Like Part of the Family

“Bet I can have L and I here before they show. Smoking in a public restaurant?”

Another smartass remark was on his lips, but he didn’t have the energy for it. He was paid by the hour and this had to be a slow shift for tips. I took a twenty from my wallet and put it on the bar.

“This isn’t your shit, kid,” I said. “Call your boss.”

He didn’t like it, but he took the twenty and made the call.

“He says come up.” The bartender pointed to another curtained doorway beside the bar. I gave him a sunny day smile and went inside.

There was a long hallway with bathrooms on both sides and a set of stairs at the end. I took the stairs two at a time. The stairs went straight up to his office and the door was open. I knocked anyway.

“It’s open,” he yelled. I went inside; and as I looked around I hoped like hell that the office decor was not modeled after the interior landscape of David Skye’s mind. The walls were painted a dark red, the trim was gloss black. Instead of the band posters and framed ‘look at who I’m shaking hands with’ eight-by-tens, the walls were hung with torture devices and S and M clothes. Spiked harnesses, leather zippered masks, thumbscrews, photos from Abu Graib, diagrams of dissected bodies. A full-sized rack occupied one corner of the room and an iron maiden stood in the other, one door open to reveal rows of tarnished metal spikes. The only other furniture was a big desk made from some dark wood, a black file cabinet and the leather swivel chair in which David Skye sat. He wore a black poet’s shirt, leather wristbands, and a smile that was already belligerent.

“The fuck are you and the fuck you want?”

The man was a charmer. I could just taste the charisma his wife had mentioned flowing like sweetness from his pores.

I flipped my ID case open. “We need to have a chat. It can be friendly or not. Your call.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

So much for friendly.

“That whore send you?” he demanded.

I smiled but didn’t answer.

He had a handsome face, but his wife was right when she said that he’d lost weight. His skin looked thin and loose, and he had the complexion of a mushroom. More gray than white.

“Did my wife send you?” he said, pronouncing the words slowly as if I’d come here on the short bus.

“Why would your ex-wife send me?”

His eyes flickered for a second at ‘ex-wife’. I strolled across the room and stood in front of his desk. He didn’t get up; neither of us offered a hand to the other.

“She makes up stories,” he said.

“What kind of stories?”

“Bullshit. Lies. Says I slapped her around.”

“Who’d she say that to?”

He didn’t answer. He did, however, give me the ninja secret death stare, but I manned my way through it.

“What are you supposed to be,” he said.

“Just what the license says.”

“Private investigator. Private dick.”

“Yes, and that was funny back in the 1950s. Why do you think I’m here?”

“She’s probably trying some kind of squeeze play. The club’s doing okay, so she wants a bigger slice.”

“Try again,” I said, though he might have been right about that.

“Oh, I get it….you’re supposed to scare me into leaving her alone.”

“Do I look scary?”

He smiled. He had very red lips and very white teeth. “No,” he said, “you don’t.”

“Right…so let’s pretend that I’m here to have a reasonable discussion. Man to man.”

Skye leaned back in his chair and stared at me with his dark eyes. It was a calculating look, and I’m sure he took in everything from my slightly threadbare Vikings jacket to my cheap black sneakers. Put everything I was wearing together and it would equal the cost of his shirt. I was okay with that. I don’t dress to impress. Skye, on the other hand, smiled as if our mutual understanding of my material net worth clearly made him the alpha.

I smiled back.

“What does she want?” he asked.

“For you to leave her alone.”

“What is she afraid of?”

“She thinks you’re trying to kill her.”

“What do you think?”

“What I think doesn’t matter. I’m not a psychic, so I don’t know whether you’re trying to kill her or if you’re playing some kind of mindgame on her. Whatever it is, I’m here to ask you to lay off.”

“Why should I?”

“Because I asked real nice.”

He smiled at that.

“Because it’s illegal and I could build a harassment case against you and you could lose your club and sink a quarter mil into legal fees. Because I know inspectors who can slap you with fifteen kinds of violations that will hurt your business. I can have your car booted by accident three or four times a week, every week.”

“And I could have you killed,” he said, the smile unwavering.

“Maybe,” I said. “You could try, and I might fuck up anyone you send and then come back here and fuck you up.”

“Think you could?”

“You really want to find out?” When he didn’t answer, I took a glass paperweight off his desk and turned it over in my hands. A spider was trapped inside, frozen into a moment of time for the amusement of the trinket crowd. I knew he was watching me play with the paperweight, wondering what I was going to do with it.

I put it back down on the desk.

“Really, though,” I said, “how long do we need to circle and sniff each other? We don’t run in the same pack and I don’t give a rat’s ass what you do, who you are, or how tough you think you are. We both know that you’re either going to stop bothering your ex-wife and go on with your life; or you’re going to make a run at her — either because you have some loose wiring or because I’m pushing your buttons by being here. If you back off, we’re all friends. I’ll advise my client not to file a restraining order and you two can let the divorce lawyers earn their paychecks by kicking each other in the nuts.”

“Or…?” he asked. Still smiling.

“Or, you don’t back off and then this is about you and me.”

“Nonsense. You’re no part of this. This is about me and—”

I cut him off. “I’m making this about you and me. Maybe I have a wire loose, too, but once I tell a client that I’m going to keep her safe, I take it amiss if anything happens to her.”

“‘Amiss’,” he repeated, enjoying the word.

“But that’s a minute from now. We’re still on the other side of it until you give me an answer. What’s it going to be? You leave her alone? Or this gets complicated.”

“What were you before you started doing this PI bullshit?”

“A cop.”

He grunted. “You sound like a thug. An asshole leg-breaker from South Philly.”

“Thin line sometimes.”

He steepled his fingers. It was one of those moves that looked good when Doctor Doom did it in a comic book. Maybe in a boardroom. Looked silly right now, but he had enough intensity in his eyes to almost pull it off. He gave me ten seconds of the stare.

I stood my ground.

His cell phone rang and he flipped it open, listened.

“I’m in a meeting,” he said and closed the phone.

His smile returned.