Mark (Mallick Brothers 3)

I mean, not that it meant anything. Except maybe that I had been too focused on work to get laid in the past couple of months. Or maybe longer. Oh, God, it had been a lot longer. The last guy had been back in some nowhere town in Mississippi. What can I say, he had that southern accent thing, and I had about five drinks in me. And he was an actual, real-life farmer. Like he farmed his land with his own hands. That was almost obnoxiously attractive to me.

But I had to make sure to look into Mr. Mallick when I got back to the crash pad. Just to make sure he wasn't some sort of threat.

I doubted he was, but you never knew.

I sucked in a breath deep enough to make my lungs burn, moved back out the alley, and took the longest, most convoluted walk back to the crash pad.

Seeing Rush's car through a window in the almost dilapidated external garage was a relief like I didn't know I needed, shrugging off a stress I hadn't been aware of possessing any more. That was from back in the beginning, when we were all as green as could be. When we screwed up more than we did right. When Rush was still driving our mom's old mini van. Without a driver's license.

In fact, not one of us actually had a driver's license.

This was because we didn't want our pictures anywhere on any file outside of our eighth-grade yearbooks.

So, even when we were on a job, Rush, the wheel man, abided not only the speed limits, but the local yield and stop signs as well.

My eyes scanned the streets for a long minute, looking for anything off. But there was nothing. Of course there wasn't. That was why we picked the place.

It was barely more than a shack in front of the woods on the corner a few doors down from the Third Street gang's headquarters. It was one of two shacks. The other was across the street and seemed equally as abandoned, but no one screwed with it for some reason. The only improvement this one had from an actual shack was a working toilet. Which, let's face it, is mandatory. After a couple stints in places with only composting toilets, I decided to lay down the law about working plumbing. Nothing against composting toilets. I knew they were the thing of the future and all that. But this was the present. And this woman had dealt with eating fast food and sleeping in the backs of cars since she was seventeen. I had earned the right to be particular about some small things. Like flushing. Flushing was a good thing.

I walked around the back of the one-floor wooden structure that a decent breeze might actually tear down, pushing the door open, and confidently moving in, ready to raise some hell.

And I was met with what was normal- the one room structure with a small kitchenette to the left with a fridge that might have pre-dated my existence, a hotplate, and a sink. There was a living space toward the front by the door. But we had pulled all the furniture into a corner and laid down five twin foam mattresses instead. Another concession of mine. I wasn't sharing a bed with any of them. There was the same faded yellow paint on the walls that was met halfway up with godawful wood paneling straight out of the 70s. The floor was the same worn linoleum in a brown and white swirling color, pulled up at most of the edges and scuffed to high hell in all the main walking areas.

There was the same normal lovely handmade dining room table that I would almost be sad to leave behind, finding all the scuffs and scrapes charming, reminiscent of a time when a bunch of armed robbers weren't using it to stash a big stack of cash stolen from a local box store.

The cash was there. It needed to be counted carefully before we handed it off to a contact to get it clean for us. Just in case. When you were a criminal, paranoia wasn't necessarily a flaw. Oftentimes it was an asset.

Another thing that wasn't wholly unusual was the fact that there was a roaring fire in the fireplace, it being the only heating source. The only unusual part of that was the fact that there was very little wood in the fireplace. No, instead it was a huge supply of men's clothing.

The men were even normal to walk in on.

What wasn't exactly commonplace was to walk in to find four guns pointed my way.

Held by my brothers.

"Fuckin' Christ, Scotti," Kingston said, lowering his gun first, the rush of relief a visible thing on his usually staid face. He was the one the Mallick guy had mentioned, the one looking for Scott. Well, me. It was Nixon, the second oldest, who had to force him to follow the game plan. Not because he loved me any less; he just knew that it wouldn't do anyone any good to get locked up. If they were in jail, there was no way they could figure out what happened to me and do something about it.