“Which means that we need to move. Clear the vans off the road, get rid of the bodies, and vamoose like this never happened.” Finn quirked his eyebrows at me. “Unless you two ladies want to hang around and explain things to the cops?”
I looked at Lorelei, who shook her head.
“No,” she said. “I’ll have enough headaches finding a replacement for Corbin. Besides, this was a . . . personal matter. I’d rather keep it that way.”
Her gaze drifted over to Pike’s body, and her mouth twisted. Lorelei might have said that things were finished, but they weren’t. Not for her. Not now, maybe not ever. Something I could relate to all too well. Perhaps we should start our own sleep-deprivation club. Nightmares Anonymous of Ashland. Heh.
Finn nodded. “All righty, then. Xavier, Bria, Owen, Silvio. You’re with me.” He went over, grabbed Sophia’s hand, and gave her a low, gallant bow. “Naturally, I will leave the bodies to your discretion, my lady.”
Finn smooched a kiss to Sophia’s hand, making her laugh, reach out, and rumple his hair. He grinned, then hurried after the others. Sophia drew a tape measure out of the pocket of her black coveralls, bent down, and measured Corbin’s body, before going over and doing the same thing to Pike’s. Jo-Jo trailed behind her sister, along with Mallory.
Lorelei started to follow her grandmother, but I called out to her.
“One more thing.”
“What?”
I stabbed my finger toward Pike. “There aren’t any more like him around, are there? No more Pike brothers or sisters or aunts or uncles? Nobody who’s going to wonder what happened to cousin Ray-Ray and come to Ashland looking for revenge? Because I don’t need to start another blood feud. I have enough problems right now.”
My voice was light, but it was a legitimate concern. My past experience with Madeline had taught me that you never knew when another relative of a dead enemy was going to pop up, come to town, and try to screw you over every which way she could.
Lorelei chuckled, then shook her head. “It was just Raymond. Trust me. This is done. You don’t have to worry about anyone else.”
“Good,” I drawled. “One near-death experience a month is plenty for me.”
Lorelei laughed again, but the sound faded away all too quickly. She stared at me, emotions flashing in her eyes. After a moment, she nodded at me. I nodded back.
I didn’t know if we would ever truly be friends, but we weren’t enemies anymore. And that made me happier than I’d thought it would.
Lorelei and I walked over to where Sophia was still crouched down, measuring Pike’s body. In the distance, a police siren wailed. Bria and Xavier would stall the cops as long as they could, but Finn was right. We needed to leave.
“Sophia?” I asked. “Are you going to haul the bodies back to the vans?”
“Nah.”
“Then what are you going to do with them?” Lorelei asked.
The Goth dwarf glanced over at Corbin, then back down at Pike. A grin split her face, and her black eyes brightened. Sophia rasped out a single word.
“Fertilizer.”
* * *
Sophia found a shovel in one of the maintenance sheds and quickly buried Pike and Corbin close to the pagoda. She’d just finished when voices started drifting through the hedge maze, indicating that the cops were here. Silvio had already texted me to say that Finn and the others had moved the vans and sedans off the road and out of sight. Once Sophia was done, the rest of us left the garden and went our separate ways.
The next day, life was pretty much back to normal—or as normal and nonviolent as it ever truly got in Ashland.
And it stayed that way over the next week. A story ran in the newspaper about a mysterious disturbance at the botanical gardens and someone vandalizing one of the rock gardens, but the cops attributed it to mischief-
making kids, and that was the extent of the news coverage.
No one seemed to be missing Raymond Pike. Silvio scoured the news outlets in West Virginia, but there wasn’t so much as a whisper about Pike disappearing. It looked like Lorelei was right, and he was the end of the line. I hoped so. Although I kept thinking about what he’d said to me in the garden, about his source being a coldhearted woman. Something about his specific words chimed a warning bell in the back of my mind, although I couldn’t figure out why.
“Well, well, well,” Finn drawled. “Lookie here on the society page. Mallory has made a sizable donation to the botanical gardens to help clean up all the recent vandalism, along with another anonymous donor.” He snapped his newspaper down and stared over the top of the pages at me, his green eyes sharp and accusing. “You wouldn’t happen to know who that is, would you, Gin?”
“I thought the gardens might need some more fertilizer.” I paused. “Other than what Sophia provided.”
Finn sighed. “First you offer that bounty for Pike’s whereabouts. Then you pay those giants to double-cross him. And now you’re handing out charitable donations. If you keep giving away our money at this rate, there won’t be any of it left!”
“What’s this our money nonsense? It’s my money. I’m the one who earned it. I’m the one who bled for it.”
Finn ignored me and elbowed Silvio in the side. “Tell her I’m right. After all, she has to pay your salary too.”
The vampire shook his head. “Oh, I don’t think there’s any need to worry about Gin’s finances. Not given how healthy business has been at the restaurant over the past few weeks. Just look at everyone piled in here today.”
The restaurant was as crowded as ever. Most of the folks were just here to chow down on a hot plate of barbecue, but more than a few underworld types were in the mix too. Apparently, eating at the Pork Pit was one of the ways to show your support for me, the new head honcho. At least, that’s what Silvio kept claiming. Maybe I should start selling T-shirts with my spider rune and the words Team Gin on them. Heh.
