Fire in the Blood Read online

  Fire in the Blood is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Perry O’Brien

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: O’Brien, Perry Edmond, author.

  Title: Fire in the blood : a novel / Perry O’Brien.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Random House, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019038390 (print) | LCCN 2019038391 (ebook) | ISBN 9780812988581 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780812988598 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3615.B765 F57 2020 (print) |

  LCC PS3615.B765 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019038390

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019038391

  Ebook ISBN 9780812988598

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Victoria Wong, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Carlos Beltrán

  Cover images: akindo/Getty Images (fire graphic); elenamiv/Shutterstock (cityscape)

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  Piles of garbage lay heaped and frozen along the sidewalk of Valentine Avenue. Kosta sidestepped the jutting wing of a flayed umbrella so as to avoid catching his coat, barely slowing as he threaded his way between the mounds of snow, hopping over runnels of mud and ice. He had come to know cities as places of battle, and his momentum was dictated by a soldier’s code—always stay alert, never linger—as if the Bronx were an enemy land.

  Turning onto the next block, Kosta found himself halted by the sight of a new black truck: a Denali, with chrome headlights and a cheese grater grille. The vehicle was enormous, big as the armored NATO transports he’d ambushed, back in Albania.

  A voice crackled in his ear.

  “I’m at corner now,” said Buqa. Next he heard Zameer join the line.

  “So we are ready, or what? My asses are freezing for real.”

  Kosta checked them both with a low hiss.

  He peered into the truck’s window, allowing himself a moment to admire it. Leather upholstery and wood grain paneling, glowing with richness and warmth. Kosta hungered for a refined interior such as this. For a second he thought to simply take the truck, but already he could hear the scolding voice of Luzhim. “Stop thinking like a Gheg,” the old man would say. “You’re not in the mountains anymore.”

  Put differently: first came the grind, then the come up.

  “On my way,” said Kosta.

  * * *

  —

  Framing the tenement’s doorway was a tangle of buzzers and exposed wiring. Kosta mashed the buttons with his fist, and after a few seconds the door opened with an electric squawk. The entryway was colder than the street outside. Squatting in the dim light was a fat kid on a stool.

  “Who’re you?” said the fat kid.

  Kosta closed the door with his foot, casting the entryway into orange darkness. Now he could smell the place: the unmistakable reek of human waste. Kosta looked casually around the lobby, ignoring the chubby sentry. A narrow staircase dripped with graffiti. Under the stairs was the gaping mouth of an abandoned elevator.

  “Man, I said who are you?” From his back pocket the kid slung out a long gym sock, weighted at one end. He jiggled the sock against his leg with a heavy clink.

  Kosta angled himself in the darkness. “So they pay you, sit down here?” he said.

  The kid nodded.

  “Anyone you don’t recognize, you supposed to jack them?”

  The kid didn’t respond, but curled his fingers tighter around the sock.

  Kosta nodded thoughtfully. Then he moved, a quick two-step, closing the distance as the kid flicked back his arm. But not fast enough. Now Kosta stood too close, blocking a good swing. He smiled widely, let the kid see his perfect teeth.

  “They pay you enough?”

  * * *

  —

  Coming up the stairs Kosta passed an old man wearing a fuzzy blue electric blanket. The corded prong hung behind him like a tail as he ambled his way down, skittering on every step.

  Kosta came to the fourth floor and prowled down the hallway. Most of the rooms were closed up, except one where a pregnant girl leaned against the doorway, smoking a cigarette and wearing a Burger King crown.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” said Kosta to the girl.

  She blinked at him and kept smoking.

  Kosta snatched the cardboard crown off her head and sent it gliding down the stairwell. The girl threw her cigarette at him and closed herself behind her door.

  “Okay,” said Kosta, into his microphone. “Buqa, come up.”

  Less than a minute later she came bouncing up the stairs in her dayglo trainers. Buqa was Kosta’s age but had the wide face of a child, with black-button eyes and hair pulled back too tight.

  “Sorry I take so long,” she breathed, a little winded from the stairs.

  Together they went to the door marked 4G.

  They knocked and waited, each of them looking down the hallway. When there was no answer, Buqa took a small c
rowbar from her jacket. The doorframe showed wounds from old pryings, and she quickly popped the bolt.

