vehicle rolled off another one, crunching onto the blacktop. I grabbed her hand, and this time she held on. I pulled her to her feet and half dragged her back up toward the barricade.
Through the muted ringing, I could already hear footsteps approaching as the cops came storming down. I stopped, holding her back by her wrist, and pushed her to the wall.
She was maybe five-eight, with short hair that was cropped on the sides and back. She was all muscle, solid and scrappy. One of her front teeth had been knocked out very recently, and her lips were painted with black lipstick. She glared up at me, a pixie-haired prizefighter.
“Did he give you anything?” I asked into her ear.
“What?”
“Luis! Did he give you anything? Anything to hold on to? Anything like that?”
“No!”
“Hold still!”
Taking a step back, I peered through the fabric of her clothes, starting at the top and working my way down. The pocket over her left breast was shielded with something and I couldn’t see in, but in her right-side pocket I could see a set of keys, a tampon, and what looked like a tube of lipstick. I focused on it, turning up the intensity of the scan, and she frowned.
“What are you looking at?”
There was something inside of the tube. Something besides the lipstick itself.
“Give me the lipstick,” I said.
“What?”
“Now! Just give it to me!”
She continued to glare at me as she reached in and pulled out the tube.
“I don’t think it’s your color,” she said, tossing it over.
I uncapped it and turned the stick out all the way, pulling it free. When I shook the tube, a data spike fell from the hollow base into my palm.
“What the hell is that?” she asked. I held it up so she could see.
“That,” I said, “is the thing five people have already died for today. You were almost number six.”
She looked at it, and her thin lips, lacquered with that same black lipstick, curled into a sneer.
“He put that in there.”
“I know.”
She didn’t look scared anymore; she looked angry. She never even looked back at the carnage behind her.
“You owe me a lipstick,” she said.
“Yes, I do.”
“And a reward.”
The police were heading down the ramp, and in the distance I could hear sirens approaching. Somehow I knew better than to touch the girl in front of me again, so instead I gestured toward the uniformed officers.
“You’ll get both,” I told her.
“Your goddamn phone almost got us killed,” she muttered.
“Quiet.”
I fished it back out and turned it on. Zoe had called twice; the first was a hang-up, and in the second she left a four-second message with a picture attachment.
When I opened it, the picture expanded to show a photograph of Faye kneeling in front of the burning prison transport, the revivor in her lap.
I listened to the message. Her voice was heavily slurred.
“She’s in trouble,” she said. “She’s going to die.”
Faye Dasalia—Shine Tower Apartments, Unit 901
By the time the blood sample had been dropped at the lab, it was dark, and I was grateful when Shanks offered to swing me by my place and deal with signing the car back in himself. As he cut the engine on the dark street in front of my apartment, wind buffeted the vehicle, peppering the windows with snow and grit.
“You going to be all right?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Come on, I’ll walk you up.”
Shanks had never seen the inside of my apartment before, but he had seen the street I lived on, and it looked a lot worse from the outside than it did from the inside. For a moment, the whole thing felt a little awkward, and all of a sudden the dream came back to me. When he looked across at me, I remembered the feel of his hands on my hips, how rough he was.
The irony was that Shanks was far too polite to ever even suggest something like that. He was the kind of guy who would wait forever to be asked. He’d wait until the moment had long passed. As he looked at me, what I saw was the look he seemed to always have these days when he saw me, and that was concern. It was unnecessary, but I found myself being grateful for it. Even though we’d never have a romantic relationship, he was one person who would care if one day I ended up in that cold box or in the ground.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You don’t need me to—”
“No, come on up.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, have a cup of coffee before you drive all the way back.”
“Thanks.”
Outside on the steps I flashed my ID at the security camera, and it made Shanks show his too before it would open the door. We didn’t speak as the elevator made its way up, and he didn’t say anything until we actually got inside.
“Nice place,” he said.
Dropping my satchel next to the door, I made my way into the living room and hung my coat on the rack. Scanning the room quickly, I saw it was reasonably clean, which wasn’t surprising, since it seemed like I barely set foot inside my apartment myself these days.
“Take off your coat. Make yourself at home,” I said, gesturing at the sofa.
He hung his coat next to mine and sat back on the couch, looking around.
“Looks like you’ve got a message,” he said, pointing at the computer terminal set up at the edge of the living area. A green light flashed on the printer, where a couple of pages were sitting in the bay. I grabbed them on my way to the kitchen.
“You want coffee or a drink?” I asked. “I’m having a drink.”
“Make it two, then.”
“Wine okay?”
“Sure.”
I probably didn’t need the alcohol, but I definitely didn’t need any more stimulants, and there wasn’t much time available to wind down. Uncorking a bottle of red wine on the kitchen counter, I poured out two glasses before shaking out a blue capsule and dropping it in mine. I drank the first sip, making sure to get the floating pill, and swallowed it as I looked at the papers from the printer. It was a copy of the lab report.
“That was fast,” I said, bringing the other glass to Shanks.
“What?”
“It’s the results of the blood sample we just dropped off. How can they be done already?”
The header on the top sheet read ERRSAMP. That was the code for “Erroneous Sample,” which was shorthand for a field slipup. They had decided it was an innocuous substance. No wonder it came back so fast.
“Son of a bitch. They’re saying the sample was a mistake.”
