Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [82]
Instead I told him, “I’m not lucky, I’m persistent.”
“And whose records do you want?”
“It wouldn’t matter if I told you. He isn’t mentioned by name, just a serial number.”
“All right.” He signaled to me that he wanted more scotch, twitching his finger my way as if I were a bartender. “Then what do you hope to find when you score those records?”
I serviced him anyway. I mean, you know. I topped off his drink, and let mine stay dry. And I figured that possibly, given the circumstances, honesty was the best policy. Veiled honesty, but honesty all the same. My inner choir girl sang.
“One of the other victims of the project is a client of mine. He needs his medical records.”
“Medical records? Can we really call them that?”
“I don’t see why not,” I all but snapped at him. “His body was experimented upon, and there are records of it. What else would you call it?”
“I don’t know. Necropsy?”
“Fuck you very much. Dead we may be, but still we bleed,” I said, trying to quote something and bombing it. I cleaned up my fumble with a lazy, “You know what I mean. You wouldn’t want someone cutting on your eyes either, I assume. Or”—I went for the heart of the matter as soon as I remembered where it was—“you wouldn’t want anyone doing it to your sister.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” he said with a flare of something hot and hateful.
“Then don’t begrudge my client his humanity either. Asshole,” I added.
He picked up his glass like he’d like to empty it further, or maybe whap me upside the head with it, but he did neither of these things. He sat it back down again and leaned against the counter, raising his hands to his face and rubbing his eyes. “It’s been so damn long,” he said. “She’s been gone all this time, and I’ve been invisible. And then you.” He shot me another napalm glare, but it surprised me by cooling into something more sorrowful. Mercurial, this one. I liked it. It was hot.
“I guess it doesn’t matter. If you didn’t lead them to me, someone else would have, eventually. Or I would’ve screwed up, or someone would’ve recognized me, somewhere.”
“Does that mean you aren’t mad at me?” I asked, just in case.
“I didn’t say that. But it was probably a question of when, not if. Hey,” he said suddenly, in a whole different tone. Then he began patting himself down, running his fingers inside the seams of his clothes. Only then I remembered—they weren’t his clothes. He told me, “I nicked these off one of the guys who was chasing us.”
“Like I didn’t figure that out.”
“I just wanted to make it clear that I didn’t mug any innocent bystander.” He grabbed his own ass and then, with a victorious flourish, produced a very slim wallet. It was not the world’s most promising wallet. It almost looked like a pair of leather credit cards bound together, which led me to guess what it actually was. An ID folder.
I sidled up to him, sneaking in close to look around his arm and over his shoulder. “What does it say?”
“It says I mugged Peter Desarme.” He brandished the badge so I could see it in all its glory. “CIA agent.”
“Wait. What?”
“That’s what it says,” he noted redundantly.
He let me swipe it out of his hand. I examined it up close and personal. It looked real. “I don’t get it.”
“What’s not to get?”
“I figured these were army guys. Or, high-ranking, suit-wearing … I don’t know. Men in Black. In my head I’d been calling them feebs. But CIA? That’s really out of left field.”
“There’s no good reason men in black can’t be CIA agents. And besides, it’s not that crazy,” he objected. “Project Bloodshot was closed. Maybe it was reopened as a civilian operation.”
“How do you know it’s closed? I mean how do you really know? We’re talking about the military. It’s a whole organization of left hands dedicated to not knowing what