Gilles poured them coffee in the breakfast room and served sticky buns with a pair of silver pincers. Nicole licked her fingers while she ate.
“Boss,” Gilles said, “the regular service will begin in half an hour.”
“I’m not finished,” Holden rasped at him. And he turned to Raab. “From now on, I pay all my mother’s bills. You’ll have to ask me if you want to have breakfast with her.”
“And what do I get out of all this?” the miser asked.
“My protection. I’ll harm whoever wants to harm you. But you have to let Louiza alone.”
“Holden, for God’s sake, she’s the one who’s been threatening me.”
“That’s ancient history. I want her freed by the time normal folks start their breakfast at the Métropole.”
He got up from the table with Nicole, escorted her out of the hotel, and rode back with her to Jupiterlaan in Vincent van Gogh’s minivan. She kissed him on the mouth.
“Are you still the butcher’s boy?” she asked.
“Always,” Holden said, and he drove out of Forest with the mime, who dropped him off at the Grand-Place and wouldn’t accept any payment.
“Mr. Holden, the pleasure was all mine.”
And Holden didn’t know what to expect when he arrived on the rue du Marchéaux Herbes, crossed the Galerie de la Reine and the Galerie du Roi with a slight trepidation and a tickle in his throat, and wandered into the Mort Subite. The first thing he recognized was her braid of blond hair, and he knew she hadn’t been knocked on the head. He kissed her, not like some gallant, but like a man who could have devoured Louiza. And they clung to each other in front of waiters and customers and the morning crowd on the rue Montagne aux Herbes Potagères.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 2012 by Jerome Charyn
cover design by Mauricio Díaz
978-1-4532-6698-4
Published in 2012 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media
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JEROME CHARYN
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