Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [30]
“You will? You promise? You’re not just trying to get rid of me?”
“Oh, I’m trying to get rid of you, yes,” I assured him. “I just woke up. I need a shower. It’s kind of cold in here, and I’m in my underwear. So make no mistake about it—I am trying to get rid of you. But I’ll also make a point to call you in another week or so. Deal?”
The pretty-pretty princess sighed and said, “Fine. I suppose I’ll have to take it.”
“I suppose you will,” I said, and I hung up without any more salutation than he’d offered at the start of the conversation. It’s okay. He knows me. I know him. We never take it personally … or at least I don’t. Maybe he takes it personally sometimes, but as long as he continues to throw work my way once in a while, I don’t give a damn.
But I didn’t really need the work right at that moment, and if he was going to get pissy about it, he could kiss my ass. Sometimes I swear he thinks I’m on call for him, 24/7. Well, I’m not. And he could learn it the hard way, if he had to.
Besides, I had to assume he had other, um, “acquisitions specialists” on the payroll somewhere. If he wasn’t willing to wait a few weeks, he could field the job out to a member of the B-team—if it was such an easy job as all that.
Of course, this made me think that it wasn’t such an easy job after all. Otherwise he would’ve been happy to pay someone else a lot less money to take care of it. Even more reason to put him off.
I wandered back into the bedroom, gathered a few clothes, and took a nice, hot shower—during which I mentally sorted through the things I’d need for the evening. I could start on the Internet, and why wouldn’t I? The information was easy, free, and even if it wasn’t accurate (which was always a risk), it usually gave me a good starting point for finding better facts elsewhere.
Within about half an hour, I’d learned that Holtzer Point was a top secret facility in St. Paul, Minnesota. I’d gathered that much already, but it was nice to have it confirmed by a series of websites that appeared to have been composed by middle-school-aged conspiracy theorists with a passion for stupid-looking animated graphics.
Depending on which frothy-mouthed Internet pulpit-beater I chose to believe, Holzter Point might conceal anything from alien artifacts to Bigfoot’s sperm samples, plus a few pickled flipper babies from Three Mile Island and Jimmy Hoffa’s stomach contents. I’d like to make fun of those guys, but I had information from a blind vampire that the storage facility held details of medical experiments conducted by the military on the unwilling undead.
So far be it from me to call anyone nuts.
I composed an email to a mortal colleague of mine, a guy whom I jokingly call the Bad Hatter. Hey, if I’m Cheshire Red, we might as well run with the Wonderland theme, right? We also have a Red Queen and a White Rabbit. Someone get us a White Queen and a set of flamingo croquet mallets and we’ll be in business.
Though when I talk about Duncan being my colleague, I only mean it in jest. At best he and I (and those other couple of specialists) are a loose network of freelancers. You see, sometimes when you work by yourself in a field such as ours, it helps to share knowledge among professionals. I’m not saying that we watch one another’s backs or anything, because we don’t. It’s more of a back-scratching than a back-watching affair, as in, “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.”
Officially, none of us has ever heard of any of us.
In real life, I’ve got a few email addresses and a phone number or two. I don’t use them often, and the freelancers don’t often use mine. But if I can help a brother out, it’s often worth the trouble of doing so. A year or two previously, the Hatter needed some specs to help him pilfer on-site from a marine recovery operation. I gave him the hookup, and now I needed a hookup in return.
I didn’t know much about Duncan. I might’ve been able to find out more with a little digging,