“You realize I don’t know them, right?” Clay said.
“Ask whoever killed them,” Grade suggested. “Presumably, if your friend knew these two well enough to want them dead, they knew if they drive a Tesla or not.”
Clay reached down and picked up the envelope Ezra had left behind. He tossed it to Grade, who caught it out of the air. The heft of it in his hand was very satisfying.
“Isn’t this what we pay you for?” he said.
Grade checked in the envelope and then folded it over to stick into his back pocket. “Not enough.”
Clay snorted and pulled his tie out of his pocket. He looped it loosely around his neck, red tangled through lean fingers, as he headed for the stairs.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “But I start talking to these people about their cars, they’re going to think I’m casing the joint.”
“And again, that’s your problem,” Grade said. “And I meant it, by the way.”
Clay turned and dropped into a crouch on the steps so he could see Grade. “Meant what?” He tilted his head to the side and slowly rubbed his thumb over his lower lip. “That you’re going to hold me to that promise to fuck you? Don’t worry. I’m a man of my word… when I wanna be.”
Despite his best efforts to keep his mind on the job, Grade’s mouth went dry and his balls tightened under his jeans. He could feel the heat spread up through the nape of his neck as he cleared his throat.
“That too,” he said. “But you haven’t paid me enough for this job. Getting rid of a body is actually the budget option. If you want a package deal like this—”
Clay held up a hand to interrupt him. “I owe you cock,” he said. “You want money, that’s Ezra’s department.”
He pushed himself upright and headed the rest of the way up the stairs. Grade walked over to stand next to the dead woman, feet just off the puddle of blood.
“Yeah, well, tell him to get his department in order. I might have eased up the not-working-for-amateurs rule, but I still get paid up front.”
Clay let himself out with a parting shot for Grade as he closed the door behind him.
“Now that sounds like your problem,” he said. Then the door clicked shut.
Grade glared up the steps for a moment, then sighed as he looked down at the corpse next to him. Her eyes were open, and he could see the faint wrinkle of a contact lens that had drifted into the corner under one eyelid.
“He paid me enough to move the two of you,” he said. “Let’s get started on that. If he tries to haggle over the invoice, I can always bring you back.”
Chapter Two
Clay thumbed a pill into his mouth and washed it down with a mouthful of whiskey. He was about to chase it with a second swallow when Ezra grabbed his forearm. Whiskey slopped over the edge of the tumbler and dripped through Clay’s fingers.
“The hell are you doing?” Ezra asked through gritted teeth and a fake smile. “The last thing we need right now is you getting fucked up on something and screwing up.”
Clay twisted his arm out of Ezra’s grip. He set the glass down on a nearby table—and some petty asshole part of him hoped it was expensive enough to be ruined by a ring on the veneer—and sucked the liquor off his fingers.
“Relax,” he said. “It was Tylenol.”
“Right,” Ezra said. He raised his eyebrows. “Because you’d never do something that stupid?”
Clay rolled his eyes and fished in his pocket for the branded blister pack to flash at Ezra. The scars on his chest didn’t hurt—he could feel pressure on them but not much else—but sometimes the ones under the skin cramped and spasmed around his ribs. It felt like wires being pulled about under his skin, like it was being pulled away from the meat so he could be basted.
“I’m not a complete fucking idiot, Ezra. I’m not going to do a handful of uppers in front of the mayor and our district representative,” he said as he tucked the blister pack into a pocket of Ezra’s slacks. “I did a bump of coke before I left the house.”
Ezra pushed Clay’s hand away. “Some people would think that was a joke.”
That wasn’t unwarranted. It wouldn’t have been the first time Clay had done something along those lines. It meant the high had time to mellow out, taking the edge off but not the clean thread of focus that kept his brain like clockwork.
It also put a short fuse on his temper, but that wasn’t always a problem.
“Calm down,” Clay said. “I came on the bike.”
