Crashed

that they’ll pretty much have things their way. And to answer your second question, to run an operation as complex as the one my father put together, you have to be very smart.”

“Personal question?”

She shook her head, and then offered me the sliver of a smile. “Oh, why not?”

“You’re too intelligent to marry a household appliance. Why?”

“Would you buy it if I told you I was girlishly swept off my feet?”

“Not by a tailor’s dummy.”

“Okay,” she said. “Tony is really good. He has two skills. The first one is to stand there and let people look at him. He’s pretty enough to preserve in amber, and he knows how to use it. The second thing is talking people around. You’ve dealt with sociopaths?”

“Who hasn’t? In our line of work, I mean.”

“Well, Tony qualifies. It’s not just that he doesn’t have a conscience, although he doesn’t. I think he could shoot you and his major worry would be the price of the bullet. But mostly it’s the way he can read you, play to your weaknesses, make you feel like-like whatever your question is, he’s the answer. He read me down to my gene sequence. I was twenty-two and dumb and in full revolt against everything my father wanted for me. Like most kids in criminal families, I was brought up on the straight and narrow, Catholic school and everything. Tony was so far off the path my father had planned for me he might as well have been on another continent. And he played that for all it was worth. Defying my father, who didn’t like Mexicans and would have been horrified at me marrying some mid-level knuckleduster. And aiming that face straight at all that pent-up Catholic schoolgirl lust. I’d never felt so brave and alive in my life.”

“Danger is addictive.”

“Sure, but I knew I wasn’t really the one who was in the line of fire. My father might just have resolved the situation by having him killed. Dad favored direct solutions. Tony said he was willing to risk that, and I have to admit that my reaction was pretty much, For little me? I figured it proved he loved me.” She sat back, hearing herself. “I’m telling you this because I suppose there’s a chance you’re going to come up against him.”

I knew the next remark might take me straight off the map, but I needed to say it, if only to begin to figure out how much trouble I was in. “But your father didn’t kill Tony.”

Trey’s eyes were on me, and they didn’t waver a hundredth of an inch. She held my gaze, and then said, “That’s right. He might have, in a week or two, but he didn’t. As you know, his plans, whatever they were, were rudely interrupted.”

I said, “Yes,” and let it hang.

After a moment, she said, “I don’t actually know that Tony did it. Not for a fact.”

This was pretty close to exactly what I didn’t want to hear. “But you suspected it.”

“I tried not to. Tony and I were already married. That’s why my father was so furious. We eloped. I was in New York on business, staying at the Carlyle, and one evening there was a knock on the door, and surprise, surprise, guess who. We had a ridiculously romantic week, real gigolo stuff. And I fell for it. We stopped in Las Vegas on the way home. I thought my father was going to have a heart attack. Me, trading my last name for Ramirez.”

“You’re aware,” I said, “that people think you had your father done.”

“Sure,” she said. “And I let them. I’m a girl, remember? Everybody figured I was going to be Miss Valentine, the sweetheart of the underworld. So I took the blame, and it made a lot of people afraid of me, people who wouldn’t have been afraid of me otherwise. It was useful.”

“And I might be up against the guy who had your father killed.”

She drew a square on the surface of the table with a carnelian-tipped index finger. “Believe me,” she said, “I never thought it would get to this point.” She erased the imaginary square with her palm and offered me a slender smile. “And maybe it won’t.”

“Whether it does or not, here’s the problem. I’m only one guy. I haven’t got a squad I can deploy. I can check out your ex, or I can stick with Thistle. I can’t do both. And I can’t protect this whole movie, although I’m pretty sure that Thistle is the obvious target.”

“She’s the only indispensable element.” Trey said.

“But you’ve got resources,” I said. “It’s just you and me here, and nobody else is listening. Why don’t you kill somebody?”

She didn’t look surprised, although she let a three-heartbeat pause go by before answering. “Kill whom? If I put Tony under, I’m the first place the cops will look. Lots of public rancor there, wrangling over assets, the whole mess.”

“Somebody close to him. Somebody you think might be working for him, helping with this. Send a message right back, let them know that the film is not to be fucked with.”

“Aren’t you the cold one? Kill this one, kill that one. I thought you were a burglar, not a hitman.”

“They killed a friend of mine. Somebody’s probably going to die for that, anyway.”

“I see,” she said. “But it’ll wait until you have some time on your hands.”

“It might, it might not. So what about it? There’s nothing like a well-placed bullet for getting people’s attention.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m supposed to be turning my back on all that. Kicking it off with a murder seems inconsistent, to say the least.”

“Just a thought.” I got up. “By the way, as long as we’re talking, you know that this movie isn’t good for Thistle.”

“That’s on my conscience, not yours.” She stood as well. “And listen. Underneath all the dope and the psychic wreckage, Thistle may be a perfectly nice girl. I admit that. You might be right about her. And you know what? That’s too bad. For my purposes, she’s irreplaceable. She did to the whole world what Tony did to me. Hundreds of millions of people bought into what she was selling, and she blew them off. She’s my primary asset here. I’m deadly serious about protecting her, up to the point where it endangers her making the movie. Don’t make any mistakes about that.”

“Noted,” I said.

“And as you said, as long as we’re talking, I think you have a problem with women. You sympathize with Thistle in a way you wouldn’t if she were male. And you don’t take me as seriously as you would if I’d been my father’s son instead of his daughter. But I’m telling you now. I am every bit as dangerous as my father was. And if you find yourself torn between taking care of Thistle or taking care of me, just remember that I’m an Annunziato, and we don’t deal well with betrayal. Is that clear?”

“Transparent.”

“Your job is to help me get this movie done, no matter what you think about it. Understand?”

“No one would accuse you of ambiguity.”

“When it’s all over, we’ll sit down and discuss things.” She smiled and put a hand on my upper arm. “We can probably wind up friends, as hard as that may be to believe right now.”

“Oh, good,” I said. “A man can always use a friend.”

25

The truth,unless a lie works better

Her hand in mine was a surprise.

Trey had commandeered a large screening room for the press conference. It seated maybe forty people, and from the sound of it, it was jammed. We could hear the hubbub the moment we opened the door into the backstage area, a jumble of voices like a crowd scene in an old radio show.

The moment she heard them, Thistle reached over and grabbed my hand. Her palm was damp and her hand was as small as a child’s.