Part 17 (1/2)
But in the future, I needed to be more careful.
I'd been saying that a lot lately, but hey, it was true. If I had nothing else to thank Ian Stott for (apart from the inconveniences), I could thank him for the wake-up call. I needed to get my business back in gear, and my head back out of my a.s.s.
As my mind had been wandering right up that rearward ca.n.a.l, Adrian had been pondering. He pointed at the gear and said, ”Tonight, we can work together. As long as you understand that I don't trust you, and that I still believe that somehow, this is all your fault.”
”This? What this this?” I demanded to know. ”Even if I blew your cover at the drag bar-which I most certainly did not not-I'm not the one who stole sensitive government doc.u.ments and buried them out in the open, where any d.a.m.n fool could come along with a bulldozer and retrieve them!”
He gave me one of those shrugs that made his torso ripple. ”No one's bothered it yet. And okay, you can have that one-that part wasn't your fault.”
”Thank you,” I spat, even though I didn't feel very thankful. But I had to say something, and it was either be polite or start fighting with him. I didn't want to fight with him. I wanted to get along with him long enough to get Ian's paperwork and get back to Seattle, or to wherever, and leave this jerk to whatever covert disco nightlife he best preferred.
Unflapped and cool, he said, ”You're welcome. Are you ready to go? Let's get this over with.”
”I'm ready. And I couldn't agree with you more.” Even though I had a feeling I'd be doing most of the digging, purely by virtue of the fact that I'm faster and stronger. Ah, well. Hand me a shovel and call me a feminist.
We skulked out of the building together, trying to simultaneously act normal and be super-careful. I don't think we succeeded very well at either goal, but I had to give credit where it was due-Adrian could skulk like a motherf.u.c.ker. That was a man with skulking in the blood...or maybe, it'd been trained into him. I didn't know much about Navy SEALS or what they do, but just from watching him navigate a corridor I could guess that they were pretty much total bada.s.ses. Or maybe just this one was. I'd need a broader sampling to really form an educated opinion.
He moved almost as silently as I did, though I think he put more effort into it. And when he moved, he looked like some kind of big cat-all long, lean muscles and poised tension. It was nice to watch.
We made our ninja way out to the parking garage and over to my mock-cop-car. For a split second he acted like he thought he'd be driving, but I disabused him of that notion immediately by jingling the keys and hip-checking him away from the driver's door.
”Sorry,” he grumbled. ”Force of habit.”
”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 they showed up.” showed up.”
I pulled the keys up into my palm and frowned. ”True. But they didn't follow us here. 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 G.o.d 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 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 s.h.i.+tting me? That's a hybrid hybrid. What if we have to run away from someone? Jesus. We'd have to get out and push. Or G.o.d help us if we have to pa.s.s 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 that was an att.i.tude I liked to hear. ”Got a Slim Jim?” was an att.i.tude 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 pus.h.i.+ng through the gra.s.s, 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, despite the fact that (as I just now established) we were all by ourselves. It's something about graveyards, I guess. They make you quiet. Like libraries.
h.e.l.l, I'm mostly dead already and I whispered back, ”Okay. Can you see all right? I've got a flashlight back in the car.”
”I'm fine,” he said.
I took him at his word and followed him along the unmowed rows and stepped sharply past fallen monuments and dismembered cherubs. The cemetery was old, but it wasn't that old. If you forced me to take a guess, I'd say that the oldest graves were dug right around the turn of the twentieth century, but some of the graves were newer. You could tell, because the monuments were flatter.
I tripped down into a pit created when someone's casket had collapsed, there under the sod. ”Pardon me,” I mumbled.
”What?”
Drat his hearing. I said, ”Nothing.”
But yes, I had begged the pardon of a corpse. Believe me when I tell you that I know how stupid this is, but people who've been dead a long time freak me out. Fresh corpses? No big thing. I've created more than a few of them in my time. But moldering old bodies, left in the ground to mulch themselves into dust? I shudder to consider it. And on those rare occasions that I traipse through graveyards (and believe me, they are are rare), my obsessive compulsions become extra-ludicrous. I cannot bear the thought of walking over anybody's...well... rare), my obsessive compulsions become extra-ludicrous. I cannot bear the thought of walking over anybody's...well...body.
It feels so f.u.c.king impolite, you know? And worse than that, mostly these old folks are buried on a grid system of sorts, and once I know there's a grid I can't keep the OCD on a leash. Step on a crack and break your mother's back? Step on a grave and horrifying things might befall you, or maybe not, because, like, who's going to do the befalling? I know. It doesn't rhyme. But that's what it is, and that's how I roll-awkwardly, and mumbling like a lunatic past the cracked and crooked stones.
”Are you still apologizing to the dead people?”
”No,” I told him.