Burn for Me
My phone rang as if on cue. I answered it.
“Hey,” Bern said. “Do you still need me? I’ve got an invite from Bug, and there are some people here with an armored Range Rover. They’re saying Mad Rogan told them to pick me up.”
I looked at him. Mad Rogan stepped close to me, his big body too near, the look in his eyes too heated. I smelled a hint of sandalwood and vetiver, mixed with an almost harsh, peppery scent. He bent down, arresting, his eyes so blue. My heart beat faster.
He smiled a slow, predatory grin. “Resistance is futile.”
“You are not assimilating me.” I stood my ground and raised the phone to my ear. “Bern, if you want to go with them, go ahead.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.” Mad Rogan already had my family covered in Austin anyway. At least Bern would be protected.
I hung up and looked at Mad Rogan. “I’ll go to lunch with you. But I’m not giggling.”
Casa Fortunato turned out to be a small restaurant at the intersection of Crawford Street and Congress Avenue, only a few blocks from the justice center. It had a small outdoor area facing the Minute Maid ballpark. The day was hot and humid, and the last thing I wanted to do was sit outside. That’s why anyone who had any sense ate underground in Houston’s tunnels. They started out as an underground passage between two movie theaters and grew over the years to connect to just about everything, with their own restaurants and rest areas. On a hot day, downtown looked almost deserted. Unfortunately, if we sat underground, Adam Pierce would have no chance of noticing us. It was highly unlikely he would enter the tunnels, where he could be cornered.
We walked to a table with bright yellow, blue, and white Spanish tile, and Mad Rogan held the chair out for me. I hung my canvas bag on the chair and sat. The canvas bag contained a Baby Desert Eagle, .40SW, with a 12-round magazine. After the last brush with Adam’s crew, I didn’t want to take chances, so I’d upgraded my firepower. I was turning into Dirty Harry. BDE was as big and bad as I wanted to be. Eventually it would all be over and I could go back to my normal business of tracking cheating spouses and insurance fraud. It might be less exciting, but it rarely required me to fire a gun within city limits.
The familiar, sick feeling sucked at my throat. I had killed someone. I really didn’t want to think about it. Eventually I would have to deal with it one way or another.
The waitress appeared with a dish of salsa and a plate of still-warm chips and took our drink orders. Two ice teas, fake sugar.
I pretended to be engrossed in the menu. What to order? Something not messy. Baja tacos with shrimp looked good. I put the menu down.
“What do you think of Lenora Jordan?” Mad Rogan said.
“I think she’s awesome. I want to be her when I grow up.”
“You want to be the DA?”
“No, I want to . . .” I struggled to put it into words. “I want to be where she is professionally but in my own way. I want to be confident and respected for what I do. I want to earn a reputation. I want it known that the Baylor Investigative Agency stands for something. My father started it, and I’d like to make sure the name means competence and quality. What is it you want?”
He leaned back. The sunlight played on his face, sneaking in past a tree on the corner. His skin seemed to almost glow, highlighting the strong lines of his face, the powerful nose, and the hard chin. He shrugged. “I haven’t thought about it.”
The waitress returned with our drinks, took our order—I got Baja tacos and he got crispy tacos with ground sirloin—and disappeared again.
His phone beeped.
“Excuse me.” Mad Rogan raised it to his ear. “Yes?”
There was an odd kind of contrast between a man who crushed people out of existence and the one who had perfect dinner manners. Somehow the raging Prime and urbane millionaire were one and the same, and it completely made sense, except that the mundane part of him made the violent part even scarier.
“When?” Mad Rogan asked. “Tell him to meet me here.”
He hung up and glanced at me. “I’m sorry, I have to take care of some business. It can’t wait, but I’ll keep it short.”
“Not a problem. I’ll busy myself with being seen and tossing my hair. Would you like me to twirl it on my finger while biting my lip?”
“Could you?”
“No, sorry.” I grinned at him.
“Tease,” he said, and my mind went right into the gutter. I dragged it out, kicking and screaming. Professional. At least try to stay professional.
“So you have no goals?”
“No, I have short-term goals,” he said. “They’re not particularly challenging.”
“Why?”
Mad Rogan took the lemon wedge off his glass and deposited it onto his appetizer plate, as if it had been some sort of offending bug. “Well, let’s see, what do men in my position usually want?”
“More money?” I sipped from my glass.
“I’m worth one point two billion.”
I choked on my tea.
He waited until I got my coughing under control. “I have investments, and I own several corporations that make money mostly without my involvement. At some point more money is just more money. Some Primes go into research, but it never held any particular interest for me. Occasionally I may improve a spell if I want to accomplish a specific purpose, but I find the idea of dedicating myself to it boring.”
“Professional goals?”
Mad Rogan shook his head. “I’m excellent at only one thing: destruction on a massive scale. Been there, done that, got a lot of fatigue-colored T-shirts. I’ve reached the pinnacle of that career.”
Our food arrived. That was fast.
I bit into my taco. Delicious. “Why did you get out of the army?”
“Do you ever regret mortgaging the business?”
I saw how it was. An answer for an answer. A piece of shrimp slipped out of my taco and landed on my plate. Smooth move.
“Oh God, yes. We should’ve sold it as soon as we knew Dad was sick. We would’ve gotten more money and started the treatment earlier. The experimental therapy was working, it’s just that by the time the mortgage went through, my father was too far gone. But I was very green at that point, and running the business with an established name seemed like a better option. Had we sold it, I would’ve built it back up by now under a different name. But hindsight is twenty-twenty. My mother got a little bit more time with my dad, and he got a little bit more time with us. I have to be content with that.” I realized he was looking at me oddly. “What?”