  The room was empty. A bare space with a mattress on the floor and few belongings. Stacks of cardboard packages climbed one wall, the boxes filled with black Maximo spray cans and Krink markers. No sign anywhere of the missing package. Probably cut up and resold, Kosta figured; dust floating back into the ether.

  He paced the room. Then went to the window, which opened to a snow-covered fire escape. Forty feet down through the ironwork was the figure of Zameer, crouched in the trash-strewn alley, using an old length of pipe to draw angry X’s in the snow.

  Kosta whistled.

  Zameer looked up but didn’t wave. “We doing this now or what?” he said, into Kosta’s ear. “It’s fucking cold, is reason I make the question.”

  Kosta shut the window and looked around the room again. Whatever might happen, he didn’t want it happening here. Risk-wise, drug addicts were easy to lowball. They tended to come off compliant, even friendly, but you never knew when one of them would turn. It was how they had lost Leke, a roofer from Tirana who’d worked part-time as a soldier for Luzhim. Leke was on a collection job when out of nowhere a half-dead teenage girl had gotten up from the floor and stuck Leke in the calf with a dirty syringe. The crew kicked her to pieces, but it didn’t help Leke; three days later he died at Montefiore from septic thrombosis. So no excitement inside the den, if possible.

  Kosta went up another set of stairs and prowled the hallway until he came across an unoccupied room. He was working to free the swollen window frame when Zameer reported from the street.

  “Hey, shit, here comes the guy.”

  Kosta popped the window and clambered out, tucking his head against a chilly blast of air. He crouched on the rusty scaffolding and took a moment to gain his balance, the fire escape dropping crookedly below. All around was the frozen Bronx. Skyscrapers ridged the horizon where a gash of purple light spread across the morning haze. Nearby was a church under construction, its spire wrapped in a cocoon of reconstructive mesh.

  Kosta spoke into his hoodie, covering the mic with one hand to be heard above the wind.

  “Okay, here’s what we do.”

  A few minutes of quiet passed. A car went by and Kosta felt the rhythmic pulse of low-sonic dub.

  There came a banging from below. Buqa in the hallway outside Sean’s apartment, her knuckles going cop-loud against the door. Kosta pictured how things would go: Sean jumping to his feet, looking frantically around the small apartment. Maybe he’d risk a glance through the keyhole before realizing there was only one exit.

  The knocking continued. Then came the scrape of Sean’s window being opened.

  Kosta drew a canister from his pocket. In the survival catalogs it was sold as “bear mace,” a highly concentrated pepper spray approved for hunters and outdoor enthusiasts. Multiple labels warned that it should never be used on humans. Kosta snapped off the can’s plastic safety. The fire escape trembled with new weight, and here was Sean crawling out his window, a skinny black kid in a Godzilla T-shirt, breathing hard as he climbed out into the cold, his jacket bundled under one arm.

  Sean had been one of Kosta’s best dealers. The kid had connects with a whole network of art-type students living in Brooklyn, a market to which Kosta would never otherwise have gained access. Which made it all the more disappointing when Sean missed their last meeting and hadn’t shown up since to pay the dividends he owed.

  Kosta whistled. Sean looked up and actually managed to pull off a smile, as if he was going to offer an explanation. Kosta fired the canister, discharging a whooshing cone of white fog into Sean’s face.

  For an instant Sean was lost in the blast, but as it cleared Kosta saw the kid’s face, dark and broken by violent sobs. Sean put a hand to his eyes, taking it away from the ladder, and his body weight swung him out over the drop. He snatched himself back to the fire escape with both hands. He began to retch. His feet kicked out. He gurgled and clung for life.

  Kosta leaned down, close to Sean’s weeping face. “What’s the deal, playboy?”

  * * *

  —

  A few minutes later Kosta and Sean came downstairs, the kid’s face purple and slimy. Buqa trailed behind, walking backward to cover their rear, just in case Sean had any friends in the building who might get bad ideas.

  “Come around front. Check the street,” said Kosta into the earphone. They waited in the entryway, where the fat kid seemed to have abandoned his post. Then came word from Zameer: no sign of police, no neighbors screaming. They decided to take Sean’s wheels, a shitty old Volvo parked on the curb. Reminiscent of the cars back home, thought Kosta: stitched together from cannibalized parts and repainted in gray primer. He shoved Sean into the cramped backseat, where stuffing bloomed from gashes in the upholstery, and once again Kosta felt a longing for the Denali.

