“How the hell are you so calm?” Ezra asked. “The whole idea of us getting this lanky streak of piss in was so we could deny Buchanan had been killed on our patch. Now, not only did he get shot in the bathroom of my bar—on his first pickup from us—we cut the fucker up and put him in a van. We can’t buy our way out of this. Fisher is going to want to make an example of us. It doesn’t matter whether I piss off Janet or not. My kids are going to grow up without a dad either way.”
There were a lot of ways to say the wrong thing right now. Clay could feel all of them rattling around behind his teeth.
My dad was around, and look how I turned out.
All this “we” and “us” is not how I remember it going down. That was all “you” and “I.”
It always matters if you piss off Janet; that shit flows downhill.
All of that was true, and none of it would help. Clay pushed his hair back from his face, the curls damp and matted from a long night of fuckups that weren’t his. He twisted it into a knot at the back of his skull as he looked at Grade.
“We blame him?” he said. Cute was all well and good, but Clay’s own ass was always his first priority. And besides, he’d not have to see whatever happened. That would make it easier. He did feel bad enough to shrug an apology Grade’s way as he tapped the nails into his coffin. “Guy goes around cutting up corpses all day every day—”
Grade bristled.
“It’s not a hobby,” he said. “I don’t have a spine room that I show off on TikTok. It’s just a job like—”
Ezra reached out and mashed a “shhh” finger against Grade’s mouth. “Shut up,” he said. “And trust me, everyone thinks you’re a creepy little bastard. They’ll believe the worst of you. And I know where your sister works, remember, so you’ll play along.”
For a second, something hard flickered through Grade’s pretty eyes. It was there and gone in a flash, so quickly that Clay almost missed it. Most people probably did, but there was something nasty under all that precision and practicality. It wasn’t going to help him, though.
Grade reached up and pushed Ezra’s hand away from his face. He wiped the heel of his hand over his mouth.
“What if I get it back?” he said. “The van. The corpse.”
Ezra pat-slapped Grade’s cheek. “Nice thought,” he said, the condescension thick as molasses. “But whoever has it obviously already knows what happened.”
“So?” Grade asked. His eyes flicked to Clay for a second and then back to Ezra. “I know lots of things that happened in LA. So do the cops. Doesn’t matter if they can’t prove it.”
Ezra shook his head and turned away. He walked over to the railing and leaned on it as he stared into the gray dawn light across the garden. The tattooed wings that covered his back flexed as he tensed his hands around the varnished handrail.
With Ezra’s attention elsewhere, Grade shifted his weight restlessly from one foot to the other as he glanced briefly toward Clay’s car. The calculation was obvious on his face. Could he make it?
Clay dropped a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. He shook his head “no” and didn’t relax his grip until Grade grimaced and slouched back into position against the wall. He stuck his hands in his pockets, knuckles sharp under the material, and bounced his heel nervously.
“It ain’t the police I’m worried about,” Ezra said. If it had occurred to him to worry about what Grade would do behind his back, it didn’t show. Sometimes Clay wasn’t sure if Ezra trusted him or was just that much of an arrogant dick.
Probably the “dick” thing. Yeah. For Ezra, that made sense.
Clay chewed on the ball of his thumb absently as he looked at Grade. Then he shrugged.
“What’s the difference, though?” he said.
Ezra looked around at him and raised his eyebrows. He mugged an exaggerated thoughtful expression. “Um, I guess, off the top of my head, Fisher has a reputation for taking people that piss him off out on his boat to use as chum,” he said, the words sharp enough to bite by the end of the sentence. “I’m no fan of the cops round here, but worst-case scenario, all they’re going to do is take me down some dirt road, shoot me, and blame immigrants. At least there’s no drama involved.”
“And how often do they give a fuck?” Clay asked.
“Fisher or the cops?” Ezra asked.
“Yep,” Clay said. He pointed a finger at Grade and mouthed “stay” before he walked over to lean back against the railing next to Ezra. “Look, the last thing Fisher wants is a war. It won’t take him long to fuck us up—”
“Might take longer than he thinks,” Ezra said.
“It won’t,” Clay said. “It’s still time and money that Fisher could use to… the hell if I know what super-rich gangsters do for fun.”
It was Grade who answered. “Same thing as the rest of us,” he said. “Just in nicer rooms.”
Ezra snorted as he turned around to look at Grade. “And you’d know?” he said. “What, you some LA kingpin’s toy boy on the side?”
