Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [26]
That museum contact is another story. I’ll get around to telling it later; I’m wandering far enough off topic as it is.
Anyway, I got home to Seattle and went looking for my box of goodies, and when I found it, it had been opened. It had been raided. And the culprits were still in the building. I rounded up Domino and interrogated him, because I couldn’t find Pepper—who back then was just plain tiny, and who has always had a gift for hiding in unlikely and inaccessible places.
Domino clearly didn’t know shit. I figured out he was only squatting so I made plans for better locks and prepared to evict him … but I couldn’t. He wouldn’t let me, and he had a good excuse. His little sister was somewhere in the building and he couldn’t find her. He couldn’t leave without her, could he? No, no of course not.
I gave him twenty-four hours to shoehorn the kid out of her hiding spot and told him that when I came back, they’d both better be gone.
But when I came back, she was still hiding—or she’d gone into hiding again, whichever. Domino begged another twenty-four hours off me, and when I came back yet again, I couldn’t find either one of them. To this very day I don’t know where they were hiding. They won’t tell me, in case I get a wild hare up my ass and decide to throw them out again.
How did they know I wouldn’t call the cops and force an eviction? My guess is that they’d done enough exploring and/or opening of boxes to gather that I wasn’t exactly jonesing for civic scrutiny. Or maybe they were just stubborn enough not to care, I don’t know.
From then on out I started treating them—to abuse the comparison again—like stray cats. I tried to coax them out of hiding with food, and that didn’t work. So I tried to coax them out with money, and that didn’t work either. Then I tore the place apart trying to find them and fling them out onto the streets with my bare hands, if necessary, and I failed royally at this attempt also.
It took me more than a year to figure out that I was taking care of them. All that time, I thought I’d been trying to eliminate some pests. But no. I’d been feeding the strays, and now they belonged to me.
The more I thought about it, the more accustomed to the idea I became. After all, if homeless people were going to make themselves comfortable on my property, they might as well be homeless people who answered to me. Eventually I gave them a prepaid cell phone (for emergency use only, thank you, Pepper, good girl) and turned the power on so they wouldn’t freeze to death during the winter. Could I do more for them? Probably. But remember what I said about not keeping pet people? This factory isn’t my doll-house, and those kids aren’t my Barbies.
But I let them keep the duvet. They’d already been sleeping all over it anyway; I’d have had to dry-clean it, and I hate the smell of dry-cleaning chemicals. So it was just as well.
I asked Pepper, since she was more pleasant to talk to, “You guys still doing all right for food?”
She nodded. Domino answered. “Duh. Yes, we’re fine for food. I bring in plenty.”
He meant he stole plenty, but what was I going to do, lecture him about it? “Okay,” I said instead. “As long as you’re covered, I won’t worry about you. Good job on the lookout, Peps. Keep up the good work.”
She beamed up at me, and I gave her a wink.
I told the pair of them to keep their eyes peeled in case Trevor had any friends, and I barred the place up behind me as I left. I wasn’t worried about locking the siblings inside. They’d get out if they wanted to. They always did.
I finally convinced myself that future intruders would have a tougher time gaining entry, and that the kids would hardly sleep the rest of the night anyway, for all the excitement.
I pinched my purse and felt Ian Stott’s envelope distorting the bag’s shape from within. Morning was coming in another couple of hours, and I had some reading to do.
3
Back at the homestead, I was too wound up to settle in for the day—even