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“Why, Lily?” he demanded. “Why is this happening to you?”
She scanned the street behind him, nervously. “Not here. I’ll tell you everything I know, which isn’t much, but not here. They’ll be back.”
Bruno felt trapped. The zombie masters massacre had shown him how unpleasant it was to be on the wrong side of the law, even for a short time. It had taken a while for the powers that be to sort out who had slaughtered who. In the meantime, he and Kev and the rest of them had been locked down, and examined from all sides. He remembered the stifled feel of it. Like a hand pressing down on his throat.
Jail would suck. He saw why Tony had run away from the life, many decades ago. Tony had used to work for his cousin, Don Gaetano Ranieri, a mafia boss back in Jersey. Tony had been his righthand man. The protracted bloodbath of Vietnam had been preferable to to that.
“If I go with you, I’m fleeing a crime scene,” Bruno said. “One that has my blood and vomit spattered all over it. Their first assumption will be that I murdered them, I guess. Since I’m not around to dispute it.”
The cold wind blew her hair back from her ravaged, streaked but beautiful face. “But you’ll be alive,” she said. “That’s good, isn’t it?”
He grunted. He was being jerked around by a girl because she was pretty, and she was desperate, and he’d fucked her, so now of course he felt responsible. But Christ. Three big guys. One unarmed girl. Dickheads. He couldn’t help it, pussywhipped sucker that he was.
“I tell you what,” he said. “I will get you some fresh clothes, and get you someplace safe where you can rest. You take it from there. Then I go to the cops and I tell them absolutely everything. Understand?”
She gave him a tremulous smile. “Deal.”
“Wait.” He scuffed through the garbage scattered around the alley. Found the trashed remains of his smart-phone, and pried out the chip.
“Hey,” she protested. “What are you doing? That thing—”
“Just the chip.” He shoved it in his pocket. “It’s mine. I want it.” God knows, he intended for life to go back to what passed for normal as soon as possible. No way was he going to waste time scrounging all his contacts together again, sending out a new number. Hell with that.
He kept rummaging, kicking. There was one red shoe beside the dumpster. The other was wedged between sacks of trash, next to one of the corpses. He retrieved them, knelt in front of her, placed her blood-smeared hand on his shoulder. Then he lifted one foot at a time, to slip those pumps onto her clammy little feet.“Stupid shoes, for a fugitive,” he bitched. “You can’t run in them. My car’s parked up on—”
“No. Not your car,” she announced.
“Huh?” He felt affronted. “What do you mean, not my car?”
“Not your car, your home, or any of your places of employment, your phones or your computers. Assume that they’re all compromised.”
“Ah.” He was stymied. “So how are we supposed to—”
“We’ll just have to be creative.” She grabbed his hand, and dragged him after her, deeper into the alley.
He let himself be towed along. “Where are we going?”
“I don’t know, but if we stay in the alleyways, we’re less likely to be seen when they come back looking for us. Can you hotwire a car?”
Lily found him suddenly immobile. “Fuck, no!” he snarled. “I do not do shit like that! Haven’t you been listening to me?”
“It’s you who aren’t paying attention! You know, about the mortal doom zooming towards you as we speak, like a heat seeking missile?”
“Wow, Lily. With your sunny attitude and your sense of civic duty, I can see why you make so many friends.”
Her eyes flashed. “Civic duty? It bums me when my father gets slaughtered. It burns my ass when thugs jump me and stab me and try to kill me! It’s tough to maintain that glass-half-full vibe under those circumstances! So shoot me!” She grabbed a boulder from a woodchipped lawn, and lifted the rock over her head.“This one looks good,” she said, walking towards an aging station wagon. “I like Volvos. They give me a sense of security.”
He grabbed her shoulders. “What the fuck do you think you’re—”
“Getting a car!” she yelled, lurching towards the car. “Watch me!”
“No.” He jerked the rock away. “Let’s think this through.”
Her face crumpled. “There’s no time,” she said. “I’m out of ideas. I’m done. They’re winning, Bruno. I’m fucked.”
She was losing it. Damn. He pulled her into a hug. She wiggled in the confinement of his arms. “Let go of me!”
He didn’t let go. “We’re not stealing any cars,” he told her. “It’s stupid, and it’s rude, and it’s also probably alarmed. And the cops will be looking for us soon enough anyhow.”
