Chapter One
Grade had a bad feeling about this job.
298 Longwall Ave was just too fucking nice. It was one of the old redbrick mansions, originally owned by mining company bosses, on the outskirts of town. They were technically part of Sweeny, but they didn’t want to talk about it. Like when you were a teenager and didn’t want to be seen in the same vicinity as your parents.
Not that Grade would know anything about that. He drove his shitty new van—it didn’t even have any concealed compartments, but it had been cheap at auction—through the unmanned security gates and slowly up the horseshoe drive. All the windows were lit up, and when he killed the radio he could hear the muted sounds of a party in progress—laughter, the clink of glasses, and the dim strains of some blandly unobtrusive string quartet.
Yeah.
That did not help the sinking feeling that he should have just let Clay’s call go to voicemail. He’d thought he was about to get laid, not called out on an emergency job.
Of course, Grade supposed, around here every job was an emergency callout. It wasn’t like LA, where he actually had clients who booked slots ahead of time, crime on a schedule. That was another thing you couldn’t get in Sweeny, along with good theater and sex that didn’t get complicated.
That part was his own fault. Grade knew that. He shouldn’t have mixed business and his personal life, but… he’d always been weak for bad ideas. Clay was definitely that. What else he was after a couple of months of casual but frequent sex? That was a rock Grade wasn’t about to try and turn over.
Orthink about right now. Grade shoved the distraction to the back of his brain as he saw Harry waving him onto the narrow spur road that led around the back of the house. The servants’ entrance. Grade grimaced sourly to himself at the familiarity of it. He’d seen plenty of those back in his teens, trailed along behind his mom to help her scrub down toilets and roll rich old shut-ins onto their sides so she could change the bedding under them.
The taste of bleach and menthol flooded Grade’s mouth from memory, still undercut with the faint, foul stink of neglect. Money could buy dignity—nurses, medical care, the threat of a lawyer to change a will—but for the ones that couldn’t spring for that, his mom’s discretion had been the most they could hope for.
Grade pulled in next to the back door, neatly slotted into the space spray-painted onto the gravel. He got out and walked around the back of the van to grab his stuff while he waited for Harry to catch up.
The big man gave him an annoyed look when he finally jogged over.
“You could have given me a lift.”
Grade unstrapped his rucksack from the back of the van and threw it over his shoulder. He was used to the weight.
“My mom always told me not to pick up hitchhikers,” he said.
Harry unzipped his coat to let the night air in. “Sometimes I see what Clay sees in you,” he said.
“His cock?”
Harry flushed. It was a slow, determined burn that started at his collar and headed up. Grade didn’t let himself enjoy it. That hadnotbeen professional. He hadn’t socked away all the money he could scrape together over the last two years to get back to LA just to let his standards slip now.
“What’s with the audience?” he asked, partially to change the subject, and that was a relevant professional question. “I don’t usually consider what I do performance art.”
Harry pulled a dour face. “Don’t worry about that. I’ve seen the results,” he said. “Nobody needs to see the process. Don’t worry. They’re all pretty occupied. No one is going to interrupt you. This way.”
He jerked his head for Grade to follow him and headed toward the back door. Grade stared at his back for a second as he tried to decide if the uneasy feeling in his gut was worth passing up a couple of grand.
It wasn’t. That was the problem with needing money. It made you way too willing to overlook red flags.
Grade sighed, grabbed a pack of PPE from the van, and followed on Harry’s heels into a tiled mudroom with two compound bows mounted on the wall and orange hunting vests hung up next to them. No blood on the floor.
“You going to give me a heads-up on what happened?” Grade asked as they headed into a long oak-paneled hall.
Harry shrugged. “You know as much as I do,” he said. “You think I get invited to this sort of party? Ezra called and told me they had a situation, then left me outside to wait for you. Down here.”
He clomped down two steps and opened a door to a set of steep stairs that went down into a basement. Grade looked at him. Harry rolled his eyes. “If I wanted to kill you,” he said, “trust me, I’d do it at a reasonable hour and somewhere convenient.”
Grade sighed, but it did sound reasonable. He hitched the bag up more securely on his shoulder and started down the steps. Half of him expected Harry to slam the door behind him just to make him jump, but instead the big man shut it quietly.
There were bloodstains on the stairs. Just a few. Grade made it a point to step around them. The last thing he needed was to take home blood on his sneakers and have to explain to his mom.
“Body at the bottom,” Clay drawled from somewhere in the basement.
“I can see that,” Grade said.
