Ustari Cycle 00,5 - Fixer Read Online Free PDF Page A

numb and stiff even though it didn’t seem that cold out, overall. Baldy followed me around to the rear of the truck. The container looked pretty solidly on there, like every other truck you saw on the highway. Baldy pulled a set of cutters from his pocket and cut off two metallic-looking tags from the locks, then worked the levers and pulled the doors open.
    For a second, it was impossible to see inside. As gloomy as the day was, it was darker still inside the container. The rain created a screen between my eyes and everything else, and so it wasn’t until they started moving that I realized the box was full of people.
    They were dark-skinned and wearing rags, packed in so tight they were just leaning against each other, exhausted, barely alive. Baldy muttered a curse and stepped back, dropping the cutters. I stared into the gloomy interior of the space. At first I felt nothing. Then a tiny voice spoke in my head, faint and unpleasant, asking, What does an ustari need with dozens of people?
    And the answer came involuntarily: Blood.
    Someone had hired Heller to get them a lot of fucking gas for some bitchin’ Ritual. And Heller had sent me in to make sure anything that went wrong, got fixed.
    “Fucking hell ,” I whispered, looking down at my shoes. I reminded myself: We are not good people.
    If I fucked it up, Heller was coming after me. If I let it slide, sixty-odd assholes who’d done nothing as far as I knew were going to be bled like pigs. Not for the first time, I wished I’d started drinking much, much earlier in the day. Or, perhaps, died in my sleep.
    “Close it up,” I said roughly. “Can you replace those tags?”
    Baldy didn’t reply right away. “Maybe. It’ll cost.”
    “Close it up,” I said. “And fuck the tags, I’m broke.”
    I looked up and Mags was there, peering into the container. “Aw, man ,” he breathed.
    The rain pelted us, wearing us down.
    As Baldy started swinging the doors shut, I felt rather than saw Mags turn towards me. I cut him off. “We can’t afford to help them, Magsie.”
    “Oh.”
    I reached up and pushed rain out of my hair, slicking it back. I stood there feeling my heart pound, knowing that seconds were ticking by and I was running out of room to maneuver. I felt each dollar on my shoulders, strangling me, crushing me.
    I looked at Mags. He was still staring at the container like he could still see the people inside through the metal. For a split second I hated him, resented this. This was not my problem. These people were not my problem. I hadn’t kidnapped them, I hadn’t paid for them. And if it hadn’t been for Mags and the spotlight of pure, unadulterated fucking goodness he beamed around like a goddamn weapon, I’d have shepherded this steel box from point A to point B and gotten back to zero. Which was where my life was now, struggling to get back to zero.
    I had a sudden vision of waking up the next day with Mags gone. He would just leave, no note, no explanation, and creep back to Hiram’s, who would take him in, box his ears, and set him to cleaning the grout in his bathroom for the next ten years as punishment. And I would know that Mags had ditched me. Because I was an asshole, and a coward. I told myself it was one thing to get rid of Mags on purpose. It was something much worse to have someone with a brain the size of a pea decide I was a waste of his time.
    And I knew if Mags gave up on me, then I was truly fucked. I wouldn’t survive it. It would eat me alive, losing that pure faith and stupid affection. I had a Moment of Clarity. My Moment of Clarity told me that every decision I’d made in the last few years had been about hanging onto Mags, my last and only friend.
    Fucking hell.
    “You know any good Glamours, Mags?”
    He kept staring at the container. “Nope.”
    I closed my eyes. “Then we’ll have to lose them.”
    FOR ONCE, IT worked. Mags was no fucking help. But it worked. And I lived up to my title. I Fixed it.
    It was