Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [27]
It was too late in the evening (or too close to morning, however you look at it) for me to get much work done, but thanks to the wonders of the Internet I could still get prepped and ready for the next night’s business.
Ian Stott’s envelope sat on the desk beside the computer. The blind vampire was a paying client and I should’ve started with his case, but floating somewhere in my purse were two scraps of paper relevant to Trevor, and they were fresher in my memory.
I retrieved the business card and the torn sheet of notepaper. The card had a handy-dandy URL listed on it: www.northwestparcoursaddicts.com. Sounded manly. I plugged it in and let it load, and yes, the testosterone reeked out from the digital window.
The home page looked like a high-school boy’s idea of a good time on the weekend. Lots of black, lots of bulky guys wearing gray-scale camo, lots of gear, lots of posing in an adventuresome fashion. Up top there was a link “About Parcours,” and on that page I learned that my idiot trespasser might well have been telling the truth after all.
If I was feeling uncharitable, I might call parcours a French martial art designed around the skill of running away. But I was forced to admit, some of the videos looked pretty cool. It consisted mostly of running, jumping, and climbing around on stuff in odd places.
And oh, look. Another link.
“Two great tastes that taste great together: Urban Exploration and Parcours.”
Oh dear. The more I read, the more it appeared that the dumb-ass had been on the up-and-up. He belonged to a club of people who liked to (a) poke around in abandoned buildings, and (b) climb around on stuff while dressed like commandos from a video game.
Even so, I couldn’t beat myself up about it too much. After all, he wasn’t just unlucky to pick my building—he was stupid, too. As I understood the rules on the website, you don’t explore anyplace that people routinely visit, occupy, or presently utilize. My old factory may look like a dump from the outside, but once he got in, he should’ve known he’d blown it. He should’ve turned around on the heels of his faux army boots and left the way he’d arrived.
It was his own fault that he was dead.
Something still felt “off” about it, though. The rules on the website were clear, and when I clicked through the image galleries, all the posted pictures depicted places that had been visibly empty for decades. All the other boys were playing by the rules. So why not my supper?
The other piece of paper drew my eye. Major, said the one legible word. Major as in “British slang for important”? Or major as in “ranking military official”? I didn’t imagine that a five AM phone call would please anyone waiting at the other end of the line, so I didn’t do any dialing yet, but on the off chance it might tell me something, I plugged the digits into a search engine and came up with nothing.
Que sera.
Oh well. I could sit and obsess about the intruder all day, or I could use the residual energy from feeding on him to be productive.
I reached for Ian’s envelope.
It’d become battered while riding in my purse, but everything inside was intact. There wasn’t much to mess up—mostly just some photos and negatives, and some documents that had been declassified, though only in the loosest sense. Long black bars blocked out huge chunks of text for the sake of national security, ass-covering, or God knew what else.
The photos were grainy black-and-whites, with coordinates listed on the back and time/date stamps in yellow. The dates roughly matched Ian’s incarceration ten years previously. At the center of each picture was one building in particular—amid several others, with what appeared to be a wall around the whole compound. It could certainly be a small military base.
What I could see of the surrounding terrain wasn’t very helpful.