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So many times our paths have crossed.

The roads we travel converge and diverge without our knowing,

until one day, we finally meet and see that our pasts are so entangled

that we were never without one another from the start.

ONE

In Newmains, Alabama, if you look up at the sky at night, it’s as though you’re staring into the very soul of all creation. Out there, with barely any light or people to pollute the atmosphere, you can travel back in time as light from long dead stars and ancient celestial bodies finally reach the Earth, hit the walls of your retinas, and for a second they still exist, aren’t forgotten, remain a part of the universe still.

And then they’re gone.

It’s the most amazing experience, if you truly comprehend what you’re looking at. That’s how my brain works. I can’t look at something and simply see pretty pinpricks of flashing lights in the sky. I see burning hydrogen and helium, vast seas of nitrogen, oxygen and iron. I see death and destruction and life and creation all at once, and it’s a symphony of chaos that clean robs me of breath every single time I witness it.

The same thing happens to me now as I stand over Freddy Clough’s body as he dies on the uneven concrete flooring of the underground parking lot of my employer’s apartment building. I see more than a beaten man taking his last breaths. I see a perfectly designed machine malfunctioning. His lungs aren’t capable of binding oxygen molecules to iron and sending it to his heart with so many bullet holes riddling them. Kidneys can’t work if they’ve received the kind of internal damage Freddy’s have. A man can only walk if his spinal chord hasn’t been severed.

Basically, Freddy is a mess. His blood is pooled around his torso, a dark crimson mirror reflecting the strip lights overhead, slowly turning black. I pick up the gun that lies at my feet, frowning at the dirt and grime encrusted along the barrel, into the handle, around the slide, into the crosshatched pattern of the metal handle, and I learn a lot about its owner. It’s clearly not one of Zeth’s. Like with everything else he owns, Zeth takes exceptional care of his weapons. The Desert Eagle he’s taken to carrying around is always highly polished, clean and ready to go. It’s surprising that a gun like this—rusted, never cleaned or maintained since it was procured—even works. There’s enough shit caked all over it to jam up the mechanism for sure.

“Please…hel…help.” Freddy grasps up at me with blood-covered fingers, the whites of his eyes showing. He’s afraid. There’s nothing I can do to save him, no help I can give to him really, so I simply crouch down beside him and hold his gaze, allowing my chest to rise and fall with his as he dies. Me being close, me breathing with him, being here to acknowledge his death, is enough for Freddy. He gives me a single, sharp nod and then the life flees his body.

When I pulled into the parking lot and found Freddy seven minutes ago, I carefully slid his wallet out of his pocket to hunt down some ID. Once I had his name—not one I recognized—I discarded it in order to assess the situation at hand. Felt rude to be rifling through a dying man’s personal belongings while he was still in the process of bleeding out. Now that he’s gone, though, I turn my attention back to the worn leather in my hands.

Freddy Clough,

2164 South Meadow,

Aimes,

PA 72340

A picture of a beautiful blonde woman with slightly gappy teeth smiles out at me from the laminated photo slot. She looks happy. A huge birthday cake sits on a table in front of her with only one candle lit. She looks late twenties but the single candle probably makes her mid thirties—what woman wants thirty-five candles on her birthday cake, after all?

Freddy has three credit cards, one of which is a platinum American Express.
Three hundred and eighty dollars in fifties and twenties in the back of the wallet, too. Freddy’s not short on cash by the looks of things, and yet whoever shot him left it all behind, along with their dirty gun and two stretches of tire tread on the concrete where they burned out of here. There’s every chance Freddy’s attacker was disturbed before he could steal Freddy’s wallet, but I doubt that somehow. I didn’t pass anyone when I was coming in.

My cell phone rings, and predictably it’s Zee. I hit the green answer button, frowning at Freddy, who’s died with his mouth hanging open. “Hey, man. Sorry, I’m here but there’s a bit of a situation in your parking garage.”

“I know. Clough, right?” Zeth’s deep voice rattles down the phone, somehow even gruffer than normal.

“Yeah. This your handiwork, then?” I straighten up, already making contingency plans. Disposing of a body is never an easy task in a city. Out in the middle of Alabama and Louisiana, it’s simple enough to dump a body in the bayou and let the alligators do the dirty work for you. In the heart of Seattle, Washington, you usually find yourself tossing dismembered body parts over the side of a small leisure boat on the Puget Sound in the middle of the night instead. There’s a lot more work involved. “Who was he?” I ask.

“A nobody. I was having a few choice words with a guy. One of the Italians. I was out on the street and he was following me. I managed to collar him and bring him back here. He said a guy, Clough, was following
him
. Sounded like bullshit. He was shitting himself, though. Wasn’t gonna tell me jack. I put the hurt on him and let him go. I heard gunshots twenty seconds after I un-cuffed him.”

“You didn’t come to check it out?” Sounds very unlike Zeth.

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ve been shot.”

