Read Online Get Blank (Fill in the Blank) by Justin Robinson - Free Book Online Page B

duckbill.
    “Filing mishap.”
    She snorted into her drink. “I wasn’t just blowing smoke up your ass. Other than the nose, you do look good.”
    “You too.”
    “What’s this about?”
    “My girlfriend was—”
    “You do not have a girlfriend.”
    “I do! That’s what that file was about!”
    “Oh yeah? What does she do? Or do you even know, since you obviously met her in Niagara Falls on a class trip.”
    “She’s a model.”
    Lara snickered.
    “I’m serious! She’s the hot redhead who was in that casserole commercial!”
    Now Lara was really laughing. I swallowed the last of the whiskey in my glass and switched over to the one she got me. I had earned it.
    Finally, she got herself under control. “Okay, I don’t know what this is about, but that’s the most I’ve laughed in a long time, so I guess you earned your files.” She dug into her briefcase and put a pair of files in front of me. “So, you dating Vassily Zhukovsky, too?”
    “Yeah, we met at Niagara Falls.”
    I opened the top one. It was a collection of Vassily’s greatest hits, and I could tell Lara had chopped it down for my benefit. There were his earlier arrests, which never resulted in convictions, leading up to his most recent one, which finally did. It was a series of weapons charges, attempted murder, the whole nine yards, all stemming from his attack on the V.E.N.U.S. compound in Mount Washington about six months before, which was half a year after I left town. He’d leaned on Mina to give up my location, and instead, she fed him to Uzi-armed V.E.N.U.S. guards. From the looks of things, the Feds were trying to tie a RICO case to the Whale, and thus bring down the Kosher Nostra in Los Angeles. Fine by me. Seemed like Vassily was spending most of his time in San Quentin, getting shuttled back and forth for a series of interrogations. Near as I could tell, he hadn’t eaten anyone yet.
    This didn’t absolve Vassily of what was going on. He had the kind of reach to get things done from inside prison. I set his file aside and opened up Mina’s.
    This one was far more focused, since Mina didn’t have a criminal record to begin with. In copspeak, she was a citizen. There was her mug shot, and by the set of her jaw, I could tell she wanted to cry but wouldn’t give anyone the satisfaction. She was trying to stare the camera down. I touched the picture briefly, then put my hand away, blushing and hoping Lara hadn’t noticed.
    “That’s your girlfriend?” Lara asked. Her voice was softer now.
    I nodded.
    “Pretty. How’d you do that?”
    “I have no earthly idea.” I looked up from the page. “Why Lara, anyway?”
    “ Dr. Zhivago .”
    I laughed. “I can’t believe you tricked me into watching that. You said it was about cannibalism.”
    “Come on, if I had told you it was the lyrical examination of the troubled history of Russia, would you have Netflixed it?”
    “No, but—”
    “But nothing. I expanded your narrow-ass horizons.”
    I paged through the file and immediately regretted it. Neil’s corpse lay on the floor of a living room, his head practically gone from a shotgun blast.
    “Your girlfriend knows how to get it done.”
    “She didn’t do this.”
    Lara was silent for a moment. “All right, she didn’t do this. But believe me when I say it sure as hell looks like she did. I’ve seen a lot of files, Bobby, but this is one of the few honest-to-goddess slam dunks.”
    She was right.
    That was Neil. I mean, I didn’t quite recognize him, what with him being facedown and all. And missing his face. But he was the right size, the right shade, and I knew that green polo shirt that had turned Christmas-y from the flecks of blood blown across it. I wished Neil had gone through a biker phase or gotten a tramp stamp or something, just so there’d be more identifying features on him. But this was Neil Greene we were talking about. He spent his whole life as one of the gray men of the Underground. He didn’t want