Fuck.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The King’s Audience House was located in a part of town where the population density was about two humans an acre, tops. Which according to V’s sense of proportion was two humans too much—but it wasn’t like the Caldwell zoning committee was calling him and asking for his opinion. With grand houses that were set back behind gates, and yards that were mowed by private gardeners in warmer months, this was where the rich lived and entitled themselves to their hearts’ desires.
As V drove his R8 up the hill, he was late. He’d taken the long way into town from the Brotherhood’s mountain, but the first drive of the year was always a good thing for his mood. When you lived in a place where snowbanks could get as tall as small trees, and sometimes Prince was right and it snowed in April, you waited with the bated-breath shit to drive your car properly. Granted, his Audi had that Quattro stuff going on, which helped with traction, and given that he’d gotten the performance engine, some front-wheel drive added to the rear-wheel vroom-vroom was handy no matter the weather conditions. But the supercar was still not an all-four-seasons kind of ride.
He’d learned that firsthand.
He’d taken it out in snow once, with Butch on shotgun. Things had gone pretty well in terms of traction, but the rate limiter had been the air dam in front. With ground clearance that could cover at most ten sheets of paper in a stack—okay, fine, twenty-five—it had been no time at all until they’d gotten stuck.
That had been a fun time.
This was not a fun time.
But the car ride helped.
When he got within range of Darius’s old place, he laid off the accelerator and coasted for a good fifty feet. The driveway was something he had to take real slow and at an angle, the R8 shifting to the side as he eased into the up-and-over. After that, it was a straight shot to the detached garage at the back of the property, and as he parked, for no particular reason, he looked up to the little building’s second story and recalled what Saxton had done to the male who had fucked with his mate there.
Talk about needing a wet vac.
And you had to respect a solicitor who could use both the pen and the sword. There might’ve also been a power tool involved, he couldn’t remember.
Getting out of the car, his back cracked, and the involuntary and unhelpful readjustment made him grimace. A side stretch got whatever vertebra was being a little bitch back in line, and as he started for the rear entrance to the Federal mansion, he lit up a hand-rolled. He never smoked in his R8, even when the top was down.
Just as he came up to the door into the mansion’s kitchen, he glanced back at his car. He’d murdered it, everything from the body color to the rims to the four overlapping circles that formed the Audi logo, black.
It was a missile with a gas tank and a pair of airbags.
A disquieting thought challenged him that he didn’t drive it much. But as if he would ever sell the thing? Audi, like most car makers, was going electric for their next bomb on wheels, and although he was all for taking care of the environment, there was nothing like the sound of that naturally aspirated V-10 engine sucking fossil fuel like it was going out of style.
Which he supposed it was—
The back door swung open and Fritz leaned out, the butler’s old face falling forward like a basset hound looking over the lip of a step.
“Sire? Would you care for me to wash your automobile?”
V shook his head. It went without saying that when this doggen offered something like that, there was no royal “we.” The ancient male would get a bucket and a clean cloth and some appropriate soap, and he would stand out here in the forty-five-degree weather playing Mr. Miyagi until the R8 gleamed like onyx.
“I’m good, but thanks.”
Fritz stepped aside as V entered. “A Grey Goose for you then, Sire?”
“On duty.”
The butler bowed low. “But of course. May I mention that the others have already arrived? I do believe they’re waiting for you and Master Lassiter.”
“Great,” V murmured.
Man, he wished he could have yes sir’d that vodka offer.
As he walked through the kitchen, with its cooking staff in uniforms and its homey smells that he’d never grown up with and only knew as a grown-up because Fritz was in his life, the sense that there was something on his heels dogged him.
That paranoia was the real reason he’d taken the car instead of just dematerializing here. He’d been hoping to lose the nagging awareness somewhere along the winding roads around the mountain, or on the Northway going a hundred miles an hour, or maybe even in the suburban sprawl of strip malls and apartment complexes and nebbish neighborhoods that eventually thinned out to this wealthy zip code.