Ace Is Wild (23 page)

For once he agreed with her. “How about Larry Hickman?” he asked her.

Vivi thought about Larry Hickman, but nothing was coming to her. Her brain was empty except for the residual aftershocks of having a gun pointed at her, and all she was feeling was relief that she hadn’t been shot. “I don’t know.”

“How about . . .” he waggled his fingers in the air, “your Cosmic Telegraph?”

Vivi cocked her head, trying not to smile. “Nothing on the Cosmic Telegraph about Larry. Not enough info.”

“Well, we’re here anyway,” he said, steering his car to the curb across the street from a rutted gravel driveway. “We might as well check out Larry so we can cross him off the list.”

“He lives here?”

“His home is a six-by-eight cell in Allenwood Federal Prison,” Daniel said, stepping out of the car. “His mother lives here.”

“Alone, from the look of it.” But Vivi hurried from the car. Much as she didn’t like the prospect of what she might face—and she wasn’t talking about the human inhabitants of the place—she didn’t want to be left behind.

“Rundown” would have been an optimistic description for the small house where Larry Hickman’s mother lived. The yard was a waist-high jungle, the house looked like it was defying gravity, and the whole place stank. It smelled increasingly more disgusting as they got closer to the house, an odor that seemed to be equal parts animal leavings, rotting vegetation, and some sort of fungus they would probably discover caused brain damage.

Daniel knocked on the door and it opened, letting out the stench of yesterday’s fish dinner and revealing an old woman. Tufts of white hair barely covered patches of shiny pink scalp, and she was badly stooped, barely able to lift her head high enough to look at them. And it wasn’t yesterday’s dinner that smelled. It was last week’s laundry, which the woman was, unfortunately for their noses, still wearing.

“My name is Daniel Pierce,” Daniel said through the torn screen door. “You must be Mrs. Hickman.”

She shut the door in his face.

He looked at Vivi.

She shook her head. “Too fast for a reading.”

So Daniel went in anyway. Or tried to. The front door was locked, so he set out through the wilderness of her yard, Vivi following carefully in the swath his feet cut through the weeds.

Mrs. Hickman was in the kitchen at the rear of the house, another badly patched screen door the only barrier between her and the backyard—which closely resembled the front except that the stench was eye watering.

“We just want to talk to you about Larry,” Daniel called out—loudly in case her hearing was as decrepit as everything else within a hundred-foot radius.

“Fine,” Mrs. Hickman said, “but I’ll do the talking.” The cast-iron frying pan she was holding when she came to the door was sending a pretty clear message, too. “My boy never did nobody no harm.”

“He was a drug dealer,” Daniel pointed out, pulling Vivi up beside him, and jerking his head in a way that told her to get on with it.

“So what?” Mrs. Hickman shouted, standing straighter and looking less like a dotty old woman and more like somebody it wouldn’t be good to meet in a dark alley. “My Larry didn’t force nobody to buy them drugs, and he didn’t force nobody to take ’em, neither. He was a middleman, a whatchacall . . . entrepreneur.”

“He was a distributor,” Daniel explained for Vivi’s sake, “part of the Corona network that kept the local street dealers supplied.”

“’Xactly,” Mrs. Hickman said proudly. “Boy couldn’t read worth a tinker’s damn, but he was a good son. He took care of me. He took care of this place, ’til you sent him to jail. And now I gotta live on Social Security. You ever try to live on Social Security, Mr. Jackass Federal Prosecutor?” And she shoved the screen door open and stomped out, standing straight, brandishing her frying pan.

Daniel backed off, trying to sweep Vivi behind him. She wasn’t having any of that, but she stayed close to his side, one hand fisted in the back of his shirt, the other light at his waist. It might have been distracting if he hadn’t been worried about death by skillet.

“I’m sorry to hear about your troubles,” he said, still trying to buy Vivi enough time to rule Larry and his crazy mother in or out, “but I need to know if you’ve been in touch with your son lately.”

“’Course I have, he’s my baby,” she snapped. “I visit him every chance I get. In that federal jail you put him in.” And she lunged at Daniel, the skillet held high over her head.

He wrapped his arm around Vivi and skipped out of the way, carrying her along with him. The skillet came down on empty air, but Mrs. Hickman had already checked her forward momentum. And she could run. She’d given up all pretense of being a frail old woman. She came after them, full speed ahead, screaming threats and obscenities at the top of her lungs.

“Call the police,” she shrieked, taking another swing. “Call nine-one-one.” Too bad for her it wasn’t the kind of neighborhood that had a watch group. Or anyone who gave a damn about what was going on next door.

Daniel took off for the car, hauling Vivi along in his arms and hoping like hell his bad leg would hold them both. He swore he could hear the homicidal skillet whistling past his ears. And to make matters worse, Vivi started to struggle.

“Hold still,” he yelled at her.

But she wriggled even more violently. Her elbow slammed into his injured thigh, and Daniel dropped her to her feet, going down to his knees. He swore he felt the skillet whoosh by, close enough to graze the waistband of his jeans. He definitely felt the breeze, so he went into a tuck and roll, coming back up in time to see that Vivi had gained her feet. And Mrs. Hickman was standing over him.

“I know Pablo Corona,” she bellowed, raising the cast-iron frying pan over her head again. “I’m going to call him and—”

Vivi popped her one, a nice right jab to the jaw. Mrs. Hickman went down like a sack of flour, the skillet clanging on the hard-packed earth of the front yard.

“I can’t believe you did that,” Daniel said as Vivi helped him to his feet. “You won’t shoot the hit men, you won’t run them over, but you’ll coldcock an old woman.”

