“It’s just me,” I said. “How you doing?”
“What’s all that noise?”
“Wind. Looks like we might get some rain.”
She didn’t question it and kept her head down, asking if I was all right. I made sure she hadn’t broken anything from being pitched out and told her what had prompted the action. She wanted to know how I’d escaped.
“I dove behind the desk. Got lucky.”
“B-but a bomb? There was a bomb in the box?”
“Not a big one,” I said, glad she couldn’t see me wincing. If I could still hypnotize people, I’d have eased her right over this part of things.
Myrna must have tuckered herself out: the office-sized cyclone abruptly ceased. The building went silent again, the normal sort, not the pending disaster kind.
“J-Joe left that for me? . . .” Emma straightened, tears spilling from her eyes. “He meant for me to take it t-t-to Gordy and kill us. . . .”
Another stupid thing to do is to tell a female to not cry. I knew better. My girlfriend was not the kind to turn on the waterworks gladly or often, but she’d taught me how to deal with them. There were five thousand other matters I had to see to before dawn came, but I put an arm around Emma, offering her one end of the toilet tissue to unreel to soak up her tears.
She cut loose, loud and ugly, but I couldn’t fault her for it, not one damned bit. I wanted to kill Foxtrot for doing this to her.
Maybe I would.
Emma’s initial reaction eased, and she lurched up with determined strength, spun in place, and yanked up the toilet lid just in time.
I’d done my duty holding her while she cried, but Bobbi hadn’t said a word about what to do when a lady is being sick. I backed off, glad I didn’t need to breathe, and looked the other way. Some instinct told me to start the water in the sink, so I did that, then backed the rest of the way out of the little room.
Right into Gino Desanctis, Foxtrot Joe’s boss. He looked as surprised as I felt.
I glared at him, an intruder in my territory and indirectly responsible for Foxtrot. Hardly aware of the action, I slugged Desanctis square in the gut.
He folded and dropped, but he wasn’t alone. The two guys behind him surged forward to teach me manners, and I took them out just as quick.
There was a third man behind them, but he stayed in place, calmly regarding the rumpus.
“Greetin’s to ye, Jacky-lad,” he boomed cheerfully. That Irish accent . . .
He flipped open a lighter, the little flame overwhelmed by the gloom of the hall, but enough to show his face.
“Riordan?” I returned, unpleasantly surprised. He was supposed to be a private investigator but was happy enough to ignore the law when it suited his bank account. We’d had a few run-ins, none of them good. The first time we met, he’d broken my shoulder with a tire iron. He had been aiming for my skull. “What the hell are you doing here?”
He held the lighter with a steady hand. Me punching flat three of Gordy’s best didn’t deserve so much as an eye twitch. He’d seen me cut loose on bigger and tougher guys and not break a sweat. “Those fine lads strewin’ the floor are looking for Emma Dorsey.”
Riordan had an egg-shaped balding head under a rakish hat, plenty of teeth, and brown eyes topped by arching brows. They gave him an ingrained expression of perpetual naïveté that he wholeheartedly exploited when he thought he could get away with it. In truth, he was as clever-brained as they come, but certifiably insane. If some head doctor locked the Irish bastard in a booby hatch, I’d have been glad to lose the key.
“You’re looking for Foxtrot, you mean,” I said.
“They are for certain. The lads an’ me were havin’ such a nice game of billiards when Gino came by wantin’ ’em to earn their keep. Seein’ that one owes me three dollars and the other owes me four, I’m keepin’ an eye on ’em till we finish our game. Have ye seen our Foxtrot?”
“No.”
“What about the lovely lady we followed here?” He pulled out a cigarette.
“She’s not feeling well. Foxtrot tried to scrag her with a grenade rigged in a box. It was meant for her and Northside Gordy.”
Riordan let the lighter burn a fraction longer than needed to fire up his smoke. “So that was the mighty flash and bang we saw from the street. A grenade, y’say? Sure?”
I glanced at the floor where Emma had landed. The twine bow and the ring with its attached pin lay almost at his feet. I pointed at it and at the now quiet office. “What do you think?”