Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [149]
And I knew to start looking for Jeffery Sykes.
18
I lost my storehouse holdings in the raid that nearly spelled the end of Domino and Pepper’s leisure squatting, but I recovered some of that loot, too—from the federal facility downtown where it was cataloged as evidence but, as far as I could tell, mostly tied up in red tape. Serious efforts to identify and return the property hadn’t been made, or if they had, they’d met with minimal success.
It was difficult to say how much the authorities knew about what they’d found.
Bruner had staged the initial raid, but he didn’t have any real interest in the building’s contents, since I, personally, was not among them. The stash had just been dumped off at a precinct storage facility where cold-case miscellany and stray evidential bits were sent to be forgotten.
I didn’t bust down the door and throw everything into the back of a U-Haul, even though I probably could have. Instead I let myself inside the quiet way, and after deciding what I could and couldn’t live without, I removed the choicer pieces an item at a time, over a period of weeks.
The history of international crime is the history of official agencies fighting for dominance, and failing to communicate. I might never know exactly how much of this had occurred. I could only proceed as if everyone knew everything about me—worst-case scenario—and act with appropriate caution.
But I’m good at caution.
I bought a new building, since my old one was formally condemned and taped off. The “new” building was 110 years old, and it was only a couple of miles from my original hiding place.
Because I’m nothing if not a creature of habit.
The new location had some perks over the old one. For one thing, it was almost fully restored inside. Much like the parkour parlor in D.C., it had been gutted and refitted for office space … but the economy had tanked, and the offices had never come. So I picked it up for pennies on the dollar, turned the top floor into perfectly serviceable housing in less than five weeks, and furnished three separate lofts.
One was for Pepper and Domino, because it was time to quit deluding myself. One was for Ian, who had no place else to go … and I didn’t want him to leave yet anyway. I’d made him a promise and I didn’t intend to break it. Or maybe that was only the excuse I used in order to keep him close. Because I definitely wanted him close, and he wasn’t exactly running away from me, either.
The kiss on the roof of Bruner’s office … it’d meant something. And given time, given space—and given a little distance from the events that had upended both our lives—I think we both hoped it’d turn into something more.
But for the moment, we were both on edge and both trying to find our equilibrium. We didn’t talk about the kiss, and for a while we didn’t repeat it. I think we were too afraid of chasing each other away, when all we wanted to do was cling together like a couple of baby monkeys. Yeah, we’re pretty goddamn stupid. And broken, and lonely, and needy in very different ways, but those differences weren’t enough to pry us apart or let us really come together. If you know what I mean.
So one of the lofts was for me, because (a) I wasn’t ready to share absolutely everything with Ian; and (b) my Capitol Hill condo was contaminated by filthy feeb fingers. I’d never returned to it.
Instead, I’d faked my death for the fourth time since I’d actually died in 1924.
This time, by all reports I had been Helene Marks, who sadly passed away of cancer in Canada, where I’d gone to seek treatment—lacking sufficient health insurance to seek treatment in the United States. The death before, I was Amelia Westerfeld, and I perished in 1978—in a car crash in Mexico. Before I became Amelia, I was Christine Johnson, who expired of an allergy to shellfish in Singapore in 1951; and before I masqueraded as