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businesses – Will Sinnott’s exotic car detailing service – off the ground, and they’d been too hungry and over-zealous to much care where it came from. Had they known who Ruben really was, Clarke’s friends would have wanted nothing to do with him, but Clarke led them all to believe he was just a common coke peddler trying to go legit, and they bought it. They were too green to do otherwise. Baumhower fretted and Sinnott whined, but in the end, with Cross’s blessings, Clarke took $250,000 of Ruben’s money and promised him Class Act Productions would clean, press, and return it in one year.
    Now that money was gone. Fucking Cross had gambled it away. Gone out to Vegas with his goddamn girlfriend and burned up a quarter million dollars belonging to an enforcer for one of the three biggest and most dangerous drug cartels in Mexico.
    ‘You had better be fucking kidding me,’ Clarke had said when Cross made the confession Monday.
    But Cross hadn’t been kidding, of course – who the hell would joke about such a thing? – and Clarke had his hands locked around the smaller man’s throat, before either Baumhower or Sinnott could stop him, the moment this became obvious.
    Killing Gillis Rainey had been a bad mistake. Leaving his body in the LA River, then getting involved in a traffic accident with somebody immediately afterward, had been a monumental blunder. But fucking with Ruben Lizama’s money was suicidal. It was the kind of thing a man did when life held no meaning for him anymore, and he didn’t care how much pain he would have to endure just to see it come to an end.
    ‘I told you, Perry. Jesus Christ, I told you !’ Clarke bellowed when Sinnott and Baumhower, working as a team, had managed to put some distance between him and Cross. ‘This guy’s crazy! The man hammers ice picks into people’s ears, for Chrissake!’
    ‘Come on, Ben. You don’t really believe that?’
    ‘You’re goddamn right I do!’
    Clarke had never seen it himself, but the people he’d heard it from were not in the habit of making up such colorful stories.
    ‘Oh, Christ,’ Sinnott said, whimpering, and Clarke turned to look at him just in time to see him vomit on to his own shoes.
    Cross pretended not to have noticed. ‘I had a run of bad luck. I thought we’d get our money back from Gillis.’
    ‘And then?’ Clarke said. ‘Gillis only owed us a hundred thousand, Perry. Where the hell did you think Ruben’s other hundred and fifty was going to come from if you’re only just now bothering to tell us this shit?’
    Cross didn’t answer.
    ‘I don’t believe it,’ Baumhower said, almost laughing. ‘He was going to roll the dice again!’
    ‘I told you, I had a run of bad luck. It wasn’t going to last, it never does. I would have made Ruben’s money back, and more.’
    ‘Two hundred and fifty thousand? You crazy sonofabitch!’ Sinnott said, wiping his face and hands with a bar towel. ‘You’re sick, Perry. You need help!’
    ‘Excuse me?’
    ‘You heard the man,’ Clarke said. The others had never heard him speak to Cross this way before. ‘You’re sick. You’ve got an illness, and you told us you were gonna do something about it. You were gonna see a doctor, you said.’
    Jesus, Perry thought, he sounds just like Iris.
    ‘I intended to,’ he said. ‘I just thought . . . Well, I thought I had things under control.’
    The four men fell silent as one, the magnitude of their dilemma slowly sinking in.
    ‘So what are we going to do?’ Sinnott asked.
    The question was meant for everyone, but Perry took it upon himself to answer it. ‘Well, for one thing, convert as many assets to cash as we can, as quickly as we can. After that . . .’
    They all looked at him, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
    ‘. . . as much as I hate to suggest it, I think the tried and true would probably be best.’
    Baumhower began shaking his head from side to side as if he were trying to break something loose