I was on the floor, back against a wall, feet against the base of the butcher-block counter. My arms were tied at the wrist behind me. I felt around back there with my fingers. Twine of some sort. Not necessarily the best thing to tie someone up with, but it still did the trick.
Cody and Leonard weren’t looking at me. Cody paced back and forth along the counter by the sink. Leonard sat up on a bar stool, a towel filled with ice pressed to the back of his head. A few red pimples lined the side of his neck, and his large jaw jutted out of his small face like Lincoln ’s on Rushmore. A steroid case, I guessed, sculpting his muscles and fighting ’roid rage until his joints turned necrotic. All to impress chicks he’d be too impotent to fuck when game time finally rolled around.
“Guy broke into your home, Mr. Falk. Assaulted both of us.”
“Mmm,” Cody touched his upper lip gingerly. He glanced down at me, his two heads moving quickly, and my stomach eddied.
I met his eyes as he gave me a broad smile and matching wave of his hand. “Welcome back, Mr. Kenzie.”
I smacked my lips together against the taste of cotton balls dipped in battery acid. He knew my name, which meant he probably had my wallet. Not good.
Cody squatted down by me, and the transparent Cody jelled a bit more with the solid Cody, so now it was like looking at one and a half Codys instead of two.
“How you feeling?”
I gave him a grimace.
“Not so good, huh? You going to puke?”
I bit down on some bile in my chest. “Trying not to.”
He tilted his head toward the butcher block. “Leonard puked. He also has a nasty bruise on his lower spine from hitting the floor. He’s kinda pissed off, Patrick.”
Leonard scowled at me.
“What’s Leonard’s capacity here?”
“He’s bodyguard.” Cody slapped my cheek, not too hard, but not too gently, either. “After you and your friend came to visit that time, I thought I might need some protection.”
“And the WWF was having a yard sale?” I asked.
Leonard leaned over the counter and the muscles in his forearm flexed. “Keep talking, bitch. Just-”
Cody waved him off. “So where is your friend, Pat? The big dumb one who likes to hit people with tennis rackets.”
I tried to tilt my head in the direction of the front of the house, but it hurt too much and the nausea kicked in double-time.
“Out on the street, Cody.”
Cody shook his head. “No, no. We took a walk while you slept this off. There’s no one out there.”
“You sure?”
A wisp of doubt flickered in his eyes, then vanished. “He’d have come crashing through here by now, I think.”
“When he does, Cody, what are you going to do?”
Cody pulled a.38 from his waistband, waved it in my face. “Shoot him, of course.”
“Sure,” I said, “make him mad.”
Cody chuckled, then shoved the gun barrel up against my left nostril. “Ever since you humiliated me, Pat, I’ve dreamed of something like this. Gives me a hard-on, to tell you the truth. What do you think of that?”
“I think your erogenous zones need rewiring.”
He pulled back on the hammer with his thumb, dug harder into my nostril.
“So, you going to kill me now, Cody?”
He shrugged. “I gotta be honest, I thought I’d killed you up in the bathroom. I’ve never knocked someone out before. I’ve never even tried.”
“Beginner’s luck, then. Kudos.”
He smiled, slapped my face again. I blinked, and when I opened my eyes, both Codys had returned, the transparent one just to the right of the real one.
“Mr. Falk,” Leonard said.
“Hmm?” He peered at something on the side of my head.
“This is bad news. Either call the police, or we take him someplace and do him.”
Cody nodded, then leaned in to take a closer look at the side of my head. “You’re bleeding pretty bad.”
“From the temple?”
He shook his head. “More the ear.”
I noticed a distant, high-pitched hum in there for the first time. “Inner or outer?”
“Both.”
“Well, you did take a few good swings.”
He seemed pleased. “Thanks. I wanted to make sure I did it right.”
He took the gun barrel out of my nostril and sat back on the floor in front of me, kept the.38 pointed at the center of my face.
As I watched, the idea grew in his brain, and an icy realization billowed in his eyes and sucked the heat out of the room.
I knew what he was going to say before he said it.
“What if we really did kill him?” Cody asked Leonard.
Leonard’s eyes widened and he put the towel filled with ice down on the counter in front of him.
“Well…”
“You’d expect a bonus, of course,” Cody said.
“Mr. Falk, sure, yeah, but we’d need to really think this through.”
“How so?” Cody winked at me from the other side of the gun hammer. “We have his wallet and keys. That’s his Porsche parked in front of the Lowensteins’. We pull the car into the garage, dump him in the trunk, and then drive him somewhere.” He leaned forward, grazed the gun barrel across my lips. “And shoot-no, stab him to death.”
Leonard’s wide eyes met my own.
“You know, Leonard,” I said, “you ‘do’ me. Just like in the movies.”
Cody reached out and slapped me again. It was starting to get annoying.
“Killing someone,” Leonard managed, “is not something you just decide to do, Mr. Falk.”
“Why’s that?”
“It, ahm…well-”
“It’s not easy,” I said to Cody. “There’s always things you forget.”
“Such as?” Cody seemed only mildly curious.
“Such as who knows I’m here. Who would figure out I was here, in either case. Who would come looking for you.”
Cody laughed. “And, lemme see if I remember this-‘burn down my restaurants and paralyze my dumb fucking ass’? Is that right?”
“For starters.”
Cody gave it some thought. He leaned his head against the butcher block and his lids fell to half-mast and he watched me with a burgeoning excitement. He seemed giddy, like a twelve-year-old at his first peep show.
“I really like this idea,” he said.
“Great, Cody.” I gave him an emphatic nod. “I’m happy for you.”