Grade twisted his mouth into a wry smile. “I wish,” he said. “I wouldn’t have had to come back here if ass was what I was selling. No, but you don’t pay LA rent by getting rid of poor people’s problems for them.”
Fair enough. Clay caught Grade’s gaze and held it. “Fucking then,” he said, accent thick and lazy on the word. Same way he liked to do it. “On nice sheets.”
For a second he didn’t get any reaction to that. Then Grade swallowed hard, licked his lips, and looked down for a second. Clay grinned briefly with satisfaction. It was hardly the time, but good to know he still had it in the tank.
“Or,” Ezra said, either missing or ignoring the subtext there, “maybe Fisher’s idea of a good time is cutting bits off people to feed his pet shark. You think of that?”
Clay shrugged.
“Still cheaper ways to do it,” he said. “If we give Fisher a way to ignore this—maybe a little something extra to sweeten the deal—he’d be an idiot not to take it.”
“Maybe,” Ezra said. He nodded at Grade. “And just so I’m clear, why isn’t blaming this skinny asshole still on the table?”
“It is,” Clay said. “But we serve him up to Fisher, we still have to admit we let his bagman get killed and his body desecrated on our turf. That’s not exactly going to fill him with confidence about our ability to keep things tight. Buchanan just disappears—well, it sounds like that worked out well enough for Pulaski Senior. It might be enough to stop him writing us off completely.”
For a second, nobody said anything as Ezra thought his options through. He didn’t seem that pleased with any of them, but the flicker of light in a window upstairs distracted him before he could come up with any alternative.
“Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaddy,” a little girl’s voice whined, snotty and drawn out. “It happened again.”
“Fuck,” Ezra muttered between tight lips. He jabbed a finger at Grade. “I need to go change some sheets, so I don’t have time to deal with you right now. That means you get a chance to fix your mess. Buchanan’s next stop was Sterling, in two days. You’ve got until someone calls me asking how Buchanan was when he left here to find the corpse and get rid of it. Got it?”
It turned out that Grade would be shit at poker. His relief at the reprieve was obvious on his face as he jerked his chin down in a quick nod of agreement.
“Got it,” he said. “I’ll make this right.”
“Yeah, one way or another. And just in case you think you’re smart,” Ezra said. He turned to Clay. “You? Keep him close. I don’t want to have to chase down… three, for god’s sake,threedifferent fuckers to throw to Fisher’s sharks before he gets to me. So cometh the day, cometh the chum.”
Clay screwed up his face. “I thought you wanted me to find TJ.”
“Yeah, well,” Ezra said. “Multi-task.”
He stalked into the house, caught his daughter up just before she let herself out, and kicked the door shut behind him.
“C’mon. Sweetheart, c’mon,” he said on the other side of the door, his voice fading as he headed down the hall. “It’s some piss, that’s all. I don’t give a fuck. You think Daddy’s never pissed himself? Don’t cry.”
That left two.
They stared at each other for a moment. Grade straightened his shirt with a fussy tug as he frowned at Clay.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Grade said. “For the record. So if you’ve got somewhere else to be, don’t worry about babysitting duty.”
Clay stayed where he was, legs stretched out in front of him and thumbs hooked into the pockets of his jeans. He sucked a breath in through his teeth and shook his head.
“Nice try. Thing is, that sounds like what someone planning to make a run for it the minute I turnwouldsay,” Clay pointed out. “And I didn’t put my ass on the line for you to hang me out to dry.”
Grade glared at him. “You wanted to frame me for murder,” he pointed out.
“As a last resort,” Clay said as he finally pushed himself upright. He hooked his keys out of his pocket and idly spun them around his finger. “Besides, I’m your ride. You aren’t going anywhere without me.”
Chapter Five
It had beena nice car once. Grade couldn’t tell how long ago that was. The back roads around here did a number on “nice” cars. The potholes took out the suspension, and gravel wrecked the paint job. It wasn’t a junker yet, but the resale value had clearly tanked.
The inside was clean enough, and it smelled of pine air freshener and a dark undernote of tobacco. The source of that was obvious as Clay took one hand off the wheel to light a cigarette. Shadows played over his cheekbone and temple as the flame flickered and jolted with the car; it caught threads of blond shot through his light brown hair.
“That’s bad for you, you know,” Grade said. He regretted it immediately. There were plenty of people he cared about out there making bad decisions; he didn’t need to find anyone new to state the obvious to.
Clay shrugged as he let the flame gutter out on his lighter and tossed it into the center panel.
