Chapter 4 Zeth
Zeth
Two Years Later
“YOU’RE SCANDALOUS, ZETH MAYFAIR.”
Lacey’s laughter is grating the fuck outta me this morning.
She’s been riding me all morning about the two girls she caught me escorting out of the warehouse in the early hours.
Cracking bad jokes. Making sly comments.
The woman just doesn’t know when to shut the hell up.
We’ve been stuck in the car for the past twenty minutes, and sometimes, twenty minutes in an enclosed space with Lacey is tantamount to twenty minutes in hell.
“How ’bout we don’t talk for the next while, huh, Lace?”
“How about you tell me what this guy’s done, and I’ll be quiet? That sounds like a fair trade.”
Lacey’s tiny. She was malnourished as a kid and didn’t get the nutrients she needed to grow, which means her head barely hits me midchest. Her long, blond hair is straight as straight comes.
Her eyes are pale cornflower blue. Combined with her fine features and high cheekbones, she looks positively angelic, but I know better.
The girl crawled straight out of hell to test me.
I’d have left her at home today, but then again, she’s not a fan of her own company. Bad shit goes down when she’s left to her own devices, and a trip to the hospital is the last thing I need tonight. Not after I’ve done what I’m about to do.
“Matthew’s been bad. That’s all you need to know.”
“When isn’t Matthew bad?” Lace pouts. Apparently, she and Matty fucked a couple of times, back before she showed up at my doorstep like a stray cat and refused to leave.
Since then, she’s been focused on more delicate prey, namely the female of the species.
Most times, I have to be careful about the chicks I bring back to the warehouse.
I let ’em out of my sight for ten minutes, Lace’ll have their panties around their ankles and her face buried between their thighs. The girl knows no bounds.
But anyway, I think she’s still got some sort of grind for Matty. She went quiet for a moment when I told her where we were headed, and that doesn’t happen too often.
“Just don’t cause a scene, okay? Wait in the car like I told you. I’ll be five minutes max.” Truth is, even I don’t have a clue what Matty’s done. All I know is that I’ve been sent to pay him a visit, and that only happens when someone has grade-A fucked up.
Charlie isn’t exactly a lenient man, but he only brings out his most expensive toys for his most expensive problems. Miss a payment on a loan?
Charlie sends Sam out to relieve you of a few fingernails.
Lose a shipment of coke with the equivalent street value of a five-bedroom house, and you get a visit from me.
Horses for courses, that’s what Charlie says.
We pull up outside Stanton Farm Markets, and I slam the gear stick into neutral.
It’s raining. Surprise sur-fucking-prise.
Welcome to Seattle. The windshield turns opaque, blasted by raindrops as soon as the wipers quit.
For a moment, it’s just me and Lace inside our own little messed-up world. “You hear me, right? Stay in the car.”
She gives me the three-finger Boy Scouts salute—the one that means she’s feeling a hundred percent noncompliant but doesn’t want to argue. “Gotcha, Boss Man.”
She’s called me that since the day I started paying her to launder my money for me.
I could have hired the Vondys to wash my bills, but everyone hires the Vondys.
One family having access to the financials for every crooked organization in the Pacific Northwest has never sat right with me.
And besides, Lacey needed a purpose, even if it was an illegal one.
“Be right back.” I jump out of the car, collect the black duffel from the back seat of the Camaro, and head into Stanton’s without looking back. Doubt Lace will disobey me today, actually. The rain’ll wreck her hair.
Inside, Archie Stanton, Matty’s brother, stands behind the counter, double-bagging for an old woman with a stooped back and perfectly styled white hair. Probably a wig. He drops the bag when he sees me, tomatoes bouncing out onto the counter and rolling away.
“Matty ain’t here today, Zeth. He’s outta state with Cindy.”
I ignore the kid. He’s paid (barely) to keep the front-of-store charade respectable, believable, if you will, and that includes running interference when a member of the family’s in trouble.
Looks like I’m expected.
