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“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 the waistband 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 that last time, I hadn’t even heard it ring.
“I was improvising,” I say smugly. “And you would have seen me if you hadn’t been busy hitting on some girl.”
If his expression is any indication, only the presence of other people keeps him from strangling me. “These guys showed up at the murder scene right after the cops,” he says, giving me a loaded look. As mad as he is, I understand what he’s trying to communicate. I didn’t call them, his expression says. I didn’t tell them anything about Lila. I didn’t betray you. I didn’t betray you yet.
The agents take down my statement. I tell them that I followed the hit man, but he got ahead of me and over the fence. I didn’t see where he went from there. I didn’t get that good of a look at him. His hood was up. No, he didn’t say anything. No, he didn’t have a weapon—or at least nothing other than his bare hand. Yes, I shouldn’t have followed him. Yes, I know Agent Yulikova. Yes, she will vouch for me.
She does. They let me go without patting me down. The gun remains tucked in the back of my jeans, rubbing against the base of my spine as Barron and I walk back to the car.
“What really happened?” Barron asks me.
I shake my head.
“So, what are you going to do?” he asks, like he’s challenging me. Like there’s even a question. “Lila ordered that hit.”
“Nothing,” I say. “What do you think? And you’re not doing anything either.”
Girls like her, my grandfather once warned me, girls like her turn into women with eyes like bullet holes and mouths made of knives. They are always restless. They are always hungry. They are bad news. They will drink you down like a shot of whisky. Falling in love with them is like falling down a flight of stairs.
What no one told me, with all those warnings, is that even after you’ve fallen, even after you know how painful it is, you’d still get in line to do it again.
2
WALLINGFORD PREPARATORY on a Sunday night is full of exhausted students trying to do the homework we were sure would be easy, back on Friday when the weekend stretched before us, full of lazy hours. I yawn as I walk in, as guilty as anyone. I still have a paper to write and a big chunk of Les Misérables to translate.
My roommate, Sam Yu, is lying on his stomach on his bed, headphones covering his ears, head nodding in time with music I can’t hear. He’s a big guy, and the springs of his bed groan when he turns over to look at me. The dorms are full of cheap cots with frames threatening to break every time we sit on them, chipboard dressers, and cracked walls. It’s not like the Wallingford campus doesn’t have beautiful wood-paneled chambers with soaring ceilings and leaded glass windows. It’s just that those spaces are for professors and donors. We might be allowed in them, but they’re not for us.
I shoulder my way into our closet and step up onto a sagging box. Then, reaching under my jacket, I pull out the gun, and tape it with a roll of duct tape high on the back wall, above my clothes. I arrange a jumble of old books on the shelf just below it to block it from view.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Sam says.
He clearly watched the whole thing. I didn’t even hear him get up. I must be losing my touch.
“It’s not mine,” I say. “I didn’t know what to do with it.”
“How about getting rid of it?” he says, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. “That’s a gun. A gun, Cassel. A guuuuuuuun.”
