It’s not a good idea to carry a woman’s body slung over your shoulder through a parking lot and into your car. Always a chance of CCTV, always a chance someone will be looking. I needed the city cops looking for me like I needed a swarm of mosquitoes in my face.
But I had this nagging voice, or feeling, gnawing at me: I couldn’t just leave her there. Why not? She was nothing to me, I’d given it a shot, I’d paid off my debt, I couldn’t control an out-of-control girl who was too stupid to get lost when she was told to and given the money to do it.
Instead I started thinking: the chance that anyone would see me here in the clean, crime-free suburbs at this hour of night was actually a lot less than anywhere else. And people only look at CCTV if they have a reason to.
Natalia wasn’t going to give anyone a reason. She had no family, and she was from Brighton Heights, which meant whenever she stopped showing up somewhere, people would figure she’d ended up like all the other girls from Brighton Heights: dead or somewhere else.
Even as I scooped her up and tossed her over my shoulder, I was still trying to talk myself into the rules I swore by. But once I had her in my arms, there was no way I was going to dump her back on the ground, no matter how many times I said I would.
Her weight was light, but dead weight was dead weight—I’d know, I’d carried a lot of it. It wasn’t a cakewalk to move quickly and get her into the car, and the fastest way to do that was to toss her over my shoulder. That’s when she puked, and it was pretty clear what had happened.
“God. Damn. It,” I muttered.
I laid her out in the back seat and took her pulse again—still weak, but about where it was before—and then I drove to avoid a tail, just in case, before pulling over and taking my kit from the back seat.
It was a standard paramedic supply of drugs, including dosable Narcan, which seemed like the likeliest candidate. No harm if it doesn’t work. Just 0.1 mg, just enough to keep her alive. I injected it, waited, and felt the return of her pulse. One tenth of a milligram more.
Not enough to wake her up.
She made a sound, and stirred, which was a good sign of two things: one, not a heavy user. Two, she was going to be okay.
I drove out to my place in the Highlands. It was a temporary measure until she was stabilized.
And then, me and Miss Karkarov, or Paulson, or whatever she was going by, were going to have areallyserious talk.
Chapter Five
Natalie
The first thing I felt was hot, which was about normal in the crappy apartment I rented, with no air. I slept with the windows closed because everyone yelling on the street kept me awake. So I wasn’t tipped off right away to anything being strange. My memory didn’t catch up just because I woke up. In fact, I had the idea I’d been out drinking—which I rarely did, but when I did, I usually overdid it.
Covers.
I kicked them off like a reflex, and that’s when things started happening. It was cold in the air around me.
My eyes flew open. Instead of my dingy apartment, dim light from the narrow space between my window and the brick wall of another apartment building edging from behind a ratty curtain, this room was bathed in a pale blue light. Instead of patchwork furniture I’d practically fished out of the dumpster, one expensive-looking and modern, perfectly clean table rested against a spotless white wall. A blue orchid plant almost four feet tall was the only object on a shelf.
