Bloodshot

by Cherie Priest

  In a flash I turned to the stairwell door and found the sliding bolt I’d spotted as we’d exited. I slipped it into the locked position and then I turned to Lieutenant Bolton, who was attempting a backward scramble up, as if it’d take him away from me.

  And then I fell on him, shoving his head to the side and baring his neck for optimum heavy nibbling. Yes, I remembered what I’d told Cal about nobody getting bitten, but come on.

  I’m a big fat liar.

  13

  Cal swore under his breath, copiously and repeatedly, all the way back from the parkour meeting. He knew what I’d done. He wasn’t psychic or anything; I’d told him, quietly, right before we made a hasty exit back to the rental car and out of the neighborhood.

  “You said you weren’t going to bite anybody.”

  “I wasn’t planning to.” But I’d been leaving it on the table because sometimes you just have to play these things by ear. Sometimes you get a good eyeful of a man-sized action figure—and he knows what you are, and what you can do … and you know what he is, and what he’s done before, or what he’s helping other people do. And you just can’t stand it because for all his bluster and bullshit he’s weak and horrible, and cowardly, and if he caught you, he’d do terrible things to you—the kinds of things that were done to Ian and Isabelle.

  Adrian wouldn’t have any pissy moral qualms about what I’d done. Ian probably wouldn’t, either.

  “I can’t believe you’re being such a bitch about this,” I said to Cal, whose lips were jammed together in a grouch-face scowl.

  “I don’t care that he’s dead. I don’t even care that you killed him,” he insisted, lips still drawn tighter than a clothesline. “I care that you deliberately endangered yourself—and me, let’s not forget me—after all your careful planning, and all your … all your crazy, self-righteous talk about being prepared for anything!”

  “Who’s self-righteous?” I demanded. I’d own up to crazy any day of the week, but self-righteous I was prepared to fight.

  “You—you act like you’ve got everything under control, like nothing that happens will surprise or inconvenience you, and everything is covered all the time because you’ve made all these preparations. These crazy fucking preparations. Did you even use anything at all in that bag of yours?”

  “No, but I might use some of it later.” And I almost certainly would, once I got rid of this crybaby and picked up my drag queen.

  His nostrils flared but he kept his eyes on the road. Deliberately, I assumed. Not wanting to look at me. “We were only supposed to be there looking around. And you didn’t just look around. You didn’t just ask questions. You could’ve gotten us both rounded up and … and wrangled.”

  Wrangled. Stupid word.

  “Wrangled, mangled. Lots of things could’ve happened, but didn’t. And yes, I said I was there to look around, and hey—I looked around. I came to some conclusions and acted on new information. You know what, Cal? That’s called flexibility. You’re one rigid son of a bitch, and someday it’ll get you killed.”

  “I’m more careful than you are.”

  “You’re …?” I was flabbergasted. “Do you seriously want to play Who’s More Careful with me? Because I’ll wipe the floor with you, junior. I’ve been around longer than your great-grandparents and I’ve had plenty of time to become the carefulest person you’ll ever meet!”

  He shook his head, eyes still locked on the road, to the traffic light and to the rear bumper of the car in front of us. “I’m more careful. Ian’s more careful. Lots of people are more careful than you. You’re reckless as hell, but you’re lucky. That’s all.”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  “No, you know what? I take that back. You’re not lucky. You are prepared, just like you like to go on and on and on about. Your ridiculous plans for things that never happen, okay—it’s your coping mechanism, I get that. And it’s a damn good thing you have it. Otherwise you’d have never made it to thirty behaving the way you do. Sometimes, I guess, you save your own ass. But you’re always the one putting your own ass in danger first. And I don’t want to be any part of it.” His nostrils rippled and billowed like peep-show curtains. “And I don’t like Ian being any part of it.”

  Ah, the meat of the matter. “Don’t worry, ghoul. In another night or two I’ll be out of your hair and you and Ian can go back to your little love nest or whatever—and you’ll never have to hear from me again.”

