At the City's Edge by Marcus Sakey Read Free Book Online

asking what time it is.
    There is sick fire in his belly.
    Michael nudges him, passes the near-empty bottle, red label with black domed buildings, somewhere in Russia. Jason wonders
     if the vodka actually comes from Russia. Wonders if there really even is a place called Russia, if there’s anywhere but fucking
     Crenwood. Crenwood and Spokane. This strikes him funny too.
    He twists off the red plastic cap and drinks. The liquid is warm and thick, and scours his throat. Acid curdles in his stomach.
     He fights a grimace, fakes appreciative noises. Turns to hand the bottle back to his brother, feeling a strange lightness
     inside.
    Turning, he explodes.
    Fire pours out of him, bile spilling up through his nose, a spray of wet heat across Michael’s chest and lap. It spatters
     and soaks and drips. The sick is bloody with the fruit soda they used to chase the Popov, and as he looks at it, Jason thinks

of the old expression, puking your guts out, and then the world tilts to black.
    He wakes in bed, in a beam of sweaty sun.
    At first there is only the throb and ache of the room, but then memory hits, and shame runs through him like warm water. His
     dirty clothes are gone, his mouth is clean. Somehow he doesn’t smell like vomit.
    Michael.
    Jason groans. Hating the humiliation he knows will come, hating himself for failing this test of manhood. Hating that his
     brother witnessed it, saw him for a baby. Knowing that he will never hear the end of it, that every friend will laugh, every
     girl will giggle.
    But he’s wrong.
    Michael never says a word.

7. Clear as Broken Glass
    Traffic on the Kennedy was steady, so Jason fumbled his phone out and tried all of Michael’s numbers again. The same thing
     – voice mail, voice mail, technical difficulties. He cursed under his breath, then shut the phone. Beside him, Billy stared
     out the window.
    ‘Kiddo?’ Jason tried for a gentle, avuncular voice, the kind that belonged to someone who hadn’t woken with a hangover and
     a woman whose last name he didn’t know. ‘You feeling any better?’
    The only response was Billy’s fingers tightening on the armrest.
    Twenty minutes ago, when Jason had yanked open his apartment door, he’d found his nephew trembling, clothing filthy and torn.
     A small leaf hung orange in the tousled mess of his hair, and it made him look like a corpse, some broken thing washed up
     on the banks of a desolate river. The boy hadn’t said a word since, not as Jason took in the enormous pupils and shaking hands
     that meant his nephew was in shock, not as he’d run his hands over Billy’s thin limbs to check for wounds, not even as Jason
     had gathered the boy into a bear hug and told him everything would be all right.
    It was nothing, Jason told himself for the hundredth time. Some sort of kid stuff, some miscommunication
or accident. Maybe Billy had been with a friend and they’d gotten in a fight. Or maybe he’d somehow gotten lost. Chicago
     would seem an enormous and scary place to an eight-year-old alone. Hell, sometimes it seemed that way to him.
    ‘I met with the cops.’
    ‘You mean you informed on a gang?’
    Jason heard Michael’s words again, clear as broken glass, but pushed the thought aside. Michael was fine. He had to be. Everything
     had to be.
    He turned onto Damen, driving though déjà vu. Not twenty-four hours ago he’d ridden this same route, past the same closed
     shops and narrow crooked houses, the same boys on the corner daring him with their eyes. Cracked pavement and exhaust haze,
     broken glass firing glints of too-bright sun. Damen Avenue, just like yesterday.
    Then he reached his brother’s block, and realized that it was not at all like yesterday, that everything was not fine.
    Everything was a thousand miles from fine.
    Over there was the extensions place, Lauretta’s, the African queen on the sign slightly darkened. Lauretta who babysat Billy
     from time to time, who liked Jason because both her boys were