Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [52]
Boy. The charm just never stopped with that guy, but I couldn’t pretend the email wasn’t useful. It didn’t tell me much, but I’m good at reading between the lines, and what I saw between the lines told me I really, really didn’t like this douchebag.
It also told me that “Major” was more of a nickname than a title, if he was retired. I wasn’t sure what to make of that, except that plenty of people retire from the military and go on to other careers—and just because my new client had been a victim of military manipulation and mutilation, that didn’t mean anything. Could be a perfectly meaningless coincidence.
Only I hate coincidences. So I wrote him back:
My name is Abigail, in case you care. I don’t have a problem poking around in other people’s stuff, believe me. I’m not really worried about this danger of which you speak, but I’d like a little more info. Are we talking crazed drug dealers here? Because if you want me to spy on the Mafia or organized meth-heads or anything, you’re out of your fucking mind.
Other than that, I might be interested. Should I meet you someplace? Do you have an office in Seattle, or are you somewhere else? Trevor didn’t say. And I haven’t seen that asshole either, or I’d just ask him. I’ll call his roommate and leave him a message that way. Maybe he’ll get back to one of us, one of these days.
Abbie
My mother’s name was Abigail. Perhaps I’m desecrating her memory or something, but I doubt she would’ve cared.
If I was lucky, he’d respond in an open, honest fashion—informing me of what his precise plans were, where exactly he was located, and freely volunteering the identity of his financial backers. I didn’t ask any of this stuff because I couldn’t think of a credible way to work it in without giving myself away as someone with a way-too-personal interest.
I closed the laptop and settled in for the evening.
The next night was supposed to be clear and cold and moonless, so that made it as good a night as any to take my life and sanity into my own hands. And God help me, but they weren’t kidding about the cold. What amounted to a chilly, damp mid-fall in Seattle was more like a deep freeze in Minnesota. Maybe I ought to have expected it, but I’d never been there before and the shock of the air outside was enough to stun me. It was like breathing liquid nitrogen; it went straight down my throat and chilled me from the inside out.
I shook it off as I kept moving, down to the car I’d bought off a used lot an afternoon or two previously. Yes, I can go out in the afternoons, if I stay in the northern latitudes. I love it when the sun sets at three thirty—everything is still open for a while after I wake up, and I can go shopping for anything I need. Summers are more of a trick, I admit. But most of the year the night is long, and it belongs to me.
My new vehicle was a very shiny Nissan with fully a hundred thousand miles on it, but somebody loved it once, and it was in good shape. I think its original color was white, but it’d been painted over with a dark green that looked like pond slime at midnight, so I liked it, and I bought it, and voilà. New wheels.
I rolled these new wheels out through the maze of neighborhoods and across roads that had been scraped so clean of ice, they couldn’t have chilled a can of Diet Coke.
I gave three quiet cheers for Minnesota. In Seattle a dusty inch of anything white and chilly means the city lapses into full-on panic mode, as if each falling flake crashes to earth with its own individual baggie of used hypodermic needles. It’s ridiculous.
But the city before me was shiny and dark, hard-frozen around its edges and glinting from the ice that coated the corners of buildings like cake frosting made of crushed glass. The streets were empty since the wee hours were approaching and hey, for all that I’d cheered, St. Paul was no Seattle, and there didn’t appear to be much in the way of nightlife—at least not through the places where I was driving.
I had a printout of directions from the Internet sitting on the passenger seat beside me.