Page 2 of Freaks
A lot of shit had happened since then.
Light. The Aztecs. Pompeii. The Marie Celeste. Hitler. Dunkin’ Donuts. Celine Dion. And, now, this Zeth guy…who looked like he was primed to beat the shit out of me.
Unlike the other two guys I’d just fought at the behest of Oscar Finch, the madman who ran The Barrows, this Zeth guy radiated not only violence, but intelligence, too. His dark eyes flashed steel, and his body hummed with power. Here was a true fighter. Here was theend level boss, designed to beat me into a bloody pulp and send me packing with my tail between my legs. He was strong. Looked light on his feet. By the way he prowled toward me, his eyes scanning my own stance and build, he was assessing me, getting a measure of me, too.
When he pulled up in front of me, eye-to-eye, we were exactly the same height. I rolled back my shoulders, rocking my head from side to side, cracking my neck. “Zeth? Doesn’t sound like a real name,” I said.
“AndFixdoes?”
My mouth curled up at the right, lifting into a smirk. “Got me there.”
“I got youeverywhere,” he fired back. “I have no idea how the rules in this place work. Don’t you just want to hit the elevator and make your way downstairs, though? You get to keep your teeth. I get to finish the really good scotch I have waiting for me on the roof.”
He didn’t know how this worked? What the actual fuck was that supposed to mean? “You came down from the roof?” I asked.
“What of it?”
“You didn’t have to swing a few punches on the way up?”
The guy’s smirk was just as twisted as mine. “I climbed up the fire escape.”
I just blinked at him.You have got to be fucking kidding me. He climbed up the goddamn fire escape. Completely avoided Falco and Foster. Avoided the basement, and all the other floors in between, and headed straight for the roof? Motherfuckinggenius. I attempted to conceal the grudging respect building inside me, right alongside my annoyance. Why the fuck hadn’t I thought of that? “How did Oscar take your unorthodox arrival?”
“I believe this fight with you is supposed to be my penance.”
Yeah, that sounded about right. Actually, it sounded like he was getting off fucking light. “Well, I hate to break it to you but whatever you came here for, whatever reason had you scaling up the side of The Barrows like Spiderman, you’re not getting back up on that roof. I have a damn good reason to get up there to Oscar, and there’s nothing like an incentive to make a man swing hard.”
“If you say so, Padre,” Zeth growled. “Win or lose, I’ll be leaving with the thumb drive I came here for. Honestly, you look like you’re gonna put up a good fight. I’m looking forward to it.”
The soles of my boots felt like they were suddenly glued to the floor. Thumb drive? He just said thumb drive. Had I heard him right? What were the chances that Oscar had two mystery thumb drives? And I just so happened to be here for one of them, and Zeth was here for the other? Basically zero. Fuck. Comeon. This just wasn’t fucking happening.
Even if I won this fight, I was probably going to have to kill the bastard to make sure he didn’t try and take the damn thing anyway. He didn’t play by the rules—Oscar’s or anyone else’s by the sounds of things—and I didn’t have fucking time for this. I needed to get back to Brooklyn, back to Sera, and the sooner the better.
“What’s on the drive?” I demanded. Blunt and to the point.
“You’re not supposed to be having a nice chat. Fucking hit each other,” the floor boss yelled from over by the board.
My lip curled back. Zeth’s lip curled back. We traded identical irritated looks. Both of us ignored the guy. “What doyoucare what’s on it?”
“I was hired to come here and collect it for a client. Must be pretty fucking important, if it’s garnering this much attention.”
Zeth was a wall. No expression. No movement. Nothing but cold, assessing judgement in his dark eyes. I hadn’t been back to New York in well over six weeks, but I kept my ear to the ground. I made it my business to track and monitor the rise and fall of power in the city. I would have heard of this guy if he’d been picked up by one of the gangs or the mob. And I definitely would have heard of him if he’d been attempting to build an empire of his own. So, he was from out of town. His accent was clean, no hint of any twang, drawl or lilt that would identify his place of origin. His eyes narrowed a fraction—the only indicator that he wasn’t paralyzed from the roots of his hair down. “Trust me,” he rumbled. “If you don’t have any personal ties to this thumb drive, then you’re better off keeping it that way. Whatever your client’s paying you, it isn’t enough. Walk away.”
I didn’t have the time to explain to him that I wasn’t getting paid at all. That I was locked into a trade with Rabbit—the thumb drive, for the identity and location of the guy who was intent on having Sera killed. Plus, it was none of this fucker’s business. “You’ve said you’re going to beat me more than once in the past two minutes. But for someone so sure of victory, you sure do seem to want me to walk away,” I observed.
Zeth’s flat expression didn’t falter. “I fight people when I have to. I fight for exercise, and to protect those I care about. While I don’t have a problem with knocking a hole right through your face with my fist, I don’t like being told I have to fight someone for the sheer spectacle of it. I’m not a fucking gladiator. And that fat fuck up there on the roof isn’t my boss. I don’t owe him shit. I tried doing this the nice way. I asked politely. Oscar didn’t feel like obliging me. So now, all I want to do is get back up there and beat the fucker to a bloody pulp.”
“I’d love to do the same. Sounds like we have more than one common goal.”
Nostrils flaring, Zeth stepped forward. “Then perhaps we can work together. We fight. You go down after a couple of hits. We fool that asshole by the board into thinking you’re unconscious. When he comes over to check, we lynch him and steal his access card to the elevator.”
His mind obviously worked in a similar way to my own. I’d been about to suggest the same thing. “Sounds great. There’s only one problem, though,Zee.”
He just arched his brow questioningly.
“I never go down in a fight.”
His response was an earthy, deep rumble of laughter that echoed around floor fourteen. “I suppose I admire that.”
