Free Broken People by Ioana Visan

him.
    “You’re both mad!” Nicholas said in one of
his rare outbursts aimed at them.
    “But we’re in charge.”
    Rake’s reminder had Spinner grinning. He
preferred to let Rake reinforce their politics while he continued
to be the good guy. There had to be a balance. They couldn’t all be
bullies or there wouldn’t be anyone left to listen to them, at
least not for long. They were not Big Dino.
    “You know what?” Nicholas said. “I wash my
hands of this whole thing. I’ll do the show, but that’s it. You deal with the mad man.”
    “No, that won’t do,” Spinner said in a
hurry. “He needs to talk to you about the plans.”
    “No, he doesn’t. You make the plans
with him. Take all the men you need. You have my
‘permission’”—Nicholas mimed the quotation marks with his
fingers—“for everything.”
    “I take it Armstrong didn’t see Big Dino?”
Aurore’s face stayed unchanged, but Spinner was convinced she was
chuckling inside.
    “There was no need,” Spinner mumbled. “In
the beginning, we thought it was a simple fixing job, then …” Then it was too late, and Big Dino wouldn’t have been able to
change anything .
    “I’ll keep you informed if there’s any new
developments.” Aurore pulled her cape back in place. “If nothing
comes up, I’ll see you on the big night. Good luck!”
    Nicholas held the door open for her, but
Spinner and Rake stayed behind.
    “Why do I feel like she wished us to burn
and poison ourselves, all at the same time?” Spinner wondered out
loud, staring at the ceiling.
    Rake’s deep chuckle served as distraction,
and Spinner moved out of the way at the last second. The knife
vibrated when it passed by him. “Missed.” He grinned, then took a
look at the knife stuck in Nicholas’s table. “Oops.”
     

15

    “We should strike early in the evening when
everyone is busy in the big tent,” an unfamiliar voice said.
    Dale’s shoulders tensed, but he didn’t turn
to see who was speaking. He’d overheard the conversation by chance
when he stepped up to the bar for a drink—water, since he was
working—and these two men were talking around a small, square table
in the corner.
    After two days spent busting heads and
wasting time in the Black & White club during twelve-hour
shifts, he was convinced nothing out of the ordinary was going on
here. Some small-class smuggling and trafficking various items, but
nothing that would have hurt the Golden Lady’s trade … at least he
didn’t think so. She had probably sent him there with one purpose
only—to keep an eye on him. He’d received the job without needing
any references at all. Lucky for him, since he couldn’t produce any
if asked. His superiors still waited for him to report back to
work, anxiously hoping he’d changed his mind about the request he’d
filed before going on sick leave. They were wrong. When the time
came, he was going to pilot that plane.
    Dale wasn’t complaining. The amount of
drunks and smoke was bad enough, but it beat spending the day
locked in the attic, watching people passing in the street through
the tiny windows. And every now and then, he exercised his muscles,
throwing troublemakers onto the cobblestones outside. His only
concern was not to use his full strength and give the witnesses a
hint of his capabilities. Keeping that in mind, he hunched over his
drink and listened.
    “We go around the tracks, climb on the car,
and enter through the window,” the same voice said. “It’s the third
car from the end. We can’t miss it.”
    “What about the security?” the second man
asked.
    “They don’t work in the evening when there
are thousands of people outside. Remember what they do is still
illegal here. There’ll be no one in the workshop.”
    “Are you sure that’s where they keep the
spare parts?”
    “I watched them for two days. It’s where
they take all their clients for fixing. The spare parts can’t be
far. It’s a big car.”
    The grunt that