“Fifty-five-gallon drum and forty gallons of acid?”

He smiled like a shark and looked every bit as deadly. “That is a good one. Perhaps I should add that to my repertoire. Would you like to be the first?”

“No,” I said calmly. “Do you want to find out who killed Irina?”

“Yes.”

“Then let me do my job.”

“You spent half the day with those men.”

“Yes, I did. Did you expect me to just ask the group over drinks whether or not any of them killed her? And did you expect any of them to just stand up and say, ”Why, yes, I killed her. Why do you ask?“”

He’d had it with my mouth. He took two aggressive steps forward, bringing a thick hand up to strike me or to grab me.

I pulled the 9mm from my waistband behind my back and planted it squarely between Kulak’s eyes, stopping him in his tracks.

“Don’t you fucking touch me,” I said, in a very different tone of voice.

My anger pushed him back a step, and then another. I stayed with him, never losing the contact between the gun barrel and his forehead. He backed up until he was trapped against his car. His eyes were wide with surprise or fear or both.

“You will never touch me again,” I declared, adrenaline humming through me like a narcotic. “I will fucking kill you where you stand. Don’t think for a second that I wouldn’t do it. I would kill you and stand on your corpse and howl at the moon.”

He was breathing shallowly and quickly. He didn’t think I was bluffing. Good. He needed to know he wasn’t the only unpredictable one in this strange arrangement.

I backed off and lowered the gun to my side. A car was coming toward the gate. The driver opened it with his remote control, drove through and on, never so much as glancing at us in curiosity.

“Which one do you suspect?” he asked.

“I don’t have a favorite, and I’m not a psychic. I need a lead, a witness, to catch someone in a lie,” I said. “If you want a quicker solution than that, why don’t you have a couple of your associates beat it out of them one at a time?”

He hesitated, looked a little away from me. Odd, I thought.

“This is my business,” he said. “My personal business.”

Alexi Kulak was the boss in his world. He could have snapped his fingers, and no one would ever see Jim Brody, or Bennett Walker, or any of that crowd again.

I shrugged. “Kill them all and let God sort it out.”

“That is what you would do?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I would do it all quietly, patiently. I would gather evidence and speak to her friends. I would speak to anyone who might have seen her that night, no matter how unlikely it may be that they would have an answer. By the time I went in for the kill, I would have absolutely no question who had murdered her. And I would have absolutely no mercy for that person.

“That’s what I would do,” I said. “That’s what I am doing. If you want to do it another way, that’s your business.”

He sighed and sat back against his car, his broad shoulders slumping. He rubbed his hands over his face. His head was bowed.

“This pain,” he said, rubbing a fist against his chest. “It is a thing that never ends. I want to scream it out of me. It is like a fire, and it burns and burns, and there is nothing I can do to put it out. I am mad with it.”

I actually felt bad for him. What an odd moment. Here was a man so ruthless he probably started his day eating the eyeballs he had plucked from enemies and traitors, and yet he was just a man, and he was grieving and in pain.

“You feel like you’re caged with a demon,” I said. “You can’t escape it. You can’t run away. There’s nowhere to hide.”

He looked at me, and his face shone with tears he had tried to wipe away. “You’ve known this pain?”

“I know what it’s like to want so badly to reverse the past that I would have turned myself inside out to do it,” I said quietly, thinking of the day Deputy Hector Ramirez had taken a hollow-point bullet in the face, blowing out the back of his skull and leaving his wife a widow and his children fatherless. Because of me. I knew what that pain was. The pain of guilt.

And I knew all about the pain of loss. Not of having a dream just fade away, but of having it yanked away and smashed before my eyes. I refused to let the faces surface in my mind. The pain came anyway, like an old friend who would just walk in the front door without knocking.

“Let me do my job, Mr. Kulak,” I said. “Then you can do yours.”

Without waiting for him to say anything, I went back to my car, did a U-turn on the street, and drove back toward Wellington.

“I would speak to anyone who might have seen her that night, no matter how unlikely it may be that they would have an answer.”

My own words came back to me, as did the vision of the strange woman who had approached Barbaro and me in the parking lot at Players the night before.

… no matter how unlikely…

Chapter 27

I swung into the drive-through at Burger King for sustenance to go, then continued on down Greenview Shores to South Shore. I pulled into the lower parking lot at Players and sat there for a while, trying to choke down a few bites of a chicken sandwich. I didn’t feel like eating. I felt like drinking.

It had been a long and taxing day already, and the night was young. My head spun with flashbacks of Landry, and Barbaro, and Bennett Walker. I could see Billy Quint squinting up at me from his wheelchair. I could see Bennett’s cold, flat eyes as he stared at he waitress in the 7th Chukker and the look he gave me when he said, “I’m surprised you didn’t go into sex-crimes investigation.” taunting me, and enjoying it.

In point of fact, I had gone into Sex Crimes when I got my detective’s shield. It hadn’t lasted long. My captain called me overzealous, sent me for a psych evaluation, and transferred me to Narcotics, where everyone was a little bit crazy and overzealous-less was considered a virtue.

I had secretly been relieved, afraid that if I stayed in Sex Crimes I would have ended up killing a suspect out of my own fury and hurt.

Fury and hurt. My emotions were bouncing between the two like the ball in a game of Pong. If I thought about it long enough, I would realize how exhausted I was, and I would start thinking about what a mess my life had been to date and how I didn’t see it getting any better. And things would go downhill from there.

Instead, I took the Burger King bag and set it on the hood so that my car wouldn’t have that nasty BO stench of cold, uneaten fast food when I got back into it later.

I looked around the parking lot, casually walked around, stared hard into the night, where the sodium vapor light faded to black and the parking lot gave way to grass and trees. Though I had the creepy feeling of eyes staring back at me, I couldn’t see anyone. Maybe later.

As I approached the front of the club, I pulled a snapshot of Irina and Lisbeth out of my clutch and walked up to the valet stand. The kid working was tall and gangly and looked like a goose with acne. His eyes went wide at the sight of my fat lip.

“You should see the other guy,” I said.

“Huh?”

The future of America.

“Were you working Saturday night?”

“No.”

“Do you know anyone who was working Saturday night?”

“Yeah…”

He paused so long I thought he had gone catatonic.

“… Jeff was.”

Jeff looked up as he came around the back of a white Lexus, stuffing his tip money in the pocket of his baggy black pants.

“Jeff was what?” he asked.

“Working Saturday night,” I said.

He cut his friend a look like he had just ratted him out to the homeroom teacher. This one was a foot shorter than the other one, with orange hair and a cowlick.

“Yeah,” he said reluctantly, as if he would have much preferred to lie to me. Little weasel.