Grave of Angels

by Michael Prescott

  There wasn’t a lot he could do. But he could try to learn about Loki. Check out his betting history, trace his IP address, maybe uncover his identity. He hunched over his keyboard.

  “Get comfortable, Elke or Ellie,” he whispered. “This may take a while.”

  PHILIPPE’S Raw Bar smelled of oysters. Or maybe clams. Some sort of mollusks, anyway. Kate caught the scent as she stepped into the restaurant. The smell went with the nautical theme—fishnets strung from the rafters, ship’s wheel on the wall. In LA, bad taste became good taste if it was just bad enough.

  In a corner booth, snapping his stubby fingers to get her attention, sat Sal French. She strode toward him through a blare of piped-in Paul Anka.

  Sal French was a singer himself, specializing in old standards. He was famous for his mellow voice, his artful phrasing, and his temper tantrums. He’d once been surreptitiously recorded chewing out his band members; the remarkably foulmouthed tirade had gone viral on the web.

  Up close, he was nearly bald, shorter than he wanted to be, and rheumy-eyed. He stood, assuming the bandy-legged pose of a pugnacious drunk. Sal didn’t drink. He was just obnoxious by nature.

  “Hey, Sal,” she said without enthusiasm. She nodded to Sal’s bodyguard, Vincent Di Milo, whom everybody naturally called Venus behind his back.

  “You get my message?” Sal asked unnecessarily. “Good. That’s good. We have a situation here.”

  “Involving your security escort?” Kate guessed.

  “Right. Yeah. Him.” Sal jabbed a thumb into Di Milo’s chest, not the most intelligent move, given that Di Milo stood six foot six and could crush a Campbell’s soup can in his hand. “And by the way, apropos of nothing, why have I got only one bodyguard?”

  “Isn’t one enough?”

  “You’re the expert. You tell me. See that numbnuts over there?”

  She followed Sal’s finger to a lean figure with salt-and-pepper hair, seated in another corner booth across the room. “Carson Banning,” she said.

  “That prick just started sporting two bodyguards. Not one—two. He used to have one, but now he’s doubled up. And he’s not half as famous as me. Probably doesn’t get half the death threats I do, either.”

  It seemed a dubious thing to brag about. “I’m not responsible for Mr. Banning’s security.”

  “You don’t want to be.” Sal seated himself with fussy dignity and picked up a breadstick, brandishing it like a weapon. “Guy’s a prize dickwad. Over the hill. Not even chasing tail anymore. You never see him with any arm candy. Hey, I ever lose my touch with the ladies, take me out and shoot me, you know what I’m saying?”

  Sal was on his fourth marriage, each wife younger than the last. At the rate he was going, his next bride would be in elementary school.

  Kate slid onto the banquette opposite him. “I don’t think you called me here to discuss a movie star’s sex life.”

  “Movie star.” He snorted. “Banning hasn’t had a hit in three years. Fucking has-been. Yesterday’s news. My last album went double platinum.”

  Sal’s last album had been released a decade ago.

  “Can we stick to the subject?”

  “Right. I want this asshole replaced.” Another jab at Di Milo, poking him in the ribs this time.

  Kate waited for the bodyguard to tear off Sal French’s arm and beat him to death with it. When that didn’t happen, she forced herself to reply. “Mr. Di Milo is one of our very best.”

  “I don’t like him.”

  “Why is that?”

  “He just rubs me the wrong way. No sense of humor.”

  “You said your last bodyguard was too friendly.”

  “He was.”

  “The one before that had a gold tooth you found distasteful.”

  “He looked like a heavy in a Scorsese flick.”

  “And now you’re dissatisfied with Mr. Di Milo because he’s not funny enough?”

  “Right. He’s got no verve, no life in him. I like a guy that cracks a smile once in a while. So he’s gone. Get me a new one.”

  A slow burn of anger traveled through her. Anger at this smiling turd with a comb-over and bling glittering on his fingers who imagined himself superior to Vince Di Milo. Vince had three daughters of whom he was fiercely proud and a wife he’d nursed through lymphoma.

