“Let’s say, as sands pass through the hourglass, I’m not sanguine either. Two and two comes out five. It smells like shoddy policework at best, a cover-up to protect corporate assets at worst. Read the report and rap with my sister.”

“Horse, then cart,” I said.

“You’re trying to figure how the lotto dropped your number.”

“Some would note that I’m tall, dark, and handsome. Occurred to me I might be a diversity hire.”

“You’re tall and dark. As it happens, Jonathan Labrador and I are golfing buddies.”

Screw a lottery number, this was the other hobnail shoe dropping.

Labrador, another gold-plated member of the billionaire industrialist club and CEO of the obscenely profitable Zircon Corporation. The corporation’s slicker-than-goose-shit media campaigns featured fresh-faced white kids drilling wells in foreign deserts, establishing communication networks to disadvantaged communities, building high-tech infrastructure, and similar propaganda. Maggots wriggled beneath the shiny façade. Zircon and the Redlick Group were peas in a pod—the former wanted to rule the world via high tech, while the latter cleaved to the tradition of owning all the dirt it could acquire.

Jonathan Labrador was no fan of Isaiah Coleridge. He nursed ill will toward me for several reasons, not the least of which being that an investigation of mine stepped on his toes and led to the death of his estranged brother, the infamous Croatoan. I prayed daily that Labrador knew nothing of my hand in his brother’s death nor my five-fingered withdrawal of one and a half mil from said brother’s nest egg. Possibly worse for our strained relationship was that I menaced his daughter, Delia, during a heated confrontation. Delia Labrador was a force of nature. She and I had since mended fences, kinda-sorta. Alas, Daddy wasn’t sharing the rapport. Then there was her torrid romance with Lionel. Their affair wasn’t popular at the royal court. I imagine the Labradors held me responsible for him as a freeman landholder might be expected to control a manservant or uppity serf.

Disowned, maniac relatives notwithstanding, rich-as-God patriarchs tend to have paper-thin tolerance for meddling detectives who wave guns and occasionally use them. Now came the heretofore hidden consequences. Nothing is ever over. Especially if the nothing is something unpleasant.

“You gamed the system as an alleged lawman,” I said. “Became Redlick’s fixer and Labrador’s golfing buddy. Have to admire a man who plays that many angles.”

“Can’t take full credit—well-connected individuals came courting after Redlick cut me loose. I just had to lie back and enjoy the attention. Wound up consulting for Zircon.”

“Labrador pumped you for secrets.”

“Well, duh. I made it pay off without burning any bridges.”

“Consultation is a refined way of saying, I supplied corporate junkets with hookers and twisted arms of plaintiffs who wouldn’t drop pesky lawsuits.”

“The Outfit-period Coleridge would approve, I promise. Jonny had an opinion of you and your character. Boy, oh, boy did he ever.”

“Choice words, presumably,” I said.

“He described you as . . . I’ll try to be delicate . . . a bully and a thug. Those are your admirable traits. He also indicated that you have huge stones and decidedly situational ethics.”