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A Novella
by M. L. Rio
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Only Hannah was unsurprised. Tuck swore a blue streak; Tamar gasped and clutched her chest; Edie almost bit her tongue in half and dropped her cigarette in the dirt. She turned in fury toward the whispering oak. Theo Pavlopoulos came swashbuckling out of the shadows, but his laugh, like his name, preceded him—that deep, roguish chuckle that topped off every drink he poured at the Rocker Box Bar. They hear his name and just start drooling, or so the saying went. Wavy brown hair and black-coffee eyes, muscled like Michelangelo's David. A textbook tall drink of your poison of choice.
"I think the Friar jumped right out of his robe," he observed, flashing his straight white teeth at Tuck. "Who's not dead yet?"
"You're lucky not to be," Tamar said darkly.
"Nine lives," Theo said, lighting up with the Zippo in his pocket. "And at least three left."
"Better start guarding them carefully," said Hannah. "Heard you had an 'Incident' in the Box." She angled a glance at Edie, who had, of course, supervised the coverage.
"Don't remind me."
"Who was it this time?" Tuck asked.
Edie already knew, but Edie listened. Wanting the story straight from the horse's mouth. She fished her cigarette out of the dirt, brushed off the filter, and pulled hard enough to keep the ember burning. The Times's series on the Hostile Incidents afflicting the community since August had, so far, gone nowhere. Unless you counted going in circles. None of the Belligerents had anything in common. But at least the Times could claim credit for coining the terminology. Because nobody knew what it was or what to call it, they'd been forced to decide for themselves and spent most of a pitch meeting arguing over semantics.
Unbothered by such considerations, Theo shook his head, talked around the cigarette. He alone seemed immune to the cold inevitable after dark this deep into the year. Bareheaded and barehanded, he made no attempt to warm himself while the rest of them scuffed their feet and stuffed their fingers in their armpits. "Only knew him by sight. He hung out with the B-school crowd. Pretty buttoned-up until last night." The Rocker Box was the favored haunt of west campus, patronized mostly by the professional schools and undergraduates who had abandoned the dormitories for that drunken pastel blood sport known as Greek life. After the six years it took to work his way up to general manager, Theo knew enough dirty secrets to blackmail every department chair on campus and half the city council besides. Every night Edie barely resisted the temptation to pump him for information. It wouldn't have worked anyway; he treated the brass rail like a confessional, any admissions made there somehow sacrosanct. "Never knew him to have more than two drinks. Never even saw him drunk."
"Stone-cold sober to stone-cold crazy just like that, huh?" Hannah asked The Hole. She lit another cigarette, not with a lighter but with an old-fashioned matchbook. She flicked her wrist and the match went out, dragging a wisp of smoke behind it like a comet's tail.
"Well, I didn't have eyes on him all night." Theo took another pensive drag, barrel chest inflating like a bellows before he exhaled again. "But one minute he's drinking his Guinness, quiet as a mouse"—he smiled, inexplicably, at Tuck—"the next he's ranting and raving and smashing his head against the mirror in the men's room."
"That where you got the shiner?" asked Tamar. Edie squinted through the gloom, and the shadow under Theo's left eye resolved itself into a swollen black bruise.
"He put up a hell of a fight for a guy who wears a tie." As GM of the Rocker Box, Theo was one part bartender, one part business manager, one part one-man goon squad.
"I heard you crushed his trachea with your rippling biceps," Hannah said. She had a special talent for making a compliment sound like an insult. Theo redirected the grin across the open grave at her, unfazed.
Excerpted from Graveyard Shift by M L. Rio. Copyright © 2024 by M L. Rio. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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