This should be shocking news to me, however I’ve heard those words come out of Zeth Mayfair’s mouth so many times now that I’m surprised if a month goes by when he doesn’t get shot. “Didn’t want my DNA getting mixed up in a crime scene,” he tells me.

“Ever the pragmatist. You want me to sort him out first, or you?”

“Him. I’m fine.”

I know Zeth’s idea of fine. Normally, fine would indicate a sightly flat-lined level of existence. Not good. Not particularly bad, either. With my boss and best friend, it simply means he’s not approaching imminent death. It could very well mean he’s trying to hold his insides inside his body, though.

Arguing with him, going to check on him, could be a fatal move on my part, however. “Okay. Freddy Clough it is. I’ll see you soon.”

“Bring whiskey.”

Typical. I haul Freddy’s body into the trunk of my Chrysler, and then I pour bleach all over the concrete floor of the parking garage. Makes a mess, stinks like fuck, but it does the job. Within twenty minutes there’s no sign that a man lost at least four pints of blood here. I take the gun that killed Freddy and I wrap it in a length of black material I conveniently had lying around in the trunk. Bleach, cleaning tools, duct tape, random bits of material…
bone saws
... it’s amazing the kind of thing a guy like me will
conveniently
have lying around in the trunk of his car. I deposit the gun into the glove compartment, and then I take Freddy over to 1
st
Avenue South, growling under my breath. I fucking hate this part of town. Like, really
hate
it—the tangle of train lines are never quiet, and the lights never stop blinking on Harbor Island—but I don’t have time to take Freddy out into the middle of nowhere and chop him up into smaller, more manageable pieces, so I’m resorting to more impractical measures. Collum Tate’s a drunk Irishman with no particular affiliation to any of Seattle’s organized crime syndicates. He does menial work that most other freelancers won’t touch. I wouldn’t normally trust someone with no steadfast loyalty to Zeth, but it’s one of those nights and Collum knows what will happen if he breathes a word of what he does here for me tonight. It will
not
end well for him. And besides, despite being Irish and drunk a lot of the time, Collum is a very conscientious guy.

He doesn’t make mistakes. He doesn’t take risks. And the bastard can pretty much talk his way out of absolutely everything, too, which is a mighty fine skill to have in our circle of friends.

Collum also doesn’t ask questions. I pay him eight hundred dollars, and he takes Freddy’s body and that’s it. It’s done. Back at Zeth’s apartment building, I head through the security door at the rear right hand side of the parking lot and walk down the narrow corridor, then enter the second to last door on the left. There, I find the man himself sitting on a single solitary wooden chair, scowling at his cell phone, as a small, bright pool of
his
blood gathers around his feet.

“Women are fucking crazy,” he informs me.

“I’m aware.” I hand him a folded up wad of bandages I’ve already pulled out of the first air kit I carry… you guessed it…in the trunk of my car. He accepts it from me and presses the material against his left calf. “Is it bad?” I ask.

Zeth shakes his head. “No. Just fucking inconvenient. Do you know where the hell I can buy Lucky Charms from at this time of night?”

Zeth asks me weird questions sometimes, but this is abnormally weird. “Probably. Should I even bother asking why?”

“There’s a girl upstairs in the apartment. I bought groceries for her, but all she wants is Lucky fucking Charms.”

I’d be less surprised if he told me he had the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the apartment upstairs. “Huh. Did you suffer a head injury during your little scuffle with the Italian?”

“No.”

“Then why the hell is there a girl in your apartment? I didn’t think you fucked women up there. You’re not hosting a party until the end of the month, right?”

“Nope. No party. And no fucking, either, asshole. She’s my sister.”

Now I’m just completely lost. “I did not know you had a sister.”

“Neither did I. Until I saw her.”

“So… you looked at her and you knew she was your sister?”

“Are you going to ask twenty questions, or are you going to help me?” Zee lifts the hem of his t-shirt and shows me the wound in his stomach that’s bleeding sluggishly down his six pack.

I squint at it, prod him with my index finger and then announce that it’ll probably only need one stitch and he should stop being such a baby. The look he gives me is arctic to say the least. I douse him in alcohol and put two stitches in just to be safe, and then the two of us make our way up to his apartment. Inside, a petite, elfish-looking girl with a mass of curly blonde hair has fallen asleep on the floor of the kitchen, one arm tucked up underneath her head. Zeth and I both freeze, hands in pockets, staring down at her prone figure on the ground.

“How the fuck did you take one look at her and know she was related to you? She looks nothing like you.”

Zeth glares at the woman some more, clenching his jaw, not saying anything for a while, and then he says, “My mother. She’s the spitting image of my mother.”

I should ask him how she came to be in his apartment here. I should ask him what he plans on doing with a fucking
sister
, of all things. I should ask him a lot of things, but I know Zee. He’ll tell me his shit when he wants to and not before. Right now, even without looking at him, I know all he’s thinking about is where he can get a very specific box of cereal.

“Did the Italian tell you why he was following you?” I whisper.

“Said Brooklyn was colder then hell and he needed a vacation.”

BOOK: Badlands

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