Black Heart (Curse Workers 3)

“I think she’s sick, Sam,” I say. “I think that she’s curing Wharton and it’s making her sick.”

“Even more reason to do something. Tell him he’s got to give her the money. Explain the situation. You know, make it clear she’s not alone. Wharton’s the one who got her into this. We’ve got pictures.”

“She’s a player,” I say. “She could still be playing us.”

“Come on, Cassel. She’s a lady in trouble.”

“She is trouble.” I scratch my neck, where I cut myself shaving. “Look, I have a Saturday detention with Wharton. He’ll be alone in his office. Maybe we can talk to him then.”

“What if she can’t wait until the weekend?”

“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.” I open my laptop. “What’s with the brochures?”

“Oh,” he says. “I’ve got college applications to write. How about you?”

“I’ve got to plan an assassination,” I say, logging into the school’s wireless and bringing up the search engine. “I know. Weird, right?”

“Cassel Sharpe: boy assassin.” He shakes his head. “You should have your own comic book.”

I grin. “Only if you’ll be my runty spandex-wearing sidekick.”

“Runty? I’m taller than you are!” He sits up, and the springs of the bed groan, echoing his point.

I grin at him. “Not in my comic, you’re not.”

Killing someone is a lot like conning someone. You need to know a lot of the same things.

Maybe the Feds have to keep me in the dark, but I have to follow my own instincts. If something goes wrong with their plan, I’ll need to improvise. And to do that I need to study my victim.

Patton’s a public figure. Learning about him isn’t hard—every detail of his life has been analyzed by the press, all his faults enumerated by his opponents. I look at photos until I know every detail of his face, until I can spot the lines of pancake makeup at the edges of his neck when he’s camera-ready, until I see how he combs the few white hairs he’s got and how he dresses to match the tone of his speeches. I look at pictures of him in his home, at rallies, kissing babies. I pore over news reports and gossip columns and restaurant guides to see who he meets with (many, many people), his favorite food (spaghetti Bolognese), what he orders at the diner he frequents (eggs over easy, buttered white toast, turkey sausage), and even how he takes his coffee (cream and sugar).

I study his security, too. He always has two bodyguards who follow him everywhere. They aren’t always the same two guys, but they all have broken noses and smirking smiles. There are a few articles about Patton using funds to hire ex-cons to round out his security staff, men he personally pardoned. He never goes anywhere without them.

I watch several YouTube videos of him ranting about conspiracy theories, workers, and big government. I listen to the faint traces of his accent, the way he enunciates, and the way he pauses just before he says something he thinks is really important. I watch the way he gestures, reaching out to the audience like he’s hoping to wrap them in his arms.

I call my mother and get a few more particulars while pretending to be interested in how she edged herself into his life. I find out where he buys his suits (Bergdorf; they have his measurements so he can just call and have a suit tailored and overnighted to a speaking engagement). What languages he speaks (French and Spanish). The medicine he takes for his heart (Capoten and a single baby aspirin). The way he walks, heel to toe, so that the backs of his shoes always wear down first.

I watch and look and listen and read until I feel like Governor Patton is standing over my shoulder and whispering into my ear. It’s not a good feeling.

CHAPTER TWELVE

FRIDAY AFTERNOON, AS I’m coming back from classes, my phone buzzes in the pocket of my uniform pants. I take it out, but the number is blocked.

“Hello?” I say into the mouthpiece.

“We’re coming to get you tomorrow night,” says Yulikova. “Clear your schedule. We want to be moving by six p.m.”

Something’s wrong. Really, really wrong. “You said everything was happening next Wednesday, not this Saturday.”

“I’m sorry, Cassel,” she says. “Plans change. We have to be flexible right now.”

I lower my voice. “Look, that thing with the death worker and me tailing him—I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the gun. I know you know. I just panicked. I still have it. I didn’t do anything with it. I could bring it to you.”

I shouldn’t bring it to her. I promised it to Gage.

I should bring it to her. I should have given it to her in the first place.

She doesn’t speak for a long moment. “That wasn’t your smartest move.”

“I know,” I say.

“Why don’t you turn the gun in tomorrow night and we’ll just call the whole thing a misunderstanding.”

“Right.” My feeling of disquiet grows, although I can’t say why. There’s just something not right about her tone. Something that makes me feel like she’s already distanced herself from this situation.

I’m surprised she’s letting me off so easy about the gun. Nothing about this sits right.