Finn finished his lunch and left to go meet some new client. Thirty minutes later, the bell over the front door chimed, announcing the arrival of two customers I could have done without: Dimitri Barkov and Luiz Ramos.
I still hadn’t settled their business dispute, and the two of them were getting antsy. Silvio had invited them to come to the Pork Pit so we could decide things once and for all.
It was three o’clock on the dot when they stepped up to the front door, both trying to enter at the same time. They ended up getting stuck in a logjam, glaring at each other, neither one willing to give an inch, not even so they could get inside. I grinned. This might be more amusing than I’d thought.
Sophia, who was wiping down one of the tables, went over, grabbed hold of their arms, and yanked them through the doorway. Dimitri and Luiz both stumbled forward before righting themselves. They started to glare at Sophia, but she crossed her arms over the black figure of Death that decorated her bright pink T-shirt and stared them down, daring them to give her a dirty look.
Dimitri and Luiz both swallowed and turned away. They were smart enough not to want to mess with the Goth dwarf, especially when she was eyeing their heads like she wanted to crack them together and leave them both addle-brained puddles on the floor.
The two mobsters smoothed down their ties and headed over to where I was sitting behind the cash register, reading For Your Eyes Only by Ian Fleming for my spy literature course over at Ashland Community College.
“Fellas,” I drawled. “What’s up?”
“It’s time you made a decision, Blanco,” Dimitri said, snapping up to his full height. The motion made the black toupee perched on top of his head wobble dangerously, as though it were about to fall off.
“Yeah,” Luiz chimed in. “You’ve kept us waiting long enough. If Mab were still running things—”
“If Mab were still running things, she would have killed you both and taken the coin laundries for herself,” I
drawled again. “Actually, now that I think about it, that option is looking better and better all the time. Maybe then I could enjoy some peace and quiet, instead of having the two of you constantly whining at me.”
Their cheeks flushed with anger, but they bit back their harsh words.
“Just tell us what you’ve decided,” Dimitri ground out through clenched teeth. “Please.”
I set the book aside and laced my fingers together. “I’ve considered both your proposals. And I’ve decided that neither one of you is getting the laundries.”
Their mouths dropped open.
“What?” Luiz screeched, drawing the attention of the other customers.
I arched my eyebrows, and he realized his mistake. His voice was quieter but still full of anger as he spoke again.
“You can’t do that!” he hissed.
“Sure I can. After all, you two geniuses came to me to mediate your little dispute,” I said. “Besides, if you really wanted the coin laundries, then you should have made the winning bid.”
Dimitri’s eyes narrowed. “Someone outbid us for the laundries? Who?”
I pointed at a woman finishing her lunch at the far end of the counter. “Her.”
Jade Jamison dabbed at her lips with a white paper napkin, then gave Dimitri and Luiz a cheery wave and a saucy wink before going back to her cheeseburger, onion rings, and strawberry milkshake.
“Her? But all she does is run hookers and hire out people to clean houses!” Dimitri sputtered. “In the suburbs!”
The way he said suburbs, you would have thought it was one of the worst places in all of Ashland. He might have been right about that.
“True,” I said. “But she also happened to top both your bids by ten percent. So Lorelei has decided to sell the coin laundries to her. It’s just business. I told Lorelei that you would understand. Right?”
Dimitri and Luiz looked at me, then at each other, the wheels spinning in their hamster brains. The idiots were actually thinking about teaming up to try to take me down again.
So I reached over, picked up a wayward butter knife lying on the counter, and started twirling it around and around in my hand, making sure that the utensil caught the light and reflected it back into their faces.
“Right?” I asked a second time, my voice much colder than before.
Luiz was the first to back down. “Oh, yeah,” he said, holding his hands up and backing away from the cash register. “Like you said, it’s just business. A winning bid is a winning bid. Right, Dimitri?”
The Russian was far more reluctant, but a few more spins of the butter knife convinced him. “Yeah. Right.”
That didn’t stop them from giving me sour looks as they whirled around, huffed and puffed their way out of the storefront, and skedaddled down the street and out
of sight. They were pissed—pissed enough to make another run at me sometime soon—but I’d be ready for them.
And next time, I wouldn’t be as nice as I had been today.
I tossed the butter knife into a bin of dirty dishes.
Jade Jamison finished her meal, then slid off her stool and sidled over to me. “Thanks again for backing my play for the laundries. I appreciate it. And thank Lorelei for me too.”
“You’re the one with a million bucks to spend. If you want to invest in some coin laundries, who am I to keep a rising entrepreneur down?”
Jade grinned. She slapped a hundred-dollar bill on the counter, refused any change, then sashayed out of the restaurant. I put the extra money in the tip jar for the staff to split. I liked her style.
Silvio watched Jade leave, then turned back to me. “Finally,” he murmured. “I can mark something off your to-do list.”
“My to-do what now?”
He turned his tablet around to me, scrolling through screen after screen after screen. “You’ve got meetings the rest of the week. I hope you didn’t think that Dimitri and Luiz were the only bosses who wanted some of your time and attention.”
