Frankie’s still not blinking. The fucker must have cast iron balls. “I’m Charlie’s man, you know that, Frank. Now, I have other jobs to get to tonight. Let’s tidy up these loose ends, huh?”

The reason for Frankie’s calm appears in hand a split second later. The little shit’s had a gun on me under his desk the whole time. Desert Eagle 50-calibre. Nice. He holds it up at shoulder height, arm held straight out. “Shame you won’t just do the job for me. Charlie’s been running this place into the ground for years. Time for him to move on if you catch my drift. And time you were leaving right now, okay?”

I’ve had a lot of guns aimed at me over the years. A man’s intent is always right there, shining in their eyes, to be read like the pages of a book. Some of them just wanna scare you enough that you back off; some of them are so desperate in trying to hide their own fear that they forget to make you believe they mean it. You gotta mean it. And some of them are sharks. Stone cold. People who’ve pulled the trigger countless before and haven’t thought twice.

Frankie, the little fuck, is a shark.

I’d never have called it. I clench my fingers around the duster, staring down at my fist. There’s little to be done about this now. Things will play out the way they’re meant to. “I suppose this is where you shoot me, then?”

“I suppose it is,” he answers.

Someone, somewhere, said something I felt compelled to have tattooed onto my chest when I was drunk once: So it goes. I know it was Billy Pilgrim from Vonnegut’s Slaughter House Five, but I frequently pretend I don’t. That would mean admitting to the fact that I actually read something in high school before I dropped out. But never mind that. As the bullet zips through the air, I realize how absolutely fucking perfect that saying is. So it goes. There is something so inevitable about me getting shot here tonight. Something so obvious and unbelievable, all at the same time.

Pain ricochets through my body like a hot, white lance. The bullet hits me in the chest, two inches below my collarbone…and suffice to say, it hurts like a bitch. Frankie seems stunned that I'm still standing. If I were him, I would already have shot me another five times and emptied the clip just to make sure I was dead. Fucker’s gonna wish he had. I launch myself across the desk and grapple the gun from his hand, ripping it free from his grip.

"Big mistake, Frankie. Big mistake." I raise my fist and bring it sailing down into his face with a brutal force. The crunch of metal crushing bone, skin and muscle separating, isn't something I ever get used to, but on occasions like this I allow myself to enjoy it a little. Just a little. We have to try and enjoy our work, after all, and pain always awakens my dark side.

Frankie’s head rolls back as I pound my fist into his face over and over and over again. My hands, T-shirt, jacket, jeans, everything is covered in blood by the time the guy falls slack. I’m laughing hysterically as bubbles of blood form on his lips.

“It wasn’t my fault,” he mumbles. His now broken teeth make the words a little muffled, but I get the gist. “You lock people inside a sealed shipping container for three…three days, they’re gonna d—die, Zeth. How…how is that my fault?”

The burritos I ate an hour ago start churning in my stomach. What the fuck is he talking about? I raise my fist to smash it into his mouth again, but…I can’t. Just…this is just fucking perfect. “What people?”

“The ones Charlie’s been bringing in through the docklands. Girls. Girls in con…containers.”

I let Frankie go. Girls in containers? Charlie promised me two years ago that he didn’t deal in girls. Drugs and guns, yeah, but he swore no skin trade. “What’s he moving girls for?” I hold my hand to my shoulder, wincing past the pain. It’s growing now that I’m not inflicting it onto someone else.

“Why do you think?” Frankie rasps. “He gets twenty grand a pop if he can prove they’re still…still in….in tact.” He chokes on the blood welling in his mouth; it runs down his chin, dripping onto his ruined shirt.

“You’re lying.”

“I ain’t,” he says, and I believe him.

Fuck.

Charlie’s the one who’s been lying to me all this time. A part of me wants to believe this is a new development, but I know my boss. He’s got a degree, masters and a goddamned doctorate in lying. Especially when it concerns money. No way he would pass up twenty thousand bucks for a nobody kid he could have snatched off the street. My head spins, numbed and disoriented from the pain of the bullet lodged in my shoulder Through the mist slowing down my mind, I still think it, though. Did that mean I’d been right about the girl? Did that mean Charlie had taken the girl’s sister nearly three years ago?

The first time I’d seen her, she was working a night shift at the hospital. My sack of shit uncle had just been eighty-sixed—that hadn’t worked out so well. To be eighty-sixed you have to actually be buried the prerequisite eight feet down and six feet under instead of dumped out of a moving car on the side of the freeway—and it had been on me to identify the body. Well, what was left of it. Sloane was a broken bird, I could tell. Beautiful in an understated way, luminous brown eyes, wavy brown hair. It was the fight in her eyes that had captured me, though. Captured and enthralled me in the space of ten seconds flat. We’d stood face to face in the corridor as she waited for the elevator, and her eyes had met mine. I felt like I was being gutted stem to sternum, and all the while I knew she wasn’t seeing me at all. She was seeing some distant horror that I could only guess at. And I didn’t like guessing.