  “Yeah, well, I thought that would be the case once we got his records, but it wasn’t. Here we are, still hanging around. Here I am, driving the getaway car from the scene of a murder—”

  “Scene of a snack.”

  “—and Ian won’t leave yet, not while he thinks you’ve got more to learn or more to tell him. But you don’t fool me.”

  “Oh I don’t?” I asked rhetorically. Previously I’d had him fooled on a number of points, but this was not the time to rub it in.

  “No, you don’t. You’re just a selfish brat with a big bank account, and there’s nothing you can tell us that will do us any more good. Ian’s already sent the records up to his doctor in Canada, and there’s no damn reason—” He swatted the steering wheel in a tepid display of anger. “—none at all for us to be hanging around D.C. waiting for you to expose everything, and everybody. Waiting for you to get us all killed, or worse.”

  “Oh ye of little faith,” I said, watching the breathless thrall squeeze and unsqueeze the finger notches on the wheel. “And for your information I like Ian, and I have no intention of putting him into any danger. Or you either, you little shit.” I went immediately for Domino’s pet name and suddenly felt unfaithful for it. At the moment, I was actually feeling kindly disposed toward the quasi-homeless kid, but this fucking hipster was jumping rope on my last nerve.

  “I didn’t put you in any danger,” I went on, “and I didn’t leave you there stranded, like I could have. I didn’t even leave the body anywhere that someone would stumble over it anytime soon. We’re in the clear. They’ll wonder where he went, wait around for a while, and then start looking. We have plenty of getaway time and nothing to tie us to him, or to what happened to him.”

  “Except a room full of people.”

  “Less than a dozen people,” I said. “Maybe they’ll describe me in more detail than ‘uh, some girl’ and maybe they won’t. But nobody knows we arrived together, and I don’t think anyone noticed we left together. I’m telling you, we’re in the clear. Everything’s fine.”

  “Where’d you put him?”

  “I took him upstairs and stuffed him in the bathroom. Renovation hasn’t reached that far yet, and the whole floor looks like nobody’s gone up there in a hundred years.”

  “You stuck him in a bathroom and figured that’d cover it?”

  I gritted my teeth and said slowly, “I stuck him … in an unusable bathroom … on a disused floor … of a building that’s more abandoned than occupied. I had to almost pull a door off its hinges because it’d rusted shut. Nobody’s going to look there for ages. Not until he starts to smell, and maybe not even then.”

  I had no idea if I was telling him the truth or not, but the general fact of the matter stood: We had plenty of time to leave the scene, and we were unlikely to be connected to it. We’d be thousands of miles away before anyone even thought to ask the parkour kids what had happened the night that GI Jackass went missing.

  “Maybe that’s your problem,” I mused aloud.

  “What? What’s my problem?” he asked with the kind of scorn that told me he’d like to give a dissertation on my problems (as he perceived them), but he was good enough to let me finish.

  “You’re not good enough at getting away.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that fleeing the scene is an art, and I’ve damn well mastered it. You can get away with a tiny bit of sloppiness so long as the getaway is clean.”

  “But it isn’t,” he sulked. “We’re still here, in to
wn. And it’s too late for any of us to leave tonight.”

  “You could leave,” I noted. “Adrian could leave.”

  “I won’t leave Ian, and Adrian won’t leave until he’s burned down the whole world, or at least the part of it that killed his sister. I don’t know what you think is going to happen with that lunatic, but you can’t give him what he wants.”

  “You may be right,” I muttered.

  “What?” I heard his honest disbelief, and nearly smiled but didn’t.

  “You heard me. I said, you might be right. I can’t give him his sister back, and he’s just going to run around breaking things until he figures out that she isn’t coming home, and nothing he can do is going to change that.”

  “So you’re using him.”

