Page 18 of Black Curtain

But this guy was rich enough, Dan didn’t want to piss him off.

If he paid like he promised, Dan hoped to do more work for him sometime.

Also, if he was beingone hundred percenttruthful with himself, Dan didn’t want to prolong this gig. He didn’t want to give this guy any reason to be angry at him, either.

Really, the sooner they could all get thefuckout of here, the better.

The sooner he could get far, far away from this client, the better.

Dan had dealt with a lot of difficult and shitty customers over the years. He’d dealt with tight asses, out-and-out criminals, mafioso murderer types, scammers who tried to get work done for free, not to mention just full-blown cocksuckers who did nothing but crack sick jokes and talk about how they were making millions on shady Wall Street deals or whatever.

None had creeped him out as much as this guy.

Not even the porn producer with the girlfriend forty years younger than him, or the guy with all the Nazi paraphernalia in display cabinets in his living room, or the guy with dead animals and guns on every wall and flat surface of his palatial Long Island estate.

None made his skin crawl or his adrenaline flow like this motherfucker did.

Even the house felt evil as shit.

Dan had long wondered if maybe some houses were like that.

Like dogs that picked up some essence of their owners, some houses went bad.

Or maybe shitty human beings were simply attracted to shitty, evil houses.

Either way, Dan got a bad vibe from this old girl, even if she was beautiful… even though it wasn’t her fault she’d been neglected for so many years. He glanced up the old walls and his builder’s heart couldn’t help thinking it was a pity.

At the same time, he wondered how this house remained standing at all, given where it was, and the shape it was in.

A house this size, with this much square footage, in the middle of New York City, and it was still being occupied as a single-family residence? Without massive renovations to the outside, and maybe inside to bring her up to code? All the old Gilded Age places in New York, like the ones that used to line Museum Row, had been gone for nearly a century now. The last had been torn down or converted decades ago. The few structures left, the ones that escaped being razed for skyscrapers and apartment buildings, now housed museums and social clubs, colleges or churches or other city institutions.

No onelivedin these fucking relics.

Not anymore.

And this one was older than any of them. It was older than the Gilded Age.

Hell, this damned thing probably pre-dated the Revolution.

Just keeping the lights on in a place like this would be expensive. Houses like these were meant to have servants, and a lot of them.

These days, rich people lived in penthouses when they were in the city.

When they sequestered their wealth outside the city, sometimes even outside the country, they put walls around it. Or they put it out in the middle of nowhere, in places where no one would see it. They bought massive boats. They surrounded themselves with high fences and endless grounds, paid to have mansions and lands blurred out on maps and in satellite images. They bought islands or hundreds of acres in New Zealand, or massivehaciendasin South America or Mexico, sprawling ranches outside Jackson Hole, Wyoming, or in the open, underdeveloped parts of the Canadian Rockies.

Thinking about that, Dan frowned, looking at the high ceilings and the antique fixtures and tapestries covering the walls.

This place was a relic.

A ghost from the past.

But obviously, this guy was okay with bucking the new normal.

Lowering his gaze, Dan watched his crew finish cleaning up the living room.

Realizing he felt like a tool standing around, watching while the rest of them worked, even though he was the boss and none of them wouldexpecthim to help, especially not to mop floors or scrub toilets, Dan grabbed a bucket of cleaning materials and headed for the kitchen anyway.

He ended up doing the kitchen floor and counters.

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