Loyalty's Price

The air in the alley tasted like stale beer and desperation. It was the kind of smell that clung to your clothes, your skin, your very soul if you let it. I could feel it, thick and heavy, as I watched Crash and Chris try to talk their way out of a mess that was about as deep as the Mariana Trench. Mark’s boys, two hulking shadows with eyes as cold and hard as river stones, were closing in. They weren't looking to negotiate. They were looking to collect.

“Yo, yo, yo,” Crash was saying, his voice a little too loud, a little too slick. “We just… we were just admiring the architecture, man. Real… bricky. You know?”

The bigger of Mark’s goons just stared. Didn’t blink. Didn’t crack a smile. He looked like he’d been carved from granite and then left out in the rain for a decade.