2 Sisters Detective Agency(20)
Feather-footed despite his size, he now wandered the second floor of Derek “Benzo” Benstein’s house in the dark, overhearing the young man’s voice echoing off the high ceilings as he talked loudly on the phone to a yacht broker in San Francisco.
“Well, that’s just too bad. I need it sooner than that,” he heard Benzo snarl. “I told you I wanted the forty footer with the double rain shower in the main bathroom. I’m throwing a party on Sunday, Doug, and I need the yacht in the marina by that morning for the caterers.”
Jacob wandered out onto the upstairs deck and stood in the shadows, looking over Benzo’s property. Two high-class escorts were sitting in the Jacuzzi, one playing with her phone, one yawning and braiding her wet hair. When Benzo returned from the phone call, the girls would be back “on,” would fawn and giggle over the eighteen-year-old homeowner, but for now they looked as bored and tired as if they were waiting for a late bus.
“L.A. Style starts shooting me at nine,” Benzo shouted down the phone. “So if the cover of next month’s issue has me standing on the pier with a captain’s hat on my head and my dick in my hand, I will personally come up there and kick your ass.” Jacob went to the second-floor railing and looked down into the foyer in time to see Benzo smash the phone, scattering the fragments on the marble tiles.
Roid rage, Jacob guessed. His workup of Benzo had revealed just how much maintenance the son of Los Angeles’s most successful film agent put into his appearance. Benzo’s calves, pecs, and six-pack were implants, and the young man had a standing appointment for flanks, belly, and buttocks liposuction twice a year to counteract the fat gained during his notorious weekend yacht parties. His lips and cheekbones were filled, and he was recovering from a recent brow shave. Jacob had crept through Benzo’s online bank accounts the way he was wandering through the boy’s house now, noting his purchases of creatine, beta-alanine, and conjugated linoleic acid to build muscle paired with Prozac and duloxetine to combat the effects of a mind filled with self-loathing. Benzo was a walking concoction of chemicals, bioplastics, and silicone.
Jacob snuck down the stairs and followed Benzo into the huge living room, standing just out of sight while Benzo flopped onto the big couch and flicked the huge television screen over to a paused point-of-view shooter game. The assassin watching from the doorway wasn’t surprised that Benzo had seemingly forgotten all about the hookers waiting for him in the hot tub. The girls were just another example of the toys available to Benzo wherever he went, machines in standby mode, waiting to be taken up again.
But, Jacob understood, there was no toy quite so entertaining as a real-life victim tied to a chair and twisting away from Benzo’s Taser. Unlike the screams of his video-game victims, the prostitutes’ false squeaks of pleasure, or the admiration of those who crowded his yachts each weekend, Neina’s fear had been real, and Benzo was always chasing the real. Jacob smiled. It felt good to understand his target. It made the takedown all the more satisfying.
Chapter 23
Jacob lifted his gun and fired a bullet into the television screen. The suppressor’s thunk was overshadowed by the thunderous blast and crack of the screen, the dramatic sparks and white flash of light that heralded its end. For a moment Benzo sat stunned on the couch, staring at the smoking hole in the screen before him—convinced perhaps that the machine had simply exploded on its own—before some extrasensory awareness alerted him to Jacob’s presence behind him. He leaped off the couch and stared wide-eyed at the intruder.
No recognition. Jacob shook his head in disgust. Sure, he probably looked different, alert, dressed, and ready for the hunt as he was now, unlike how Benzo had last seen him—gagged, bound, and helpless in his Dodgers T-shirt and boxer shorts, covered in his own blood and sweat. But more likely, Benzo didn’t recognize him because his life was a constant parade of people who didn’t matter—salespeople, bartenders, gardeners, cleaners, chauffeurs, and masseurs. Benzo looked at the gun, and all his muscles tensed, a whole-body reflex that in anyone else would have been terror but in Benzo was chemical rage.
“Dude, what the fu—?”
Jacob lifted the gun and fired at the wall beside Benzo’s head. It had been years since he’d done any marksman’s training, but his old self was returning. The bullet whizzed past the boy’s ear, close enough for him to hear it. He cowered but recovered quickly.
“Okay, okay, okay!” Benzo said, hands up, his posture bending to Jacob’s will but his eyes speaking of a mind that was boiling with anger. “Who are you? What do you want? Is this about my dad?”
“Look closely at me,” Jacob said. “Think hard.”
Benzo’s breath quickened. “Oh, dude…Oh, shit. You’re that Palos Verdes guy. The guy with the family.”
“That’s me.” Jacob’s fury almost choked off his words.
“Look.” Benzo gave a short laugh to try to soften the seriousness of the situation. He swallowed hard. “There’s no need to go all John Wick on our asses.”
Jacob held his pistol in one hand and used the other to pull a long, thin black rod from its holster on the back of his belt. He gave the cattle prod trigger a demonstrative pull and watched Benzo’s eyes twitch as the end of the device sizzled and snapped with light. Jacob could almost feel Benzo’s heart sink.