Alpha by Greg Rucka Page B

his hair, shot the vodka he’d been drinking down his throat, made his way over. The Uzbek didn’t move, didn’t seem to blink, and for all there was to read in his expression, Matias might as well have been illiterate. Fleetingly, Matias wondered if the Uzbek would just shoot him then and there.
    But the Uzbek smiled. “Matias. We haven’t met.”
    “No.”
    “We should talk. There a place we can talk, without all this noise?”
    “You mean alone?”
    “I’m not chasing your ass cherry, Matias, you can relax.”
    Maybe not literally, Matias thought, but he shrugged and led the way out of the room, through the master bedroom, where two of his boys and three of the girls were contorting themselves without clothes. Matias didn’t care, and from what he caught of the Uzbek’s reflection in the glass doors, neither did the other man. Slid the doors back, stepped out onto the balcony, into the nighttime view of Odessa, down to the Black Sea. You could see lights of the ships moving about the port, life on the waterfront. It was late spring, not cold, but not quite warm enough.
    “You a trusting man, Matias?” The Uzbek indicated the drop.
    “You want me dead, I’m dead.” Matias shrugged, much as he had before, but he liked the fact that the Uzbek had called him a man. That was something he normally had to fight for.
    But the Uzbek undercut it immediately. “How old are you?”
    Matias felt the tension race up his back, felt the fleeting satisfaction vanishing. “Twenty.”
    The Uzbek shook his head, leaned forward on the railing, and knocked a cigarette from its pack into his hand. He made fire from a lighter, paused before touching it to the tobacco. “You don’t have to lie.”
    “I’m not lying.”
    “Then that’s a pity.”
    “Why?”
    A plume of smoke. “We thought you were younger. You look younger. We thought maybe sixteen, seventeen.”
    “You like boys.”
    The Uzbek exhaled, watched his smoke disappear into the night air. If Matias’s implication had offended or annoyed or even registered, he couldn’t tell.
    “We like potential,” the Uzbek said. “But twenty, Matias…that’s too old, I’m afraid.”
    “So maybe I’m not twenty.”
    “Ah.”
    “Maybe sixteen, that’s true.”
    “Sure. And you’ve been running your crew, what, four years?”
    Matias nodded, thinking that the Uzbek already knew the answers to the questions he was asking; thinking that the Uzbek maybe wasn’t here to kill him, and if not, now wondering just what the fuck this player wanted. He was sensitive about his age with good reason, had needed to fight, even kill people who thought his youth meant he was unworthy of their respect. It was how he’d started, smuggling cigarettes, and Old Grigori had come to him and told him to cut him in or he’d get cut, cut and left to bleed out. Grigori, fifty years old, who hadn’t caught up to the times, and the next day Matias had gone to him under the pretense of bringing tribute, and instead used a tire iron to modify their arrangement. When that was done, Grigori had more gray matter outside than in, and what had been his now belonged to Matias, including his crew, including his customers.
    He’d been twelve then.
    So now, sixteen—or maybe seventeen, he really wasn’t sure—and he didn’t know what he was feeling. Felt his brow furrowing as he searched out the emotion, and all the while the Uzbek kept his silence, smoking his cigarette and apparently in no hurry to explain himself. It took some digging before Matias found the name to what he was feeling, realized he was curious. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt that .
    “So sixteen is good?”
    The Uzbek nodded.
    “What is sixteen good for?”
    Flicking the cigarette away, watching the ember spark orange in the sky until it vanished. “Because we can make something out of you.”
    Then the Uzbek explained what that meant.
     
    Still no names, no explanations beyond the most basic. Yes,