Doubletake Read Free Page B

thoughts were much badder than most and I wanted to act on them. Sometimes or often or frequently or very frequently, depending on my mood…no judgment needed or wanted. If I thought it, I absolutely wanted to do it.
    But I didn’t.
    The voices/thoughts were almost as much a bitch as family could be, the squabbling, but I’d learned to mostly tune them out. Many psychotherapists would be proud of my progress—the ones who hadn’t met me and, if they had any sense, wouldn’t care to.
    I wasn’t good or bad. I was only me, and I was neither.
    They’d have to invent a new bizarrely long German psychological description for what I was. How did the German say, “To see him is to piss your pants in fear”? Freud would’ve known.
    I shook my leg futilely one more time and exhaled in irritation at the molten mercury eyes, the dark red coat dappled with silver spots, the milk teeth—as large as a German shepherd’s adult teeth—that continued to gnaw at my thigh. “Three seconds and he’s a rug under the coffee table. Your move, Cyrano.”
    Did Niko have a proud, hawklike nose? Yes, he did. Did I give him hell over it? What do you think?
    I answered my still-ringing cell phone as I shot the last kishi that leaped through a boarded-up window. Wood split, glass shattered, and bone splintered. The combination made for one dead kishi whose stomach was rounded and full with its last meal, which, I was guessing, had been the last occupant of this street. From the hypodermic the para-hyena coughed up in its dying throes, that meal had most likely been a tweaker.
    They say drugs kill, but does anyone ever listen?
    “Yeah, Leandros,” I said into the phone. “Death and destruction by the dollar. The meter’s ticking. Go.”
    I hadn’t had a chance to check the incoming number, not with Kishi Junior both seducing and making a meal of my leg. But it didn’t surprise me to hear a familiar voice. Five people total had my personal number. Our business number was an untraceable phone with voice mail lying on the floor of an otherwise empty storage locker. Niko and I’d been sorry before—we went with safe now. “Kid, thank Bacchus.” I heard the relieved exhalation. “I need you and Niko at my place now.”
    The three seconds was up, and I had the muzzle of my Desert Eagle planted between toddler kishi’s moon eyes as it gnawed harder at my lower thigh. I had a high pain tolerance—you learned to in this business—but to balance it out, my tolerance for nearly everything else remotely irritable in the universe was low.
Damn
low. Contaminating part of your soul will do that…if you believed in souls. I hadn’t made up my mind, but either way it was too bad for baby. It was night-night time. I might as well stop the pattern now. The same as its parents, it would grow up to be a killer anyway.
    Like you did?
    As if I didn’t know that.
    But I was a done deal; the kishi wasn’t, not quite yet. “Goodfellow? You in trouble?” I started to put pressure on the trigger and tried to overlook the shadow of guilt. It
was
a kid. A killer kid, but a kid. Couldn’t I relate? On every single level? Then again, did I care if I could relate? Was I Dr. Phil? Hell, no. I was, however, Niko’s brother. That had me yanking harder at my internal leash while frowning crossly at Niko as I gave him a few extra seconds to move over and slide his katana blade between my leg and the kishi to pry it off with one efficient move.
    “You owe me,” I grumbled at him.
    While it squealed, barked, yowled, and laughed hyena-crazy through a toothy muzzle, Niko threw the last kishi down and hog-tied its preteen fuzzy ass. My brother—he wasn’t a bleeding heart. There were more dead monsters and people in whatever version of hell you wanted to believe in who’d testify to that. He did like to give a break when he thought one was due, though—or when he thought their birthright shouldn’t automatically condemn them.
    He’d learned that raising