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By Root 5019 0

in handmade English suits from Savile Row. But he was cursed with a swarthy complexion, flat black glass for eyes, scary eyes that made him look like a Middle Eastern terrorist or a religious fundamentalist, and a five-o’-clock shadow that started at nine o’clock in the morning. Actually, he looked like the Hollywood stereotype of exactly what he was: a crime boss. For all that, the man had more women than he could reasonably keep up with. Murdock suspected it was danger that brought the women. For all his smallness, Shaker looked like danger. He’d heard that Shaker had serviced two women the night before, and he was fifty-eight years old. Amazing.

Service. Murdock liked that word. He wished he could service women the way Mr. Shaker did. Maybe if he lost the six pounds, they’d come around him a little more here the way they had in Germany. Of course they’d wanted to use him to get close to Louey Santera, the little slime.

“He believes in transgressions, all right,” Rule Shaker said. “Just not in his own. Let’s just wait and see. Tell Rudy to keep alert. I’m going to have my helicopter fly out over the desert now. It’s time to scatter Melissa’s ashes.”

“That’s what she wanted, sir?”

Rule Shaker said, “Melissa was twenty-three. She didn’t even know there was such a thing as death.”

30

THERE WERE SIX bodyguards on duty around the clock, three shifts, one man always in the hospital room with Mason Lord and another outside his door. Mason Lord didn’t trust the cops to do the job.

He said to Detective O’Connor, “If I’m not paying someone, then I can’t be sure he’s working for me.”

“Fine by me,” Detective O’Connor said. “It’ll save the taxpayers some money. In Chicago, the good Lord knows they need a break.”

The mainstream media finally got bored and left, but some paparazzi, hoping for another strike on Mason Lord, stayed on speculation of blood and gore. They were like a plague of locusts only not as benign, said one of the hospital administrators. They camped out at the Lord mansion, too. One of them got a shot of Emma sitting in the shade of a big rhododendron bush in the garden of the estate, playing her piano. It was taken from a goodly distance, a bit on the blurred side, from magnification, but it was still clearly Emma. She’d been labeled as the Granddaughter of Crime Lord.

When Mason Lord saw the photo, he said quietly to Gunther, “How clever the play on words is. Isn’t it odd? It’s this photo that has broken my patience, my indifference. Get the name of the paparazzo who took the picture.”

JUST after lunch that day, Eve Lord came out of the living room into the grand foyer to hear Ramsey say to Molly, “There’s no reason to stay longer. Your father is over the worst. We all know who likely shot him and there’s not a thing we can do about it. As to the actual person who pulled the trigger, the cops are on it. Chances are slim we’ll ever know. This could mean that the violence will escalate. I don’t want us here if it does, particularly Emma. Let’s get married. Let’s go home.”

And Molly, frumpy plain Molly with her wild red hair and too-skinny body, gazed up at the big man whom Eve would take to bed in a minute, stared up at him like she wanted to eat him, and she probably did. Then she laughed and jumped into his arms. She clearly caught him off guard, but he was fast, managing to catch her and bring her tightly against his chest, his arms locked around her. She wrapped her legs around his waist. Then he laughed and swung her around. “Home,” she said, kissing him once, twice, a half dozen more times. “I like the sound of that.”

Slowly, he slid her down the front of his body. When she was standing, staring up at him, laughing, he leaned down and kissed her mouth. Molly’s hands were on his shirt. She looked ready to rip it off him.

Eve cleared her throat. “I see there’s more going on here than a little friendship.”

“Yes,” Ramsey said, lifting his head, releasing Molly slowly. The taste of her was still fresh, still drawing on him, the memory of her body was still warm against him. “You can congratulate