Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [47]
Then I went to my drawer full of cell phones and other useful things. I picked up three or four at random and took the remaining half dozen into the kitchen, where I jammed them into the microwave and pressed the three-minute button. Immediately sparks began to fly and the microwave hummed a distress signal, like I’d given it indigestion. But I wanted the phones good and dead, even though I wasn’t strictly certain I’d ever used any of them.
The sputtering wail of melting plastic and cooking circuitry made my ears hurt, but I ignored it and went back to my bedroom while the phones turned to mush and, very likely, destroyed the microwave. A very loud pop reinforced this suspicion, so I ran back to the kitchen and hit the CANCEL button, since I’d resolved not to burn the place down.
On the turntable behind the glass door I saw a lumpy cluster of smoking, sparking phones, and it occurred to me that I’d better not open that door lest I set off the smoke alarm, which would not be good for my full-on sneak mode.
Back in the bedroom I lingered against my better judgment. I stood beside my bed, staring around the room and fretting, wondering what else I should take. It shouldn’t have been such a major crisis; I’ve abandoned living spaces before, more than once, without any heartbreak or waffling. But most of those abandonings took place at my own whim, at my own instigation—or at the very least, they happened as a result of my own criminal activities.
Maybe that was the problem.
I didn’t feel like I was leaving. I felt like I was being unjustly pursued.
I wanted to muster some righteous indignation, but I was too hyped up on my own fear to manage it. I’m not often driven to tears by such things, but as I stood there, hunting desperately for something to gather—or maybe just dithering in my confusion—I almost wanted to cry.
But after a minute or two of hand-fluttering, I pulled myself together and grabbed a duffel out of the closet. I crammed it full of my most worn clothes and a pair of beloved boots that Fluevog doesn’t make anymore, and I left everything else. I went out the way I came in, for whatever silly reason I couldn’t tell you. But back out in the night, on the roof, beside the mildly irritated pigeons and the occasional rat that ran along the power lines, I jumped back down to the ground and walked the rest of the way back to my car.
I didn’t have a parking ticket.
I didn’t really expect one.
I threw the duffel bag and my purse onto the passenger seat, leaned my forehead against the steering wheel, and forced myself to think.
What now? Where should I go? What should I do?
I’d sent Ian and Cal off to Ballard, and I’d left the kids as secure as I could leave them, so I was faced with a handful of options—none of which seemed strictly ideal. I could officially and completely leave the city, pretending that I’d never heard of any of them and that I didn’t owe any of them anything. But while I was prepared to insist that I owed my feral squatters nothing, I was harder-pressed to conclude that I didn’t owe Ian the time of day.
True, he was the one who’d gotten me into this mess, but he did warn me. And I didn’t believe (then, or now) that he’d deliberately put me on a federal watch list and sent the men in black after me. At this point, I was already eyeballs-deep in his problem anyway. There was an excellent chance that if I couldn’t solve Ian’s problems, I might never untangle myself from Official Interest. And God help me if whoever was after me put two and two together, realizing that the woman in the condo was in fact the thief known as Cheshire Red to all those international agencies.
But I was getting ahead of myself. I was doing it again, assuming the worst and doing my best to plot against it, even though the worst-case scenario is often either incorrect or vastly under-calculated.