“I was reading about Patton,” I say, to keep her talking.

“We can talk about this when we pick you up.” She says it kindly, but I can hear the dismissal in her voice.

“He has private security with him at all times. Tough guys. I was just wondering how we were getting around that.”

“I promise you, Cassel, we’ve got good people handling this. Your part is significant but small. We’re going to take care of you.”

“Humor me,” I say, putting some of the anger I feel into my voice.

She sighs. “I’m sorry. Of course you’re concerned. We understand the risk you’re taking, and we appreciate it.”

I wait.

“We have one of them on the payroll. He’s going to stall the other guard for long enough that you can take care of things. And he’s going to watch your back.”

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll meet you at Wallingford. Call me when you get here.”

“Try not to worry,” Yulikova says. “Good-bye, Cassel.”

My heart’s racing and my stomach is in knots as I close my phone. There is nothing worse than the creeping formless sense of dread—until that moment when it becomes clear what you should have been dreading all along. When you know it’s not just all in your head. When you see the danger.

The Feds don’t need me to bring in Patton. They don’t need me at all. If they’ve really got one of his bodyguards on their payroll, they could disappear him anytime they wanted.

I sit down on the library steps and call Barron.

I can hear traffic in the background when he picks up. “You want something?” He sounds annoyed.

“Oh, come on,” I say. I’m not exactly pleased with him, either. “You can’t really be pissed off—just because you thought that I couldn’t convince her you were lying when you were actually lying.”

“So you called to gloat?” he asks.

“Yulikova moved up the date for the thing, and she has an inside man already. Someone positioned to do this job a lot better than me. Does that sound fishy to you?”

“Maybe,” he says.

“And that death worker I chased down. Her people picked him up after to see if I lied about anything.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah. I took something from him and I . . . I kind of let him go. She knew that and never said anything.”

“That does seem weird. I guess you’re screwed. Sucks to be you, Cassel. Looks like the Feds aren’t your friends after all.”

He hangs up, leaving me with silence.

I don’t know why I expected anything else.

I sit on the steps for a long time. I don’t go to track practice. I don’t go to dinner. I just turn the phone over and over in my hands until I realize I have to get up and go somewhere eventually.

I dial Lila’s number. I don’t expect her to answer, but she does.

“I need your help,” I say.

Her voice is low. “We’ve helped each other enough, don’t you think?”

“I just need to talk through some things with someone.”

“It shouldn’t be me.”

I take a deep breath. “I’m working with the Feds, Lila. And I’m in trouble. A lot of trouble.”

“I’m getting my coat,” she says. “Tell me where you are.”

We arrange to meet at the old house. I get my keys and head to my car.

I’m sitting in the kitchen in the dark when she opens the door. I’m thinking about the smell of my father’s cigarillos and what it was like when we were very young and nothing really mattered.

She flips on the lights, and I blink up at her.

“Are you okay?” She comes over to the table and puts one gloved hand on my shoulder. She’s wearing tight black jeans and a scarred leather jacket. Her blond hair is as bright as a gold coin.

I shake my head.

Then I tell her everything—about Patton, about Maura, about wanting to be good and falling short, about following her that day when I chased down Gage without knowing why, about Yulikova and the gun. Everything.

By the time I’m done, she’s sitting backward in one of the chairs, resting her chin on her arms. She has shouldered off the jacket.

“How mad at me are you?” I ask. “I mean, exactly how mad—like on a scale of one to ten, where one is kicking my ass and ten is a shark tank?”

She shakes her head at my scale. “You mean because you watched me put out a contract on someone and then watched Gage kill him? That you’re cooperating with the law, maybe even working for them? That you never told me any of this? I’m not happy. Does it bother you—what you saw me do?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“You think I have ice in my blood?” She asks it lightly, but I know the answer matters.

I wonder what it would be like, being raised to be a crime lord. “You are what you always were going to be.”

“Remember when we were kids?” she says. There’s a slight smile on her mouth, but the way she’s looking at me doesn’t quite match up. “You thought I would be the one making deals and enemies, backstabbing and lying. You said you were going to get out, travel the world. Not get swept up in the life.”

“Shows what I know.”

“That’s one long game you’ve been playing, Cassel. One long, dangerous game.”

