Chapter 8
He picked west because something too deep to be just-instinct stirred vaguely in him at the thought.
Besides, it made no sense for her to go north; that would bring her closer to some of Sigma’s thickest-scanned areas.
South would pin her against the Gulf with no escape routes after a major brush with them, and east would do the same with the Atlantic.
So west it was.
It had been absurdly anticlimactic to escape. All he had to do was push one heavily armed guard at the bottom of the murderously unfinished stairwell. Apparently even Andrews thought only a suicidally insane person would brave the rickety, no balustrade, leap-over-gaps.
Maybe they were right. In any case, one bored guard smoking a cigarette was no match for Del. He wanted to take the man’s wallet and gear, not to mention weapons, but for maximum confusion he needed to simply vanish without a trace.
Negotiating the security net on the ground floor and the three-block radius outside the building was another matter.
It took him two precious hours to traverse those three blocks.
Keeping himself invisible from the psionics and their handlers—he had to avoid killing one of them and leaving a hole, too.
The wet heat and slowly increasing need for a hit of Zed made it even more difficult to concentrate.
He even crouched behind a dumpster for a full twenty minutes, less than six feet away from a precog and her handler, only escaping when the handler needed to take the thin bald girl in to a 7-11 bathroom because she had started to moan softly and sway with her knees pressed together.
I could have ended up like that.
Maybe this faceless Rowan Price could have, too. The thought of that deep, softly peaceful mind broken, maybe a brutal handler to add to the fun, made sheer red protective fury rise in him.
What the hell am I doing?
His first need was money. Thankfully, it was now in the prime hours of dusk, and he found himself in a bad part of town. He summarily relieved three petty gangsters of their cash, leaving them with blinding headaches. He could have also taken a very nice 9mm, but wasn’t sure if it was a clean gun.
Del broke it down, wiped it, and left the parts in two separate dumpsters.
A cab ride later, he found a small teriyaki shack unlikely to have surveillance cameras and put away three bowls of rice-and-chicken.
He wanted to buy some ibuprofen because something monstrous was being torn from the center of his brain, but he didn’t have time.
Hunger would slow him down, but he could live with pain for a while longer.
He made it out of the city with nearly four thousand dollars and a ride hitched in a DariMilk semi that was actually, according to the garrulous mutton-chopped man driving it, carrying grape mash for winemaking.
“Yeah, ain’t no money to be had in carrying fuckin’ milk,” the driver said as Del settled back in the seat and watched the asphalt slip away under the wheels.
“Guess not,” Del replied with a thin attempt at humor.
The driver was feeling chatty, and his rig reeked of cigarette smoke and old sweat.
The initial push to make him friendly hadn’t been hard.
Larry the Truck Driver was a deeply lonely man, glad for someone to talk to.
Del made the appropriate noises, one part of him monitoring the chatter from the CB radio and the patterns of traffic in front of and behind the semi.
He’d done the easy part. Now he had to find Rowan Price.