Sacred (Kenzie & Gennaro 3)

“Then what do you care about, Mr. Kenzie?”

He raised the cigar to his lips and I slapped it off his face, let it smolder in the rug at my feet.

“I care about Jay Becker and Everett Hamlyn, you useless piece of shit.”

He blinked at the drops of sweat forming on his eyelashes. “Mr. Becker betrayed me.”

“Because to do otherwise would have been a mortal sin.”

“Mr. Hamlyn had decided to call several authorities and report my dealings with Mr. Kohl.”

“Because you destroyed a business it took him his entire life to build.”

He removed a handkerchief from the inside pocket of his dinner jacket and coughed heavily into it for a minute.

“I’m dying,” he said.

“No you’re not,” I said. “If you truly thought you were going to die, you wouldn’t have killed Jay. You wouldn’t have killed Everett. But if either of them hauled you into court, you couldn’t climb into your cryogenic chamber, could you? And by the time you were able, your brain would be gone, your organs completely shot, and freezing you would have been a waste of time.”

“I’m dying,” he repeated.

“Yeah,” I said, “now you are. And so what, Mr. Stone?”

“I have money. You name your price.”

I stood up and ground my heel on his cigar.

“My price is two billion dollars.”

“I only have one.”

“Oh, well,” I said and pushed him out of the study toward the stairs.

“What are you going to do?” he said.

“Less than you deserve,” I said. “But more than you’re ready for.”

42

We climbed the grand staircase slowly, Trevor leaning on the railing and taking halting steps, his breathing labored.

“I heard you come in tonight and watched you walk across your study,” I said. “Your steps were a lot surer then.”

He gave me the tortured face of a martyr. “It comes in spurts,” he said. “The pain.”

“You and your daughter,” I said, “you never give up, do you?” I smiled and shook my head.

“To yield is to die, Mr. Kenzie. To bend is to break.”

“To err is human, to forgive is divine. We could keep going with this for hours. Come on. Your turn.”

He struggled up to the landing.

“Left,” I said and handed him back his walking stick.

“In the name of God,” he said. “What are you going to do with me?”

“At the end of the hall, take a right.”

The mansion was built so that its back faced east. Trevor’s study and his recreation room on the first floor looked out at the sea. On the second floor, the master bedroom and Desiree’s room did the same.

On the third floor, however, only one room faced the water. Its windows and walls could be removed, and in the summer a rail would be placed around the edges of the parquet floor, the slats in the ceiling removed to open up to the sky overhead, and hardwood squares fitted across the floor to protect the parquet. I’m quite sure it was no easy task to break this room down every sunny summer day, nor to put it back together and protect it from inclement weather at whatever time of night Trevor Stone chose to retire, but then, he didn’t have to worry about that. Lurch and the Weeble had to, I assumed, or whatever servants had been their servants.

In the winter, the room was laid out like a French drawing room with gilded Louis XIV chairs and chaises; delicate, embroidered settees and divans; fragile gold-encrusted tea tables; and paintings of bewigged noblemen and noblewomen discussing opera or the guillotine or whatever the French discussed in the numbered days of their doomed aristocracy.

“Vanity,” I said, looking at Desiree’s pulpy, broken nose and Trevor’s ruined lower face, “destroyed the French upper class. It triggered the revolution and sent Napoleon into Russia. Or so the Jesuits told me.” I glanced at Trevor. “Am I wrong?”

He shrugged. “A bit reductive, but it’s not far off.”

He and Desiree were tied to their chairs on either end of the room, each a good twenty-five yards from the other. Angie was off in the west wing of the first floor, gathering supplies.

Desiree said, “I’ll need a doctor for my nose.”

“We’re a little short on plastic surgeons at the moment.”

“Was it a bluff?” she said.

“Which?”

“About Danny Griffin.”

“Yeah. Total bluff.”

She blew at a strand of hair that had fallen in her face and nodded to herself.

Angie came back into the room and together we cleared all the furniture to the sides, left a wide-open swath of parquet between Desiree and her father.

“You measure the room?” I asked Angie.

“Absolutely. It’s exactly twenty-eight yards long.”

“I’m not sure I could throw a football twenty-eight yards. How far is Desiree’s chair from the wall?”

“Six feet.”

“Trevor’s?”

“The same.”

I looked at her hands. “Nice gloves.”

She held them up. “You like ’em? They’re Desiree’s.”

I held up my good hand, also gloved. “Trevor’s. Calfskin, I think. Very soft and supple.”

She reached into her purse and pulled out two pistols. One was an Austrian Glock 17 nine-millimeter. The other was a German Sig Sauer P226 nine-millimeter. The Glock was light and black. The Sig Sauer was silver aluminum alloy and slightly heavier.

“There were so many to choose from in the gun cabinet,” Angie said, “but these seemed the best for our purposes.”

“Clips?”

“The Sig holds fifteen. The Glock holds seventeen.”

“And one each in the chamber, of course.”

“Of course. But the chambers are empty.”

“What in God’s name are you doing?” Trevor said.

We ignored him.

“Who’s stronger, you think?” I said.

She looked at them both. “It’s a toss-up. Desiree’s young, but Trevor’s got a lot of strength in those hands.”

“You take the Glock.”

“Pleasure.” She handed me the Sig Sauer.

“Ready?” I said as I pressed the butt of the Sig Sauer in between my bad arm and my chest, worked the slide with my good hand, and jacked a round into the chamber.

She pointed the Glock at the floor and did the same. “Ready.”