Page 94 of Constantly Cotton
His hands were shaking, and Ace used tender fingers to take the gun from Sonny’s clammy hand and shove it in the back of his jeans with the other one he’d used during the op.
“Sonny? You gonna let me in there to see what’s what?”
“Yeah. He’s looking a mite feverish, Ace. I got no idea what to do with him.”
Ace took a deep breath and shoved the door open, allowing sunlight to penetrate the murky, oil-scented depths of the garage bay.
There was a bad guy there. He was bound and gagged—but he’d been given a pillow and water, and judging by the bottles filled with yellow water, had been allowed to relieve himself when necessary. He had a clean bandage wrapped tightly around his calf, and he was a little pale, but generally looked well cared for, and when Ace walked through the door, he started struggling and protesting from behind the gag.
Sonny kicked him in the wound, which surprised the hell out of Ace, and said, “Hush now. This is the guy you were sent here to kill, so nowhe’sgoing to have to decide what to do with you.”
The guy turned gray, and his eyes rolled back in his head and he passed out.
Ace stared at him. “You wounded him?” he asked, struggling for context.
“I wounded him,” Sonny admitted. “He and his buddy were going for their guns and I wounded him. And then his buddy was gonna shoot me, so Ernie shot him in the head and got rid of the body and the SUV. But see? Now we got a problem.”
“Yeah, we do,” Ace muttered. He strode to the guy without preamble and tore off his mask, which brought him abruptly back to consciousness. “Who in the fuck do you work for?” Ace demanded.
“Why the fuck do you care?” the man snarled weakly.
Ace smacked him on the side of the head. So help him, it had been a rough and ragged three days, and he got here and this asshole is bleeding in his garage? And lookit, Sonny and Ernie—they weretoast.They were exhausted. And as far as Ace could tell, this asshole was the reason why.
“’Cause if you been shut up in here since yesterday, I know a bunch of shit you don’t know. Like, I know which mob bosses are dead, which ones are in prison, and which ones are in the wind. So you give me the name of your mob boss and I’ll tell you what’s gonna happen to you. That simple.”
The guy slow-blinked. “Uhm—”
“And you gotta tell me where he got his information. ’Cause that’s real fuckin’ important. We’re not exactly Grand Central here. How did he know who in the fuck we were?”
“’Cause one of his coyotes carrying a shipment of kids asked the people at the gas station store across the street,” the guy said sullenly. “We been losing people, and there’s been weird shit happening on this stretch of road. He said he’d look to see what was going on. Ivanov said he’d pay extra.”
Ace gave a narrow grin. “We got nothin’ to do with weird shit goin’ on here,” he said. “We’re just a bunch of people tryin’ to make a living.”
The guy’s mouth worked, and Ace kept his expression serene because he knew the reality of all those times Ernie had known someone was a bad guy and Ace and Jai or Ace and Burton, or sometimes Jai all by himself, had gone off into the dark of night and done invisible deeds was carefully shielded behind his hooded eyes.
“How am I going to explain my dead partner?” the guy asked, the disbelief dripping from his voice.
“You don’t need to explain jack to nobody,” Ace told him. “All the peopleyou’reworried about are dead. If I dropped you off in the middle of the night at a shopping center with an urgent care, you could feel the fuck free to forget we existed. You might even want to crawl back into whatever hole you came from and find a different life.” He pulled the gun from the back of his pants and shoved the muzzle under the guy’s chin. “That might be the only way you get to keep your life at all.”
The guy nodded wearily, and Ace took a breath and sized up the situation.
“Either of you sleep?” he asked.
Ernie and Sonny both shook their heads negative.
“Then here’s what we’re going to do.” He had to think a minute because they’d set fire to Ernie’s car in the desert, and it wasn’t like they had burner cars wandering around. But….
“Sonny, grab the spare plates from the work counter over there and put ’em on your car. I’ll put this guy in the trunk and go make the drop. While I’m doing that, Ernie, you watch the front office and tell them we’ll be gone until this afternoon, and Sonny, you’ll go to bed and sleep for real this time. When I get back, you two switch off and I’ll help with the backlog if we get any. How’s that?”
They nodded their heads wearily and they got to work.
Ace drove the guy to the bus station in San Diego. There were a lot of homeless people hanging out there—the guy wasn’t going to stick out any, and Ace figured one of the officials in the terminal could get him to an urgent care center.
As Ace helped him out of the trunk under a series of overpasses, he made sure the guy was square on the details.
“So,” Ace said, slicing through the duct tape Sonny had used on his hands. “What happened to you?”
“I was walking by a stop and rob and got hit by a stray bullet,” the guy repeated dully.
