13
“Just because you have no dreams of glory doesn’t mean you get to ruin mine.”
“Glory? You’re a performer in a rinky-dink, two-bit circus. You can’t sacrifice your health for a—Rialto’s right behind me, isn’t he?”
Last words Tori and her brother shouted at each other before Lenny Rialto blew a gasket and very nearly her family’s contract
I laid in bed trying to ignore the figure watching over me like some latter-day gargoyle. Armani was planning to put me under surveillance whether I liked it or not and insisted on taking first shift. I didn’t like it, but then I wasn’t too fond of fighting for my life either, so a temporary guardian might be the lesser of two evils.
Since he wanted to remain watchful, I doubted Armani would accept an offer of a place to lay his head. He’d gone all quiet when I told him that I’d been unconscious for most of the missing time and even more so somehow when upon further questioning I accounted for Apollo’s whereabouts. I left out exactly what had transpired when I awoke, but I had the awful feeling that Armani was filling in his own blanks. I couldn’t very well stop him without confessing to what had happened, which was bad enough.
I finally fell off to sleep, only to dream of being chased by coyotes who turned into paparazzi and herded me into the center ring at the big top. To escape I climbed to the high-wire act, where my family tossed me from one to the other while I tried not to shriek like a banshee—until my brother’s shoulder gave out. Then I plummeted toward certain death.
I awoke sweaty, thrashing and alone. Second watch, I guessed, hadn’t been invited in, for which I was grateful. Even though I was sure the surveillance was completely unnecessary, I felt I had to know where my watcher was—just in case. Muscles protested, but only vaguely, as I got up to wash away the sweat with a cool cloth. The bathroom mirror reflected back at me a rumpled, sleepy-eyed image. If this was the vision that had greeted Apollo, it was a wonder we’d gotten to first base. Anyway, even with my nightshirt ending three-quarters of the way down my thigh, I reckoned it safe enough to peer out my doorway to see how close by my babysitter might be. I was unlikely to incite more than a grimace.
I’d wondered if the surveillance would be as far away as a squad car on the street, but no, Armani had opted for aid closer at hand—a baby-faced patrolman whose five am shadow seemed incongruous. He looked up from his paper as my door opened, raked me with a glance and a nod and went back to his reading. Yup, I was definite siren material.
I drew my head back in, set the deadbolt, unset it again, figuring that with my enemies trouble might not come knocking at the front door; it might not be the best idea to lock out aid. With that happy thought, I resumed the supine position. It was a long, long time before I gave in once more to sleep.
Yiayia was on a roll.
“… clutched to his chest for gods’ sake and you don’t call …”
It had been a good ten minutes since she’d awakened me from a fitful sleep, and I had yet to get out a single word in my own defense.
I cut in finally, “Yiayia, I was a little busy being passed out, thank you very much, then being interrogated before passing out again. I promise that I would have called you if only you’d given me the chance to wake up at a decent hour.”
There was a weighty silence while Yiayia measured my sins against my suffering.
“Fine, you are forgiven, but only if you tell me everything. How did he feel? Was he sexy as hell?”
“Yiayia!” I gasped in astonishment. “For one thing, I was unconscious.”
She clucked her tongue at me. “Then. Do not try to tell me that you’ve had no private moment. It cannot be a coincidence that you start digging into the gods’ lives and then Apollo himself rescues you from the deep. You have been holding out on me.” She sniffed, “You will get no more from me until you come clean.”
Gods, she was getting as bad as me with the slang. Maybe we’d both seen one too many cop shows.
Heavens knew I’d get no peace until I complied. Anyway, I needed someone to talk to.
I poured it all out, more or less. Apollo, Armani, my confusion, the case itself, the conclusions we’d come to, everything I knew of my attacker.
She hesitated only an instant once I wound down, as if to be certain that I was done.
“I will not tell you what to do, since you have never listened anyway. Whatever you decide with your men, go carefully. Apollo … I think you know the dangers already. He may burn you out or leave you still burning with no way for another to ever take his place. But if you should choose your detective, it will not be any safer, certainly not for him. You’ve heard the stories of scorned gods. Just know I am here for you, whatever you need.”
I tabled that, since my only choice was no choice at all. I would not be subsumed by some god, no matter how sexy, and Armani seemed to have taken himself out of the running. Anyway, my love life was the least of my concerns.
Yiayia beat me to a change of subject. “Regarding your attackers, I would say Glaucus, but in all the pictures I’ve seen of him, he has a tail like a serpent. Of course, it is possible that he has found some potion or spell to allow him to walk like a man once again. It sounds like his MO”—she pronounced it like one of the Three Stooges—“is falling in love with an inappropriate woman like that actress only to have something horrid happen. Just think of that poor Scylla, a monster for all eternity because Circe double-crossed him on that love potion.”
It made perfect sense. Glaucus, having been betrayed by Circe in the past, wouldn’t have had any trouble believing that she’d killed his new love. The question was, who’d suggested it to him? Who’d manipulated him into Circe’s murder? And was that the whole purpose of Sierra Talbot’s death or was there more?