  Buqa took the driver’s seat, Kosta sat shotgun, and Zameer went in back with the kid. Kosta turned on the radio, found a song he liked. The beats came through as a racket of thuds on the bootleg system, but he kept up the volume in case Sean starting yelling.

  The Volvo pulled off toward the Grand Concourse. He saw Buqa nodding along to the music, her relief visible. Even Zameer seemed happy.

  Kosta twisted in his seat. “So,” he said to Sean. “You been busy?”

  Sean just squinted at him.

  “A month ago I give you a package of eight bundles. Supposedly you’re stinging for forty-five each, right? Except, funny thing, you don’t bring nothing back. And now you don’t answer your phone?”

  Sean put his head down. The car slowed at an intersection.

  “Which way?” said Buqa.

  Kosta began to give Buqa directions when he heard a metal snap from the backseat. He turned to find Zameer with his knife out, a little hook-shaped razor, the kind they make for cutting linoleum. Zameer was tickling Sean’s earlobe with the blade.

  “The fuck are you doing?” said Kosta, switching to Albanian.

  Zameer glared back, sticking out his chin.

  In a surge of movement Kosta thrust himself between the seats, grabbed Zameer’s hand and twisted away the knife.

  “You fucking listen to me—” he began.

  Something hit the car with a gunshot smack. Kosta whirled around just in time to see a figure slam against the front of the Volvo and fall away, vanishing beneath the wheels.

  Buqa stomped the brake and the car skidded through the empty intersection.

  Kosta punched off the music. He looked out every window, trying to put together what had just happened. The neighborhood was bright and silent—a weekend morning, he remembered—no one on the street except a crumpled shape in the snow behind them, lying between two arcs of tire track.

  “The fuck was that?” said Zameer. He’d stopped searching for the knife and was holding Sean facedown against the backseat.

  Behind them, a young woman stood up. In the gray morning light Kosta could see she had a pretty face, even with all the blood. The sun was bright on the snow. She turned toward them and began to spin, arms stretched out for balance, looking around as if getting a full picture of the world. Then she teetered and slumped to the ground.

  This time she stayed there, motionless in the churned-up snow.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Coop made his way down a cracked strip of tar, the only highway in Afghanistan. He walked with his weapon slung at the ready, padding heel-foot, heel-foot, stalking the bright apparition that lay ahead of him: a lone pale horse, quivering in the morning light.

  The wind blew cold but still Coop sweltered under the weight of his gear: his kevlar vest, helmet, and demolition pack. He was nervous about the horse and it made the sweating worse. Reels of bomb gossip played through his mind as he walked; stories of dead camels lying along the road with jiggered Russian mortars sewn
up inside their bellies. Coop was pretty sure he’d only heard of this done to roadkill, whereas the horse up ahead was clearly alive. But that didn’t eliminate the possibility of bioweapons. Recent briefings had stressed the possibility that Iraq had armed the Taliban with WMDs. Could the horse be infected with one of Saddam’s plagues?

  His radio crackled, and out came a blare of mariachi trumpets. Coop twitched at the sudden noise, fumbling with the handheld as a voice came over the music.

  “Hey Specialist, that horse is like a quarter-klik out, hooah?”

  Private Greely, The Fucking New Guy.

  “Roger that,” said Coop.

  “Sergeant Anaya says maybe his morning PT ain’t sufficient, you have all this energy for walking.”

  Coop took a knee, pointing his M4 carbine toward the dirt, and swiveled back the way he’d come. A few hundred meters down the blacktop sat his team’s humvee, where Greely and Anaya were waiting. Coop keyed his radio.

  “Private Greely, do me a favor and inform Sergeant Anaya that his ethnic music is compromising my stealth.”

  Now Coop heard Anaya’s faraway voice.

  “What’d he say? Give me that,” and the transmission cut out for a second, Coop clearly picturing the sergeant wrestling the radio from Greely.

  “Hey Specialist Cooper,” said Anaya, coming on the radio, his voice full of mock authority. “Listen, Greely’s calling you out. He bets his Skittles you won’t ride that horse.”