Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [119]
“Well, before we get to it, I want to know what it is.” Really, I wanted to get his attention and get him talking. I wanted him to look at me and know that something was wrong.
I lucked out and a couple of the other guys in front of me were ignorant on the matter, and they mumbled that they, too, would like some information. I was half afraid Cal would chime in, but he didn’t.
Good ghoul, Cal. Don’t agree with me too much. Don’t even notice me. Don’t forget, you’re mostly here in case something goes horribly, horribly wrong.
“All right,” Bolton relented. The irritated twitch to one eyebrow told me that this was considered jumping some gun, somewhere, and that I’d derailed his evening’s lesson plans. But he was game, and so he said, “Urban exploration is, at its core, a propensity toward trespassing in abandoned buildings. It doesn’t always go hand in hand with parkour, but you could … I don’t know. You could think of it as a master’s class in parkour, if you wanted to.”
“A master’s class with night-vision goggles and burglary gear?” I followed up, knowing I was pushing my luck and wondering if it wasn’t too much—if he didn’t have some secret panic button hidden in his uniform, or a lackey at the table behind me. Any moment, the doors could burst in and armed maniacs from Project Bloodshot (or whatever it’d morphed into) would take me away and drop me in a basement on an island, never to be seen again.
Or I could needle the fucker a little more and trust my powers of bullshit and escape to see me through. I squeezed the handles of my go-bag and it gave me confidence. Maybe undue confidence. It didn’t matter.
“No,” he barked. “We don’t do that kind of thing.”
Everybody in the room instantly thought he was lying.
He stuck to his guns anyway. “It’s not a master’s class because anybody’s burglarizing anything. It’s a master’s class because there’s a lot of legal legwork to untangle, making sure that the abandoned buildings are actually abandoned, and that they don’t belong to anybody who’ll prosecute if you get caught. Working your way up to urban exploration also means you go out there with a good working knowledge of the distinctions between breaking-and-entering and merely trespassing, and the legal hairsplitting that can mean the difference between jail time and a slap on the wrist. But since that’s the master’s class and this is the bunny slope, we’re going to save that for later, Miss …”
He was clearly cueing me to give him a name, so I said, “Raylene. Raylene Spade.”
“Spade, very nice,” he said, and I felt a stab of condescension that said he knew for a fact that I was lying. I didn’t like the condescension because it had come radiating off him, flaring through my psychic radar like a laser beam, not a flashlight. Oh yes. He knew something now, or he suspected it so positively that the semantics wouldn’t mean the difference between saving my ass and becoming a pain in his.
“Something funny about that?” I played it cool.
“Not at all, Miss Spade. But we’ll save the UE talk for later and for now, if you don’t mind, we’ll talk brass tacks instead.”
What a stupid expression. There were no tacks involved, and not much that any idiot who’d ever seen a cop show on television couldn’t have sussed out. That which followed was a miniature thesis on how to fall without breaking an ankle, how to roll without bashing your head in, and how to climb without tearing all the skin off your knees. It was basically a twenty-minute starter class on stunt falls, and I could see how it might be useful to some of the pasty-faced high-schoolers present, but I had to pretend to give it my rapt attention while my real attention wandered elsewhere.
Near as I could gather—a qualifier that was in no way authoritative—Bolton seemed to be alone, insomuch as he seemed to be the only military representative present. If anyone else was there on Uncle Sam’s dime, he was out of uniform and keeping his allegiances to himself. But as I’d previously speculated, that didn’t mean Bolton didn’t have an easy means of