“Yeah, well, she earned it,” Vivi said, “but I’m not strong enough to put her completely out, and she’s about as frail as a rottweiler.”

Daniel climbed to his feet and looked down at her. Larry’s mother was flat on her back, dazed but not unconscious,a bruise already blooming where Vivi’s small fist had made contact.

Daniel wasn’t feeling much sympathy. “Any luck?” he asked Vivi.

“Larry’s not trying to kill you,” she said, setting off for the car. “She’d know if he was, and she wasn’t hiding anything.”

“You got all that, huh?”

“It helped when I touched her.”

“You mean punched her.”

“Fine, I punched her, and if we’re smart, we’ll be long gone by the time she calls the cops.”

“Man,” Daniel said, “you really don’t like the cops.”

“Law enforcement personnel don’t, as a rule, have much imagination,” Vivi said dryly. “They tend to want to arrest me.”

“You have to admit they have cause this time. You did sucker punch an old woman.”

“To keep you from getting your head caved in. By an old woman.”

Daniel refused to be embarrassed by that. “I’m just going to enjoy this for a while, if you don’t mind.”

“Okay,” Vivi said, stopping at the passenger door and looking over the roof of the car at him. She was smiling, too. “And when you’re done poking fun at me, you might want to ask yourself why we’re all the way across the street, but it still smells.”

VIVI WAS FINDING IT HARD TO BREATHE, BUT THERE was no stench involved. Daniel had peeled out of his shirt before he got in the car, took one look at the brown smear on the back of it, and tossed it into Mrs. Hickman’s yard, where it immediately sank into the tangle of debris and disappeared.

He was sitting there, a foot away, like it was nothing to drive around Boston without a shirt. Vivi was sitting there, trying not to think about the fact that he was a foot away, bare from the waist up. And all of it was muscle, including his head most of the time. But she wasn’t thinking about his head. She was thinking about his pecs, peppered with just enough dark hair to make her palms itch to touch it. The hair veed down over washboard abs and disappeared beneath the waistband of his jeans like an arrow pointing the way to . . .

“It’s not Mrs. Hickman,” Vivi said, dragging her thoughts back above his waistband and wiping surreptitiously at her upper lip. “She’d know about it if Larry was up to anything. She’d have tried to keep you at the house long enough for Hatch and Flip to take care of you, instead of attacking you with a skillet.”

Daniel didn’t respond, and she didn’t dare look at him or she’d lose what little presence of mind she possessed, not to mention the tiny bit of willpower that kept her staring out the passenger window. And then there was the drooling. That would be really embarrassing. “I didn’t realize Larry worked for Pablo Corona.”

Corona the Butcher, rumored to be insane and known to be indiscriminately violent, was the Colombian drug lord who controlled a good portion of the cocaine trade in North America. There was a ten-million-dollar bounty on his head. It had yet to be collected, and not for lack of trying.

“Would Corona take out a contract on you?” she asked Daniel.

“Not over Larry Hickman. Pablo probably knew when Larry was arrested, but he would have seen it more as routine maintenance than anything else. The only person Pablo would’ve had killed was Larry, if he’d been stupid enough to talk. Which he wasn’t.”

“Then why did we bother with him?”

“Had to rule him out. Have to rule everyone out to be completely sure, either through research or personal knowledge.”

Vivi made the mistake of looking over at him, and her mild level of exasperation was no match for the instant flare of lust. Worse yet, Daniel knew what she was thinking, or rather feeling. It amused him, she realized, narrowing her eyes on that little lawyer smirk on his face. She hated that smirk. Her palms stopped itching and the iron snapped back into her willpower. Parts of her were still experiencing a heat wave, but she wasn’t caving in to that anymore.

“There are a lot of names on this list,” she said, holding up the legal pad where Larry Hickman’s name was now crossed off, along with George Washington’s and Rudy Manetti’s. “Are you saying we have to find every one of these people or their lunatic relatives?”

“The law of averages says we’ll get the right person before we’re halfway through.”

Vivi didn’t want to be overly pessimistic, but the law had never been a friend of hers. “I thought we were going back to the apartment,” she said when Daniel pulled into the parking lot of a mom-and-pop-type restaurant.

“What for?” Daniel got out of the car and went around to the trunk, opening it and digging through his duffel. He pulled out a clean shirt and slipped it over his head.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Vivi wanted to know.

“You claim you never get a decent meal while I’m around.”

“This place can’t be decent. I know this neighborhood. An ex-friend of mine lives not too far from here.” And Heather Wilcox definitely wasn’t decent. At least she hadn’t been when Vivi caught her on top of Eric “just having sex, babe.” Not that it had been a surprise. She’d known Eric was a hound, but it had been right after her grandmother died and she’d needed . . . someone. Being alone, however, had turned out to be an improvement over having a toxic spill like Eric in her life.

The restaurant was on a main street, but the building had clearly once been a house. It sat on a patch of potholed macadam, a few weeds in the cracks the only spots of green on the property—if she didn’t count the stuff hanging out of the Dumpster at the far back corner of the lot. The building itself was covered in aluminum siding, dented and faded to a dull gray.

“I know it doesn’t look like much,” Daniel began.

It looked like food poisoning waiting to happen.

“But you get your best meals at a place like this.”

Vivi wasn’t convinced, but he took her by the wrist and towed her to the front door, and when he opened it, some really fantastic aromas leaked out and beckoned her inside.

Something niggled at the edge of her mind, but Daniel was touching her and they hadn’t had breakfast, so she walked in without further objection—and stopped just inside the doorway, taking a good look around and trying to figure out why she felt uncomfortable. She shook Daniel’s hand off, which helped until he set his fingers at the small of her back and gave her a light shove.