The entire Vigilante network, ordered to kill me on sight.
“Thank you for not doing it,” I say.
She reaches over and tweaks my ear. “You were one of my boys. I don’t hold no account for them killing the likes of you, no matter what it’s over.”
I take her hand. “Thank you.”
She squeezes my fingers. “I can’t get you to Antonio, if that’s what you were after. If I were you, I’d ditch everything tying you to the network, even if it’s stolen or redirected. Cloaking won’t help. They’re double authenticating everything with a circuit, trying to ferret you out.”
I nod. “Got it.”
“I wish I could do more to help you,” she says.
“You’ve done plenty.” I let go of her hand.
The lights flicker and come back on.
Marty draws the book closer to her. “There’s the lights. Will that number work for you? Is your cell phone charged?”
I nod. “Thank you. I’ll call them straightaway.”
“Take care of yourself,” she says. “It’s a big bad desert out there.”
I walk out the back door, skirting the fringe of the range of the cameras. They’ll have me identified within ten minutes, if I have to guess. Damn. Someone will see that power drop, pull up the footage, and do a visual.
Still, Marty did me a favor. I know what I have to do now.
As soon as I’m out of camera range, I break into a run in the opposite direction of my car.
It’s sixteen miles before I come across a ramshackle gas station on the highway. I’ve got nothing on me but my clothes and Sam’s Blackphone, which I feel reasonably certain can’t be traced by theVigilantes since none of the parts or circuits came from their inventory. That’s what makes it a Blackphone.
Still, I power it up only long enough to nab the number of the only person I can think of to get me information on that MMA fight in Vegas, someone outside the Vigilante network but who could access that sort of data.
The Cure McClure.
The Cure is a retired boxer in California. About six years ago, he called on me to help locate an abducted girl, a friend of his son, Colt. Colt was big in the MMA circuit at that time, at the height of his career. Some punk hired a thug to shoot him in an alley, then tried to settle another score with another fighter who went by Power Play.
I remember the girl, black haired and fiery. Maddie was her name. She’d been through some stuff that night. But The Cure called on me for a couple other things after that, and now it is my turn to call on him.
Rather than use the Blackphone and have the use of a high-tech device be spotted so close to the compromised safe house, I head into the door of the gas station to see what I can use inside.
An old man sits behind the counter, reading a newspaper from 2009.
“Hello, sir,” I say to him.
He catches me staring at the front page and shakes the newspaper so it rustles. It’s a nostalgic sound.
“I share your fondness for paper,” I say.
“Still can’t handle those newfangled reading devices,” he says. He thumbs at a pile of papers in his corner. “I figure I’ve got enough old news to keep me occupied till I keel over.”
“Indeed you do.” Quite the fire hazard as well, I want to say, but simply grab three bottles of water from a cooler.
He smacks the back of his hand against a headline. “Really funny to read a decade later about how we’re all going to die of swine flu,” he says. “I love this stuff.”
I wait for his laughter to subside, trying not to sweat the time passing. I drop several dollars on the counter for the water.
“Where’s your car?” he asks.
