“As soon as Councilwoman Rosado gets your approval on a DPD substation in Mexicantown, we can resume our conversation,” I said. “Until then, you might want to sleep with a .50 caliber rifle under your pillow.”

“My ass is hangin’ out on this one, Snow!”

“And I couldn’t care less,” I said. “Your paymaster? Sloane? He’s disappeared with ten million cash. Maybe more. I’m betting somebody wants to know where their money is. How much you want to bet that ‘somebody’ will try to sweat both of us, starting with you?”

“Snow!”

While descending the steps of City Hall, I made a call to Lucy Three Rivers.

“Tell me you got everything,” I said.

“From first punch to macho luchadore exit line,” Lucy said.

“Good,” I said. “And you know what to do.”

“I get raw copies out to your FBI friends and to this Leo Cowling dude,” she said. “You do know you’re not gonna come out of this smelling like extra-virgin olive oil?”

“Yeah, I know. But aggravated assault is way less time than racketeering, conspiracy to commit grand larceny and accomplice to murder.” There was a long pause, and not knowing if I’d lost my connection, I said, “Lucy?”

“Yeah, I’m still here,” she said. She drew in a long, slow breath, then said, “If you don’t mind my saying, Sherlock, that beatdown of this Quinn dude and his bodyguards? Pretty savage. You’re starting to worry me. And I don’t really worry about nobody. But you? I kinda look to you when it comes to doing the right thing, ya know? And that was seriously fucked up, dude.”

“My mother died from ovarian cancer during my wrongful dismissal lawsuit,” I said. “She heard and read what that bastard said about me, and it made her sicker. Quinn got off light today, Lucy.”

“Somehow, I don’t think your mom is looking down on her baby boy from a Christian heaven and saying, ‘Yeah! Kick the bloody fuck out of that guy!’” Lucy said. “Just my two cents, Sherlock. Adjusted for inflation.”

23

23

Every fiber of my being wanted Tatina to go.

To run as far away from me as possible.

I could feel what I was becoming and, perhaps, had always been—a perpetually evolving Möbius strip capable of attracting only dark materials while repelling the healing properties of light. One for whom the answer to every problem was the strike of a fist or the squeeze of a trigger. One for whom collateral damage was easily forgiven through a fleeting sanctimonious thought and well-rehearsed Catholic prayer.

I was looking at my hands; they were trembling.

Not from fear but from dark and violent energy yet to be released.

A prince in the kingdom of spilled blood.