  A little too astute for his own good. See? Ghouls. Bad news, the lot of them. “Sure, I’m using him. But he’s using me, too. He spent years sitting on the evidence that covered up his sister’s death, not having a clue what to do with it until I came along.”

  “How very gallant of you.”

  “He needs me more than I need him, and at least he’s not a useless Seeing Eye ghoul.”

  “Then why didn’t he come on this errand with you?”

  I growled, “We’ve been over this. You were the only warm body we could trust, and Ian agreed that I could use some backup—if only to spread the word that I’d made a wreck of things, brought down the parkour school in a blaze of glory, and gone home to Jesus.”

  “It’s a shame I won’t be bringing that message back,” he said, which was needlessly mean, in my opinion.

  “Is that so?”

  “Sure it’s so. If you’d crashed and burned, at least the rest of us would be headed home.”

  “Tough shit. You’re not headed home, you’re headed back to the hotel with me, and if you don’t like it you can stuff it up your ass and let it melt.” I leaned back in the car’s cheap fabric seats and crossed my arms, tired of fighting with him. All it did was make me angry, and all I did was make him accusatory.

  The fact was, I didn’t give a damn what he thought. I liked Ian—hell, maybe I liked him more than was strictly smart, given the circumstances—but when all was said and done he was a client, and I’d come through on the assignment, and all that remained was for him to pay me. Then we could move on with our lives, never seeing one another again.

  Literally, and figuratively.

  That’d be best for everyone. We’d sort it out when Adrian and I returned from doing our own little reconnaissance on Major Bruner’s office. We’d make our arrangements, write our checks, see one another off, and that’d be the end of it.

  When we reached the curb, Cal dropped me off on the sidewalk and went to park the Malibu under the building. I left him to it, and went upstairs to the rooms—adjoining suites—wherein I’d find two guys whose company I could actually stand.

  Adrian answered the door when I knocked, and his hand was behind his back. “Oh. It’s you.”

  “You were expecting …?” I fed him the straight line, but he didn’t bite. He only withdrew that hand and revealed the big carbon steel blade that looked obnoxiously familiar. “Hey, that’s mine!”

  “I know,” he said with a shrug. “But you can’t be too careful.”

  “Hardy har har.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

  “Who’s More Careful,” I muttered, pushing past him into the room. “Stupid Cal.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  Ian was sitting on the couch, facing the television, which was broadcasting a PBS special about submarine disasters of the thirties. Listening, I assumed, since he obviously couldn’t watch it. But he asked, “Where’s Cal?”

  “He’s parking the car. I had him drop me off.”

  “Ah. Should I assume that things went reasonably well, since you seem to be in one piece?”

  “You should absolutely assume that,” I said. “Though you should be aware that I might have sort of, hypothetically, killed Lieutenant Bolton.”

  “Hypothetically?” Adrian asked.

  “Okay, so I totally killed him. And I figured I’d bring that up before Cal came upstairs being all morally superior and trying to call me out about it.”

  Ian’s mouth turned up in a faint smile, but stopped in a pose of bemusement. “I don’t suppose he would’ve approved of that.”

  “No. I heard about it all the way back,” I complained.

  “Did you draw any undue attention to yourself, or to him?” he asked.

  “No. Except that I drew out GI Jerk-face for a private conversation. I don’t think anyone saw me do it, and we’ll be long gone from D.C. before anybody goes looking for him,” I concluded with more confidence than I felt.

  Maybe Cal’s admonitions had worn me down more than I thought.

  “I’m prepared to trust you on that matter,” said Ian. “Did you learn anything important from the man, before you made him into supper?”

  “Yes and no. He confirmed some suspicions, and tried to point all the blame at Bruner—which may or may not be fair. He insisted that Project Bloodshot was closed, and that any further activities related thereunto were squarely on the major’s now-civilian shoulders. Except that it’s being funded by someone else. He claimed not to know who.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “More or less. And I was right about Bruner using parkour clubs to scout for trespassers.”

  “Trespassers?”

