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CHAPTER ONE
Rural Route 149
Caldwell, New York
I gotta bad feeling about this.”
As Mickey Trix’s cousin spoke, he wanted to beat on the fucker, but it was his own damned fault. Why had he thought bringing the deadweight on a hit was gonna help anything?
“Mickey, you hear what I say—”
Overhead, lightning rippled across the night sky and the snowy forest came alive, the bare branches of the trees turning into arms that reached forward to grab, the knee-deep drifts reflecting the all-wrong flash back to the freaky storm. When everything went darker again, Mickey had a split second of double-thinking himself. It was fucking January. You didn’t get thunderstorms in—
“Shut up.” He searched those trees, which seemed to stalk instead of stand still on their root systems. “Fuck, why you always talking—”
“Where are we—”
Mickey turned on the dumbass as thunder rumbled. All the fucking snow made the landscape glow so he could see too much of his cousin’s weak-dick chin and beady little paranoid peepers. The ski mask he’d giventhe fool was wedged up over a set of thin eyebrows, the layers of black wool a crown of bad intent that on anyone else would’ve been a warning that shit was about to go down. On Evan? It just covered up all the premature balding.
Even his fucking hair didn’t want to be around him.
And who thefuckcouldn’t grow eyebrows. Even cue-ball-bald SOBs had eyebrows—except for when they had that shit, what was it called?
Alpaca.
“Mickey, we gotta turn back. I gotta bad—”
Mickey slapped that crap into silence, hard enough that his palm vibrated inside his glove. “I got business here, and you want to get into business, so we’re coming to take care of business, you fuckin’asshole.”
As snowflakes swirled, Evan put his bare hand on the side of his face. “Why you gotta do that shit?”
“?’Cuz you’re doingthisshit.” He motioned back and forth between them, the sleeve on his parka flapping. “Now, come the fuck on.Fuck.”
Stomping off through the snow, he was not about to tell an adult male that he needed to put his goddamn mittens on. Besides, if Evan got frostbite, he probably wouldn’t even know what it was.
Ten fucking years,Mickey thought. Ten years and he was getting nowhere in the organization or with their uncle. He was twenty-nine years old, still roughing up idiots who didn’t pay when they lost at the book, still pushing small bags on the street. His pops had run the family at this age, and had been in charge right up until the old man had been shot twelve times on 19th Street.
Mickey was the fucking son of a legend, and there was a birthright to that. If his pops hadn’t been murdered over that territory dispute with the Southend gangs, Uncle wouldn’t be more’n a second-in-command of some crew on the secondhand side of the river—
Snap.
Mickey froze and scanned the woods.
“WhatwasthatohmyGod—”
“I stepped on something.” If he hit the guy again, Evan was likely to start crying. “Fuck, relax.”
As another lick of lightning flickered down, Mickey searched for true movement in the forest, not the shit that was an illusion. It was hard to tell, so he was going to stay where he was… until he was sure what was around them was safe. Well, safe-ish. Who the fuck knew what kind of booby-traps could be out here?
“Mickey, I know what you’re doing—and we don’t want to mess with him.”
Scanning. More scanning. “I’m just gonna pay the guy a little visit. Talk to him.”
“You’re not here for conversation.” When Mickey glanced over his shoulder, Evan’s eyes narrowed like he wasn’t completely stupid. “I’m not completely stupid.”
Time to get moving again. “Whatever.”
“Why don’t I get to have a gun? You never let me carry a gun.” Evan tapped him on the shoulder. “C’mon. Let’s not do this—”
