The Frame-Up (The Golden Arrow #1)(68)

“Yeah. I managed to make enough hand gestures that Mr. Casey realized there was something up. I slipped out of the room, and he ended up just reporting that someone had attempted to break in through the downstairs window, and the officer left. Mr. Casey got kind of . . . excited then. He loved a good story, and a dirty cop, in his mind, was the best kind of story line. He asked me all sorts of questions and . . . well, we sort of started following the drug dealers around.”

I can see where this is going. “You followed them around, and he wrote about it.”

“I guess he did. At the time I thought it was a game, sort of like my job working security was also my job to rid the neighborhood of my previous friends.”

L tells me about some of their escapades, many of which ring eerily true to the comic. Following a dealer to a warehouse in LA. Watching boats unload cargo into the warehouse. How they followed dealers from different rings and how Casey Senior suspected that the rings were planning a showdown. Everything falls into place in my head like a huge game of Tetris.

“Lawrence, this is huge. You guys should not have been out there tailing these guys.”

“I know that now. At the time, though . . . it just seemed fun. Mr. Casey would come back from these trips so excited to work, and before I moved in, I guess he’d been really down in the dumps, feeling like he didn’t make enough of a difference in the world writing comics. I never paid attention to what he wrote. I just knew that spying on bad guys was fun.”

“You were Swoosh.”

“Who’s that?”

“The Hooded Falcon’s sidekick.”

“I guess so.”

I contemplate all that he’s just revealed. “But after he died . . . surely you could have said something then. Especially if you thought maybe he got killed for investigating these guys.”

“Mr. Casey had told me that he prepared evidence for the police. Now I think maybe he’d found proof of the cop’s involvement, something the cop couldn’t deny, though at the time I just thought it was general ‘we followed drug dealers’ stuff. He was going to seal it in an envelope and send it to three different detectives so that he could be sure it got addressed. When he died and that big bust happened, I just figured that he’d done what he promised. That his information had put all of those men in jail and that his spirit could rest well knowing he’d done what he’d set out to do.”

“That’s really romantic.”

“It’s stupid is what it is, if you’re saying that these guys are still in business. I don’t know how they avoided that bust, but it’s apparent they’d kill to keep their secret.”

“And you don’t know where the information went?”

“Like I said, I thought he sent it. Then he died, and Casey Junior resented me. Thought I’d brought trouble into his house—and he was right. So then I got fired, and here I am.” Lawrence stands and brushes his hands on his pants.

“Thank you for telling me, Lawrence.” I stand and follow him down the stairs into the shop. Still no sign of Matteo, which is good. But now I have so much more to weigh in my head.

He turns to give me a brief hug. “Don’t ever lie to me like that again, okay?”

“Deal. Thanks for the dye job. I’ll just grab my comic and head to the office to sign off for Andy.” But I pull Lawrence’s apron off my proof copy and stop dead, staring at the front page. This is definitely my copy. There’s the telltale splatter of coffee on the back cover from my breakfast that I ate in the car, so it’s not like someone snuck in and put a new cover on it. This is the cover that came out of the test-print run, but it’s not the cover I saw Andy send to the printer. I must have looked only at the back cover when I brought it in. Someone changed the test-print file after I’d seen Andy send it off. I flip forward to the second page—it’s exactly as I remember it, but the first page is a single panel, which we never do. Not only that, it’s not a finished drawing. It’s a sketch. A sketch I’ve seen before.

It’s the Hooded Falcon and Swoosh kneeling in the middle of a dark panel, one holding out the bow to the other. It’s the same panel I admired in Lawrence’s journal.

“This isn’t the end . . .” written in bold comic script and the words “I know” are sketched in the Hooded Falcon’s dialogue bubble. Underneath the panel are four typeset words I didn’t see earlier. I read them now, and the bottom falls out from beneath my feet. “And I’ll find you.” It’s signed with the drawing of an arrow.

I’m eyeing Lawrence, the sense of impending doom as thick as the scent of dye and shampoo in the air.

I hold up the comic and point to the panel signed by the Golden Arrow. “I guess we know who has your journal.”

Lawrence mutters a string of curses a mile wide.

I pull out my phone to call Andy right this very moment but catch sight of a familiar car parking on the other side of the street. Crap, crap, crap. And a familiar gorgeous, hazel-eyed cop driving it.

“L, is your front door locked?” Usually when he has only one client, he locks it to avoid the homeless visitors.

“Yeah, why?” Lawrence picks up my frantic vibe and cranes his neck to see out the windows.

“Matteo’s here.” I do a bad impression of an army crawl, hit the one light switch that’s still on, and get back to my feet. “We need somewhere to hide!” I grab Lawrence’s hand and pull him along toward the back hallway.