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“On the floor!” the woman commanded.

Her voice was lovely even though she was trying to sound harsh.

Malto attempted to hunch down behind me. After all, I was seated and chained, and he was too tall for my body to hide.

“Drop it or I drop you!” the woman yelled.

Malto did as asked. Over sixty, he kind of had to crawl his way down to the floor.

Four more cops rushed in. They wore riot gear too, brandishing handguns with elongated ammunition clips. And there I was, just another prisoner of war in a time of militarization.

Two more combatants struggled in, carrying between them a staggering Kenneth Rouche. He was bleeding from a cut on the side of his skull. Not shot but hit pretty hard.

“Joe!”

That was Leaf. Behind her came Oliya, armed with a pistol that she had been licensed to carry since her days as an international investigator.

Leaf kissed my cheek as the female cop used a key she’d retrieved from Lamming to unlock my bonds.

“Mr. Oliver,” Carlton Van Arc said. He too was clad in armor, but he wore no helmet and his hands were free of any weapon.

I smiled and said, “You lost me, didn’t ya?”

32.

I’D TAKEN THE two-story Airbnb in Venice because it had enough bedrooms for my friends, just in case they needed a place to lie low.

Late that night Olo, Leaf, Gladstone, and I sat around a dining table large enough for eight, telling our stories of violence, fear, and expertise.

“We got to the jazz club not long after we left you, Joe,” Oliya was saying. “I gave Klaus five hundred dollars—”

“The doorman?”

“That’s him. When I asked Ms. Reese if there was anybody among the staff that she trusted implicitly, she told me that I should talk to Klaus, that he had been her friend since before her nightclub days. Anyway, he told me that he knew most of Mr. Lamming’s drivers, so I asked him to attach a locator device to the car bumper of one or more of them if they showed up tonight.”

“So,” I said, “you bugged the debugger’s car.”

“I was pretty sure that they wouldn’t check their own car for a transmitter, so that seemed like the best way to go. It’s lucky too. You know, that two-doored garage thing would have worked if I hadn’t seen them moving on the screen. That way, we got to the high house no more than five minutes after you did.”

“Yeah,” Leaf added. “When we got there Oliya choked the driver out. I thought she’d killed him.”

“I got to admit,” Olo said, twisting her lips. “His neck was so scrawny that I was afraid that he might break. We got close enough in the house that I could set up a mini-lens to watch what was happenin’ with you and the rapist.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Leaf agreed. “And—and when they chained you to that chair, I sent Van Arc a text. Oliya said that she could stop ’em if they tried anything, but I wanted more.”

“So Van Arc came up quietly,” I reasoned, “and when Travis came to, they made him call out Rouche.”

“Van Arc told Travis that they’d go in guns blazing if he didn’t call to them, and that if anybody died they’d charge him with second-degree murder.”

“And what about Rouche and Lamming?” I asked Glad.

“They can’t hold ’em long. I mean, that is, if you insist on not pressing charges.”

“I’d do it if I thought it’d hold them. I mean, if Oliya wasn’t involved and it was a straightforward police sting, that’d be okay. But Van Arc’s gonna have to say how they got to the house, and any good lawyer could make that look like entrapment. I was hoping that with Dalia’s testimony, and the bodies in New York, you could hold him long enough to extradite.”

“That’s what we’re tryin’ to do now, boyo. They can hold Lamming for a day or two. That should be time enough.”

“I hope so.”