Page 36 of Hanging and Burning

“Nice place,” she said after settling in the plush chair.

“What are you doing here, Olo?”

“Mel said that you might need some help. So I jumped a transport and made it out around midnight last night. I took a room no bigger than a closet on the first floor. It costs eleven hundred dollars a night.”

“Mel sent ya, huh?”

“No. He just told me that you might need some help. I sent myself.”

The woman sitting across from me was of many races, languages, and cultures; a child who had been an orphan and a sex slave before learning 101 ways to kill a man in less than half a minute. As usual she wore a uniform-like black culotte outfit that came to her forearms and knees. Her hands bulged with muscles and her forearms would have shamed Popeye the Sailor Man.

“What do you need?” she asked after a brief silence.

“I want you to go back to New York and look for a woman named Twyla Mann, or maybe Twyla Macintosh. She’d spent some time with a guy named David Blass, also known as Randolph David Blass. He’s in the art game somehow.”

“He in New York too?”

“He’s dead in Redondo Beach.”

“Oh.”

“She has a grandfather named Arman Babylon, but her father is MIA and her mother is too.”

“This Babylon is in New York?”

“No. He’s at a hospital out here called Pilgrim’s and is being treated for some cancer or other.”

“You got that covered?”

I nodded and started thinking about something else. “I have pictures of Blass and Twyla. Some information about ’em too. Not much.”

“What are we trying to get done?” the eternal mercenary asked.

“I’m not sure. Babylon is lying about something, I know that much. But he seems to really care about the granddaughter. Him and the guy who sent the goons after me were persons of interest in the disappearance and probably the murder of a woman named Dalia Shorts, thirty-six years ago, somewhere around then. At the same time the cops were looking into a man named Cedric Hargrove and a pianist called Minnie Fulton.”

Oliya didn’t take notes. She was a professional’s professional.

“So,” she said. “The most important thing is finding this Twyla chick.”

“Yeah.”

“You know Mel called off those guys that were looking out for you before.”

“I won’t be needing them.”

“Why not?”

“I got Rags if things get hinky, and anyway, I allowed myself to get in trouble the first time… wanted to find out how hot the water was before I started doin’ laps.”

“He’s got some good moves, your cousin, but one man might not be enough.”

“One helper and me,” I corrected.

Oliya smiled.

We talked for hours about possibilities and what I wanted her to do and not to do.

After we were through, she went down to her eleven-hundred-dollar closet. In the morning, I knew, she would board the first available U.S. military jet bound for New York. At some point in her career, she had saved a general and his girlfriend from humiliation, and since that time, Oliya had a pass for unlimited international travel with no paper trail whatsoever.