“I didn’t mean for everything to get so crazy. It was one thing after another. I had to fix things. Someone had to fix things for Maura, and I was the only one who knew, so there just wasn’t anyone else. And I had to keep Barron from going to the Brennans. And I had to stop myself—” I do stop myself there, because I can’t say the rest. I can’t explain how I needed to stop myself from being with her. I can’t explain how I nearly didn’t manage it.

“Okay, well, quit.” She makes a wild gesture with her hands, as though stating something so obvious that it shouldn’t have to be said. “You did what you thought you had to do, but you still have a way out, so take it. Get away from the Feds. And if they don’t want to let you off easy, then go into hiding. I’ll help. I’ll talk to my dad. I’ll try to see if he can take some of the pressure off the thing with your mother, at least until you can solve this. Don’t let them play you.”

“I can’t quit.” I look away, at the peeling wallpaper above the sink. “I can’t. It’s too important.”

“What makes you so eager to throw away your life on whatever cause comes along?”

“That’s not true. That’s not what I was doing—”

“None of it is your fault. What is it that you feel so damn guilty about that makes you act like you don’t matter?” Her voice rises, and she rises with it, coming around the table to push against my shoulder. “What makes you think that you’ve got to solve everyone’s problems, even mine?”

“Nothing.” I shake my head, turning away from her.

“Is it Jimmy Greco and Antanas Kalvis and the rest? Because I knew them, and they were really bad men. The world’s a better place without them in it.”

“Stop trying to make me feel better,” I say. “You know I don’t deserve it.”

“Why don’t you deserve it?” she yells, her voice sounding like the words are being ripped out of her gut. Her hand is on my upper arm; she’s trying to get me to look at her.

I won’t.

“You,” I say, standing. “Because of you.”

For a moment neither of us speaks.

“What I did—,” I start, but I can’t make that sentence go anywhere good. I start over. “I can’t forgive myself—I don’t want to forgive myself.”

I sink down to the linoleum tiles and say what I have never said before. “I killed you. I remember killing you. I killed you.” The words, over and over and over, rolling out of me. My voice is catching. My voice is breaking.

“I’m alive,” Lila says, sliding to her knees so that I have to look at her, have to see her. “I’m right here.”

I take a deep, shuddering breath.

“We’re alive,” she says. “We made it.”

I feel like I’m about to shake apart. “I’ve screwed up everything, haven’t I?”

>

“I think she’s sick, Sam,” I say. “I think that she’s curing Wharton and it’s making her sick.”

“Even more reason to do something. Tell him he’s got to give her the money. Explain the situation. You know, make it clear she’s not alone. Wharton’s the one who got her into this. We’ve got pictures.”

“She’s a player,” I say. “She could still be playing us.”

“Come on, Cassel. She’s a lady in trouble.”

“She is trouble.” I scratch my neck, where I cut myself shaving. “Look, I have a Saturday detention with Wharton. He’ll be alone in his office. Maybe we can talk to him then.”

“What if she can’t wait until the weekend?”

“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.” I open my laptop. “What’s with the brochures?”

“Oh,” he says. “I’ve got college applications to write. How about you?”

“I’ve got to plan an assassination,” I say, logging into the school’s wireless and bringing up the search engine. “I know. Weird, right?”

“Cassel Sharpe: boy assassin.” He shakes his head. “You should have your own comic book.”

I grin. “Only if you’ll be my runty spandex-wearing sidekick.”

“Runty? I’m taller than you are!” He sits up, and the springs of the bed groan, echoing his point.

I grin at him. “Not in my comic, you’re not.”

Killing someone is a lot like conning someone. You need to know a lot of the same things.

Maybe the Feds have to keep me in the dark, but I have to follow my own instincts. If something goes wrong with their plan, I’ll need to improvise. And to do that I need to study my victim.

Patton’s a public figure. Learning about him isn’t hard—every detail of his life has been analyzed by the press, all his faults enumerated by his opponents. I look at photos until I know every detail of his face, until I can spot the lines of pancake makeup at the edges of his neck when he’s camera-ready, until I see how he combs the few white hairs he’s got and how he dresses to match the tone of his speeches. I look at pictures of him in his home, at rallies, kissing babies. I pore over news reports and gossip columns and restaurant guides to see who he meets with (many, many people), his favorite food (spaghetti Bolognese), what he orders at the diner he frequents (eggs over easy, buttered white toast, turkey sausage), and even how he takes his coffee (cream and sugar).

