“Nah, I’m good.” I gesture with the gun and Letitia and Peter get the hint and sit in a couple of other leather chairs. I stay standing.

“Tish? Peter?”

“I could use an iced tea,” Peter says, as if having a suspected arsonist waving a gun around happens to him all the time.

“Nothing for me,” Letitia says. “Thanks.” There’s a tremor in her voice, but I don’t think it’s fear. At least not fear of me. One of her “colleagues”?

“He killed Attila Werther,” she says.

Chu raises his eyebrow. “Really? Now that’s a feat.”

I wave it off. “He’s not dead. He’s just someplace he doesn’t want to be. He’s a smart boy, he’ll figure a way out before he gets eaten.”

“Your mercy knows no bounds,” Chu says. Two glasses slide into the room hovering at about waist height. They float down to rest on the coffee table, coasters sliding out from a stack to catch them. It’s showing off. It’s a little thing, but I get the feeling that Chu’s the sort of guy who’d use a handshake to assert dominance, or some such bullshit.

He showed me his, it’d only be polite that I do the same. But I resist the urge to slip over to the other side and pop out behind him with my straight razor.

“I notice you don’t seem to have a lot of wards covering this place,” I say. I felt a few when I walked through the door, but nothing impressive. Mostly low-level alarm type stuff. Nothing that would fry an intruder’s brain, say, or melt their eyeballs in their sockets.

He shrugs. “If I’m not here I don’t much care, and if I am, well, I handle it myself.” That tells me pretty much everything I need to know about this guy.

I holster the Browning. There’s no point keeping it out. If things get hairy it’s all going to be tossing spells at each other. If I’m reading him right, keeping it out is just going to be seen as a weakness, and that leads to the kind of fallout that’s more of a pain in the ass than I’m really up for right now.

“All right,” I say. “I’m here. I’m told you had a proposition for me.”

“You spent some time in Mexico recently,” Chu says. “I hear you caused quite a stir with some of the cartels. Must have made some enemies.”

“Oh, you have no idea.”

“Why did you do it?” Peter says. He takes a sip of his tea, blue eyes locked on me like missiles.

“Since I was in Mexico, I figured I’d murder a bunch of cartel assholes.” Letitia gives me another one of those looks like back in the car, like she doesn’t want to believe me, but does, anyway.