Sacred (Kenzie & Gennaro 3)

“I—”

“One,” Angie said.

Her eyes welled up. “I just want to be sure—”

“Two.”

Desiree looked at me, but I gave her nothing back.

“Three.”

“Look—”

“Four.” Angie turned her chair to her right and the metal made a short screech against the concrete.

“Just stay there,” Desiree said, and the wavering gun turned toward Angie.

“Five.” Angie stood up.

Desiree pointed the quivering gun at her, and I reached up and slapped her hand.

The gun bounced off the railing, and I snatched it from the air before it could drop to the garden six stories below. Lucky, too, because when I peered over the side, I saw a couple of kids, grade school age, playing on their ground-floor patio by the garden.

Look what I found, Ma. Boom.

Desiree’s face dropped into her hands for a moment, and Angie looked at me.

I shrugged. The gun was a Ruger .22 automatic. Stainless steel. It felt light in my hand, but that’s deceptive when you’re holding a pistol. Guns are never light.

She’d left the safety on, and I ejected the clip into my sling, pulled it back out, and placed the gun in my left pocket, the clip in my right.

Desiree raised her head, her eyes red. “I can’t do this anymore.”

“Do what?” Angie pulled another chair over. “Sit down.”

Desiree sat. “This. Guns and death and…Jesus Christ, I can’t do it.”

“Did you rip off the Church of Truth and Revelation?”

She nodded.

“It was your idea,” Angie said. “Not Price’s.”

A half nod. “His idea. But I pushed him toward it after he told me.”

“Why?”

“Why?” she said as two tears coursed her face, dropped off her cheekbones and landed on her knees just below the hem of her dress. “Why? You have to…” She sucked up air through her mouth and looked up at the sky, wiped at her eyes. “My father killed my mother.”

I never saw that one coming. I looked at Angie. She hadn’t either.

“In the car accident that nearly killed him?” Angie said. “Are you serious?”

Desiree nodded several times.

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “Your father sets up a fake carjacking. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes.”

“And pays these men to shoot him three times?”

“That wasn’t part of the plan,” she said.

“Well, I’d hope not,” Angie said.

Desiree looked at her and blinked. Then she looked at me, her eyes wide. “He’d already paid the men. When everything went wrong and the car flipped—that wasn’t part of the plan—they panicked and shot him after they killed my mother.”

“Bullshit,” Angie said.

Desiree’s eyes widened even further and she turned her head to a neutral point between the two of us and looked down at the concrete for a moment.

“Desiree,” I said, “there’s enough holes in that story to drive a couple of Humvees through.”

“For instance,” Angie said, “why wouldn’t these guys, once they were arrested and tried, tell the police everything?”

“Because they didn’t know my father hired them,” she said. “One day, someone contacts someone and asks that a woman be killed. Her husband will be with her, this someone says, but he isn’t a target. Just her.”

We thought about that for a minute.

Desiree watched us, then added, “It’s all chains of command. By the time it got down to the actual killers, they had no idea where the order came from.”

“So, again, why shoot your father?”

“I can only tell you what I said before—they panicked. Did you read up on the case?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, if you did, you’d see that the three killers weren’t exactly rocket scientists. They were dumb kids, and they weren’t hired for their brains. They were hired because they could kill someone without losing any sleep over it.”

I looked over at Angie again. It was coming out of left field, and it definitely had an outlandish quality to it, but in a twisted way, it made some sense.

“Why did your father want to kill your mother?”

“She was planning to divorce him. And she wanted half his fortune. He could fight her in court, and she’d drag out all the sordid details of their life together. Her being sold to him, his raping me when I was fourteen, his continuing to assault me over the years, plus a thousand other secrets she knew about him.” She looked at her hands, turned them palm up, then down again. “His other option was to kill her. And he’d exercised that option with people before.”

“And he wants to kill you because you know that,” Angie said.

“Yes,” she said and it came out as a hiss.

“How do you know?” I said.

“After she died, when he got back from the hospital, I heard him talking with Julian and Graham. He was enraged that the three killers had been arrested by the police, instead of dealt with. The best thing that ever happened to those three kids was that they got caught with the gun on them and confessed. Otherwise, my father would have hired a top lawyer to get them off, bought a judge or two, and then had them tortured and killed as soon as they hit the street.” She chewed her lower lip for a moment. “My father is the most dangerous man alive.”

“We’re starting to hold that opinion ourselves,” I said.

“Who got shot in the Ambassador Hotel?” Angie said.

“I don’t want to talk about that.” She shook her head, then brought her knees up to her chin, placed her feet on the edge of the chair, and hugged her legs.

“You don’t have a choice,” Angie said.

“Oh, God.” She laid her head sideways on her knees for a moment, her eyes closed.

After a minute or so, I said, “Try it another way. What made you go to the hotel? Why did you suddenly think you knew where the money was?”

“Something Jay said.” Her eyes were still closed, her voice a whisper.

“What did Jay say?”

“He said Price’s room was filled with buckets of water.”

“Water.”

She raised her head. “Ice buckets, half filled with ice that had melted. And I remembered the same thing at one of the motels we stayed in on our way down here. Price and me. He kept making trips to the ice machine. Just a little ice each time, never filling the bucket. He said something about liking the ice in his drinks to be as cold as possible. Fresh from the machine. And how the ice at the top was best because hotels never replace the dirty ice and water at the bottom of the machine. They just kept chugging ice in on top of it. I remember knowing he was full of shit, but couldn’t think why, and at the time I was too exhausted to care. I was also starting to get frightened of him. He’d taken the money from me our second night on the road, and wouldn’t tell me where it was. Anyway, when Jay said that thing about the buckets, I started thinking about Price in South Carolina.” She looked at me, gave me her sparkling jade eyes. “It was under the ice.”