  “Pawns. Disposable ones.” I sat down on the end of the love seat and drew up one leg so I could face Ian. Then I admitted, “I think Bolton might have actually seen it differently. He took umbrage at my suggestion that he was rounding up these kids for the slaughter. Maybe he assumed it was just a covert recruitment program. Maybe he didn’t know exactly what they’d be called upon to do, or how dangerous it would be.”

  Adrian folded his arms and leaned, as he was prone to doing. “Maybe?”

  “Maybe. And he’s too dead to ask for clarification now. So,” I tried, changing the subject. “What about you two? What’d you do while we were out wreaking havoc and killing people?”

  “Watched TV,” said Adrian.

  Ian smiled graciously and nodded. “I kept an ear on it. Ah. Here comes Cal.”

  My joy overfloweth.

  Sure enough, as predicted, he skulked into the room, shot me a disparaging look, and greeted his master. “Did she tell you she killed a guy?” he asked without any preamble.

  “She told us,” Ian confirmed. “I’m sure she had her reasons.”

  “I bet she did. So does this mean you two—” He made windshield-wiper finger gestures back and forth between me and Adrian. “—will be heading out now? I’m tired, and I’d like to settle in.”

  “Enough adventuring for one evening, eh?” Ian asked, casual and not at all curious, probably knowing that Cal would be happy to settle down anyplace away from me. His loathing reeked off him like cheap cologne.

  “Plenty,” he said.

  “Great. Give me the keys,” I said.

  “Give you my keys?” he parroted so high it was almost a squeal.

  “You heard me,” I told him. “We don’t have a car yet, and there’s no such thing as a getaway bus. Remember what I was telling you?”

  “I remember,” he grumbled as he forked over the keys with a slap. “Here. Take them. But it’s under my name, you know. So take care of it.”

  I thought surely he must be joking, even though it didn’t sound like it. Who used real names anymore? Sometimes people are a mystery to me.

  I let Cal off the hook by giving a let’s go head-nod to Adrian and saying, “Don’t worry, Cal, I’m done with you for now. You two have a lovely rest-of-your-evening, and we’ll be back in a few hours.”

  Cal practically shoved us out the door and locked it behind us with what I felt was unnecessary, insulting speed. But the clack of the lock and the flip of the deadbolt made me feel lik
e they were safe and secure, or at least staying put for now.

  Adrian said, “You sure know how to win friends and influence people.”

  “That’s why they call me Raylene. It’s Greek for ‘charming.’ ”

  “You’re so full of shit,” he observed.

  “You’re not the first to suggest it. You ready to hit the town?”

  “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

  He was tense. Really tense. It looked good on him; made all his manly muscles and lumps stand out, even though they were squeezed in close by the black ribbed sweater that fit him like everything else he owned: perfectly. I knew it was new. I knew he’d gone through my bag and taken money while I was asleep. So long as he didn’t go nuts with it, I didn’t mind. It was only money, after all. It’s not like I didn’t have more of it stashed all over the place, and what was I going to do? Lecture him on the evils of petty thievery?

  When we’d bolted from the Poppycock Review he’d been wearing not much more than some glitter and a smile. His next set of duds came off Peter Desarme, but I didn’t assume he’d pulled the rest of his wardrobe out of his ass … or from wherever he tucked his—

  Never mind. I retrieved my wandering thoughts from the gutter.

  We reached the car, and I adjusted all the mirrors and seat so I could drive without feeling Cal’s butt-print beneath me. Even if I was only imagining it.

  On the other side of the neighborhood we found office buildings of a bland and utilitarian nature, though here and there were older structures in brick or stone. We parked Cal’s rental two blocks away in a lot between two office buildings that were almost fully dark—save a few pinpoints of light where the last unfortunate souls were chained to their desks, working late. We liked that particular lot because it was almost entirely devoid of light, and running low on other cars, too. These two details were possibly related, or possibly not. There’s no telling in D.C.