Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [14]
It wasn’t fair, but life isn’t fair—and as far as I know, neither is anyone’s afterlife. I hope I’m wrong and there’s a heaven or a hell, and that in the long run, everyone gets what’s coming. Then again, if we all get what’s coming to us, there won’t be anybody left to see the flash of light and the puff of smoke. So I guess I don’t really want to know. Sometimes I think I don’t want to live forever, or live however long a vampire can make it last, but then I wonder what happens next and I’m too chicken to die.
And then I see someone like Ian.
“Forever” loses a lot of its shine when you can’t see a damn thing.
At half past one, Cal returned. He didn’t come inside to interrupt; I saw him through the window, milling around in the cold. He stomped his feet and tugged an oversized scarf tighter around his neck, and I would’ve felt sorry for him if he hadn’t been too hip to wear a coat.
I could hear him, too—or sense him, or feel him, or whatever. He was sending out a psychic inquiry, the details of which I couldn’t discern. But I got the gist. He was asking if all was well and if it was time for him to escort his boss home. I don’t know if it was a school night or what, but Ian took the hint and signaled for the check.
I let him get it. He’d done most of the drinking, anyway.
2
Ian and I said our good-byes, and I said I’d give him a status update and a cost estimate within a few days. He agreed to this because—as he’d made clear—he was a man with reasonable expectations.
He knew better than to think I could fix his problem tonight. I’d need to pin down locations, study security systems, confirm specifics, and decide what equipment I might need to acquire. I own quite a selection of useful devices and helpful tools, but sometimes I have to order online just like everybody else.
There are faster ways to steal things, but none of those ways are very conducive to flying under any mortal radars.
Sloppy thieving leads to broken or damaged loot. Broken or damaged loot leads to a poor reputation; a poor reputation leads to fewer jobs; fewer jobs lead to lower rates; and lower rates lead to less money and eventual homelessness, starvation, et cetera.
Sure, I’m enlarging the problem to show detail, but you see how I think.
I could sit here and complain about it—the way I live in permanent consideration of how every slight slipup could set into motion a chain of events that will lead to my death, disrepute, and ruin—but I’ll restrain myself. I can’t really complain about it, since that obsessive instinct has kept me alive and fed for all these years.
It’s all my father’s fault, anyway. Isn’t that how it goes? We get to blame the things we don’t like on our parents?
My dad’s been dead now for longer than he was alive, but he taught me how successful being crazy can make you. He was a detective, see. He worked with the Pinkerton agency in California, back when I was a kid, and he was one of the best damn detectives you ever heard of. They still talk about him out there, and there are still pictures of him on the walls, in the boardrooms, and in the offices. I’ve always had it in the back of my head someplace that Dash Hammett based Sam Spade on my dad, Larry Pendle, but that’s probably wishful thinking on my part.
I met Dash once or twice when I was little. He was a thin, handsome guy who was probably too smart for the room, but he didn’t try to lord it over anybody. I don’t remember much about him, except for him telling me once that my daddy was a great gumshoe, and I didn’t know what a gumshoe was. I wound up with a weird and deeply incorrect idea of what my father did for a living.
Anyway, I liked Dash. And when I sneak myself one of his books, every now and again, before bedtime at sunrise, I hear my father’s voice when I read along to Spade.
If it sounds like I’m digressing, that