Read The Five for Free Online Page B

death.
    “It won’t work,” Berke said quietly, and she looked at him with what might have been sadness in those dark chocolate eyes. In contrast to that, a quick and nasty smile flashed across her mouth. Nomad thought she was torn up inside, just like himself, and she didn’t know whether to cry or curse. But Berke was Berke, and so she said, “Fuck it” before she turned her gaze away.

THREE.
    For a while they didn’t seem to be anywhere, and then suddenly they were where they needed to be.
    < >
    Must be the place,” George said, as he pulled the Scumbucket and the U-Haul trailer off China Spring Road into a parking lot. They had passed through a nondescript area north of Lake Waco and the Waco regional airport surrounded by scrubby fields and scabby warehouses. He’d been directed by email from Felix Gogo to look for the red-and-yellow Delgado Cable van, and there it was, sitting next to a shiny black Toyota Land Cruiser from which the sun radiated like a blazing mirror.
    “Watch out for glass,” Terry warned. Jagged bits of it glittered on the heat-cracked pavement. Not only that, but broken beer bottles lay scattered about, and one of those under a tire would not only sound like a roadside bomb in Iraq going off but might lame their ride.
    “Jeez.” Berke was not impressed. “I thought we were going to a studio .”
    “Well, the guy evidently knows what he’s doing.” George eased the Scumbucket up next to the pristine Land Cruiser. He could imagine the Toyota saying to his van, in snobbish car-language, Have you ever heard of something called a wash ? He cut the engine, put it in Park and pulled up the handbrake, and then he sat looking at what might have been a small stripmall before a meteor the size of a freight train must’ve crashed down onto it.
    Nomad was thinking that a plane had arrowed in, short of the airport’s runway. Blackened walls testified to fire. Windows were broken out and red metal roofs sagged. Here and there, on remaining sections of gray cinderblock, were the elaborate black and blue swirls of gang symbols. Looked to him as if two gangs had fought over the turf, and nobody won. But then he realized the place may never have been actually finished, because nearby stood two abandoned Port-A-Potties and beyond them, back where the thicket boiled up, were pieces of machinery that appeared to be part of a cement-mixing truck. A pile of old tires lay beside those, and a few beatup garbage cans full of burned lumber. Rags and other bits of trash hung in the brush like a hermit’s laundry.
    “This can’t be it,” Nomad said, but George was already getting out. Heat from Hell’s oven rolled into the Scumbucket. And here came the hermit himself from one of the crooked doorways. He was a chunky Hispanic dude, a kid really, maybe nineteen or twenty, and he was wearing a baggy pair of brown shorts and a white T-shirt damp with sweat. His arms were crisscrossed with tats and his scalp was shaved except for a black stripe going back along the middle of his head. Nomad thought they were about to get jumped by a cholo until he saw the light meter hanging on a cord around the guy’s neck.
    “Hey, man,” the dude said to George. “We’re almost set up.” He motioned with a thumb toward the doorway from which he’d just emerged, and he continued to the cable company van to fish something out of the back.
    “Ohhhh kay ,” Mike said, mostly to himself. “Let’s do this.”
    They climbed out of the Scumbucket. Sweat immediately popped from their pores. Their shadows were ebony on the bleached pavement, and as Terry, Mike and Berke followed George through the doorway Nomad stopped to wait for Ariel.
    “Careful,” he told her, because the broken glass had crunched ominously under his own sneakers. Where the others had gone was in relative darkness. He felt her hand grasp his arm, to steady her path over the glittering rubble. He thought this place looked like a fucking warzone, and