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"To kill someone?"

"Preferably not," the Gray Man said, in a much lower voice He ducked behind Ronan’s half-open door "There are nearly always easier ways"

"Mr Gray --"

Someone kicked open the door The Gray Man’s careful lock-as rendered irrelevant

"I will," the Gray Man interrupted softly, "call you back"

Standing in the shadows of Ronan Lynch’s room, he watched two men stalk into the room One man wore an oversized polo shirt and the other wore a T-shirt printed with a missile The two men took in the scope of the space with obvious annoyance, and then they spread out The oversized polo shirt clung to the area near the s to keep watch out in the parking lot, and the other crashed through the boys’ belongings They kicked over stacks of books and pulled out desk drawers and upended the bare mattress

At one point, Missile turned to Polo Shirt Missile Shirt held a pair of sunglasses up for inspection "Gucci Rich bastards"

He dropped the sunglasses before stepping on them One of the fractured earpieces skittered across the wide floorboards It made it all the way to the Gray Man’s feet, but only the Gray Man atching it He leaned and picked the shard up, pensively thu the sharp, broken end

So these were the people Greenmantle had warned hiht be The Gray Man picked his teeth with the broken edge of the sunglasses and then used his phone to take photos of thehim lose patience Perhaps it was that they still hadn’t noticed that he atching them Or perhaps it was the inefficiency of their process Whatever it was, it solidified precisely as they began to trundle through the miniature model of Henrietta He didn’t knohat the Greywaren looked like, but he was certain that he could find it without kicking in the front of a miniature cardboard courthouse

He swiftly moved out of Ronan’s room

"Whoa!" said Missile from the middle of the destroyed Henrietta "Don’t move"

By way of reply, the Gray Man stuck the sharp end of the earpiece into Polo Shirt’s neck They fought briefly The Gray Man used a coe of theair conditioner to gently lay the other man down on the floor

It happened so quickly that Missile had only just reached them when the Gray Man wiped his hands on his slacks and stepped over the body

"Jesus F Christ," said Missile He pointed a knife at the Gray Man

This fight lasted slightly longer than the first It was not that Missile was bad; it was that the Gray Man was better And once the Gray Man had relieved the other man of his knife, it was over ie of Henrietta, fingers braced on the floorboards, gasping for breath

"Why are you here?" the Gray Man asked him He rested the tip of the knife as far into thea , and unlike Declan Lynch, he folded at once "Looking for an antique for an eet his name He’s French"

The Gray Man licked his lips He wondered if Maura Sargent’s thing was environ shoes, and that, to hi that so in France or French living over here?"

"I don’t know, ot an accent!"

It would’veto have to change clothing before he went to 300 Fox Way for his wallet He had intestinal matter on his slacks

"Do you have a contact number? Of course you do not What was this antique?"

"A, uh, box He said it was probably a box Called the Greywaren That we’d knoe saw it"

The Gray Man doubted that highly He looked at his watch It was nearly eleven; the day was racing by and he had so o?"

"Please --"

The Gray Man shook his head "It was a rhetorical question"

24

Would you like to explain, noe’re in the middle of this puddle?" Adam asked

"Godforsaken puddle," Ronan corrected from beside Gansey As a pale-skinned, dark-haired Celtic sort, he didn’t care for the heat

The five of them -- plus Chainsaw, minus Noah (he had been present, but feebly, when they’d left) -- floated in the boat in the ly man-made lake they had found before It was relentlessly sunny The smell of the field -- wars he’d picked up Adam from his parents’ double-wide

From shore, crows hollered apocalyptically at them Chainsaw hollered back

It really was some of the worst Henrietta had on offer