Extraits

Chapter 1

Dee Ligit didn’t care anymore about being a champion. All he cared about was staying alive.

Two competitors were dead already, and the evidence was right there in front of him. Blood-black smears stained the plywood catch basin that was jokingly called “the Moat.”

Getting hurt was one thing—in the sport of rail surfing you broke bones all the time. But these guys were dead. And not just any two rail surfers. They had been two of the greats.

Antonio the Terrible was a legend. Around from the beginning, when kids first started standing atop trains as a sport, these days he was to rail surfing what Michael Jordan was to basketball. He’d been on a hundred magazine covers in his native Brazil. He had his own line of helmets and knee pads. And now he was dead.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo, and he felt just as stupid as he looked.

“You look fantastic,” said the Romanian image consultant.

“You’re just saying that.”

“I am a professional. I’d never say it if it weren’t true. Simply put, it is the most natural-looking fake mustache I’ve ever seen.”

“You’re trying to butter me up so I don’t splat you.” Remo gripped the Romanian by the belt and dangled him out the eighth-floor window of the Albuquerque Salon of Image Consultation.

“That wasn’t even a consideration,” the image consultant lied.

Remo could smell a lie a mile away, with or without the fake mustache tickling his nostrils. He wrenched off the mustache and flung it out into space. It tumbled to the street like a skydiving caterpillar. The image consultant watched it disappear.