King Maybe by Timothy Hallinan Read Free Book Online

unexpected set of skills, at a speed that suggests well-worn neural pathways. Which, as we both know, are developed through repeated use. Trenton?”
    â€œFine, sure, Trenton.” She swerved the car violently into the oncoming lane and then brought it back. “Cat,” she said.
    I hadn’t seen a cat.
    â€œSo we’re not going to Stinky’s, so you’re in this foul mood, because you didn’t get it? The big hotshot burglar didn’t—”
    â€œI got it. I always get it. I’m a professional. And I flatter myself that I can recognize a professional.”
    The word made her pause just a bit longer than she should have. Perhaps she hadn’t expected me to be so blunt. “Whatever that means. Look. You got your stamp, you got out in a single, not badly shaped piece, with your fairly attractive face intact. You’ve got that stamp in your pocket, and you should be ready to hop on over to your fence’s house—” She bit her lower lip. “That’s what you’d call someone like Stinky, right? A fence?”
    I just looked at her.
    â€œYou throw that term around a lot,” she said. “Fence this, fence that. ‘I’ll just run this over to my fence.’ Like that. You know?”
    â€œSo if I were to send someone to comb through the criminal files of Trenton or Albany under the name Veronica—wait, what’s your maiden name?”
    â€œThis is territory we haven’t covered,” she said. “And I appreciate that we haven’t covered it. I know it’s taken willpower on your part.”
    â€œIt has. What was it?”
    She did a little warning drumroll on the steering wheel with her nails. “LeBlanc.”
    We shared a moment of silence.
    â€œYou do realize,” I said, “that LeBlanc is not a name that really rings with credibility.”
    She pulled the car to the curb, hard enough to put the front tire halfway up it. We were most of the way to Mulholland, in an area where the houses were sealed behind gates that made the one she’d driven through look like a saloon door. There were no streetlamps, and we were on a tight curve to the right, practically begging to be hit from behind. The top of the ridge, a few hundred yards ahead, was a curving, pillowy line of solid black against the diffuse glow of the Valley’s zillion lights. “I come from a long line of LeBlancs,” she said between her teeth. “LeBlancs all the way down.”
    â€œDown to where?”
    She sighed heavily, a sign that she needed time to work on the answer and its tone. “Down to 1209 a.d. ? The Albigensian Crusade? When Pope Innocent III, of all the ironically named people, decided to kill every single Cathar in France because they didn’t like the cookies the pope served at the altar. That was when we changed our name, because we’d been Cathars, and burning at the stake didn’t seem like an option. Okay?”
    â€œChanged it from what?”
    â€œLeNoir,” she said. “Later anglicized to Leonard.”
    â€œAnglicized when? That makes no sense at all. I mean, if your name is still LeBlanc—”
    â€œLeNoir was an embellishment,” she said with fraudulent candor. She shook her head fondly at her own foolishness. “I can’t resist embellishments.”
    â€œYou’re telling me. So your family was Cathar?”
    â€œStill is.”
    â€œI thought all the Cathars were dead.”
    â€œYeah, well, don’t tell the pope. Can we get going now?”
    â€œAnd you? You’re a Cathar?”
    â€œTo the center of my clean little bones.”
    â€œSo you believe that the world is the result of a war between God and Satan and that everything that’s visible was created by Satan and is therefore evil?”
    â€œExplains a lot,” she said, “when you think about it.”
    â€œAnd that human beings are the genderless spirits of