Made to Kill by Adam Christopher Page A

forth across West Hollywood—precautions seemed necessary, after what Ada had told me back at the office. It would have made the hairs go up on the back of my neck, if I had any. But thanks to Thornton, I still knew exactly what that felt like.
    Eva McLuckie. She was our client—our first one, anyway. She was a movie star and she’d taken out a hit on another movie star, one Charles David. The only issue was that the current whereabouts of Mr. David were unknown, which meant I had to do a little of the old private detecting first just to find him. It seemed like a lot of work but as motivation went the amount of gold sitting in the brown athletic bag sitting by the desk in the outer office was right up there.
    Then Ada told me about the Temple of the Magenta Dragon and the fact that our client Eva McLuckie had supposedly dropped out of the public eye herself—apparently in order to take out hits on her co-stars and host little meetings of her own particular kind of private club in the Temple’s basement.
    None of which made any particular kind of sense, but it was early days yet and I wasn’t worried. So far, so good.
    The real problem was what else had been lurking in the Temple basement. This problem made my circuits ache like a bad tooth.
    This problem had a name.
    Chip Rockwell.
    I’d asked Ada to repeat everything to me twice, because the first time I wasn’t sure I believed my audio receptors, even though I could have rewound and played it all back to myself. In fact, that’s just what Ada did.
    That wasn't all she played. She had my memory tape from the previous day lined up and she gave me the highlights. The dark basement and assembled crowd and the guy who Eva called “Mr. Rockwell” sitting there in his suit and bandages looking as much like a living human being as I did.
    And that voice. I couldn’t get it out of my circuits. It buzzed like a wasp, a monotone like a shorting wall socket had developed a voice and a bad temper.
    Chip Rockwell. Movie producer, head of Playback Pictures. The big-time. Even the soda jerk knew him.
    I knew him too.
    Because I’d killed him.
    Ada had told me about the job because I didn’t remember it. Three years ago. Back when she called the shots while I slept on the job. The story went that Rockwell had fallen in with the mob and was using his studio to launder their money. Something must have gone wrong, because someone took out a contract with us on Rockwell’s life, which I prematurely ended one dark and stormy night courtesy of a dangerous stairwell in the backlot of his own studio.
    Chip Rockwell was dead. It had been big news.
    But three years later the dead guy was sitting up in a basement on Sunset Boulevard, in dinner jacket and bandages, talking through some kind of machine.
    Which meant he wasn’t dead. Injured, and badly by the sound of it, but not dead.
    That was a problem. It meant that we hadn’t fulfilled the contract. If news of Rockwell’s survival got back to the original client, chances were they’d want their money back. Chances are they would want far more than just money. And if Rockwell was still alive, he might remember me and my little late-night visit. Our little enterprise risked exposure.
    Except it had been three years. We hadn’t had any trouble, according to Ada. Everyone thought Rockwell was dead. Still dead. Which meant his current state of health was a secret. Which meant we were still in the clear.
    For now.
    And then on top of this, the new job from the new client. One that seemed to intersect the first in a way that neither Ada nor I much liked.
    I was to kill Eva McLuckie.
    Now, this was hinky and we knew it. A little care was required here. Sure, I could have found Eva and punched her ticket, but the way the two jobs tangled was by no means coincidental. Couldn’t have been. Throw in Chip Rockwell and things weren’t just tangled, it was a bone fide Gordian Knot.
    So while Ada tried to go back to our new client for some