Tall, dark, and dangerous, Reny Stark is from the wrong side of the tracks. A criminal, a thug, and a brawler, he’s the best at making bad choices, until one such choice landed him in prison for five years. Now Reny is out and has a great big chip on his shoulder. Having lost everything, he has no future. He’s unemployable, and the only place he can afford to live is in a cheap rundown room in the plague pit of New York City called Gangland. At one time he didn’t care what he had to do to stay alive, but now he’s trying to stay clean -- but the gangs won’t let him. Since he’s not a member of any gang, they’ve fingered him as their assassin, and one night he is forced to honor a contract on someone’s life, or die. Having little choice, he haunts the city streets until he finds his target, and hates him on sight. He’s everything Reny is not. He’s young, ambitious, good looking, and with a great future ahead of him. This man is so clean he squeaks while Reny is covered in the dirt of the ghetto, stuck with a prison record, and no hope of ever getting out. Because his target has had an easy life, Reny expected a soft, prissy guy that wouldn’t put up much of a fight, but instead he looms hard and tough, and refuses to go down. Ric Ferrand may be young, but he knows all about living a hard life and the tough choices that come with it. Although he’s always had kind of a yen for the wild side of life he’s tried not to let the evil of the city pull him down. But now the streets are fighting back in the person of Reny Stark, the scariest, sexiest, and most complicated ex-con this big city has ever produced -- and this tough guy wants to kill him. Then something happens that Ric didn’t count on. He slowly gets so know and understand the brute whose next stop is Death Row, and begins to have feelings for him. Taking a big chance, he invites him home where the contract killing gets lost between the sheets making Ric realize some guys are just better when they’re bad.

Walk on the Wild Side

This clearly wasn’t his part of town.


The feeling he got here was one of culture and elegance. No running in the streets, no gunshots, no drive-by shootings, no dead bodies in dumpsters. Here everything seemed organized, civil, ordered. When he thought of his own place in Gangland there was such a sharp difference between the two it almost took his breath.


Suddenly he wanted this kind of life more than he wanted anything he might have left there. He wanted to make a new life, he wanted to be a new man, and as manly and tough as he tried to be he couldn’t keep the tears from edging from out of his eyes and falling along his cheek because he knew it was an impossible dream.


When Ric realized Reny was crying, he pushed the gun he was holding on him aside, took him in his arms, and comforted him.


Chapter 8