Tam clenched her jaw. The noisy sobbing and wet snuffling sounds were intensely unpleasant to listen to. Robot Bitch, she reminded herself. Get the job done. “Open the car door, and get in.”
Ana slid into the car with a thump, her eyes already dripping gothic black streaks down her cheeks.
“Do you have a remote opener for the electronic gate in your purse?” Tam demanded. “I hope for your sake that you do.”
Ana nodded, hiccuping pitifully.
“Get it out and toss it onto the driver’s seat.”
Ana did so. Tam sucked in a sigh of relief, grabbed her hairclip, and squirted the soporific into Ana’s face.
Ana’s head flopped to the side almost instantly. Snot cascaded from her nose down over her mouth. Tam averted her eyes, grateful for the silence. This would keep her quiet for the twenty or so minutes it would take to get to the clinic. So far, so good.
She slid into the driver’s seat. Ana was sagging sideways, which put her body unpleasantly close to Tam’s. She shoved the other woman upright on the seat and strapped her slack body in.
The remote really did open the gate, to her relief. Would have been a fine joke on her if it hadn’t.
She felt better once she was speeding around the curves on the mountain highway. Driving very fast gave her something to concentrate on other than how monumentally shitty all this was making her feel.
Robot Bitch was not supposed to feel shitty. She wasn’t supposed to have feelings, period. She just got the job done, boom boom boom.
Tam reminded herself grimly of what Ana had tried to do to her. Her ugliness, her spite. She thought of driving that pin into Ana’s boyfriend’s scrotum. Her first real strike for freedom, for payback.
She’d come a long way since then, but she felt like she was crawling back into a prison and pulling the door shut after herself.
She’d thought this experience would be cleansing. Cathartic. It wasn’t. Looking at the unconscious woman’s slack, drooling mouth, she didn’t feel cleansed. She felt, paradoxically, soiled. And cuffing Val to the bed made her feel that way, too. Only much, much worse.
A vague, formless fear stirred inside her, that she had drifted too far. She was going down a road that had no escape. She was doomed.
She stomped it. None of this doom shit. She did not have the luxury of doubt. It wasn’t part of her personal philosophy.
The problem was, that was feeling a little tight lately. Like a pair of outgrown shoes.
The decrepit Fiat shuddered and threatened to fall apart at any speed above forty-five kilometers an hour. Amazingly, the Vespino with its buzzing fifty-cubic-centimeter miniature motor had been quicker. No wonder Tamar had considered the ten minutes or so that he’d been unconscious to be a sufficient head start. The real head start was the velocity of the fucking toy car.
He drove with grim purpose, leaning forward to squint through the cracked, filthy windshield in a desperate attempt to see the road well enough not to kill himself. He pondered how much time he might gain or lose by procuring another car, either by stealing or renting, but came up with no useful ideas. San Vito was the closest place, but he could hardly go back there to rent, and going anywhere else would cost him still more time. And as groggy and addled as he was, he was in no shape to steal a car. He’d probably get caught and get himself beaten to death by an eighty-year-old man. Something ignominious like that.
Besides, his clothing fit the car. The ragged wool sweater with the cigarette burns and the brownish-yellow underarm sweat stains, the pilled, threadbare pants that did not succeed in covering his ankles though they did threaten to slide off his ass. All that could be said for them was they were dry.
The signora must have laughed up her sleeve when she picked them out of her rag bag. He would have been amused at her little joke, if he hadn’t been so angry and miserable.
And in pain. Everything hurt. Most of all his shoulder, but there wasn’t a centimeter of the rest of him, inside or out, that did not sting, ache or burn in sympathy. His head throbbed like a rotten tooth. Hung over from whatever drug Tamar had zapped him with, no doubt.
He felt humiliated. Betrayed into confessing his love, and she’d fucked him over to reward him for his idiocy. Served him right for being such a fatuous dickhead.
So why was he following her? He could turn his back and go.
He could not answer that question. He couldn’t stop himself, either. Burning stubborness, that was all it was. He hated being bested.
He stared at the ring on his finger. Tamar’s ring. What the hell she had meant by leaving it with him, he did not dare to imagine.
But he had not taken it off.
Tamar’s cell phone beeped from his pocket, as he finally came into an area of coverage. Val pulled it out and glanced at it.
He glanced again. Twenty chiamate non risposte. Twenty unanswered calls. He ran his eye over the numbers visible in the display. All the same number, all with a Seattle area code. Someone in the Seattle area had been desperately trying to call her all night long.
That could not be good news. He thought suddenly of Rachel. The bars of the prison Imre had tried to free him from closed in on him again, along with the chill of fear.
No, please. Not that. Not her baby girl.
He’d just poised his thumb over the callback option when the phone rang. The phone registered an unknown number, and in a moment of wild, irrational hope, he thought it might be Tamar.
He stabbed the button to answer. “Sì?”
There was a suspicious pause, and Connor McCloud’s voice rasped through the line. “Who the hell is this?”
“It’s Val Janos,” he said. “What happened?”
“Rachel,” Connor said. “They got Rachel.”
The creeping dread solidified instantly into horror. He flash froze it and put it aside. No time for it. No time for anything now but action.
“Who?” he asked. “When?”
“How the fuck do we know who? She was playing with Sveti in the park right outside the house. A black sedan with three men in it pulled up. They roughed up Sveti, took Rachel, and took off. It was six PM.”
“Cazzo,” Val whispered.
“Yeah,” Connor agreed. “Where the fuck is Tam? And why doesn’t she have her fucking phone?”
Val let out the tension with a sharp, gusty breath. “She’s off to assassinate someone,” he said grimly. “We disagreed about it. She handcuffed me to a bed and drugged me. I just got free. I’m hoping to catch up with her before she gets arrested. Or killed.”
“Ah.” There was an uncomfortable pause. “Well, there you go. That’s our Tam for you. Are you having fun yet?”
“Fuck you,” Val said.
“Sure. Whatever. Moving on. I was hoping you two might know—”
“Novak,” he said flatly. “Check the RF tags for Rachel’s position.”
Connor sucked in a sharp breath. “Holy shit. I can’t believe this. You tagged Rachel? With what?”
“SafeGuard beacons,” Val said. “One in her bear, one in her stroller, one in her blanket, one in her coat. That red puffy one.”
“She might still have the coat with her.” Connor’s voice vibrated with excitement. “Frequencies?”
“I don’t have them on me,” Val