Chapter 29. We were in the back room of the wrecks by 9.15 the next morning, having spent the most of the night driving from nowhere in particular to nowhere else. I hoped this worked. I could use some sleep.

Trixie's bit about the three letters had been convincing. Convincing enough that we decided we should actually do something more or less exactly like that.

If Bratsey was conning us, if this was a setup, at least we could hope that he'd lose Rosetti's shirt for him in the process.

And afterwards, one may presume his own head.

So we wrote out letters full of details, the whole mess, and sealed them up with instructions

regarding the aftermath of our grisly demise.

It isn't easy to think about who you send something like that, too, but we did it.

About 11.30, we had finally posted them from the lobby of the Metro Light Hotel, throwing in

some of the better prints from the Jimmy Lish collection for good measure. It was all pretty

neat and tidy, except for the grisly demise part, which I was still keen to avoid. Malik's coffee

house was mostly retail, but he still opened up at 8 in the morning, and I was back on a nice

even keel by the time we made our way into the backroom of the Rex Hotel, which was more of a

saloon with some rooms to flop

located above. The back room was regularly used as a meeting place by less than legitimate

businessmen, and the staff had long ago learned to pay no attention to whoever went in or who

came out. Past the heavy wooden doors were three steps down, each one about six feet wide, as if

to accommodate the crowds

that had used this room when it had been a speakeasy. The rest of the room may once have been

mostly dance floor, and you could tell where the bar had been from the marks along the wall

where it had been removed maybe a decade ago. But now the room was dominated by a conference

table, about 12 feet long, with one end pointing towards the stairs.

Trixie and I removed all but two seats, one at each end, and I stood on the chair opposite the

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