The Last Deep Breath Read Free Page B

they’d been kidnapped by Pax.  With the dog collar tight in her fist, Ellie told him to get fucked.  Grey gave the death glare, manned up and said Pax was his brother and best friend.
    The media hung Pax out to dry until Mrs. Wagner burned down her own house when the meth lab in the garage went up.  Firemen found child porn, lists of hacked credit card numbers, and evidence of an interstate lottery scam.  The DA asked Pax, Grey, and Ellie why they never explained their reasons for running.
    Pax just grinned.  Grey said he’d been waiting for somebody to ask, which was the truth.  Ellie just told the DA to get fucked again.
    They shuffled Pax to reform school and let him wait out the four years until he was eighteen.  Then he joined the Army.  Grey went back into the system and landed with another foster family, sweet folks who went a little heavy on the Jesus loves you shit, but overall very solid citizens.  He hung in until he was old enough to join the Army too.
    Three years later he was on KP duty in Ramadi, east of Baghdad, on his way out on a dishonorable discharge. Pax walked into the kitchen where Grey had his arms down to the elbows in the grease trap and said, “You learn how to throw a solid punch yet?”
    It was better than “Man up,” anyway.
    Grey wouldn’t meet up with Ellie for another two years after that, over ten since he’d last seen her, when he turned the corner on West 4 th and found her crouched in the doorway of his building, leering at him with red teeth, a four-inch blade half-buried in her side.

6
     
    Kendra’s agent was a short slick hustler named Monty Stobbs who had a classy office with glass walls.  A fast-talker who danced forward and back, pecked Kendra and clapped Grey on the shoulder, working the room the way a boxer rope-a-doped in the ring.  His suit and shoes were fine Italian but his toupee looked like horse tail.
    She only wanted to grab a couple of residual checks she was owed but Monty made a big play, open arms held high, said he was happy to see her, he’d been thinking a lot about her lately, thought she would be perfect for a couple of roles.  Kendra’s eyes turned black and hard as shale but she sat, crossed her legs, showed a little knee.
    Seated beside her, Grey played man about town, chauffeur, bodyguard, boyfriend, troubleshooter.  Monty offered coffee, spring water, virgin daiquiris, but didn’t wait for a response.  He pulled five scripts out of his bottom drawer and stacked them on the corner of his desk for her to take home and read.  She smiled pleasantly and ignored them.
    “You’d be perfect for any one of these,” he said.
    Grey took a look.   Love Hotel 4: Nightly Delight, Love Hotel 5: Manager’s Heaven, Warrior Woman 3: Return to the Arena, Angela’s Eyes 5: Seeing You Again.
    He’d caught a few episodes of the soft-core Love Hotel series on cable as part of the free adult entertainment package you got with the really low class motels.  The ones waiting at the edge of dead towns, the dead towns waiting at the edge of forgotten highways.
    Monty Stobbs got as far as, “Kenny, love, tell me what—” before his office phone rang.  He answered, held up a finger in a wait-a-sec gesture, and huddled in the far corner taken up by a rubber tree plant.  He told his secretary to put a big name actor through.  He talked loudly and so rapid-fire that he sounded like the Portuguese stevedores loading cargo on the New York docks.
    An argument over money.  Monty broke from the corner and marched across the room and out into the huge corridor where harried mailboys shoved huge overloaded carts.  He trotted past the glass wall and down to the waiting room where his secretary was eating a bagel.
    Kendra turned to Grey, shot him the grin again, and said, “So what do you think?”
    He thought it was odd that she didn’t correct Monty Stobbs for calling her Kenny, the way she did all the barflies in Reno.  “Is it a compliment that he