Made to Kill by Adam Christopher Read Free Book Online Page B

included—getting in the way of our new business plan.
    I thought about Thornton quite a lot, and that included the time it took to unwind my journey down the Hollywood Hills. But I was soon back in the real world and I let those thoughts float away like dandelion fluff on a cool evening breeze.
    After negotiating more of the heavy traffic no doubt caused by the commotion around the Chinese Theatre, I found myself on Sunset Boulevard and cruising past a long line of clubs on both sides of the strip. I kept my optics open and the speed low. There were clubs for dancing. Clubs for drinking. Clubs for drinking and staring at dancing girls dressed like peacocks. Clubs for staring at dancing girls dressed in much less than that.
    I don’t know what I expected the Temple of the Magenta Dragon to look like. Something like Grauman’s Chinese Theatre I suppose, but I only supposed that in retrospect, because what I didn’t expect was the famous temple of high-class pleasure to be a plain black door sandwiched between a steakhouse and a building with no apparent signage.
    I parked up and sat in the car and took a good long look.
    The door wasn’t all black. There was gold on it, in the form of the numbers 6277 near the top and in the middle a character that looked Chinese. I wondered what it said, if it said anything. I didn’t know Mandarin or Cantonese and I wondered if the proprietors did. Ada could look it up, if it was important. I doubted it was but I took a picture anyway.
    The traffic was heavy on the Strip and there were a lot of people around. I hunkered down in the car. With a little luck nobody would pay me much attention. I was just a big guy taking a snooze in his car with his hat pulled down low. Real low.
    I watched a while but there was no action and the black door of the magenta temple remained very closed and I guessed it would remain in that state for a little while longer. What I really wanted was some facts on the club and its clientele. The documents in the dead drop didn’t tell me anything worth a dime. But looking down the street I saw the prime spot for a little homework.
    It was an ice cream parlor that looked pretty nice. The front of it was all glass and that glass curved at the corners around the door. But it was what was behind that glass that caught my optic. I zoomed in for a closer look. The view through was distorted by the curve of the windows but I could pick out enough detail to pique my interest.
    Inside the ice cream parlor was a mirror that ran the length of the back wall behind the counter. Above that mirror was a row of photographs and they all showed an older man—the proprietor, clearly—with in a white cap and apron standing next to people dressed rather more impressively. There was a scrawl in the empty white space of each of the pictures, which was mostly the man’s apron.
    They were autographs. The wall of photographs was a wall of fame, a record of the rich celebrities who had popped in for a root beer float before dancing the night away at their private little club just a few doors down.
    Right now a tall glass of something creamy sounded like a really pretty swell idea and I didn’t even drink.
     

 
     
     
     
8
     
    The ice cream parlor was busy, which I thought was a good sign if you were looking for an ice cream, but there was room enough for a one ton steel man to pull up a pew at the bar in front of the soda fountain. Except I didn’t, because the stools were too small and I would have concertinaed it like a bus driving into a cinderblock wall if I had tried to sit down. So I just stood and leaned a little.
    On my right were two girls who must have been about sixteen and in front of me was a soda jerk who looked about the same age and wore his white cloth garrison cap with an air of authority I had to admire. He nodded at me, like he saw robots in his joint all the time, and asked me what I wanted.
    I considered his adolescent complexion, the skin rubbed clean raw