Page 37 of The B!tch is Bad

But she wouldn’t. She reached the guy first, and he still hadn’t moved. She remained steady and sure as she aimed the barrel at the informant’s chest. “Get. Your. Fucking. Ass. Out of my bushes.”

The guy came, hands up to show he held no weapon.

Only it wasn’t Joe King.

Santiago Slayer himself in the flesh, for the first time ever the subordinate.

“Slayer!” I cried, whipping the gun to my side. Patience still held firm, and I had to reach out and gently lower her arm. She huffed with unspent rage. “What the fuck are you doing crouching in the bushes like Sean Spicer?”

He wouldn’t drop his hands until Patience let down her piece. His eyes darted nervously from side to side. “I saw you two—”

“In my dining room,” I prompted.

The normally suave actor even had beads of sweat decorating his forehead. “In your dining room. You know.”

Her gun down, Patience took a step toward Slayer, teeth gritted. “Doing it.”

Slayer shrugged. “Yes, doing it. I didn’t want to interrupt you. Then I saw that cray-cray asshat Klozov riding around on a shiny new bike. I didn’t want him to see me.”

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s get inside.”

I sloshed Santiago Slayer the last of the zin, which he gulped after wiping his forehead with a cloth napkin. He acted like he’d just jogged from Sean Wildstar’s, not emerged from a pittosporum hedge. And he was the one with a Sig Sauer in a shoulder holster under his polyester shirt.

We sat around the unused gas fireplace, all panting for our own reasons. I suppose I was the calmest, surprising since I just thought a stalker was coming to kidnap Patience. Yet I locked the pistol back in the gun safe.

We opened a new bottle of zin.

“I went down to Grand Falls,” Slayer explained. He held his palm out, face down. “It is a remote waterfall on the Little Colorado inside the Navajo Nation. Lytton suggested it to me.”

“You took Joe King,” I prompted him.

Slayer waved me away, as though this was a small point. “Yes, yes. Local Indians got fed up with people coming to see the giant falls after these rains, so they closed it. People trashing the place.” Slayer’s squinched his face. “You wouldn’t believe the amount of used el profiláctico and empty Monster and Rock Star energy cans I found around there. Fucking ATVs off-roading. These chocolate falls, let me tell you. It is a sacred and holy site. They still have no running water or electricity.”

Patience asked, “So how’d you get in if it was closed?”

“Lytton called in a favor. I met a guy at the barricades who let me in. He saluted me like a soldier. This Grand Falls is something else! It’s 185 feet tall just oozing, a cascade over the ledge from the massive snowfall upriver.”

It was my turn to wave him off. “Yes, yes, we’ll go there in the spring.”

Slayer’s eyebrows shot up. “If they let you in! They don’t just let any skidmark in now.”

Patience gripped my bicep. “I think I see where he’s going with this.”

Nodding with supreme holiness, Slayer confirmed her suspicion. “Indeed, my dear. Indeed. Niagara Falls is really only seventy feet tall due to rocks at the base.” He glanced soberly at both of us. “I had a kayak on my roof.”

“Oh!” Patience jerked, sloshing her wine. “Good one, Santiago! Extremely good one.”

He clapped his chest, his Sig Sauer, unable to wash away the look of pride that colored his face. “Well, first I shot him in the femoral artery. I am not that cold-hearted.”

This was uncommon for me, talking to hitmen. But I knew a bit about arteries. “That’s a very fast way to go.”

Slayer was enfolded in the drama of his story. I’d seen a few tapes of the Mexican telenovela he’d starred in, Prohibido Mojarse. Which meant something like It Is Forbidden to Get Wet. But man, did a lot of people get wet in the scenes I watched. Slayer was fantastic at the role of diamond mine businessman sweeping women off their feet.

He even squeezed his fingers as though pinching a diamond. “Exactly. I threw Joe King into the kayak and towed them both to the launching point. Ah, the amber waves of chocolate flowing over the rippling ridges!” Slayer slapped his taut stomach. “Made me want a handful of churros.”

Patience and I gripped each other’s hands so strongly, her nails made my palms bleed. I urged, “Yes! So you shoved the kayak over the edge!”

“Exactly! That pendejo must’ve fallen seventy miles an hour over those tawny gingerbread falls. That would be certain death even if I had not shot him in the groin. I ran around the bend to watch the boat, flowing in slo-mo, which did not hit the water perfectly. This means his ribcage shattered under the massive g-load, shooting pointed bones at his organs. Imagine this. His skull fracturing as his head compacted into his spine.”

I felt Patience shudder. “Ew.” She could muster this compassion even for her kidnaper.

Slayer orated. “Same goes for his other organs. Their momentum would carry through to his feet. However, stuntmen know the water down there is aerated. The kayak traveled farther into the bubbly water before it stopped, reducing the g’s. This is how stuntmen keep their organs intact.”

It was actually pretty fascinating. I uttered, “Wow.”

“Our friend was stuck behind the curtain of water. Sometimes hosers in barrels going over Niagara get stuck behind that curtain for hours.” Shrugging, the sicario took another sip of ruby wine. Exhaling with satisfaction, he glanced at my wall. “Is that a Ken Bob Cook acrylic painting? It looks like Baja.”

“Aah!” This time, Patience did slosh her wine. Slamming the stemmed glass onto the coffee table, she lurched to her feet. She reached for the ceiling—either with frustration or exhilaration, I didn’t know. “You did it. You did it!”

I stood, too. “We still need to know if Wolf Glaser succeeded in getting into the Everglades with Joe King’s phone.”

Slayer said, “They are currently in New Orleans taking photos of jambalaya and crawdads.”

Patience skittered a dance, palms to the heavens above.

But we didn’t get to celebrate for long.