Status Updates From Choice of Evil (Burke, #11)

“But I get the impression that it’s old. He did it a long time ago. He’s an . . . artist. And he finally decided that the highest art was homicide. As a kidnapper, he was the best there was. No contest. He didn’t need his name in the paper, he knew. He probably thought he was the greatest killer too.

I remembered the “social worker” I had when I was a kid. One of them, anyway. A young girl . . . although I guess she looked pretty old to me then. All I remember about her was her mouth. Her lying mouth. I never looked at her eyes.

I’m a thief. Been one since I was a baby. And I’ll be one until I die. Those ‘codes’ . . . You’re right: it is all movie bullshit. Any one of those slimy little gangsters’ll rat out any other. Happens all the time. But me, I got no gang. No crew. No fucking ‘Mafia’ or anything like that. I’ve got a family. Not my blood, but more true than any DNA could be. Truly mine.

Wolfe wouldn’t help me anymore. Maybe she wasn’t sure . . . but I could tell, from the way her gray eyes looked at me just before we parted, that the weight was mine to carry. And I’d have to carry it a long way before we could ever be . . . whatever we were to each other . . . again.

That was it, then. Humans are the only pack that tolerates predators of its own species. Most think “family” is a biological term. Not my family. My family is my choice, and I belong to them like a wolf cub does to a pack. Only I’m grown now. All of us, grown.

I just sat there and took it. The way I always do—fear and rage dancing inside me, nothing showing on my face. I’ve had a lot of practice, from the hospital where my whore of a mother dropped me—dropped me out of her, I mean—to the orphanage to the foster homes to the juvenile joints to prison to that war in Africa to prison again and . . . all of it.