Stalking the Angel by Robert Crais Read Free Book Online Page B

on my chest. He was still there. I said, “I went by Bradley’s house last night. Someone called and scared the hell out of Sheila.”
    “That’s one of the reasons Bradley wants to see you. We’re at the Century City office. May we expect you in thirty minutes?”
    “Better gimme a little longer. I want to think up something real funny to see if I can make you laugh.”
    She hung up.
    I lifted off the cat, went into the kitchen, filled alarge glass with water, drank it, and filled it once more when the phone rang again. Lou Poitras. He said, “I made some calls. Those two guys who sixed you yesterday were Asian Task Force cops.”
    “Gee, you mean Nobu Ishida isn’t a simple businessman?”
    “If ATF people are in, Hound Dog, it’s gotta be heavy.”
    Poitras hung up. Asian Task Force, huh? Maybe I had been right about old Nobu. Maybe he was the mastermind of an international stolen art cartel. Maybe I would crack The Big Case and be hailed as The World’s Greatest Detective. Wow.
    I fed myself and the cat, then showered, dressed, and was turning down Century Park East Boulevard forty minutes later. It was clear and sunny and cooler than yesterday, with a lot of women on the sidewalks, all of them wearing lightweight summer outfits with no backs and no sleeves. Century City was once the back lot of Twentieth Century-Fox Studios. Now it is an orchard of high-rise office buildings done in designer shades of bronze and black and metallic blue glass, each carefully spaced for that planned-community look and landscaped with small pods of green lawn and California poplar trees. The streets have names like Constellation Boulevard and Avenue of the Stars and Galaxy Way. We are nothing if not grandiose.
    The Century Plaza Towers are a matching set of triangular buildings, thirty-five floors each of agents, lawyers, accountants, lawyers, business managers, lawyers, record executives, lawyers, and Porsche owners. Most of whom are lawyers. The Century Plaza Towers are the biggest buildings in Century City. They have to be to squeeze in the egos. Warren Investments occupiedhalf of the seventeenth floor of the north tower. Rent alone had to exceed the Swedish gross national product.
    I stepped off the elevator into an enormous glass and chrome waiting room filled with white leather chairs that were occupied by important-looking men and women holding important-looking briefcases. They looked like they had been waiting a long time. A sleek black woman sat in the center of a U-shaped command post. She wore a wire-thin headphone set that curved around to her mouth with a microphone the size of a pencil lead. “Elvis Cole,” I said. “For Mr. Warren.”
    She touched buttons and murmured into the microphone and told me someone would be right out. The important-looking men and women glared enviously. Moments later, an older woman with gray hair in a tight bun and a nice manner led me back along a mile and a half of corridor, through a heavy glass door, and into what could only have been an executive secretary’s office. There was a double door wide enough to drive a street cleaner through at the far end. “Go right in,” she said. I did.
    Bradley Warren was sitting on the edge of a black marble desk not quite as long as a bowling alley with his arms crossed and a J. Jonah Jameson smile on his face. He was smiling at five dour-faced Japanese men. Three of the Japanese men were sitting on a white silk couch and were old the way only Asians can be old, with that sort of weathered papery skin and eternal presence. The other two Japanese men stood at either end of the couch, and were much younger and much larger, maybe two inches shorter than me and twenty pounds heavier. They had broad flat faces and eyes that stared at you and didn’t give a damn if you minded ornot. The one on the right was wearing a custom-cut Lawrence Marx suit that made him look fat. If you knew what to look for, though, you knew he wasn’t fat. He was all