  Calmly she said, “I’m not replacing him.”

  “You have to. I’m telling you to. I insist on it. I demand it.”

  Kate shrugged. “In that case, you’re fired.”

  Sal nodded, blinked, and did a comical double take. “Huh?”

  “I’m through with you. Adios.”

  “You can’t fire me. You work for me.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “God damn it, I’m a paying client. You can’t fucking treat me like this.”

  Kate smiled at him, a smile of knives and razors. “Let me tell you a story,” she said. “When I was eighteen years old, I married a guy in Jersey.”

  “You got married? I thought you were—”

  “A nun. That came later. Stay with me, Sal. Back then I was a bit on the wild side. The man I married was twenty years older than me. His name was James. He insisted on being called that, not Jim, never Jimmy. He’d inherited some money. He thought it made him a big man. I did too. We decided to move out West, so we drove his Alfa Romeo across country. One night in a Ramada Inn he got drunk and started beating on me. Really worked me over. I’d never seen that side of him before.

  “Next day we’re driving through the desert in New Mexico when James gets out to take a leak. I floor the gas and take off, leave him jumping up and down, waving his arms and screaming. Not another car in sight. No rest stop for fifty miles. That was the end of our marriage.”

  She sat there, arms folded.

  “So?” Sal said after a puzzled silence. “What’s your point?”

  “My point is, if I could ditch my own husband that easily, what makes you think I’d have any trouble ditching a washed-up gasbag like you?” She stood. “Vince, take the rest of the night off.”

  Di Milo, who prized economy of speech, answered with a nod and walked away. Kate moved to follow. Sal was suddenly alone at his table. “Hold on a minute. I’m high and dry here. What am I supposed to do about protection?”

  “Wear a rubber.”

  As she was leaving she looked across the room and caught Carson Banning’s eye.

  THE restaurant was in a Century City shopping plaza with a multilevel parking garage, the kind of place where Deep Throat might turn up. Kate located the limo easily enough, a custom-built Mercedes with tinted windows, parked near the elevator as always. To make a quick getaway, he liked to say.

  She waited by the car, assessing the damage she’d done tonight. Already, she’d alienated the Brewers and terminated her relationship with Sal French. At the rate she was going, soon she wouldn’t have any clients left.

  She missed Barney. He’d had people skills. When she had met him, she’d been a novice working the streets. He’d worked the patrol side of the LAPD for thirty years, never trying to make detective. He retired only when his supervisors made him give up riding a squad car. Riding a desk wasn’t for him.

  He used to come by the church and drop off canned food. He liked talking to the nuns.

  But he worried about Kate. She had a reputation as someone who went looking for trouble. She would meet with street kids in their hangouts, venturing into crack dens and meth houses. Once, she’d had a gun held to her head by a paranoid dealer who swore she was a narc. Another time, she’d received a cut on her arm, the work of a switchblade; it had required sixteen stitches in the ER.

  If she insisted on placing herself in harm’s way, Barney said, at least she could know how to handle trouble.

  He taught her how to outmaneuver an attacker, fend off a knife, spot a concealed weapon. How to know someone was lying. How to shake off a tail. How to use a gun. It’s not always feasible to turn the other cheek, he said. Sometimes
you gotta kick some ass.

  Now he was gone—dead for two years—and damn, she wished he were still around.

  The elevator doors opened and Carson Banning emerged. He swept the area with a glance to be sure they were alone.

  “I don’t have a lot of time,” she said.

  “We’ll make this quick.”

  Multiple thumps—the car doors unlocking. She slid into the backseat. He followed, shutting the door. She pushed him down into the leather bench seat and freed him from his trousers. Lifted his wallet from his back pocket, found a condom, inserted it between her lips. Bending to him, she worked the condom into place with her mouth. He was fully erect when he pulled free. She rose, finding herself already wet—pleasant surprise—and settled atop him as he raised her skirt and the car began to rock.

  The rocking continued for some unaccountable period of time, driving all thoughts from her mind, erasing all awareness except the intensity of his need and hers, until an electric flash ignited in the pit of her stomach and shivered like a sizzle of voltage, ending in a bloom of white light.

