Another Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

Pryce wasn’t an outlaw like us. There was always work the government needed done, so unemployment wasn’t one of his worries. No surprise he’d been plugged into the White Night underground. He had informants all over the country, on both sides of the Walls. Some people thought he was a myth; others thought he was a magician. That’s the rep you earn when you always find the tools you need to do a job. Any job.

Pryce wasn’t some fantasy-world “spook.” He knew survival wasn’t about staying in the shadows; it was about never casting one.

“Maybe you’re more interested in current events?” he said.

I shrugged again. I didn’t know what he was going to say, but I knew it wouldn’t be a threat. Pryce had already seen for himself how far I’d go if anyone threatened my family. Seen a piece of it, anyway.

“The Prof needs his right leg amputated,” he said, like a mechanic saying you needed a valve job. “It should have been done a while ago. They’ve been keeping him in a comatose state so they can use an air tourniquet on the femoral artery, but he can’t stay like that for much longer. Not only don’t they have the facilities to do a perfect cut-and-reattach, they don’t have a prosthesis-maker, a rehab facility, or a—”

I held up my hand, meaning, “Enough!” That didn’t stop him from talking, or even modulate his tone.

“They’re afraid,” he said, in that same mechanic’s-report voice. “Everyone on your side of the fence knows the deal with that place they run. They don’t report gunshot wounds, and they fix whatever they can—bullet extractions, stitching, just about any kind of patch-up work. They’ve got all the antibiotics, and they can even handle transfusions….”

He paused, waiting for me to be impressed that I’d recently learned that one way to pay for blood is to replenish the supply. When I didn’t react, he rolled right on: “But they don’t have a cath lab or a—”

I raised my eyebrows. All the communication he was going to get, until he got to what he wanted.

He moved his head just enough to show me that he wasn’t trying to outwait me, then spread his hand on the table between us. “Their thinking is this: If they cut, and the old man dies, they’re sure you’d send them along to keep him company. And if they don’t cut, and he never comes out of that coma, they’re convinced they’ll all end up in one.”

I just watched him.

“It may surprise you,” he said, with just the barest trace element of sarcasm in his metallic voice, “but there seem to be a number of people there who believe if anything happened to that old man you might just lose it and turn their whole operation into a slaughterhouse.”

“So…?” I said, knowing there had to be more.

“So they made a phone call,” Pryce said. “But what they had to say wasn’t news to…us.”

The heat from where Clarence was stationed was starting to peel the paint off the wall behind me.

“We have the whole thing on video,” he said, more like a prosecutor than a mechanic now. “I didn’t know you had access to that level of ordnance. That sniper you blew up—he was ours. In fact, the whole team up there was. We had our own operation in place, took years to set up. We had no idea you were going to make a move on our targets.”

I speak Pryce’s language, so the translation was instantaneous: “ordnance” meant the RPG I’d shoulder-fired at the sniper’s roost; “ours” meant someone paid by the same agency that paid him.

I knew Pryce wasn’t there about payback; he doesn’t get emotional over chess pieces. The sniper who had tried for the Prof was a paid assassin. Didn’t know who he was aiming at, didn’t care. Nothing personal. Not for him, anyway.

But Pryce hadn’t stopped by to shoot the breeze with an old friend, either. Pryce didn’t have friends.

“Let me guess,” I said, contempt making a crop-duster’s pass over my voice. “Homeland Security, right?”

“And you don’t care about that?” he shot back. “No,