– Yes?

I purse my lips.

– He’s studying you. Marking your moves, the way you go about it.

– About?

– Your business.

I pistol my fingers at him.

– He’s trying it on, Predo, seeing how the job would fit him. Yours, that is.

And I’m out the door and down the stairs and through the lobby past the giant who’s gonna have Predo’s eyes in the back of his head from here on out, and on the street where I can breathe.

I light a smoke.

Did it tell him anything? That hesitation, did it spill what went down with the Docks? I don’t know. But he’s better at this than I am. He’s better at everything than I am. It probably told him every fucking thing he wanted to know. Every goddamn thing he got me up here to find out from me.

I’m getting screwed.

Figure I know that much. God knows I should recognize the feeling when Predo slips it in. Scumbag’s had his action in my ass often enough.

Manipulate, he said.

Guess that’s the way the polite folks are saying fucked over these days.

Like to say he’s got it all wrong. Like to say he’s never had my number. Never pulled it over on me. Never made me dance on his strings. But I’d be lying. And lying to yourself pays out nothing. Not that it’s ever stopped me before.

Terry and his damn forest. Well, he was right about that. Way Predo snagged me at the end there, asking about the Docks, figure he’s seeing the same landscape as Terry. Both of them looking across the Brooklyn Bridge at all that territory, the couple thousand infecteds that have been living in the bush out there, and how they’ve suddenly started crossing the bridge looking to come back into civilization.

A Van Helsing?

Like Predo could give a fuck.

Pull my ass up here, drag me across 14th Street for a consultation he knows Terry won’t let me bow out of. Do that for a lone whackjob? Bullshit.