  They lay together, side by side, in the tinted-window dimness. “Saw you talking to Sal,” he said finally. “You on the clock?”

  “It’s all work and no play in the security game. Speaking of which, where’s your muscle?”

  “I thought I’d made that reasonably obvious.”

  “Not that muscle. The hired kind.”

  “I told them I was using the bathroom.”

  “They’ll be looking for you by now.”

  “Not yet. I said I was making number two.”

  “Wow, too much information.”

  He smiled, but his face turned pensive when he asked, “Any news?”

  About his daughter, he meant. Carson Banning and his ex-wife shared custody of sixteen-year-old Amber. The girl had been staying with her dad when she had sneaked out of the house ten days ago, leaving an angry note. They’d had an argument, and now she was gone, a runaway. Banning had asked Kate to find her, and to keep it quiet. If the tabloids found out, they would turn a family crisis into a media free-for-all.

  “If there were,” Kate said quietly, “I’d already have told you.”

  “Right. I know.” He checked his watch. “Well…my escorts will be getting antsy.”

  They got out of the car and parted with a kiss. She walked to the Jag, her footsteps echoing on the concrete, bouncing off the colonnaded pillars.

  Sometimes it bothered her that she was willing to meet Banning like this, for a quick, almost wordless encounter. It seemed wrong to need sex that badly. Especially given her background. She had been ready to sign a vow of chastity, after all. Would have done so if she’d remained a nun. And leaving the order hadn’t been her choice.

  She remembered Barney asking her once if the whole chastity thing didn’t seem a little, you know, medieval.

  Medieval is what the Church is, she’d answered. It isn’t a dot-com startup. There’s a history. You sign on for the whole package.

  But didn’t it bother her, he’d pressed, the prospect of being celibate for life?

  She’d told him that at that particular point in her life, she hadn’t been too interested in having sex again.

  Barney’d thought about that. Either she’d had a very bad experience, he’d said, or she was punishing herself for something.

  It was a little of both, Kate had said.

  In her car, she checked her office voice mail. All Guardian Angel bodyguards were required to leave a message when they moved to a new location. Grange reported that Chelsea Brewer had left Stiletto and progressed to Panic Room.

  She thought she might head over there. Could be a good idea to double-team Chelsea for the rest of the night.

  Grange wouldn’t like it, but it wasn’t his call.

  PANIC Room was smaller than Stiletto, the dancing less frenetic, but still there were stroboscopic downspots dappling the dance floor, a crush of people, the reek of beer. A rock combo on a little stage riffed on speeded-up covers of old C&W tunes. At the front of the club was a lounge with a lower decibel level.

  That was where Swann hid the package.

  It was a small package, easily concealed under his jacket. In the lounge, he pretended to drop something, stooped to pick it up, and pressed the package against a table leg. The putty on its underside would hold it in place.

  Later, when the time was right, he would use the remote control to set it off.

  For now, his priority was to get Chelsea Brewer into the bathroom. It wouldn’t be hard.

  Swann had held many jobs. For a while he had worked as a carnival roustabout. He’d learned the art of misdirection from a carnie named Pistol Pete, who had run a dart-the-balloon scam on the midway. Theoretically, a successful throw would puncture a balloon, revealing a tag that entitled the winner to a lavish gift. In reality, the game was gaffed with underinflated balloons and dull darts, and the prizes were rigged. Pricey gifts like plush toys and clock radios were prominently displayed, but all the tags under the balloons were for cheap “slum”—plastic combs, ballpoint pens, emery boards.

  Occasionally a mark would demand to see the unexposed tags. Pete would make a show of revealing valuable gift tags under the remaining balloons. Of course, the tags had never really been there. It was sleight of hand, and when he got drunk, which was often, Pete would show Swann how he palmed the real tag and substituted the phony.

  Later, Swann ran a game of three-card monte in the subways of Chicago. The rubes never saw the money card change places with the losing card in the throw. Like the carnival marks, they saw what they expected to see.

