'How'd you like Cesar,' I said.
'Ain't no lettuce plucker,' Hawk said.
'Probably not,' I said.
We got in Hawk's car and pulled away. Slowly.
'He ain't gonna give you money for that stuff,' Hawk said. 'He can't stay in business, he let people hold him up like that.'
'I know,' I said. 'He's smart, though. He haggled with me just like he was going to pay.'
'He'll come to a price with you and then when you show up he'll kill you.'
'Unless we prevent him.'
Hawk grinned. 'Cesar going to take heavy preventing.'
'We heavy enough?' I said.
Hawk's grin widened. ''Course,' he said. 'You got some kind of plan here?'
'About half a plan,' I said. 'I held back the two hundred kilos so I could have some leverage with Esteva. If everything was aboveboard a hundred keys is enough to blow Esteva out of the water and if it did I could turn the other two in.'
'But it didn't,' Hawk said.
'No. Which meant pretty sure that everything was not aboveboard.'
'We back to Wheaton's finest again.'
'Yes,' I said.
'Where the stuff now,' Hawk said.
'In a storage room downstairs at the Harbor Health Club.'
'You kind of illegal,' Hawk said.
'I figured you wouldn't mind,' I said.
'Mind,' Hawk said, 'I like it. Just never figured out where you draw all them lines you draw.'
'I'm a little fuzzy on that myself.'
'You know Esteva's going to ace you if he can, which he can't but he don't know that. You know he's Frosty himself for maybe the whole Northeast. You think he clipped three people including a seventeen-year-old kid. You willing to hijack his truck and hold his junk and extort him, all of which making him and old Cesar mad as hell.'
'True,' I said.
'But you not willing to just dust him and fold it up.'
'No.'
'You not practical, babe.'
'True.'
'You willing to kill some people. You done it to a bunch out west a couple years ago.'
'Yeah.'
'But not here.'
'I don't know enough,' I said.
'I don't know the whole thing and Caroline Rogers has a right to know it all.'
'You had to shoot anybody since out west?' Hawk said.
'Shot a guy in the leg, couple weeks back,' I said.
Hawk said, 'Um.'
'Didn't I hear you whistling Willie Nelson back there in the warehouse?' I said.
'Susan play those tapes at me,' he said, 'all the way out.'
'And maybe you kind of like Willie?' I said.
'He ain't Jimmy Rushing,' Hawk said.
Chapter 29
Susan came back from seeing Caroline Rogers. She came into the bar, where Hawk and I were being served in silence by Virgie. Hawk and I were drinking beer.
'Asked for champagne,' Hawk said to Susan. 'They gave me Korbel.'
'Frontier living,' Susan said. Hawk slid down a stool along the bar, and Susan sat between us. Virgie came down the nearly empty bar and looked at her.
'Margarita,' Susan said, 'on the rocks, salt.'
'What do you think,' I said.
