Doubletake by Rob Thurman

Author:Rob Thurman [Thurman, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101576885
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

It was ninety degrees in Bridgeport, Connecticut, unusually hot, the radio said—before I kicked it. It wasn’t the kind of weather you layered for, and I was wearing a bright green cashmere Lacoste cardigan over a pink polo shirt, pleated khaki pants, white socks, and loafers. I’d also been offered a holster for my Eagle and something called a Members Only jacket to cover that. I knew the names because Goodfellow had labeled each plastic bag in which they were immaculately folded, along with a catalogue page of some blond, blue-eyed, tanned, blindingly white-toothed man wearing the same outfit while standing by a boat. With a blond woman. A blond kid. A blond damn dog…wearing a matching damn sweater.

Douche bag.

It covered the catalogue dick and Robin both.

“What did you do to piss off Goodfellow this badly?” Niko asked, edging away from me as if I were color-contagious. He was dressed in the black-and-gray clothes the puck had smugly given him. Normal clothes. The kind that didn’t make you look like someone pulled the head off a Golfing Ken doll and stuck a catastrophically pissed-off serial killer’s head in its place, which was a look I was pulling off in spades. I let my black hair hang where it wanted. Still no ponytail for me, until Kalakos was gone despite what I’d talked to Niko about in the car.

“You don’t want to know,” I said glumly.

We stood by the rusted chain-link fence at the abandoned Remington Arms factory. Despite its being early afternoon, it wasn’t a safe place to be for most. It was the typical bad part of town, but it would be more peculiar if I were in a good part of town. An industrial area near the water, no shadows, no alleys, nothing green—not a blade of grass pushing up through the sidewalk. Or what was left of the sidewalk.

Nothing but our rusty fence the armory stretched far behind, a wide street with dilapidated houses on the other side. Nik and I were waiting for the others to get out of their car, parked by ours at an empty house across the road with a battered For Sale sign. Promise climbed out of the car, her gloved hands keeping her face well shadowed by the hood of her cloak. She wanted to see this through as much as we did, if only for Niko’s sake.

Following her out of the car was Kalakos, who, as Goodfellow had said, was like a terminal case of gonorrhea with a side order of herpes. You couldn’t get rid of him no matter how hard you tried.

As the three of them were crossing the street, I looked back down at the clothes that were my punishment for pissing off Robin. “Nik, if Hephaestus kills me, strip me, would you? I don’t want my corpse seen like this.” None of the clothes had been worn before. Robin had been waiting with this vengeance bomb for a while, and I’d been the one to set it off.

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