My eyes glazed over just looking at all the lists on his tablet. “But why so many of them? And why now? A week ago, everyone was dragging their heels about actually involving me in any of their dealings.”
“They heard what you did for Lorelei.”
I frowned. “What do they think I did for her? We didn’t exactly broadcast our garden party with Pike.”
“I might have casually spread the word around that Pike was trying to muscle in on some of Lorelei’s territory—and everyone else’s in Ashland.”
“And?”
A sly grin creased his features. “And that you took care of it as the big boss.”
I groaned. “So now what? I’m a hero to the underworld too?”
Silvio’s grin widened. “Something like that. After all, good public relations is the first step to winning hearts and minds . . . and loyalty.”
I groaned louder. Silvio chuckled, enjoying my misery. I shot him a dark look, but that only made him chuckle harder. But he quickly went back to work. He was too much of a professional, and he had too much to do, according to him, to keep harping on how I just kept digging myself in deeper and deeper with the Ashland underworld.
While Silvio typed away on his tablet, setting up meetings between the other bosses and me, I looked out over the restaurant, scanning the crush of customers as they came and went and chowed down on their barbecue.
Raymond Pike might be dead, but he’d left a loose thread behind: whoever had given him all that information about me, Lorelei, and everything else going on in Ashland.
I wondered if Pike’s friend, the one who’d known so much about me, was worried that she hadn’t heard from him in a week now. Or maybe she’d already realized that he wasn’t ever coming back.
This person seemed to be connected to the Ashland grapevine, so it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that she had heard the whispers about me dealing with Pike. I wondered if she had spies in town—spies who could be in my restaurant at this very second.
But it didn’t much matter. She wasn’t going to make an appearance today, and I didn’t have any way to start tracking her down, not a name, not a rune, nothing but Pike’s smug mentions of how powerful she was. So she would stay in the shadows—for now.
Whoever the mystery woman was, if she wanted to come to Ashland and take me on, she was more than welcome to step into my parlor.
Then I would show her what coldhearted really looked like.
32
Despite Silvio’s protests that we should squeeze in at least one more meeting, I departed work early, leaving the restaurant in Sophia’s and Catalina’s capable hands. But I didn’t go home. Instead, I went to the other place I’d been visiting a lot recently.
The cemetery.
Most people would have thought it morbid, but I actually enjoyed driving out to Blue Ridge Cemetery, walking the winding paths, and admiring the tombstones. It was calm and quiet and just about the only place where I could be by myself these days, without worrying about someone trying to kill me.
So I parked my car, got out, and meandered along the paths, staring at the fading flowers, stuffed animals, and other ornaments that marked the tombstones of loved ones. A faint breeze gusted through the cemetery, making the last of the autumn leaves spiral down to the ground, covering up the green grass like jagged red, orange, and yellow jewels. It was a pretty scene, and I breathed in, enjoying the crisp chill in the air. It wouldn’t be long now before fall slipped into winter and flakes of snow replaced the leaves. I just wondered how many new enemies the changing season would bring with it.
I headed over to Fletcher’s grave and did a careful scan of the cemetery, just to be sure that my peace and quiet wouldn’t be disturbed by some idiot who thought he was tougher and stronger than I was. Most of the time, the cemetery was deserted, especially this late in the day, when the sun was s
etting over the mountains and the landscape would soon be cloaked in darkness.
But I wasn’t alone today. Another figure stood at a grave partway up the hill.
Lorelei.
She was about halfway between my Gin Blanco tombstone and the one that marked the final resting place of Genevieve Snow, my childhood self. That was where her mother’s grave was. I didn’t know how Mallory had managed it, but she’d gotten Lily Rose buried here all those years ago.
Lorelei looked at me, waved, and turned back to the tombstone. I waved back, then went about my own business. Even though we’d arranged to meet here, away from prying eyes, neither one of us wanted to talk right now. We were both too busy thinking about the ghosts of our past and how they’d come back to haunt us over the past several days.
I crouched down next to Fletcher’s gravesite, setting a small jar of his barbecue sauce on top of the tombstone. I’d made it fresh earlier in the day, and it was my own little way of honoring him. Every time I came back, the jar that I’d left the time before was gone. I didn’t know what happened to all that barbecue sauce, and I didn’t really want to. Maybe it was stupid, but I liked to think that it went to Fletcher, wherever he was.
I stayed there for several minutes, just soaking up the quiet and the sense that Fletcher was watching over me. Then I stood and looked up the hill. Lorelei must have sensed me staring, because she turned around again. She laid a bouquet of white lilies and red roses on top of her mother’s grave, then stuck her hands into the pockets of her blue leather jacket and walked down the hill toward me.
We met in the middle.
“Lorelei.”
“Gin.”
We looked at each other, then at the graves we’d come to visit. Lorelei grinned when she spotted the jar sitting on top of Fletcher’s tombstone, but she didn’t comment on it.
I didn’t ask Lorelei how she was doing, but she didn’t seem as tense as before and certainly not as hostile toward me. Good. I needed more allies in the underworld, and I wanted her to be one of them. But time would tell whether that would actually happen.