“The murder of Roland Blue, for summoning a Nightmare tulpa that killed a lot of other people before it lost interest and faded, and for all nine of the unsolved ritual murders dating back to 1984. Apparently she got intel that you and Blue were running some kind of grotto-snuff-porn cult together and he was your accomplice until you killed him last night.”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it.” I was lighting a cigarette and looking around for Grinner’s rental car. LAX was a small city all its own, but Grinner had told me the general section of the vast parking moat that he’d be in. “I’ll talk to Gida and we’ll—”
“Laytham,” Dragon interrupted. “There is no negotiation about this. You’re wanted dead or alive. Any owl that spots you is going to drop you.”
“They can try,” I said, getting a little pissed. “I can handle them.”
“Not all of us, not me,” she said, sounding almost panicked. “Damn it, why couldn’t you just leave, like she asked you to?”
“Because I wasn’t fucking done yet,” I said. “I found Crystal. She’s alive and okay, case closed. I’m close to having the real identity of the Dugpa cult’s leadership.”
“You’re close to getting busted, killed, or banished,” she said. “I know you think you’re the baddest ass on the block, but the Nightwise is all the baddest asses, together. You can’t fight that, Laytham, and if you try they will most likely kill you. Please, run, now, until I can talk to the Maven and get this all sorted out.”
I spotted Grinner’s rental, a white Toyota Camry, with the burly hacker squeezed into it behind the wheel. I headed toward the car. “I’ll make sure I email Gida whatever I find before I take them down, Lauren,” I said. “You guys can take all the fucking credit. I just want them shut down for good.”
“You’re not fucking listening to me,” she said. Her voice was changing, deepening. She was losing control of her human form. “If I see you, I have to take you down, you understand that. It’s my job, it’s who I am. It’s who you used to be, Laytham. Let me bring you in. I can make sure you stay alive.”
“You think I did it, don’t you?” I said.
“No, of course not, but it’s a tight frame,” Dragon said, regaining some composure. “Whoever set this up knows you, played to your reputation. I’m the only one who stood by you last time when at least part of the shit you were accused of was true, jackass. Don’t you dare accuse me of selling you out. You have every cop in the Life coming down on you now. Not to mention the Janissaries that will come after you for the bounty.”
“Bounty hunters too, huh?” I said. “How much they put on me?”
“Do not fuck around with this, Laytham! They are coming for you. All of them are coming for you. Please, give yourself up and let me—”
“I’m not turning myself in to you, to anyone. I’m closing these assholes down.”
I hung up on her.
Fuck. All the Nightwise, everywhere. There wasn’t anywhere in this world or several others I could hide for long. I had to clear this up or I would be a dead man. I opened the door to the car and slid into the passenger seat. Grinner looked like three hundred pounds of sausage stuffed into a two-hundred-pound casing. I laughed, I couldn’t help it. “Where’s your fez and the other six Shriners?” I said, shutting the door.
“Ha-fuckin-ha,” he said. “I didn’t care about anything, color, style, nothing, I said, ‘Just give me some leg room, I’m a fluffy motherfucker, just give me leg room.’” He gestured to the cramped compartment trying to eat him. “I get this.”
“Wait ’til you see your airplane seat,” I said.
Grinner grunted at me and opened a very thin laptop. He tapped a few keys and then leaned over toward me with it. The screen showed an international bank’s logo and columns of figures and dates. “Hacked a few accounting firms and a bank or twelve. I followed the money and as usual, it did not disappoint. Brett Glide’s company, Red Hat Productions, gets regular infusions of cash from a series of dummies and fronts that lead back to—”
“The Legion of Doom?” I offered. Grinner ignored me.
“Pentacle Studios,” he said, “the Pentacle Studios, been around since the silent movie days. They fucking built L.A. around them. Pentacle’s a media monster.”
“Can you give me a specific person or department at Pentacle that is propping up Glide’s business?”
“Yeah,” Grinner said. “Better than that, and, oh, Brett’s name’s not really Glide, it’s Winder. Brett Winder.”
“Winder,” I said. “That name sounds familiar.”
“It should.” Grinner opened a second window on the screen. It showed a Forbes article with a picture of an athletic, smiling, older man, perhaps in his late fifties. He had a full mane of silver hair and a neatly trimmed goatee. His eyes were an intense, deep brown in the photo. He reminded me of someone I had seen recently, but I couldn’t place it. The title of the article was “Winder’s World, Pentacle CEO Brings Hollywood into the Twenty-first Century.” “Our boy Brett’s old man is Maximilian Winder, the president and CEO of Pentacle Studios. He’s the source of the off-the-books cash to Red Hat, along with about a dozen other adult entertainment companies, all tucked away under one of their subsidiaries’ independent development budgets.”
“I wonder if Disney invests in porn companies on the DL too,” I said.
“Ask fucking Hannah Montana. All of the adult entertainment companies Pentacle is secretly funding have one investor in common, Brett Glide.”
“So a studio exec is funding his kid’s walk on the wild side?”
“His adopted kid,” Grinner added. “Brett was adopted by Max Winder in 1984, when Brett was five years old and Max was only in his twenties. Want to guess which
