Free Vampire Moon by J.R. Rain Page B

“How could you do this?” he asked.
     
               “I have contacts,” I said vaguely.
     
               “And your contacts can get you Jerry Blum?”
     
               “Yes,” I said. “Sooner or later.”
     
               “And I would face him?”
     
               I nodded. “Alone.”
     
               “Man against man?”
     
               “ Mano y mano ,” I said, which, I think, meant man and man , but what the hell did I know?
     
               Stuart said, “What about all his bodyguards, his shooters, his hired killers?”
     
               I shook my head. “It would just be the two of you. Alone.”
     
               “And would anyone else know about this?”
     
               “Just me, you, and Jerry Blum.”
     
               Something very close to a smile touched the corners of Stuart’s mouth, but then he shook his head and the smile was gone. “As much as I would like to believe you, Sam, I have to face the fact that this is nothing more than a fantasy—”
     
               “I can get him,” I said, cutting him off. “Give me two weeks.”
     
               Stuart stared at me long and hard, then finally he nodded and grinned. He looked good when he grinned; it made his perfect bald head look even more perfect.
     
               “Okay, I believe you,” he said. “Why I believe you, I don’t know, but I do.”
     
               We both sat back in our patio chairs and I listened to the wind and the waves and the sounds of someone in the condo below us making a late night dinner. Shortly, the smell of bacon wafted up. God, I used to love breakfast for dinner.
     
               Stuart rolled his head in my direction. “And what if I kill him?”
     
               “Everybody’s got to die sooner or later,” I said.
     
               “You’re a tough woman.”
     
               “Getting tougher by the minute,” I said.
     
              
     
              
     
              
     
               Chapter Eighteen
     

     
              
     
              
     
               It was midnight, and I was sitting in my minivan with my laptop near the Ritz Carlton in Laguna Niguel. No, I don’t normally hang out at the Ritz Carlton, but this was as good a place as any for what I was about to do.
     
               Orange County’s only five-star hotel sat high on a bluff, which, if you asked me, looked exactly like a cliff. Anyway, I was parked in the guest parking lot in the far corner of the far lot. I doubted I had attracted much attention. Just a small woman in a big van.
     
               A small woman who was about to get very naked.
     
               My windows were cracked open and far below the steep cliff—I was going with cliff —was the pleasant sound of the surf crashing along what I knew were mostly smooth, sandy beaches.
     
               I briefly thought about what I had gotten myself into, and the further away I was from Stuart and his heartbreak, the more I realized how crazy my idea had been.
     
               Think about it, Sam: you promised to deliver one of the West Coast’s most notorious gangsters to a mild-mannered widower—for a one-on-one smackdown .
     
               Yeah, I’ve had better ideas.
     
               Of course, as things presently stood, Stuart would never see justice. Or, if he did, it might be years before Blum was locked behind bars again, and that’s if the feds could pin anything on him, which I seriously doubted. After all, Blum had been in prison awaiting trial when the plane went down.
     
               A hell of an alibi.
     
               And so what do you do, Sam? You offer to deliver a murderer to a man who’s only outstanding physical attribute was perhaps the world’s most perfectly bald