Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [124]
Ah, the meat of the matter. “Don’t worry, ghoul. In another night or two I’ll be out of your hair and you and Ian can go back to your little love nest or whatever—and you’ll never have to hear from me again.”
“Yeah, well, I thought that would be the case once we got his records, but it wasn’t. Here we are, still hanging around. Here I am, driving the getaway car from the scene of a murder—”
“Scene of a snack.”
“—and Ian won’t leave yet, not while he thinks you’ve got more to learn or more to tell him. But you don’t fool me.”
“Oh I don’t?” I asked rhetorically. Previously I’d had him fooled on a number of points, but this was not the time to rub it in.
“No, you don’t. You’re just a selfish brat with a big bank account, and there’s nothing you can tell us that will do us any more good. Ian’s already sent the records up to his doctor in Canada, and there’s no damn reason—” He swatted the steering wheel in a tepid display of anger. “—none at all for us to be hanging around D.C. waiting for you to expose everything, and everybody. Waiting for you to get us all killed, or worse.”
“Oh ye of little faith,” I said, watching the breathless thrall squeeze and unsqueeze the finger notches on the wheel. “And for your information I like Ian, and I have no intention of putting him into any danger. Or you either, you little shit.” I went immediately for Domino’s pet name and suddenly felt unfaithful for it. At the moment, I was actually feeling kindly disposed toward the quasi-homeless kid, but this fucking hipster was jumping rope on my last nerve.
“I didn’t put you in any danger,” I went on, “and I didn’t leave you there stranded, like I could have. I didn’t even leave the body anywhere that someone would stumble over it anytime soon. We’re in the clear. They’ll wonder where he went, wait around for a while, and then start looking. We have plenty of getaway time and nothing to tie us to him, or to what happened to him.”
“Except a room full of people.”
“Less than a dozen people,” I said. “Maybe they’ll describe me in more detail than ‘uh, some girl’ and maybe they won’t. But nobody knows we arrived together, and I don’t think anyone noticed we left together. I’m telling you, we’re in the clear. Everything’s fine.”
“Where’d you put him?”
“I took him upstairs and stuffed him in the bathroom. Renovation hasn’t reached that far yet, and the whole floor looks like nobody’s gone up there in a hundred years.”
“You stuck him in a bathroom and figured that’d cover it?”
I gritted my teeth and said slowly, “I stuck him … in an unusable bathroom … on a disused floor … of a building that’s more abandoned than occupied. I had to almost pull a door off its hinges because it’d rusted shut. Nobody’s going to look there for ages. Not until he starts to smell, and maybe not even then.”
I had no idea if I was telling him the truth or not, but the general fact of the matter stood: We had plenty of time to leave the scene, and we were unlikely to be connected to it. We’d be thousands of miles away before anyone even thought to ask the parkour kids what had happened the night that GI Jackass went missing.
“Maybe that’s your problem,” I mused aloud.
“What? What’s my problem?” he asked with the kind of scorn that told me he’d like to give a dissertation on my problems (as he perceived them), but he was good enough to let me finish.
“You’re not good enough at getting away.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that fleeing the scene is an art, and I’ve damn well mastered it. You can get away with a tiny bit of sloppiness so long as the getaway is clean.