I study his security, too. He always has two bodyguards who follow him everywhere. They aren’t always the same two guys, but they all have broken noses and smirking smiles. There are a few articles about Patton using funds to hire ex-cons to round out his security staff, men he personally pardoned. He never goes anywhere without them.

I watch several YouTube videos of him ranting about conspiracy theories, workers, and big government. I listen to the faint traces of his accent, the way he enunciates, and the way he pauses just before he says something he thinks is really important. I watch the way he gestures, reaching out to the audience like he’s hoping to wrap them in his arms.

I call my mother and get a few more particulars while pretending to be interested in how she edged herself into his life. I find out where he buys his suits (Bergdorf; they have his measurements so he can just call and have a suit tailored and overnighted to a speaking engagement). What languages he speaks (French and Spanish). The medicine he takes for his heart (Capoten and a single baby aspirin). The way he walks, heel to toe, so that the backs of his shoes always wear down first.

I watch and look and listen and read until I feel like Governor Patton is standing over my shoulder and whispering into my ear. It’s not a good feeling.

CHAPTER TWELVE

FRIDAY AFTERNOON, AS I’m coming back from classes, my phone buzzes in the pocket of my uniform pants. I take it out, but the number is blocked.

“Hello?” I say into the mouthpiece.

“We’re coming to get you tomorrow night,” says Yulikova. “Clear your schedule. We want to be moving by six p.m.”

Something’s wrong. Really, really wrong. “You said everything was happening next Wednesday, not this Saturday.”

“I’m sorry, Cassel,” she says. “Plans change. We have to be flexible right now.”

I lower my voice. “Look, that thing with the death worker and me tailing him—I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the gun. I know you know. I just panicked. I still have it. I didn’t do anything with it. I could bring it to you.”

I shouldn’t bring it to her. I promised it to Gage.

I should bring it to her. I should have given it to her in the first place.

She doesn’t speak for a long moment. “That wasn’t your smartest move.”

“I know,” I say.

“Why don’t you turn the gun in tomorrow night and we’ll just call the whole thing a misunderstanding.”

“Right.” My feeling of disquiet grows, although I can’t say why. There’s just something not right about her tone. Something that makes me feel like she’s already distanced herself from this situation.

I’m surprised she’s letting me off so easy about the gun. Nothing about this sits right.

“I was reading about Patton,” I say, to keep her talking.

“We can talk about this when we pick you up.” She says it kindly, but I can hear the dismissal in her voice.

“He has private security with him at all times. Tough guys. I was just wondering how we were getting around that.”

“I promise you, Cassel, we’ve got good people handling this. Your part is significant but small. We’re going to take care of you.”

“Humor me,” I say, putting some of the anger I feel into my voice.

She sighs. “I’m sorry. Of course you’re concerned. We understand the risk you’re taking, and we appreciate it.”

I wait.

“We have one of them on the payroll. He’s going to stall the other guard for long enough that you can take care of things. And he’s going to watch your back.”

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll meet you at Wallingford. Call me when you get here.”

“Try not to worry,” Yulikova says. “Good-bye, Cassel.”

My heart’s racing and my stomach is in knots as I close my phone. There is nothing worse than the creeping formless sense of dread—until that moment when it becomes clear what you should have been dreading all along. When you know it’s not just all in your head. When you see the danger.

The Feds don’t need me to bring in Patton. They don’t need me at all. If they’ve really got one of his bodyguards on their payroll, they could disappear him anytime they wanted.

I sit down on the library steps and call Barron.

I can hear traffic in the background when he picks up. “You want something?” He sounds annoyed.

“Oh, come on,” I say. I’m not exactly pleased with him, either. “You can’t really be pissed off—just because you thought that I couldn’t convince her you were lying when you were actually lying.”

“So you called to gloat?” he asks.

“Yulikova moved up the date for the thing, and she has an inside man already. Someone positioned to do this job a lot better than me. Does that sound fishy to you?”

“Maybe,” he says.

“And that death worker I chased down. Her people picked him up after to see if I lied about anything.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah. I took something from him and I . . . I kind of let him go. She knew that and never said anything.”

“That does seem weird. I guess you’re screwed. Sucks to be you, Cassel. Looks like the Feds aren’t your friends after all.”

He hangs up, leaving me with silence.

I don’t know why I expected anything else.

I sit on the steps for a long time. I don’t go to track practice. I don’t go to dinner. I just turn the phone over and over in my hands until I realize I have to get up and go somewhere eventually.

