Nothing left to do. No options.
Barney unholstered his .40 and put five rounds through the windows in front of the morgue, aiming high, hoping not to hit anybody. The sheet glass caved in with a breathtaking racket, people screamed, hollered and sought cover, alarms sounded, and pretty soon there would be police swarming.
Barney crawled toward his car, hands and knees the whole way, cringing at honking traffic.
After parking on Ocean Boulevard and punching the steering wheel a few times to vent his backlog of adrenalin, Barney refreshed his SIG Sauer and walked toward the hotel entrance, where he spotted Erica Ledbetter crossing the lobby in a brisk hurry.
She coded as feminine right down to the ground: attractive ankles, hell on heels, calves with the precise roundness to stop traffic at a leg crossing, the classic hourglass, real hips. She lacked the insectile height of fashion models, but put her in a bikini magazine spread where height is a digitally enhanced mystery and all you’d ever notice were those soft-shoulder, dangerous-when-wet curves. Her padding was all to her advantage and she lacked the bovine look of women who fret about dress size. This woman never fretted about anything. You could read her determination in the precise cut of jaw, the elegant neck, the eyes so blue they hurt to look at, like pure cyan broken off the sun’s spectrum and laser-refracted through a crystal. She was the woman Barney had seen in Carl’s photograph, but distilled into something more fierce.
She walked like a woman with a mission, and Barney managed to trap her in the elevator, alone.
“Wow, I always wanted a new man in my life, and voila,” she said, startled yet not surprised. “I’ll assume that’s a gun in my ribs, and not that you’re happy to see me.”
“Overjoyed,” said Barney. “Stay in the corner. Hold the rails. Bag on the floor.”
Now she was looking at him directly. “You’re him,” she said. “Carl’s guy.”
From the bag Barney extracted a ten-shot, Black Melonite-coated Cobra Patriot in .380. He quickly popped the magazine. Three rounds gone.
It might have been any of them walking into the kill zone back at the gun range, but Sirius had drawn the duty. The hole in his head had not come from a guy with a four thousand dollar rifle, but someone who got close enough to shoot point-blank, perhaps with this pistol.
The illuminated numerals crawled toward the fourth floor. “What do I call you?” said Barney.
“Who cares?” she said. “What’s in a name?”
She fostered dislike, but apparently did not care, even with a gun pointed at her. She was far too attractive to be smiling at her captor now and saying, “It’s nice to meet you at last,” as though they were headed for a high school reunion. She should have had hazard tape on her forehead, and Barney was acutely aware of a completely different kind of arsenal coming into play.
“If you have any sort of special knock, or code, don’t break it to warn him,” said Barney, meaning Tannenhauser. “If there is gunfire, lady, you are going to be point number one, I swear it.”
“Whatever,” she said, as though this had all been rehearsed. Her sheer indifference was disorienting.
He swept the hall. No bystanders.
“Oh, the drama,” she said. “It’s not necessary. Listen, Tannenhauser is not going to shoot you. I promise.”
Barney indicated she should use her key card and walk through first anyway.
They were top floor in one of the Miramar’s biggest suites, and she strolled in on those fabulous legs as though she owned a controlling interest in the hotel.
“Slow down,” Barney said.
“Relax,” she returned. “Look, I did not kill your friend.” She headed for a fully stocked roll-in cocktail counter that must have billed at a good $1200.
“Sit in the chair right there.”
“And stay?” she said impishly. “Woof. I am going to fix myself a drink for our little talk. You’re welcome to one too, but I don’t expect you’ll take one and relax.”
She set about concocting a bourbon and branch water while Barney stared at her. “This isn’t some kind of goddamned meeting, lady,” he said.
“Yes it is,” she said. “A meeting. You’ll see.”
Barney half-expected Tannenhauser to saunter out in a smoking jacket with a martini, to deliver an opening line like Gentlemen, I’m sure we can clear up this little misunderstanding... before attempting to buy, bribe, lie or kill his way clear.
The bedroom double doors were open and the curtains drawn. Dark inside. Feet in silk socks, no shoes, dangled from the king bed.
Tannenhauser — El Chingon — was spreadeagled across the down comforter, one tiny bloodsmear on the fabric and three bullet holes in his chest, a compact and lethal shot group. Both his eyes matched now, gazing sightlessly in two different directions. The tip of his tongue protruded from his slack lips. He had not been dead for very long, his body still cooling, courting rigor mortis.
She stirred her drink and kept her seat. “Now can we talk?”
“I guess he outlived his usefulness, too,” Barney said. “Like all of them — Felix Rainer, Carl... me.”
She made a dismissive gesture with her glass. “Felix was a nervous, impotent little paranoid that needed adventurous solutions. Carl was a loser looking to win the lottery.” She indicated the bedroom, where Tannenhauser had not yet been dead an hour. “He was... greedy. And kind of nasty. He was going to kill you himself when you got here, did you know that part?”
There was no place in the room where Barney could be comfortable holding a gun on this woman. There was no place on the planet where he could be comfortable even being near her. He felt an irretrievable black-mamba vibe warning him to stay sharp. She was too reassuring, too easy to look at, and he should just add lead to her diet and hustle away. But uncannily, she seemed to sense his need to know things. Radar was one of her primary weapons.
She made a little frown and continued: “After his man killed your friend — I forget which one — Tannenhauser knew you’d come here. I think his vile little plan was to kill me, then you, wrap us up, and get out.” She shrugged. “I changed the plan.”
“You fucked them all,” Barney said with unconscious marvel.
“I don’t know that who I sleep with has anything to do with anything,” she said with false outrage.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, well...” She shrugged; no biggie. “Tanny was a greedy entrepreneur looking for the next big score. He and Carl and Felix were like one personality split up into three parts. Putting them together was obvious.”
“You mean playing them off of each other.”
“Semantics. I put them together and the deal invented itself. I don’t vouch for the workability of it.”
“Meaning: you were clean no matter what happened.”
“Now you’re getting it.”
“All you had to do was seduce each of them.”
She emitted a pfffhht sound of annoyance. “All I did was utilize the chemistry. You’re big enough to have learned there’s no such thing as romance, right? It’s all DNA. Romance and love are the window dressing with which we tart up our vulgar biology; we use it to excuse our animal hungers in an attempt to delude ourselves that we are some sort of higher being. We’re not, you know.” She narrowed her eyes at him even as the pheromones flew off her skin like mustard gas. “You do know that, yes?”
“I know about black widow spiders,” said Barney. “I know about the preying mantis, chomping the head off the male after sex.”