Wardell grabbed my shirt and shoved me against Arne’s car. I tipped back over the hood, my feet coming off the ground. Christ, he was strong.
I drew my ghost knife from my back pocket.
Arne’s car began to back down the street, and I slid along the hood of the car until I dropped backward. I heard my shirt tear just a little in Wardell’s grip.
“You just cost me a job, Flower. A good job that paid okay. There ain’t a lot of places a guy like me can get paid to have my fun. So now you’re going to hire me.”
Arne backed away down the street. I saw him grimace as he twisted to look through the back window, but he didn’t glance at me at all.
“Don’t you look at him,” Wardell said. “You look at me now. Just like you paid those barrio motherfuckers to watch your back in Chino, you’re going to pay me to watch your back out here.”
“I wouldn’t pay you to watch a pot of chili,” I said, and slid the ghost knife through his ribs.
According to the spell book I’d cast it from, the ghost knife could cut “ghosts, magic, and dead things.” Its edge could split a steel door, destroy the sigils that made spells work, and on living people, it could cut their “ghosts.”
Whatever that meant. I’d never seen an actual ghost, but trial and error had taught me that the ghost knife took away a person’s anger and hostility, turning them docile and apologetic but without doing them any physical harm. At least, no harm I could see.
Wardell was no exception. He gasped as the spell passed through him and his eyes went wide like deer eyes. He lifted me to my feet—the spell didn’t take his strength away. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said those things.”
“You’re right. You shouldn’t have.” Arne was long gone. I sighed and turned to Wardell. “Where’s your car?”
He led me to it. It was just around the corner, parked beneath an old oak. It was an older Nissan Pathfinder, and it had probably been his run-around-town vehicle before he went inside. He asked me if I wanted to drive.
I did. Traffic was heavy on the way back to the Bigfoot Room. Wardell talked most of the way, mostly about what he was doing now that he was outside and people we’d known inside. An unsurprising number of them had gotten themselves out and gotten themselves thrown right back in again. Wardell was of the opinion that that would happen to him soon, too.
He also told me that Linen’s real name was Steve Francois, and that he’d inherited his money from some South American paper mills and banks in Texas. Mostly banks. Steve liked having badasses around, and Wardell was an ex-con and ex-NFL, so he was hired.
I couldn’t even begin to guess why Arne was running errands for a guy like Francois.
I liked Wardell better when he wasn’t desperate to be alpha male, but not much better. Even with his aggression cut out of him, he was still arrogant enough to think he should dominate the conversation. I was tempted to make him turn himself in to the cops until he said he had a wife at home who was sticking by him—so far. “She wants me to go to anger-management classes,” he said.
“Why haven’t you?”
“I didn’t want to,” he answered. “I’m sorry about the buttons on your shirt. Do you want me to ask her to sew them back on? She would, I think.”
I looked down. He had popped off a button from my shirt, second from my top. “No, thanks,” I said, being polite because of the ghost knife, and I didn’t feel like taking anything else from him. “Do you beat on her?”
“No! I would never hit my lady.” He sounded honestly surprised that I’d asked.
“Good. You should take her advice.” I remembered waking from nightmares in the middle of the night. “If your shit isn’t under control, you should get help.”
I pulled up to the curb at a corner near the Bigfoot Room and climbed out. My legs and back were getting stiff and achy from sitting so long. I was glad Potato and his men had landed most of their punches on my chest and stomach, where I was protected. My car was still where I had left it.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said.
Wardell climbed into the driver’s seat. He was a big guy, but he was limber enough to make it without knocking the stick shift out of PARK.
“Thank you,” Wardell said. I shut the door. He hit the turn signal and pulled into traffic.
I watched him go, wondering what I could do if my own stress got so bad I lost control of it. Not therapy; as soon as I talked about predators, the therapist would think I was delusional. And if the therapist found out about the people I’d killed …
It didn’t matter. None of it mattered.
Wardell disappeared into traffic, so I crossed the street and entered the Roasted Seal. The sawdust was still on the floor and the rumpled guy was still sitting at the bar, a beer and a cup of coffee beside him.
And Arne was sitting in the same booth. He was tapping at a different laptop.
I moved toward him, holding out my hand to block Lenard as I came around the wait station. “Are you going to pat me down again?”
Lenard slammed a little locker door shut and spun the combination lock. Then he glanced at Arne. Arne shrugged. Lenard backed toward the booth, and his body language told me not to approach.
“I hope,” Arne said, “you’re not pissed that I took off without telling you what’s what or caring one shit what was going on with you.”
“Of course not. What kind of petty bastard do you think I am?” And it was true. I wasn’t pissed. In fact, I’d expected him to abandon me somewhere—that’s why I’d held out my hand for the Land Rover keys when Arne