  He was counting on the same ruse tonight. He knew it would work because people were the same everywhere. They were sound asleep, living in a dream world. He was awake and alert and he could beat them. He’d been beating them all his life.

  He waited till there was a break in the music, when Chelsea Brewer got herself a rum and Coke, her invariable cocktail of choice. She chugged most of it, requested a refill, and when a new song started up, left the brimming glass with the bodyguard, next to her handbag with the poodle inside. Then she was back on the dance floor, spazzing around with her ugly gal pal and a half dozen doofuses hoping to score.

  Swann stepped up to the other end of the bar, well away from the bodyguard, and exchanged a ten-dollar bill for a Cuba libre. The bartender, juggling bottles to pad his tips, never noticed when Swann slipped a syringe out of his pocket. The syringe held five grams of GHB, dissolved in ten milliliters of water. His hands hidden, Swann dispensed the solution into the drink.

  Holding the glass, he sidled up to Chelsea’s yojimbo. The goon recognized him up close. “Bouncer’s not doing his job. He was supposed to keep you out.”

  “That so?” Swann had slipped the bouncer fifty bucks to look the other way. “What’s your beef with me?”

  “You’re harassing our client.”

  Swann set down his glass near Chelsea’s drink. “I’m just clubbing, bro.”

  “You were at Stiletto.”

  “So were a lot of people.”

  The two of them stood measuring each other. The bodyguard was a big man, but in a throwdown, what mattered was quickness, skill—and experience. It was doubtful the yojimbo had ever killed anyone. He would know how to do it, but the knowledge was theoretical. Swann knew in his nerve endings, knew with the deep knowing that predators had.

  “Nice dog,” Swann said with a glance at the pink handbag. “Yours?”

  “Funny man.”

  Swann reached out to touch the poodle. It growled. “Not too friendly, is he?”

  The bodyguard took a step closer. “Dog doesn’t like you. I don’t like you. Walk away.”

  “You don’t want me near your client, get a restraining order. For now, I want to watch her dance.” He flicked a thumb in Chelsea’s direction, and reflexively, the bodyguard glanced away.

  Swann was sipping a cocktail when the man turned back.

&nbs
p; “She’s not putting on a show for you. Get going. I won’t ask again.”

  “You didn’t exactly ask the first time,” Swann said, but he moved off.

  “I’m watching you,” the bodyguard warned.

  Not closely enough, Swann thought. He walked away with Chelsea’s rum and Coke, leaving the spiked drink on the bar.

  When he looked across the dance floor, he saw Chelsea standing frozen. She’d just seen him, recognized him. He was pleased she remembered.

  Swann himself had never forgotten. Though he had seen her just once, in Colorado, when she was a little scrap of a thing, and though it was only a glimpse through a window, he’d always remembered her wide eyes and pale, childish face. He had smiled at her, and she had ducked out of sight, and he’d laughed. Sam’s daughter, he had guessed, though until then he’d been only vaguely aware that Sam had any family at all.

  He wasn’t sure why the momentary encounter stuck in his memory. Maybe because he hadn’t expected a sewer rat like Sam Brewer to bring anything so wholesome into the world.

  In the years since, Chelsea Brewer had become a star, and Swann had occasionally come across her image on magazine covers and in TV ads. He was hardly the sort of person who followed celebrity news, but he was aware that the scared girl from the Colorado trailer park had made a name for herself. It was more than her father had ever done. Swann respected her for it. The planet was crowded with mediocrities who’d been dealt a better hand in life than Chelsea Brewer had, and who’d pissed it away. To fight your way clear of Sam Brewer’s negligent upbringing and become a Tinseltown millionaire was a rare accomplishment, the kind Swann could appreciate. He admired anyone who stood out from the bovine herd.

  And sometimes he wondered if he’d had anything to do with it. If maybe the flash of fear he’d seen in her face had electrified her into taking chances she might otherwise have missed. If her sight of him, brief though it had been, had opened her up to the possibilities of a larger life.

  Probably not. But you never knew about these things, did you?