“Not until we find her.”
I said, “It was that darn old kiss, wasn’t it.”
He wouldn’t look at me, “She’s running. She probably needs help.”
I nodded, “I imagine. That truck hitting her car wasn’t an accident. Otherwise, you’d think a person you rescued from a fiery death might at least stay around to thank you.”
“You’d think,” Hondo said.
“How did she disappear from the scene? There were cameras and cops and a big crowd of people all crowded around. Only thing I can imagine is Criss Angel was there and Mindfreaked her to Cancun.”
“My guess is she crawled between some cars and then got up and moved into the crowd. Police said the Firebird had been taken from a car lot so recently that a stolen report hadn’t gone out yet.”
“Any prints?”
“No, fire pretty much took care of any forensics.”
“How about the pickup that hit her?”
“Drove away and the news crew never got a clean shot at the license plate.”
“You get an uncut copy of the news film?”
“Not yet. They’re mailing it to the office. The camera crew said they filmed another few seconds beyond what we just saw, but that was it.”
“Might be enough, though.”
“We’ll see.”
Emma came over as if on cue and said, “Are you ready, Darling?”
Hondo handed me his Ray-Bans and raised his eyebrows twice, “Darling,” he said and grinned. Hondo followed Emma to his mark and they did the scenes, then did them again, and again, and again.
CHAPTER 2
They wrapped at sundown and Hondo cleaned up. We got into Shamu, my big four-wheel drive Ford pickup with the paint job that makes it resemble a killer whale and I headed toward our office in Venice.
I said, “You’re buying dinner, I presume.”
“I bought last time.”
“Yeah, but you just told me how much you made today.”
“If I remember right, you asked how much we were going to make.”
“Well sure, we’re a team,” I held up my hand with the index and middle fingers crossed, “Tight like this, but since you did all the work I thought you’d want the satisfaction of picking where we eat. I don’t want you to feel inferior simply because I usually make all the important decisions. I want to empower you.”
“You listened in on that managers’ symposium in San Francisco, didn’t you? I thought you were running security for them.”
“Well, I wanted to pick up some management tips for our business.”
Hondo said, “There’s only two of us.”
“True, but I’ve never had a chance to use the word empower in a sentence before.”
“I’m glad you got it out of your system. Don’t ever use it again.”
“I’m purged, cleansed, pure as the driven-“