I dial Lila’s number. I don’t expect her to answer, but she does.

“I need your help,” I say.

Her voice is low. “We’ve helped each other enough, don’t you think?”

“I just need to talk through some things with someone.”

“It shouldn’t be me.”

I take a deep breath. “I’m working with the Feds, Lila. And I’m in trouble. A lot of trouble.”

“I’m getting my coat,” she says. “Tell me where you are.”

We arrange to meet at the old house. I get my keys and head to my car.

I’m sitting in the kitchen in the dark when she opens the door. I’m thinking about the smell of my father’s cigarillos and what it was like when we were very young and nothing really mattered.

She flips on the lights, and I blink up at her.

“Are you okay?” She comes over to the table and puts one gloved hand on my shoulder. She’s wearing tight black jeans and a scarred leather jacket. Her blond hair is as bright as a gold coin.

I shake my head.

Then I tell her everything—about Patton, about Maura, about wanting to be good and falling short, about following her that day when I chased down Gage without knowing why, about Yulikova and the gun. Everything.

By the time I’m done, she’s sitting backward in one of the chairs, resting her chin on her arms. She has shouldered off the jacket.

“How mad at me are you?” I ask. “I mean, exactly how mad—like on a scale of one to ten, where one is kicking my ass and ten is a shark tank?”

She shakes her head at my scale. “You mean because you watched me put out a contract on someone and then watched Gage kill him? That you’re cooperating with the law, maybe even working for them? That you never told me any of this? I’m not happy. Does it bother you—what you saw me do?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“You think I have ice in my blood?” She asks it lightly, but I know the answer matters.

I wonder what it would be like, being raised to be a crime lord. “You are what you always were going to be.”

“Remember when we were kids?” she says. There’s a slight smile on her mouth, but the way she’s looking at me doesn’t quite match up. “You thought I would be the one making deals and enemies, backstabbing and lying. You said you were going to get out, travel the world. Not get swept up in the life.”

“Shows what I know.”

“That’s one long game you’ve been playing, Cassel. One long, dangerous game.”

“I didn’t mean for everything to get so crazy. It was one thing after another. I had to fix things. Someone had to fix things for Maura, and I was the only one who knew, so there just wasn’t anyone else. And I had to keep Barron from going to the Brennans. And I had to stop myself—” I do stop myself there, because I can’t say the rest. I can’t explain how I needed to stop myself from being with her. I can’t explain how I nearly didn’t manage it.

“Okay, well, quit.” She makes a wild gesture with her hands, as though stating something so obvious that it shouldn’t have to be said. “You did what you thought you had to do, but you still have a way out, so take it. Get away from the Feds. And if they don’t want to let you off easy, then go into hiding. I’ll help. I’ll talk to my dad. I’ll try to see if he can take some of the pressure off the thing with your mother, at least until you can solve this. Don’t let them play you.”

“I can’t quit.” I look away, at the peeling wallpaper above the sink. “I can’t. It’s too important.”

“What makes you so eager to throw away your life on whatever cause comes along?”

“That’s not true. That’s not what I was doing—”

“None of it is your fault. What is it that you feel so damn guilty about that makes you act like you don’t matter?” Her voice rises, and she rises with it, coming around the table to push against my shoulder. “What makes you think that you’ve got to solve everyone’s problems, even mine?”

“Nothing.” I shake my head, turning away from her.

“Is it Jimmy Greco and Antanas Kalvis and the rest? Because I knew them, and they were really bad men. The world’s a better place without them in it.”

“Stop trying to make me feel better,” I say. “You know I don’t deserve it.”

“Why don’t you deserve it?” she yells, her voice sounding like the words are being ripped out of her gut. Her hand is on my upper arm; she’s trying to get me to look at her.

I won’t.

“You,” I say, standing. “Because of you.”

For a moment neither of us speaks.

“What I did—,” I start, but I can’t make that sentence go anywhere good. I start over. “I can’t forgive myself—I don’t want to forgive myself.”

I sink down to the linoleum tiles and say what I have never said before. “I killed you. I remember killing you. I killed you.” The words, over and over and over, rolling out of me. My voice is catching. My voice is breaking.

“I’m alive,” Lila says, sliding to her knees so that I have to look at her, have to see her. “I’m right here.”

I take a deep, shuddering breath.

“We’re alive,” she says. “We made it.”

I feel like I’m about to shake apart. “I’ve screwed up everything, haven’t I?”