Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [48]
None of this changed anything. I was mired in Ian’s situation whether I liked it or not, and if I’d had the option of declining his case before, that option had gone out the window when I’d taken that PDF from the Bad Hatter. Logic dictated that I needed to see this through, and sort it out at the source if I ever hoped to resume my wholly understated existence.
Merely coming to this decision bolstered me a bit, and made the world look a little less overwhelming. I could do it! All I needed to do was track down the missing paperwork, hand it over to Ian, perhaps flee the country with him and Cal (hey, why not?), and start over Elsewhere, as I’ve done a dozen times before.
Plan: Achieved.
I reached for my car keys and slipped the right one into the ignition. The moment before I turned it, a sleek black car with government plates went sliding around the corner with all the perfect quietness and glide of a UFO. If that thing had an engine in it, I couldn’t hear it—but there’s always the possibility that I’d become totally unhinged with fear.
I backpedaled for a second, trying to rationalize and justify a means whereby that car was absolutely not cruising my neighborhood because its driver knew where I lived, but within moments that car was joined by a second vehicle, rolling smoothly down the perpendicular road and vanishing around the side of an Indian restaurant that had been closed for hours. The sneaky black sedans moved with preternatural slickness, like they were touring the town on frictionless tires.
I sank down low in the driver’s seat until, it was to be fervently prayed, anyone driving past couldn’t see me. Carefully but quickly, I fired my hand up to the rearview mirror—tilting it so that I could see the street outside without revealing my oh-so-clever hiding place … in the front seat of my car.
The first car oozed past and turned down the street I’d walked along mere minutes earlier; the second car was out of sight. Both of them had government plates, which I noted with a god-awful sinking feeling. I didn’t see anything else and I didn’t hear anything else, but once I couldn’t see either one of them anymore, I took a chance and started the Thunderbird. It came to life almost cheerfully, and far too loudly for my comfort—but at least it started. I’d been half afraid that the engine would pull a horror-movie cliché on me and refuse to turn over.
I eased the car forward toward the stop sign and pretended to mind my own business all the way into the main drag, where I took excellent care to obey every damn traffic law I could think of, to such maniacal excess that it no doubt looked far more suspicious than if I’d just gunned the car and shot down the hill.
Nobody stopped me. No flashing red lights or crow-black cars with tinted windows came stalking up to my bumper. And eventually I was away. I was out of my neighborhood and instinctively heading toward the interstate again, but I stopped myself downtown, pulling into an all-night parking garage to regroup and make some more distinct plans than “solve Ian’s problem and bill him an arm and a leg.”
I parked in a back corner of the bottom floor, in a half-empty row of other vehicles that had been abandoned over the evening by third-shift workers or drunks. I pulled Ian’s file out of my bag and examined it again, hunting for direction or inspiration under the lemon-yellow and sickly orange security lights of the garage.
Cal’s atrocious handwriting stood out from the margins of the first thing I grabbed.
“Holtzer Point, St. Paul.”
But whatever Holtzer Point had once held, it was long gone—stolen by Mr. 887-something-or-another, and relocated to parts unknown.
I reached up to click on the car’s dome light so I could read a little better, then turned it off again when I realized it made me more visible. Such indecision. I was plagued with it.
This guy. Mr. 887 … forget it. In my head I nicknamed him The Other Thief.
Whoever he was, I needed him.
And I had no idea where to find him, but it didn’t sound like Uncle Sam knew, either. This was a problem. I couldn