“Are you out of your fucking mind? There isn’t enough money to make dealing with that guy worth it.”
“Well, yes, but I agreed to represent him before he told me the name. We shook hands on it.”
“Well, unshake his fucking hand.”
“I gave him my word.”
“Stone, Lance Cabot and the people he works for would screw you in the blink of an eye, if it was worth their while, and maybe just for the fun of it.”
“Actually, my dealings with Lance have been, if not exactly straightforward, then conducted in an honorable manner.”
“Stone, this is the guy who hustled you into putting up a quarter of a million dollars to finance a theft from the British government, then disappeared into thin air.”
“I got my money back, remember?”
“Yeah, but he promised you a million-dollar profit, too. Whatever happened to that?”
“It’s in my brokerage account, less taxes.”
Dino stared at him, stupefied.
“No kidding.”
“You never told me that.”
“Where is it written that I have to tell you everything?”
“Where is it written that I can’t put a gun to your head and pull the trigger? You’d fucking well better tell me everything. I was involved, remember?”
“As I recall, your involvement was pretty much confined to lying around the Connaught Hotel, watching cricket matches on TV and gaining weight on room service.”
“Not all that much weight,” Dino said defensively.
“Have you lost it?”
“Most of it.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Well, it was a pretty good hotel, and your friend Hedger was paying.”
“By the way, Hedger is dead. He was knifed near the Connaught by an ex-cop that I had hired to follow Lance.”
“You had him snuffed?”
“Of course not; it was nothing to do with me. Well, not much to do with me.”
Dino shook his head. “Wherever you go, people drop dead, and women take off their underwear. I don’t know how you do either of those things.”
Holly returned to the table. “So, have you been talking about me in my absence?”
“No,” Dino and Stone said as one man.
“Well, that’s insulting. I thought you might have said something nice about my ass as I walked away.”
“It’s a very nice ass,” Dino said. “I mentioned that to Stone.”
“You did not.”