Black Heart Read Free Page A

is.
    Taking slow steps, I hold up the plank, which is split now, a big chunk of the top hanging off by a splinter, the remainder jagged and pointed like a spear. He watches me, every part of him tense. He doesn’t look much older than I am. He might even be younger.
    “Who the hell are you?” When he speaks, I can see that some of his teeth are gold, flashing in the fading sun. Three on the bottom. One on top. He’s breathing hard. We both are.
    I bend down and lift the gun in one shaking hand. My thumb flicks off the safety. I drop the plank.
    I have no idea who I am right now.
    “Why?” I say, between breaths. “Why did she pay you to kill him?”
    “Hey,” he says, holding up both his hands, the gloved and ungloved one, in a gesture of surrender. Despite that, he seems more stunned than scared. “If he was your friend, then—”
    “He wasn’t my friend.”
    He lowers his hands slowly until they rest at his sides, like he has made a decision about me. Maybe that I’m not a cop. Maybe that it’s okay to relax. “I don’t ask why anyone wants anything. I don’t know, okay? It was just a job.”
    I nod. “Let me see your throat.”
    “No marks.” He pulls the neck of his shirt wide, but there’s no scarring there. “I freelance. I’m too pretty for all that bullshit. No one puts a collar on Gage.”
    “Okay,” I say.
    “That girl—if you know her, you know what she’s about.” He reaches into his mouth, pulling out a loose tooth—a real one—black with rot at the top. It sits like a flawed pearl in the palm of his glove. Then he grins. “Good thing murder pays so well, right? Gold’s expensive.”
    I try to hide my surprise. A death worker who loses only a single tooth with each hit is a very dangerous guy. Every curse—physical, luck, memory, emotion, dream, death, and even transformation—causes some kind of blowback. As my grandfather says, all work works the worker. Blowback can be crippling, even lethal. Death curses rot a part of the worker’s body, anything from a lung to a finger. Or, apparently, something as minor as a tooth.
    “What’s a death worker need a gun for anyway?” I ask.
    “That gun’s real sentimental. Belonged to my gran.” Gage clears his throat. “Look, you’re not going to shoot. You would have done it already. So can we just—”
    “You sure you want to double-dog-dare me?” I say. “You sure?”
    That seems to rattle him. He sucks on his teeth. “Okay, all I know is what I heard—and not from . . . her . She never said anything, except where I could find him. But there’s rumors that the guy—he goes by Charlie West—bungled a job. Killed a family in what was supposed to be a simple smash and grab. He’s a drunk coward—”
    My phone starts to ring.
    I reach down and tug it out of my pocket with one hand, then glance down. It’s Barron, probably just having realized that I ditched him. At that moment Gage vaults himself at the chain-link fence.
    I look at him go, and my vision blurs. I don’t know who I’m seeing. My grandfather. My brother. Myself. Any of us could be him, could have been him, coming from a hit, scrambling to get over a fence before getting shot in the back.
    I don’t yell for him to get down. I don’t fire a warning shot or any of the stuff that I could do—that a federal agent trainee watching a murderer escape should do. I just let him go. But if he’s got the role that I was supposed to have, then I have no idea how to be the person left in the alley. The good guy.
    I wipe off the gun on my green shirt, then tuck it in thewaistband of my jeans, against the small of my back, where my jacket will cover it. After I’m done, I walk to the mouth of the alley and call Barron.
    When he arrives, he’s with a bunch of guys in suits.
    He grabs me by the shoulders. “What the hell were you doing?” his voice is low, but he sounds honestly shaken. “I had no idea where you were! You didn’t answer your phone.”
    Except for