The dead woman lay on her back where she’d fallen, legs bent at awkward angles on the stairs. One of her red-soled heels had broken on the way down, and the shoe dangled from her toes. The heel of her foot was skinned and bloody from the fall.
A puddle of blood had formed under the back of her head. One of her arms was dislocated at the elbowandher forearm broken. The bones pushed visibly against her professionally tanned skin.
Grade stepped over the woman’s legs and hopped down the last two steps to avoid the mangled knot of her arm. He caught his balance and looked up. The first thing he saw was Clay, sat backward on a chair as he smoked a cigarette.
Curly brown hair was scraped back from his face, although he’d not gone so far as to shave off his stubble, and he’d swapped his usual baggy T-shirt and jeans for a suit. Most of a suit, at least. He’d shed the jacket at some point, and that left the dusty gray pants and vest over a darker gray dress shirt, with the sleeves rolled back to expose his lean, tattooed arms. He’d pulled the tie out of his open collar and stuffed it into his hip pocket, the dark red strip of silk left to dangle against his leg.
For a second Grade’s brain glitched out and his mouth went dry. Well-turned-out wasn’t usually his thing, but it worked so hard here that his brain needed the processing power to wire in the new kink.
“What?” Clay asked with a smirk through the thin ribbons of smoke. “You didn’t think I owned a suit?”
Grade cleared his throat and tried to ignore the hot pulse of embarrassment behind his temples.
“I know you don’t,” he said. Then he paused as he heard footsteps overhead and dropped his voice an octave before he went on. “Just wondered who you rolled for that one.”
Clay laughed. He didn’t seem to care who heard him.
“If the two of you are done flirting?” Ezra growled. Grade nearly jumped at the sound of his voice. He’d been so distracted by Clay he’d forgotten to look and see who else was there. Sloppy. “We ain’t got all night.”
Grade grimaced at the fact that Ezra had a point. He had a nice dry apology on the tip of his tongue, ready to go, as he turned away from Clay and took in the rest of the basement. The words never made it past his teeth as he caught sight of the man bludgeoned to death on the tiled floor.
Blood and red wine splattered the walls. It had matted in the dead man’s gray-brown hair and dried in sticky patches on his battered face. Broken glass glittered dully on the ground next to the body. He wasn’t naked, so at least that wasn’t where Clay’s nice suit had come from.
“What,” Grade asked, “the fuck happened here?”
Ezra stepped over the dead man’s legs. He had also cleaned up for the night, in black slacks and a matching crew-neck sweater. The heavy buckle on his belt was the only leftover from his usual appearance.
“I need you to make this go away,” Ezra said as he jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the bodies, a gold watch peeking from under the sleeve on his right arm as he gestured. “Except they can’t just disappear. The bodies need to be found, just not here.”
Grade could have guessed that. It probably wasn’t fair, but class mattered to corpses too. Hit a certain social strata and problems couldn’t be solved by making people just “go away”. Some of his colleagues back in LA pegged it at white-collar jobs—accountants and doctors—but Grade would set it at blue-collar. A plumber just vanishes, and even if he had no family, he would have clients chasing him or the bank wanting repayment on a loan.
All those media campaigns where family members and loved ones demanded action from the police? Nothing compared to a financial institution that wanted the all-clear to foreclose on a house.
Habit made his brain click on as he tried to work out what scenario he would need to craft to explain away these two deaths.
Then Clay mildly added, “And they can’t be found together.”
Grade caught himself, because his “bad feeling” finally had a concrete reason behind it.
“Good luck with that,” he said. “But I’m afraid I can’t take on any more clients right now.”
He hitched his bag up more securely on his shoulder and turned to go. Before he could get far, someone grabbed his rucksack and pulled him back. It turned out to be Ezra.
“The fuck are you talking about?” Ezra growled. “You work for me.”
“I freelance for you,” Grade corrected him. He yanked his bag out of Ezra’s grip. “That means I can turn down a contract, and that’s what I’m doing. I’m not getting involved in this. Find someone else to clean this up.”
Ezra looked annoyed. “What the fuck is your problem?” he asked. “You didn’t even blink when we got you to scrape Buchanan—or whoever he was—off the restroom walls.”
“That was business,” Grade said. He waved his hand around at the basement. “This? This was personal. I have two rules. Cash up front, and I don’t work for amateurs.”
Ezra reached into his pocket and pulled out a stuffed white envelope. He slapped it against Grade’s chest, hard enough to make Grade stumble. Behind Ezra, Clay narrowed his eyes and got up off the chair, casually swinging it around, out of the way. It would have been romantic, in a way, Grade supposed. Except he wasn’t sure whose side Clay would pitch in on here.
“Cash up front,” Ezra said and tapped his finger pointedly against the paper. “And you’re working for me. If that is a problem for you, then you aren’t going to get much work around here.”
The crinkle of notes inside the envelope as Ezra pressed on it distracted Grade for a second. A job like thiswouldpay well—Grade didn’t offer a two-for-the-price-of-one discount—and he needed the money. The new van might be shit, but it had still taken a bite out of his savings. He could…
No. This once, Grade was going to listen to his instincts, not his wallet. He shoved down the temptation to at least look at the money and stepped back.
