and the open rolling door of the storage area for the apartment next to the Brinkerhoffs’. Watson Gallery was discreetly lettered across the side of the van, but it was the storage unit that had my attention.

  Even in the dim lighting, I could make out the masterful, beautiful paintings inside of the long space. Drawing closer, I was surprised to discover the air flowing out of the storage unit was cold, nearly crackling icy, and appeared to be coming out of a vent punched through the drywall between it and the Brinkerhoff unit. The canvases were up on their ends, sitting in something that looked more like a dish rack than any place to store a painting, but my expertise on the subject was thin at best. An ugly, twisted male face caught my eye, and I slowly pulled a canvas out using the edge of my shirt so as not to get my fingerprints on it. I recognized the painting I’d seen on Watson’s wall. On this one, however, there was no black rectangle with Arthur’s distinct signature. Instead there was a scrawl I couldn’t make out, and it was as tempered with age as the rest of the painting… or at least made to look that way.

  “Well, shit.” I reached for my phone to take a picture of the canvas in case O’Byrne needed it for proof. “It was Watson all along.”

  “Don’t be stupid. He isn’t smart enough to pull this off,” a woman said behind me. I glanced over my shoulder and recognized the petite, smiling wife Watson proudly slung his arm around in every family photo. She wasn’t smiling this time, and more importantly, she had a very large gun pointed directly at me. “You have been a hard man to kill, Mister McGinnis. So I am so happy to be the one who finally gets to do it.”

  Twenty

  “MARIE WATSON, I presume.” It was a hideous paraphrase, but when faced with the business end of a gun, my brain tended to glitch. She didn’t look amused, but I wasn’t exactly in a chuckling mood myself. “Let me guess. You’re the one who’s been moving Arthur’s forgeries.”

  She was even smaller in person than she was on camera, which was a mean feat because I was pretty sure she’d only come up to Watson’s elbow at best. I hadn’t been stealthy coming down the ramp and around the cars, but I honestly hadn’t expected to discover a storage unit full of forgeries and a tiny Asian woman with a big gun. I don’t know why I wasn’t expecting that. With the way my life pretty much had gone every single step of the way since birth, I should’ve naturally assumed there was either going to be someone with a gun or perhaps an interdimensional portal filled with water and a kraken pissed off at me because I’d eaten his cousin squid in a bowl of soon dubu chigae.

  “Well, thanks to you, all of that is over now,” she spat out with the fury of an enraged hamster. “You just had to be the one to find Adele. Of all the people in Los Angeles, that had to be the one asshole who couldn’t leave things alone.”

  “You seem to forget the Los Angeles Police Department wasn’t planning on just letting it go.” I studied her, trying to gauge how comfortable she was holding a weapon.

  “You should have walked away. It was bad enough I had to bring their stupid nephew into this and he wouldn’t kill her, but now their damned granddaughter is down here. She’ll probably take him back to San Francisco and this whole deal I’ve been trying to save is blown out of the water. The only reason Arthur wanted to stop painting was because Adele wanted him to.” She gripped the gun tighter, her knuckles blanching down to the bone. “We could have kept this going for ten more years. Then she tries to pay me off with fake diamonds? Who does that? We had a deal. She should have kep
t to it.”

  There was something disconcerting about being held hostage by a tiny woman dressed like nearly every middle-aged Korean woman going to church in her Sunday best. There was an odd discordance to her outfit, like her closet was a time portal that she’d jumped through that morning and come out wearing a pair of polyester pants from the ’80s, matched up with a ’90s frilly satin blouse embellished with slightly off-brand logos. Her hair was feathered back away from her round face, lacquered black ebony water spouts that should have moved in time with a pounding soundtrack, much like the fountains at Caesar’s Palace. At first glance—and possibly even a second one—she was hard to take seriously.

  Except for the very mean-looking piece of steel in her hand.

  The gun looked like it’d probably come from Watson, unless her taste ran to Desert Eagles. It was a lot of firepower for a small woman, and I had doubts she’d be able to control it if she did pull the trigger. But all she needed to do was punch a hole in me. One lucky shot and it would be McGinnis brain stew all over the parking structure’s floor.

  “What I can’t figure out is why you killed Adele. Just because she wanted Arthur to stop? Seems kind of flimsy there.” I was baiting her, hoping to draw her off guard, possibly giving me a chance to get the jump on her. Her dark eyes were glittering and furious, so I was either going to piss her off into talking or she was just going to say fuck it all and shoot me. It was a chance I had to take. “I thought you guys were all friends, or was she tired of the scam and wanted to quit? Or maybe he just was losing his touch and she wanted to spare his pride.”

  Marie flinched.

  “That was it, wasn’t it? Arthur’s getting old, and maybe his game isn’t as good as it used to be.” I gestured behind me to the painting I’d pulled out, keeping my eyes on Marie and her gun. “How many times did he have to do a painting over until he got it right? That’s why he gave your husband the other one. There was something wrong with it that somebody could spot right away.”