Free Badlands by Callie Hart Page A

Freddy’s attacker was disturbed before he could steal Freddy’s wallet, but I doubt that somehow. I didn’t pass anyone when I was coming in.  
    My cell phone rings, and predictably it’s Zee. I hit the green answer button, frowning at Freddy, who’s died with his mouth hanging open. “Hey, man. Sorry, I’m here but there’s a bit of a situation in your parking garage.”
    “I know. Clough, right?” Zeth’s deep voice rattles down the phone, somehow even gruffer than normal.  
    “Yeah. This your handiwork, then?” I straighten up, already making contingency plans. Disposing of a body is never an easy task in a city. Out in the middle of Alabama and Louisiana, it’s simple enough to dump a body in the bayou and let the alligators do the dirty work for you. In the heart of Seattle, Washington, you usually find yourself tossing dismembered body parts over the side of a small leisure boat on the Puget Sound in the middle of the night instead. There’s a lot more work involved. “Who was he?” I ask.  
    “A nobody. I was having a few choice words with a guy. One of the Italians. I was out on the street and he was following me. I managed to collar him and bring him back here. He said a guy, Clough, was following him . Sounded like bullshit. He was shitting himself, though. Wasn’t gonna tell me jack. I put the hurt on him and let him go. I heard gunshots twenty seconds after I un-cuffed him.”
    “You didn’t come to check it out?” Sounds very unlike Zeth.  
    “Nope.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because I’ve been shot.”
    This should be shocking news to me, however I’ve heard those words come out of Zeth Mayfair’s mouth so many times now that I’m surprised if a month goes by when he doesn’t get shot. “Didn’t want my DNA getting mixed up in a crime scene,” he tells me.  
    “Ever the pragmatist. You want me to sort him out first, or you?”
    “Him. I’m fine.”
    I know Zeth’s idea of fine. Normally, fine would indicate a sightly flat-lined level of existence. Not good. Not particularly bad, either. With my boss and best friend, it simply means he’s not approaching imminent death. It could very well mean he’s trying to hold his insides inside his body, though.
    Arguing with him, going to check on him, could be a fatal move on my part, however. “Okay. Freddy Clough it is. I’ll see you soon.”
    “Bring whiskey.”
    Typical. I haul Freddy’s body into the trunk of my Chrysler, and then I pour bleach all over the concrete floor of the parking garage. Makes a mess, stinks like fuck, but it does the job. Within twenty minutes there’s no sign that a man lost at least four pints of blood here. I take the gun that killed Freddy and I wrap it in a length of black material I conveniently had lying around in the trunk. Bleach, cleaning tools, duct tape, random bits of material… bone saws ... it’s amazing the kind of thing a guy like me will conveniently have lying around in the trunk of his car. I deposit the gun into the glove compartment, and then I take Freddy over to 1 st Avenue South, growling under my breath. I fucking hate this part of town. Like, really hate it—the tangle of train lines are never quiet, and the lights never stop blinking on Harbor Island—but I don’t have time to take Freddy out into the middle of nowhere and chop him up into smaller, more manageable pieces, so I’m resorting to more impractical measures. Collum Tate’s a drunk Irishman with no particular affiliation to any of Seattle’s organized crime syndicates. He does menial work that most other freelancers won’t touch. I wouldn’t normally trust someone with no steadfast loyalty to Zeth, but it’s one of those nights and Collum knows what will happen if he breathes a word of what he does here for me tonight. It will not end well for him. And besides, despite being Irish and drunk a lot of the time, Collum is a very conscientious guy.  
    He doesn’t make mistakes. He doesn’t take risks.