Another short story is up over at Noble Cobra Magazine. I’ll leave you to discover the rest.

Marvin Jennings gazed at the magnificent Spanish-style mansion hidden among two-hundred acres of richly cultivated landscape as the car rolled up the sweeping drive. Just how much money must a guy be swimming in before he felt the need to blow it on a place like this, he wondered. The upkeep alone would run well into the tens of thousands, not to mention the small army of servants you’d need. This was the kind of place a guy bought only to show that he could.

Officially, he knew – for he had examined the records thoroughly – it was owned by Lance Caldecott, the shipping magnate. He certainly could afford it, of course, but then, he was almost never there. Had his own place in the city, plus villas overseas. Apparently, he owned it just so that the Crimson Cavalier could live in it.

Jennings frowned to himself. That was one of the things that didn’t seem to make any sense about this whole setup. There had to be a reason Caldecott was spending that kind of dough on a place like this only to rent it out to someone else. The obvious idea was that the Cavalier had something on him. But Jennings hadn’t been able to find anything. From all appearances, the guy and his company were clean.Nothing but the same minor customs fraud that everyone in the business got into; no drugs, no real smuggling, no signs of anything seriously criminal. And his private life was pretty much the same; clean, but not unnaturally so. Just what you’d expect from a basically honest, basically decent ordinary sap.

That left the idea that the Cavalier was paying him off. But the money involved in that case…well, it was frightening.

It troubled Jennings that he couldn’t figure it out, since he usually was very good at that. It was why old man Mayler had brought him on as a kid, paid his way through law school, and helped him set up his practice. The idea was that he would be the legal arm of the organization, as well as a diplomat in dealing with other syndicates. And he’d done very well in that capacity; his law firm was one of the most prestigious in California, and there was talk of him going to Congress in a few years. On the other side of things, he’d successfully negotiated with everyone from the Yakuza to the Cartels to the East Coast, and wall the while made quite a nice little nest for himself.

The Mayler Syndicate had been the work of a lifetime for the old man and was well established by this point. With people in the DA’s office and the Police Department, they were pretty well safe from prosecution, and a few more years at this rate would make them just about untouchable. Anyone who wanted to do business in the L.A. metropolitan area had to reckon with them….

Or so they’d thought. That’s when they’d started getting word of the man who called himself the Crimson Cavalier; a theatrical figure who suddenly seemed to have his hands in everything and who, by all accounts, terrified people even more than the Syndicate did.

So it was that Jennings had been tasked with setting up a meeting with this elusive mastermind, ostensibly to see if they two sides couldn’t do business together, but in truth to try to get a read on what kind of a man he was. After all, everyone had a weak-spot, if only you could figure them out.

Read the rest here.