Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [90]
“Yeah. Well by force of my personal habit—my car. I drive.”
“Wait a minute.”
“What?” I asked.
“Should we even take this car?”
“What?”
He said, “Just in case we’re being watched. Satellites. You know.”
I stood there with the keys hovering before the lock, suddenly torn. “Do you think? I mean, it’s a big dark car. There have to be zillions of them in the Greater Atlanta metro area. I always pick the blandest vehicle possible.”
“Easily jillions of them,” he agreed amiably. “But this is the one you drove to the Review, right?”
“Right.”
“And not long after you showed up, they showed up.”
I pulled the keys up into my palm and frowned. “True. But they didn’t follow us here.”
“It’s a busy part of town and, like you said, big dark car. Jillions of them. You might’ve lost them. It’s hard to follow one car through a river of cars, especially when it looks like any other car.”
“I like the way you think,” I said, even though I hated what he was thinking. “But … if I lost them before we made it home—and God help us if we didn’t, and they’re only watching us, stalking us from afar—then they won’t know to chase this car again. Will they? I mean, in case there are …” I had a new scariest word, something to usurp reconnaissance. I said it. “Satellites? Watching us?”
He shook his head and said, “Maybe we’re overthinking it, but I’d rather overthink than underthink. If you were followed …” I began to object but he held up a hand and said quickly, “And I’m not saying that you were, but just in case … let’s put one more piece of distance between what they might know and what we’re really doing.”
“Fine. What do you suggest?”
He looked around the parking garage. “No cameras in here?”
“None. And I like it that way.”
“Then how about that car?” He pointed at the precise opposite of my mock-cop-mobile. A tiny white Prius.
“Are you shitting me? That’s a hybrid. What if we have to run away from someone? Jesus. We’d have to get out and push. Or God help us if we have to pass somebody going up a hill. No way. Forget it. What about that one?” I indicated a gray Cherokee with a few years on it.
“That one?”
I said, “We could climb difficult terrain in it. Four-wheel drive, I bet.”
“Control freak much?”
“You have no idea,” I said. Though he’d spent nearly twenty-four hours in my company, and he probably could guess.
“Whatever makes you happy,” he muttered, and that was an attitude I liked to hear. “Got a Slim Jim?”
His directions to the cemetery were precise and limited, doled out in monosyllables all the way to the other side of town, where we got caught in the midst of a three-car pileup and the subsequent cleanup. On the other side of that, we puttered down into a neighborhood with which I was unfamiliar. It was somewhere on the south side, at the edge of the sprawl that makes Atlanta look like a big ol’ stain on any given map of Georgia.
We found the general location and parked a few blocks away—or at least, the general equivalent of blocks. There weren’t many buildings and there weren’t strict blocks; it looked like an abandoned quadrant of someplace that was never very well built up in the first place. I almost asked Adrian why his parents had put up a marker there, of all places, but then I remembered their modest home and I realized that the property out here in the boonies was probably pretty cheap.
The cemetery itself was surrounded by a low wooden fence that was too small and rotted to keep anybody out, and unlikely to keep anybody in, either. We found a particularly darkened corner, away from even the fuzzy white lights of a distant streetlamp that was probably a hundred yards away.
I heard a rumble, somewhere not too far off. I gave it a second of attention and called it a train, then recalled that we’d driven over tracks. This distant clatter of metal wheels on rattling rails, the soft shush of our feet pushing through the grass, and the salty puffs of my companion’s breath were all I heard. We were all alone—blessedly alone, but almost unnervingly alone, there with the dead.
“This way,” he whispered,