I head straight for the swinging doors to the rear of the store, while Archie scrambles over the counter, green apron thrown over his shoulder. “Zeth, I mean it, man. Matty ain’t here.”
But when I slam through the office door hidden out back, Matty most definitely is here.
His beat-up, junkie wife is on her knees, blowing him good.
Her black-and-white striped dress is hiked up so high I can see her ass cheeks.
The look of surprise on Matty’s face is priceless.
He’s so stunned that it takes a second for him to slap Cindy’s shoulder.
Another two seconds for her head to stop bobbing.
“Put your dick away, Matty. We’re having words.
” The last thing I need to see right after dinner is his fucking cock.
I roll my eyes to the ceiling while he zips up.
Cindy stands, one hand balancing herself on Matty’s desk, the other hand tugging her dress down.
Her eyes are bloodshot, totally vacant. In other words, she’s baked.
“The fuck you think you’re doing, Zeth?” she drawls. “You can’t just barge in here whenever you fucking feel like it.”
Her husband slaps the back of her leg—crack! “Watch it, bitch. Careful how you speak to my business associates.” He might as well have thrown a bucket of water over her. A spark of life reignites in her eyes.
“Well, fuck you, Matty. I got better things to do than stand around defending you all day.”
“You were on your knees if I recall. Now get out of here. Me and Zeth gotta talk.” He either has no idea why I’m here or he’s trying to ingratiate himself to me.
It doesn’t matter. There’s no sweet-talking me.
No point in brown-nosing. I curl a lip as Cindy storms out of the office.
She shoulder barges me, and I raise an eyebrow at Matty.
“Bad attitude,” I tell him.
“Bad everything,” he replies. Matty and Cindy were like Bonnie and Clyde ten years ago, but now he’s a two-bit womanizer and she’s an addict.
Matty still has his looks, though—the only reason Lacey looked at him twice.
She’s shallow like that. It’s part of her charm.
Matty leans back in his leather chair, eyeing me.
“You know why you’ve been given this ticket, Zeth?” he asks.
“Am I supposed to?”
Matty shrugs. “Most times, people know why they’re killing a man.”
So he does know why I’m here. Hardly surprising. You don’t piss off Charlie to this degree without realizing you’re gonna reap the consequences. “I’m not what you’d consider… inner circle. I get an address and a set of instructions, nothing more.”
“And a suitcase full of cash, too, right?”
My turn to shrug. No point in being shy. “Right.”
“Well, how ’bout I offer you two suitcases full’a cash instead, Zeth? Hire you to go right back where you came from and put an end to this once and for all?”
“You want to hire me to kill Charlie?”
“Why not?” Matty is one composed motherfucker.
He’s richer than God—the eighties might be long gone, but cocaine is still Seattle’s drug of choice—and I doubt this is the first time he’s offered to buy his way into someone’s good graces.
No doubt he’s never had anyone tell him no before, though.
See, the thing is, I don’t have good graces.
And I don’t need his money. I dump the duffel onto his desk. Unzip it. Pull out my go-to duster.
Matty’s still not blinking. The fucker must have cast-iron balls. “I’m Charlie’s man. You know that, Matt. Now, I have other jobs to get to tonight. Let’s tidy up these loose ends, huh?”
The reason for Matty’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 caliber. Nice. He holds it up at shoulder height, arm 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. And time you were leaving, Zeth. Okay?”
I’ve had a lot of guns aimed at me over the years.
A man’s intent is always right there, shining in his eyes, easy to 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 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 times before and haven’t thought twice.
Matty, the little fuck, is a shark.
I’d never have called it. I clench my fingers around the duster, staring down at my fist. Not much to do about it now. Things will play out the way they’re meant to. “This is where you shoot me, then?”
“I guess,” 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 Slaughterhouse-Five who said that, but I pretend that I don’t.
That would mean admitting 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’s something so inevitable about me getting shot here tonight. Something so obvious and unavoidable.