Page 2 of Dressed to Kill
"He got lucky. I don't fuck with luck."
My radio crackled. "Aleksi." Dmitri's voice cut through the static. "Second floor. You need to see this."
"See what?"
"Found somebody. Tied to a radiator up here."
"Italian?"
"Negative. Redhead. Looks Irish, maybe."
I looked down at the guy on his knees. Still breathing because luck had decided he could.
"One minute to disappear," I told him. "After that, if I see you again, the deal's off."
Gregori cut through the zip ties. He scrambled to his feet, nearly fell, and caught himself. He looked at me, looked at his dead friend, and ran.
I headed for the stairs. My knees protested with every step. The gun was still warm in my hand and the chamber was empty now. I should reload. I pulled five bullets from my pocket and loaded them one by one, the metallic clicks echoing in the stairwell. I left one chamber empty out of habit. Always one chamber empty.
My father had taught me that. Not the Russian roulette part—that was my own addition—but the superstition. One empty chamber. Room for luck. Room for God, whatever. I didn't know what I believed in anymore. But I knew I didn't load all six.
The stairs creaked under my weight. Below me, I could hear my men moving through the warehouse, Dmitri coordinating over the radio. We'd done this a hundred times. A thousand. Walk into a place, take what we needed, leave the rest.
Except this time we'd found someone. A redhead. Irish, maybe. Left to die.
I stopped on the landing and looked back down. The body was already being moved. The blood would be cleaned up. The counterfeit bags would be destroyed. Everything would disappear like we were never here.
But I was going upstairs to see about a guy who'd been left behind.
I didn't know why that mattered. It shouldn't have mattered. But I kept climbing.
The second floor was a maze of offices that had been stripped down to nothing. Empty filing cabinets, bare desks, walls with cleaner squares where photos used to hang. The Italians had cleared out fast, but they'd been thorough. Dmitri was standing outside the last door at the end of the hall.
"In here," he said and jerked his head toward the door.
I went through. They'd cleared this room out like the others, but they hadn't taken everything. A guy was slumped against the radiator in the corner, one wrist zip-tied to the pipe, head hanging, red hair gone dark at the temples with sweat. He wasn't moving.
I crouched and pressed two fingers to his throat. The pulse was there, and I didn't like it. It came fast and thin, skipping under my hand, his skin cold and damp. I'd watched enough men die to know this was the quiet kind, the kind where the body gives out before anything shows.
I reached for the tie to see how long he'd been cinched to that pipe, and his wrist turned over soft in my hand. No calluses. Long fingers, fine bones, the kind of lean you saw on dancers. Pretty, even half-dead and gray. Whatever he was to the Italians, it wasn't muscle.
I went over the rest of him. No blood, no wounds, nothing to say why anybody wanted him dead, no ink, no vory marks. Just a skinny kid in clothes washed soft and thin. When I turned him to check his back, metal caught the light at his wrist. A cheapbracelet, the kind nobody bothers to steal. I flipped it over and read it.
He was diabetic. Type one.
"Shit." I glanced at my watch.
"He alive?" Dmitri asked from the doorway.
"Barely." I stood up. "Get Gregori. Tell him to bring your kit up from the car."
Dmitri pulled out his phone. He'd been diabetic since before I knew him and kept a kit in the car for the bad days. Gregori had brought him back from a couple of them. First time it'd be for somebody else. The empty office stared back at me while he made the call. Bare walls, stripped filing cabinets, nothing left but this one guy zip-tied to a radiator. They'd cleared out the operation, taken the workers, left one diabetic guy to die slowly while his blood sugar tanked. That was cold even for Italians.
What the fuck had he done to earn this?
Gregori appeared in the doorway with a small red case. "You're serious about this."
"Give him the shot."
