Kitty started at the beginning and talked for a long time, and Luke realized there were occasions when you didn’t have to say anything at all.

Sometimes it was better to just listen.

12
In a Bad Place

The dude with the shaved skull entered Kitty’s apartment building at 3:13 p.m. The bulky Black dude—Ruben Osterfeld; Luke had seen some of his UFC bouts—exited at 3:17. There was nothing surreptitious about their movements. They came and went as if they lived there.

No sign of the Viking.

Luke had looked him up online, though, and he wasn’t hard to find. Johan Fly had two YouTube channels, each with over four million subscribers. One was for video games. The other—Vibin’ Viking—followed Johan through the streets of Los Angeles, usually cruising in his Mustang, hanging with his homies, or barhopping on the Strip. He came across as a big personality, the life and soul of the party. The kids no doubt loved him, but Luke saw a privileged douchebag who thought way too much of himself, and who likely hadn’t struggled for anything his entire life.

“It’s a front,” he’d said to Kitty, the YouTube video paused on a shot of Johan pumping free weights at Muscle Beach. “All gangsters hide behind a legitimate business. This is his. It’s very Gen Z.”

“I guess.” Kitty couldn’t look at Johan for long. She pushed Luke’s cell phone away with a shudder. “Doesn’t seem very Viking, though.”

“That’s because Johan Fly isn’t a Viking,” Luke said. “He’s a rich, entitled asshole from the Palisades.”

“Tell that to Sly Boy.”

Kitty was right. Johan was asking his subscribers to “hit the ‘like’ button” one moment, and beheading rival drug dealers the next. The guy was dangerously charismatic, and seriously unbalanced—a psychosis that could only lead to ruin.

Luke searched beyond the social media persona, looking for evidence of this psychosis. He found nothing. There were numerous pictures of Johan as a chubby preteen: fly-fishing at Piru Creek with his old man, posing alongside the new family Maserati, standing outside a Viking ship museum in Denmark. There was an article in Three-Tier Online about Johan’s decision to turn down UCLA in favor of developing his YouTube career. The most incriminating thing was a disturbing-the-peace incident in which Johan used “fighting words” with a doorman at the Mondrian. The police were called, the situation was defused, and Johan was sent home with a slap on the wrist.

Perhaps Luke didn’t dig deep enough, but bitter experience had taught him that shit had a tendency to float to the top, which suggested that Johan had been extremely careful over the years, or that he had friends in high places.

Probably both.

“The heavy with the skull tattoos just showed up at your apartment.”