Free The Terror of Living by Urban Waite Page A

shoulder. He guessed her to be no older than nineteen. "Come on," he said. "Don't be shy, get yourself in the car and close the door." He had no way of knowing if she understood him. He didn't know what she'd been told. Probably that there would be a few of her countrymen there to pick her up. There probably should have been, but Grady thought he'd do fine, and it would suit him perfectly to do the job himself.
        Grady was always battling that same familiar ache in his heart. He felt it now, throwing her bag in the backseat next to his knife bag and opening the passenger-side door. This ache, this urge, had brought him to prison and had been his salvation. The priest at the prison had always said he had the devil inside him, that it was the devil who had brought him there. Grady had understood this, had understood what the priest was saying, what the doctors had told him before, giving him pills, asking him questions, trying to calm that ache he felt deep down in his insides, humming away like a little bird trying to take wing. They'd said he was almost ready to be back out in society. Young as he was, he shouldn't waste his time in prison. He'd told them all that he intended to kick the devil right out of his body, take him by the head and kick his front teeth right down his throat. They'd said that was a step in the right direction. Grady had grinned then, imagining his foot so far down the devil's throat, he was tickling that devil's heart with his toes.
        He watched the little Vietnamese girl get in the car, then close the door. He was already sizing her up. One hundred pounds. He'd read somewhere that the human stomach could expand to hold up to fifty times its resting capacity. He started the car and drove out toward the highway. When he was sure there were no cops around, he put his hand up under her shirt and felt her stomach. She slapped him hard across the hand and said something in Vietnamese he didn't understand.
        The skin stretched tight and smooth under his hand. He'd been told to take her to the Vietnamese. It was what he was paid for, what he had been instructed to do. But looking at her, he couldn't help it, a little piece inside him coming loose. The lawyer was paid to deliver drugs, not little things like this. Not little girls like this one. "Can't wait to get you home," he said. She didn't say anything back, just kept staring out the front window at the highway, at a world she didn't yet understand.
        
        
        DRAKE WOKE EARLY. HE MADE HIMSELF A CUP OF coffee in the small two-cup pot and watched the city turn from blue to gray. He poured the second cup and sat in the big armchair that faced the television and the dressing table. Sheri was still asleep and he could hear the soft pull of her breathing. He hadn't turned on a light, but the early sun came through the curtain and he saw she was lying half beneath the covers as she always did.
        With the cup still in his hands, he dressed. A little under ten years of regular work had gotten him trained on early mornings, and he couldn't sit there, hidden away in the hotel room, for the rest of the day. He didn't like being out of his depth. The city was something he didn't know, but he figured it was just like anything else: he had to experience it to understand it.
        He wore a pair of jeans and a button-down shirt with the tails pulled out to hide his gun. Outside the hotel it was warm, and he carried his gun in a holster at the small of his back. He didn't like the feeling of not being in control. It was something he'd grown used to up north and it was something he understood. Down the street was a small coffee shop and he stopped in and bought a croissant and walked on. The morning buses were running and the streets were filling with people. Every once in a while a man in a suit or a woman walking by gave him a questioning look. He was wearing his cowboy hat and he tipped it and mumbled a good