While Glaucus now sported eternally in the surf, he’d once been a humble fisherman, transformed by some magical mystery herb he’d found on a deserted island. The herb hadn’t done a damned thing, though, to ease the transformation or extend his human lifespan. For that he was beholden to the water gods and goddesses, who’d made him a pet project, taken him under their wings and granted him divinity. Whether Glaucus’s initial metamorphosis was unstable or some new monkey wrench had been thrown into the works, it was not out of the realm of possibility that he could regrow legs. Neither was it inconceivable that beings with such long lifespans had memories to match and that someone like Glaucus could still feel such a debt of gratitude that he’d be prone to unquestioning faith in his saviors.
“Your contact?” I asked, dragging my focus back to the conversation. “Has he said anything about what’s going on?”
Yiayia sighed heavily. “He has been—evasive, hard to reach. I have half a mind to fly out there myself and demand answers. If we were on hiatus …”
I laughed. “Yiayia, if only you could get out here to kick butt and take names, we’d have this whole mess cleared up in no time.”
“Darn straight.”
“One more thing—where’s Hermes hiding out these days?”
“Do you not know?” She tsked. “This younger generation, they never listen to us molden oldies. He is a syndicated columnist, Thom Foolery.”
Strangely enough, Yiayia’s call had invigorated me. I’d closed the door on my silly urge-to-give-up pity party and was ready to jump back into things.
Sadly, before I could do anything else, my presence was required down at the station. Lau and Armani, as he’d told me last night, were under increasing pressure to close the Holland and Talbot cases. The chief was maybe twenty-four hours away from ordering a task force. Even knowing it was futile, Armani had passed along the insistence that I come in to work with a police sketch artist. I wondered what the hell I was going to say. I didn’t want to forever ruin my credibility by playing unobservant, but neither could I have the unsuspecting populace turning in some poor man who just happened to look like a made-up perp. Of course, I had held right from the beginning that there was something odd about Circe’s killer, so it would serve them right if I gave them the Swamp Thing.
Chafing at the senseless waste of time, I grabbed a scone and latte on the way to the station to ease my pain. I even grabbed a large dark roast for my shadow, who had pulled over when I did.
Armani was either out following another lead or on Hephaestus watch, but Lau, just as pleasant as ever, babysat my efforts. She huffed and puffed over the ridiculousness of my description, as if she had no idea what was really going on. I was as impressed as I was irritated at her performance.
After the sketch artist finally threw in the towel, Lau and I had a little one-on-one. The stakeout of Hiero Cholas was off. He’d deserted his little pied a terre to return to his home base near San Marino. It might have meant that we were completely wrong about Hiero being one of the co-conspirators—only he’d chosen to rent a truck and load all his worldly goods onto it for the trip. It didn’t bode well. If I looked good in sandwich board, I’d be going around with a sign saying “The End is Near.” Or, what the hell, “Nigh.” Might as well wax poetic before the end. It wasn’t as if La La Landians didn’t see weird crap every day and would pay me any heed.
With nothing but a crazy story even the SyFy Channel would reject as too “far out,” there was no way to convince the San Marino PD to keep tabs on Cholas. There was no way to monitor packages he might send out or avenues back into the city. Lau had, apparently, convinced Cholas’s super here in LA to let her know if he returned, but the long and short of it was we’d lost him.
I hated this part of an investigation, the part where the trails all petered out, where you had to clear-cut a new path without a compass. If this were a dime novel, now would be about the time for a wild hunch. If I were Holmes I’d no doubt have made some logical leap that would leave my everyman partner in awe of my deductive reasoning. As it was, I retreated to my car, pulled the notebook I used to keep track of mileage from above my visor and nibbled on the end of the accompanying pencil while I took refuge in a loose-ends list. I liked lists—they made you feel like you were doing something even when you weren’t. Plus, it felt so good to cross things off.
1. Find out whether Christie knew Circe (Yeah, I was reaching, but I never had gotten an answer and that niggled at me.)
2. Find Hermes
3. Find Mrs. S’s damned dog
4. Figure out what the hell Apollo meant when he said I was “not quite” mortal
5. Why wasn’t I weak and jittery from my second water escape?
6. Explosives: where from, where set?
7. Which old ones have been jittery or disappearing? (It was something Apollo had mentioned in passing and a question I should have asked earlier.)
8. Yiayia’s mystery man?
I probably could have gone on all day avoiding real work by coughing up questions, but the thought of me and the rest of LA at the bottom of the ocean was pretty damned motivating. Somehow, I sensed that Cholas’s move had started the countdown. Maybe it was Apollo’s gift of precognition, maybe it was just those investigator’s instincts I was supposed to have belatedly kicking in. Either way we were screwed.
It irritated the hell out of me that before I could even get to my list I had one very important errand to run—replacing the cell phone Glaucus or whoever had dunked in our very first ocean encounter. I felt oddly cut off from the world without it and certainly from the all-important 9-1-1 in case of emergency, which the way my life was going was not a question of whether but of when. So, with a semi-quick stop at the RadioShack I’d passed on the way to the station, I rejoined the twenty-first century.
