Chapter 11 – Hush Money

Sol

“You too?” Marcus’s friend in the hoodie says, before I’ve even finished knocking. “Your board buddy already came by.”

“He’s not my anything.”

“Whatever.” He props himself in the doorway so I can’t get past him. “The Kron guy. Couple days ago, by himself.”

Laz came back for another crack at the stoner, and he made damn sure I wasn’t in the room for this one.

There’s a cotton ball taped inside my elbow, and it itches like a motherfucker. Whitaker took three more vials this morning, and I keep a running total the way I used to count tips.

Every one of those vials gets her a little closer to whatever turns vampires into Marcus’s customers, so somebody can kill it dead. They also bought groceries. I could even afford meat for the first time all year. Nothing fancy, just chicken breasts and ground beef, but it’s a luxury to me.

“What did he want?”

“Nothing from me.” He jerks his chin down the hall. “He took my roommate in the bedroom and shut the door for like an hour. Next morning, that showed up.”

A TV box is propped against the wall, still in the plastic, taller than the door. It’s got a delivery slip taped to the top.

“I didn’t get a TV,” the hoodie adds, like that’s the real crime here.

The bedroom door opens. The guy who was on the couch last time comes out in boxers and a T-shirt with a cartoon weed leaf on it, and he’s sober today. I know because he sees me and looks scared, instead of thrilled to meet a new friend.

“Nope,” he says. “I was super high, man. I say all kinds of shit. I don’t know any Krons.”

“You knew one well enough to laugh in his face.”

“I was high.”

“Did he Pull you, or did he just pay you?”

He looks at the TV box. He looks at me. He thinks about it way longer than an innocent guy needs to.

“Can it be both?” he asks. “It kind of felt like both.”

He goes back in his room and locks the door, and the hoodie shrugs at me like, well, you heard the man.

* * *

So that’s how a Kron handles a witness. You don’t threaten the stoner. You buy him a TV the size of a door. Laz’s brother was over there every weekend buying Sugar off Marcus, and now the one guy who said so out loud has decided he doesn’t remember that part at all.

I can only think of two ways this goes. Either the brother killed Marcus and Laz is cleaning up after him, or Laz killed Marcus himself to cut his brother off from the guy selling to him.

I can’t decide which version makes me angrier. Either way, Laz is sitting on that board pretending he wants the truth.

My phone buzzes.

Kat: ur location says nail salon. r u getting ur nails done without me. this is a betrayal

I leave her on read. Kat’s parents have lawyers who’d have Fisk crying into his pocket square by lunch. They also stood up in every hearing for the Severance Act with my mom’s name in their mouths. Kat has no idea they did that. I’m never asking the Morenos for anything.

The board meets tonight. Laz is going to sit there with his fountain pen and tell them Marcus’s friends had nothing, and I swore I’d call out every lie he told in that room.

Fisk can scream defamation all he wants. It’s not defamation if it’s true, and I’ve got a stoner and a TV box that say it is.

* * *

The dean asks for our report on Marcus Bell’s friends, and Laz starts talking first because he believes it’s his divine right.

He doesn’t even open his leather notebook.

“The first gentleman confirmed what the roommate told us. Marcus sold to wealthy vampires and never named them.” He taps the pen on the closed notebook. “The second gentleman was too intoxicated to give a useful statement. He asked me if my car could fly.”

The human rep on the left giggles.

“He didn’t ask if your car could fly,” I say. “He said your brother was at that apartment every weekend, and you dragged him into the hallway before he could finish the sentence.”

The dean puts his pen down. Everyone looks at Laz, then at me, like it’s a Real Housewives reunion and somebody just threw a wine glass.

“I helped a young man who could barely stand get to his bed,” he says. “Mr. Hallowell, meanwhile, sat on the arm of their couch and told them a sad little story about a pen.”

My hand goes to my jacket pocket before I can stop it. Marcus’s pen is right there. Laz watches me touch it and looks very pleased with himself. That piece of shit is using a dead kid’s pen to score points off me.

“Ask him about his brother,” I tell the dean.

“Mr. Kron?”

“My brother is twenty-four and hasn’t been a student here for years. He’s none of this board’s business.”

Laz sounds a little bored, like he’s just stating a fact and not avoiding the question.

“If Mr. Hallowell is so eager to talk about who bought from Marcus Bell, he could start with his own customers. He pours drinks on the block where most of the Sugar in this city gets sold.”

The microphone in the middle of the table crackles before it lets out a feedback shriek so loud the dean slaps both hands over his ears. Then it pops, and a thin curl of smoke comes out of the base.

Four faces swing to me. The giggler bites her lip so hard to keep from laughing that it has to hurt.

It’s anger. I’m so furious my ears are ringing louder than the dean’s, and I can watch every single one of them decide I’m horny for Laz fucking Kron.

Laz doesn’t smile. He looks at the smoking microphone, then at me, and he writes something in his notebook for the first time all night. I’d give a kidney to know what.

“Let the minutes show the microphone has failed,” the dean says, rubbing one ear. “We’ll hear from the second witness ourselves at the next session. I trust that’s no trouble, Mr. Kron.”

“None at all,” Laz says.

It’s no trouble because he already paid for the answer.

* * *

Laz is waiting for me in the parking lot, leaning on the Bugatti like he owns the place, which, knowing his family, he might.

“Mention my brother in that room again,” he says, “and find out what happens.”

“What, you’ll buy me a TV?”

“I wouldn’t waste the money. You’d sell it for rent by the weekend.”

That lands right where he wanted it to. I paid this month’s rent with my own blood, freely given to help his fucking kind.

All he’ll ever see when he looks at me is a destitute bum, barely managing to stay out of the gutter. Whatever. I don’t need Laz Kron’s approval.

He’s had everything handed to him all his life. He knows nothing about working your ass off to just barely keep surviving.

“I’d rather sell a TV than buy a witness,” I tell him. “Did you Pull him first, or did you just open your wallet?”

“I didn’t need to Pull him.”

“So you bribed him. Great. Did your brother buy his Sugar off Marcus? Is that why Marcus is dead?”

He comes off the car and leans down until his face is level with mine. Behind me, I hear my bus pulling away without me. Now I’m going to have to wait forty-five minutes for the next one.

The lot gets so quiet I can hear the crickets chirping in the dark, which means he can hear every beat of my heart, and he’s standing there with his head tilted, counting.

I want to punch him. I want to bite him first. My dick has the worst taste in murder suspects of anyone alive.

I blame the vials and the lunch I skipped. My brain’s running on fumes and bad decisions.

“Three months ago,” he says, very quietly, “my brother drank at your bar. Taller than me. Red hair. Ring any bells, Hallowell?”

My heart does exactly what he expects it to. That’s not a bell. That’s Big Ben having a full-on breakdown.

He hears my heart trip, and I watch him decide what it means.

“That’s what I thought,” he says.

He gets in the car and leaves. The dashboard I fried on him is still dark, and I hope it costs him a fortune to fix.

It was July. The air conditioning at Fang & Sons was broken, and an attractive vampire with long red hair had to duck under our door frame, the same way Laz did last week.

His eyes were black all night, and I figured he was just hungry. He tipped a fifty on a four-dollar beer and laughed every time I told him to fuck off when he flirted.

Right before he left, he leaned over the bar and asked if I had anything sweeter than coffee liqueur back there.

I told him to get the fuck out of my bar.

Laz’s brother came to me looking for Sugar, and I threw him out. Now Laz thinks I’m the one who got him hooked in the first place.