Episode One: Look Back in Anger Read Free Page B

I’m here for Sam.”
    Marx didn’t speak for a long time. Not to tell him to go to hell or even to open barter. The silence made Arles’s smile grow absurdly wider. Even he would admit he looked a bit like the rabid dog when he permitted the malice inside to touch his face.
    “No,” Marx finally said. “She won’t do it. I won’t make her.”
    Arles allowed his features to shift back to something less crazed, and scooped up that precious picture of his stepsisters once more. “Well, now, let’s be truthful. You can make her do a lot of things. Just not the one thing that really matters to you. Not yet, but soon, I’m guessing. Unless someone gets in your way. Again. That seems sort of my job, doesn’t it?”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “Of course you don’t. Play dumb. Play old and feeble and win her through sympathy. That’s the game plan, right?”
    “She’s afraid of you. With good reason.” Marx’s lips peeled back from his teeth threateningly as he gave Arles a long, appraising survey. “She thinks you’re a monster. A disgusting man. Nothing you can do now will change her mind.”
    Arles’s smile wavered just a bit. He gave the image in his hand one last look, then spiked it onto the desk so hard it sparked and hissed as parts of the fractured screen sprayed out all over Marx. “Here is the deal, Daddy. She’s mine…and while she’s mine, you get to keep limited lordship over the company. I can’t have her distracted with ideas of you living under a bridge and handing out blowjobs for sustenance. So you keep the job, and you keep the other two girls, for now, and you count yourself lucky I’m only here for Sam.”
    “She doesn’t want you!”
    “Did I mention I’m not alone? Not this time. You can’t win this. Not against me. And especially not against me, and all of them .”
    The old man’s hands stilled in their furious attempts to right the now shattered image display, stilled completely as he became calculating ice. Arles knew him well enough, knew he was running the options in his head, and knew it was only a matter of moments before he had his answer, if not his woman.
    “You call her, get her down here now, and convince her to leave with me any way you have to, or I call my family. That is a terror you know you don’t want gunning for you.”
    * * * *
    “You know I don’t like guns, right?” Alex turned the weapon over in his hands, studying it like a spider caught between his fingers.
    “Quit being such a little Nancy. It’s just a few interconnected pieces of metal. It don’t bite.” Jesse steadily fieldstripped one of the many weapons laid out on the table as he voiced his disapproval. He took the gun apart as if it were held together by Velcro—a bunch of quick snaps and he was done. It was amazing how Jesse managed to hit every cowboy cliché without even trying, from the low-hanging Stetson hat he wore to the beer he chugged periodically while working. The man was everything Alex wasn’t. Except for short—that was a shame they shared.
    Jesse wiped his hands on his jeans, leaving grease stains behind that would have sent Alex to the showers instantly and on a panicked search for a change of clothes. Why did being a man seem to mean being filthy and poorly dressed? Ugh, no way he was getting gun grease on his shirt.
    Setting the gun down, he pulled a piece of the old newsprint covering the hotel table out from under a stack of others and brought it to his lap. He stared at it a moment, wondering how practical it would be to wrap himself in it like a mummy before starting again on the gun cleaning. A glance at Jesse’s scowl put him off the idea fast, so instead he lifted the crinkly paper and tucked it into the neck of his silk shirt like a dinner napkin.
    “Seriously?”
    “What? I’ll never get grease stains out of silk.”
    “Well, maybe you should wear something a little more durable.”
    Alex picked up the gun from the table.