No sooner had the door hit my fanny on the way out than the phone rang. I checked the readout. Jesus. “Yes?” I answered.
“Boss lady, I mean no disrespect, but where the hell are you?” I blinked.
“The phone has been ringing off the hook. Apollo actually sounds desperate—” Two beeps cut across Jesus’s rant.
“You gave him my cell number,” I accused.
“I’m surprised you didn’t. I mean, aside from the fact that E Magazine named him last year’s sexiest man alive—”
My jaw ached from clenching. “I’ll take this up with you later,” I threatened, jamming my finger on the button to cut him off and send Apollo through. At least my virtue was safe over the phone. In theory.
“Karacis Investigations,” I answered, as if I hadn’t recognized the number.
“Tori, you have to come forward,” Apollo demanded without preamble.
“’Scusé?”
“Without a grateful victim, there are some rumors that the rescue was a publicity stunt. I need you in front of a camera.”
Sure, ten million or so registered SAG actresses would give their eyeteeth for such an opportunity and I got the call.
“No.”
“Tori—” He imbued it with a boatload of mojo. Even sitting my knees went weak.
“Still no. Hire someone.”
“I’ve hired you.”
“For an investigation. Not to put my life under a magnifying glass.”
He muttered something under his breath. “If I hire some actress, it’s bound to come out, and then my name will be mud. All because I saved your life. I didn’t want to play this card, but you owe me.”
There they were, those dreadful words. I hadn’t asked for any of this and still the bill had come due. I just hadn’t expected it so soon.
“The whole life-debt thing, eh? Look, I’d be glad to give my life literally. Anytime you want me to leap in front of a bullet or save you from a watery grave, just say the word. Promise. But that’s a one-time deal. If I do this, I’m going to keep paying. Your damned press will pry into my background, lurk outside my door”—talk to my family—“and make it impossible to do my job. You know, the one you hired me to do?”
He was momentarily hushed. “I don’t suppose you have a sister?”
That surprised a laugh out of me. “Brother. And let me tell you, there’s not enough hot wax in the world to pass him off as a woman.”
“Pity.”
I waited. It couldn’t be that easy.
“Someday—” Apollo’s voice dropped low, gravelly, to a dead-on impression of The Godfather. “—and that day may never come—I’ll call upon you to do a service for me.”
“Cute,” I said wryly.
“I was going for clever.”
“Be glad I gave you cute.”
“You are possibly the most contrary woman I’ve ever met.”
“Am not.”
“I know what you’re doing.”
“Rolling my eyes?”
“Argotera, Tori.”
“Anh anh ah—not so fast. I want some answers first. What’s this about my mortality?”
“Tori, my battery’s dying. I have to go.” And just like that he was gone.
I was steamed. This time not in the good way. There’d been no telltale sound or lack thereof, on my end anyway, signaling a foundering battery. That meant evasion; he was hiding something. Finding out what meant more contact than was probably healthy.
It hit me in a flash that my own curiosity was truly the only thing connecting us now. I’d solved the case Apollo had hired me to investigate. I might not be able to prove to a court of law that Poseidon had drowned Sierra Talbot and implicated Circe, leading to her murder, but conviction wasn’t my job. I didn’t know whether to be offended or relieved that Poseidon hadn’t seen me as enough of a threat to drown. Maybe he thought Glaucus would take care of that as well. Anyway, as soon as I turned in a report, my association with Apollo would come to an end. A mischievous thought flitted past, that I could withhold my information as a bargaining chip for the answers I wanted, but I was too professional to do it. I put temptation behind me and headed for the office.
If Jesus had possessed a smidgeon of sense, he’d have run for the hills as soon as he saw the whites of my eyes. Instead, he sat behind his desk as though it was an executive model made of solid mahogany rather than veneer over pressboard and actually had the nerve to put me on hold with a raised finger while he continued his telephone conversation.
Only the tightest rein on my fury and the fact that it seemed to involve Mrs. Strohmeyer’s missing hound kept me from disconnecting on his behalf.
When he finally hung up, I took a deep breath, ready to lay into him with a stream of words and run-on sentences, but Jesus beat me to it.
“Look, chica, I do not appreciate being thrown into the middle of your lover’s quarrels,” he said, looking for all the world like a pissy librarian glaring through pince-nez even though he’d never be caught dead in the damned things.
“What the hell?” I burst.
“Apollo-freakin’-Demas, sí? I don’t know what you do to get a man so worked up but honest to god, chica, you are going to share the secret or I will key your personal information into every Internet dating scheme I find.”
I shuddered. “Jesus, I promise that when all this is over I will take you out for one helluva thank-you dinner and tell all.” I hoped he didn’t notice my crossed fingers. “For now, can we get back to work?”
He eyed me like a Rodeo Drive sales girl. “One thing first. I must know; stud or dud?”
I groaned.