“Grand Wizard’s the Klan,” Bailey corrected.
“Thank you,” I deadpanned. “I appreciate you saving me from the mortifying experience of referring to some douche-nozzle skinhead by the wrong title.”
Bailey dropped her napkin on the table, then put on her shoulder holster and checked the magazine of her Glock. Taking her cue, I went to the dresser where I kept my firepower and pulled out the biggest gun I had-the.44-caliber H & K. My recent assault had given me a whole new perspective on self-defense. I would’ve taken a bazooka if I’d had one.
“I’d go easy on the douche-nozzle too,” Bailey said, picking up her overcoat. “At least until we’re off the compound.”
Compound?
“Dominic Rostoni lives on a compound in Calabasas,” Bailey said. “He’s a skinhead and an entrepreneur.”
“Great,” I said. I popped the magazine into my.44, checked to make sure the safety was on, and put it into my purse.
“We’re going to have to leave these in the car,” Bailey said, gesturing to our guns. “There’s no way they’re letting us in if we’re strapped.”
We shared a long look. If our chat with Dominic didn’t pan out the way we hoped, safety was going to be an issue for both of us.
I did what I could with makeup and concealer and presented myself to Bailey.
“What do you think?” I asked.
She looked at my face and shrugged. “It’s as good as you’re going to get.”
With those encouraging words, we headed out to Bailey’s car. I had to move slowly at first, which frustrated me. I didn’t want to hobble into this meeting like a ninety-year-old-especially if it was one of his minions who’d attacked me. I pulled myself up straight and forced myself to walk as normally as I could. It was pretty slow going, and I’d have to remember not to wince, but I thought I pulled off a pretty good semblance of normal.
While Bailey drove, I surreptitiously tried to stretch and work out the kinks. I wanted to keep my little rehab efforts on the down low, because if Bailey saw, she might cancel the meeting and hustle me back to bed. I could not let that happen. The possibility that this cretin Dominic was behind my attack had me good and mad, and I was spoiling to confront this son of a bitch.
We’d picked a good time to travel. At 10:30 a.m., the northbound traffic on the 101 Freeway was light. We flew up through Hollywood, Studio City, Tarzana, and Woodland Hills. As we headed toward Calabasas, stores and strip malls gave way to rolling green hills and the Santa Monica Mountains. Calabasas itself was once a bucolic one-horse town with open fields and a hitching post in front of the post office. But in recent years, developers had seen the possibilities of catering to the newly moneyed families who wanted a quiet place to raise their children. Now it was an upscale suburban enclave filled with gated communities, McMansions, and plush estates. But there were still rural pockets where the roads were barely paved and the animal population outnumbered the humans.
Dominic’s compound was nestled in one of them.
Bailey got off at Las Virgenes and headed west, toward the Santa Monica Mountains. If we stayed on that road, it’d take us to Malibu in minutes. But our destination was on the Calabasas side of the mountain. Bailey turned left onto Mulholland, then made another left onto a wide country road.
The air was clean and crisp, and the sky was a cloudless cornflower blue. In a fenced pasture on the right, beautifully groomed horses galloped and played, their manes flying, and in a large open stable on the left, equally well-kept horses stomped their hooves and whinnied to one another. Goats and sheep grazed on the hillside above the pasture, and a family of cows huddled on a hill just beyond the stables. Giant oak and maple trees that undoubtedly provided welcome shade in the summer but were now bare-limbed lined both sides of the road. We stopped to let two ranch hands holding the reins of a pair of gorgeous platinum-gray mares cross the street. It was hard to believe that just forty minutes ago, we were surrounded by concrete and skyscrapers.
Bailey turned right, into a driveway that was closed off by ten-foot gates with cameras mounted on the posts. A concrete wall of equal height surrounded the front portion of the property. The back abutted rolling, wooded hills. From what I could see, the residence was a single-story ranch-style home of about seven thousand square feet that sat on at least an acre and a half of land. Bailey pushed a button below a speaker on the right side of the gate and gave our names. There was no response. We waited thirty seconds, but just as she’d reached out to push the button again, the gates slowly swung inward.
The driveway led us onto a road that wove through lush shrubbery and mature trees and ended in a horseshoe driveway. We pulled to a stop at the apex of the arc, where two muscle-bound six-footers in blue do-rags guarded the front door. I’d call them a welcoming committee, but they didn’t look all that welcoming. I decided not to let this hurt my feelings.
“We’re about to get frisked,” Bailey said. “Try not to give anyone your phone number.”
We exchanged a “here goes nothing” look and got out of the car.
The thug on the right spun his finger in a circle, gesturing for us to turn and “assume the position”-i.e., face the car, with our hands on the roof. We complied, and they ran their hands across our arms, down our sides, and all over our legs and ankles. Then they patted our torsos, front and back. It wasn’t rough, but it was thorough, and in my current condition, any touch hurt like hell. I clamped my jaws together to keep from wincing.
I considered making the standard joke about at least buying me a drink but rejected the idea. What if they took me up on the offer?
We followed them into a foyer with dark-wood floors and walls lined with photographs of gleaming motorcycles of all shapes, sizes, and colors. The sign in the background of one of the photographs told me what had built this mansion. Motorcycles-exquisitely customized ones-were big business. Our escorts gave us no time to linger and steered us directly into a room that would ordinarily be called a study, except no one was ever going to study anything in here. Instead of the usual dark leather and mahogany, the room was carpeted in a champagne-colored low-pile topped off with burnt-orange throw rugs. A latticed window gave the sunlight a gentle glow, and the biggest flat screen I’d ever seen presided over a grouping of soft, cushy burnt-orange couches and reclining chairs at the other end of the room. I noticed that our host was already seated on one of the reclining chairs, and we were steered to the couch nearest to him. I lowered myself onto the farthest spot on the end of the sofa slowly, hoping it would make me look cool and defiant rather than stiff and sore.
Dominic Rostoni did not look Italian. With shoulder-length white-blond hair, ruddy, pitted skin from an early siege of acne, and dark-brown eyes, he looked more Nordic than Neapolitan. And although it couldn’t have been more than fifty degrees outside, he was wearing just a wifebeater, jeans, and flip-flops.
“You’re the cop.” He looked at Bailey. “And you’re the DA,” he said to me.
“And you’re PEN1’s CEO,” I replied, just to show I’d prepared too.
“It’s not a crime,” he replied, his voice relaxed, conversational.
This was true. It wasn’t a crime to belong to a gang. It was only a crime to do crimes with a gang.
“You remember the case where the Glendale cop got murdered in his own basement?” I asked.
Dominic frowned a moment and stared out the window.
“That the one where the wife cut off his head with an ax?” he asked.
Not much I could add to that, so I nodded.