I studied him for a long moment. His eyes didn’t dart; his breathing didn’t spike. There was no flicker of deceit, no tell I could see. Hell, could he even feel those things? Novak knew nothing—and I could read the honesty in him not born from fear, but from genuine truth. I slid the scalpel into its sheath and sat back in my chair, letting the tension drain from the room.
“Kyle Rourke turned up dead with missing organs. You wanna explain that?” I asked, voice level but razor-thin.
Novak’s eyes narrowed, confusion there before his cold assessment returned. “Red? The fight guy? Dead?” He straightened, the coffee forgotten. “He was breathing when we dropped him. You think something happened at the hospital?”
“No,” I said, quiet, steady. “I think something happened with you and Rufus.”
Anyone else would’ve told me to fuck off, maybe flipped the table, but Novak stared. I could work off most people’s tells—the twitch, the shallow breath, the fear under their anger—but Novak gave me nothing.
He stared at me, jaw working, catching up to the accusation. “Same as always. Anonymous tip to someone we left unconscious on the bench, standard M.O. You patched him up enough to move, pulse weak but steady. We didn’t stick around long enough for the sirens. You know how it goes.” His gaze sharpened, and his voice was flat. “You think I’d butcher a man after hauling his bleeding ass halfway across town? If I wanted him dead, he’d never have made it to the ER. So, if organs went missing, that’s on someone else. The hospital, maybe. But not me.”
“What about Rufus?”
Silence. Novak had trust issues, I was sure, but did he know Rufus well enough to rely on him? He didn’t immediately tell me not to worry; in fact, his pale silver eyes turned flinty.
“Wait here,” he said, and headed into his bedroom, out again in less than a minute. Jeans gone, now head-to-toe in black, he was holstering a wicked-looking knife. “You want in on this?” he asked.
I followed him out. Turned out Rufus lived ten blocks away. We took separate cars, and we let ourselves into an apartment barely holding itself together. The door stuck, the frame swollen from damp. Inside, the air was sour—stale smoke, rot, and sweat. We moved quietly through a reeking kitchen, withgarbage piled high and old takeout containers slick with grease. Flies buzzed over an overflowing sink. The counters were littered with burnt foil, cracked pipes, a spoon blackened at the edges, and the sour stench of melted chemicals.
Novak’s eyes flicked to mine, one brow lifting as we exchanged glances and moved deeper into the room. We stopped at a table shoved into the corner, its surface sticky and cluttered with the detritus of drug use—syringes without caps, baggies crusted with residue, a lighter fused to a patch of melted plastic. There was a smear of something dark—blood or worse—dragged across the edge. Novak’s expression stayed unreadable, his voice low. “Guess Rufus had himself a party.”
“Did you know he was a user?” I whispered.
He leaned in close. “Yeah. Shit, he wasn’t my first choice, but it worked in a pinch.” There wasn’t even a flicker of guilt. This was his crew, his responsibility, and yet his focus remained pure and clinical. He scanned the room like a crime scene tech instead of a man who worked alongside Rufus, noting details, angles, and exits. “Cleanup crews are the fucking dregs of desperate humanity,” he added.
“Apart from you,” I suggested.
He raised an eyebrow and stared at me. “Maybe.”
We moved into the bedroom—Rufus lay there, snoring, naked as the day he was born, one arm flung over a girl half his age curled next to him. Her skin was pale and slack, and her arm still had a tourniquet biting into it. A used condom was stuck to dirty sheets, the air thick with rotting trash and alcohol. Novak took it in without expression, eyes narrowing just enough to register disgust or calculation—it was hard to tell which.
I crossed to the girl. Her pulse fluttered, shallow and quick. “Still breathing,” I murmured.
“Lucky her,” Novak said, voice flat, not a hint of emotion.
I snapped my hypodermic and injected her with a small dose of sedative—enough to keep her out longer than whatever poison she’d pumped into herself. She exhaled once, body slackening further. “She’ll sleep it off.”
Novak crouched beside Rufus, poking him and studying him. “If he knows anything, he’s too stoned to talk.” He looked up at me. “I have somewhere we can take him,” he said, and nodded at my wrist. “Do your thing.”
Sedated, Novak lifted him like dead weight, dropped him into the trunk without a flicker of emotion, and turned to face me. “Trust goes both ways,” he said. “You fuck me over, and you’re dead.”
“Likewise.”
Novak regarded me carefully and then nodded, and all too soon we were heading away from Rufus’s dump of an apartment, his unconscious self in Novak’s car, and me following, cutting through the outskirts of L.A. toward a rundown patch of abandoned warehouses. The one Novak had chosen had cracked windows and seemed likely to collapse at any minute. He led the way through a maze of corridors, the walls oozing grime, until we reached a solid metal fire door with a number pad. The code beeped, the lock clicked, and inside was nothing but a concrete room—a drain in the middle, neon lighting that flickered overhead, and windows too high to see through. He tied Rufus to the chair.
Novak glanced back at me. “You got something to wake him up?”
I pulled a vial from my kit, drew it up fast, flicked the syringe, and jabbed it into Rufus’s arm. The effect wasn’t instant, but it was quick enough that I didn’t need to make small talk with Novak. Rufus jerked awake, eyes rolling, pupils blown and unfocused, breath coming in ragged gasps. He tugged at the rope binding his wrists, confusion twisting to fear as his brain caughtup to where he was. He saw me first, confused, and then spotted Novak.
“Boss?” he said, yanking at his bindings again. “What the fuck?”
Novak dropped to a crouch in front of him, forcing Rufus to look down, and pulled out his knife. “Kyle Rourke,” he said, and Rufus’s expression changed.
“The kid we dropped at St Paddy’s?” he asked, feigning confusion.
Novak’s eyes went cold. He dragged the knife up Rufus’s bare leg, slow enough to make his breath hitch, the tip stopping dangerously close to his cock. “Try again,” he said, voice low and almost conversational, as if discussing the weather. The flicker of neon caught the blade, the reflection dancing across Novak’s face. Rufus froze, muscles trembling. Novak didn’t blink. He might as well have been asking for the time of day.
“I don’t understand.”
