Free Badlands by Callie Hart Page B

And the bastard can pretty much talk his way out of absolutely everything, too, which is a mighty fine skill to have in our circle of friends.  
    Collum also doesn’t ask questions. I pay him eight hundred dollars, and he takes Freddy’s body and that’s it. It’s done. Back at Zeth’s apartment building, I head through the security door at the rear right hand side of the parking lot and walk down the narrow corridor, then enter the second to last door on the left. There, I find the man himself sitting on a single solitary wooden chair, scowling at his cell phone, as a small, bright pool of his blood gathers around his feet.  
    “Women are fucking crazy,” he informs me.  
    “I’m aware.” I hand him a folded up wad of bandages I’ve already pulled out of the first air kit I carry… you guessed it…in the trunk of my car. He accepts it from me and presses the material against his left calf. “Is it bad?” I ask.  
    Zeth shakes his head. “No. Just fucking inconvenient. Do you know where the hell I can buy Lucky Charms from at this time of night?”
    Zeth asks me weird questions sometimes, but this is abnormally weird. “Probably. Should I even bother asking why?”
    “There’s a girl upstairs in the apartment. I bought groceries for her, but all she wants is Lucky fucking Charms.”
    I’d be less surprised if he told me he had the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the apartment upstairs. “Huh. Did you suffer a head injury during your little scuffle with the Italian?”
    “No.”
    “Then why the hell is there a girl in your apartment? I didn’t think you fucked women up there. You’re not hosting a party until the end of the month, right?”
    “Nope. No party. And no fucking, either, asshole. She’s my sister.”
    Now I’m just completely lost. “I did not know you had a sister.”
    “Neither did I. Until I saw her.”
    “So… you looked at her and you knew she was your sister?”
    “Are you going to ask twenty questions, or are you going to help me?” Zee lifts the hem of his t-shirt and shows me the wound in his stomach that’s bleeding sluggishly down his six pack.  
    I squint at it, prod him with my index finger and then announce that it’ll probably only need one stitch and he should stop being such a baby. The look he gives me is arctic to say the least. I douse him in alcohol and put two stitches in just to be safe, and then the two of us make our way up to his apartment. Inside, a petite, elfish-looking girl with a mass of curly blonde hair has fallen asleep on the floor of the kitchen, one arm tucked up underneath her head. Zeth and I both freeze, hands in pockets, staring down at her prone figure on the ground.  
    “How the fuck did you take one look at her and know she was related to you? She looks nothing like you.”
    Zeth glares at the woman some more, clenching his jaw, not saying anything for a while, and then he says, “My mother. She’s the spitting image of my mother.”
    I should ask him how she came to be in his apartment here. I should ask him what he plans on doing with a fucking sister , of all things. I should ask him a lot of things, but I know Zee. He’ll tell me his shit when he wants to and not before. Right now, even without looking at him, I know all he’s thinking about is where he can get a very specific box of cereal.  
    “Did the Italian tell you why he was following you?” I whisper.  
    “Said Brooklyn was colder then hell and he needed a vacation.”
    “You believed him?”
    Zeth gives me a scathing look. “Of course not.”
    “And you just let him go?”
    “I was feeling magnanimous, okay? I don’t have to murder everyone I meet, do I? Do you murder everyone who pisses you off?”
    “No one pisses me off, man. I am unflappable.”
    He seems to think about this for a moment. I think he’s going to disagree with me but he shrugs his shoulders, agreeing. “Don’t forget about Fresco’s,” he says.
    “Fresco’s?”
    “That shitty