“I’m coming, I’m coming.” Giving up her investigation into my camera placement, she takes Bear out.
A few clicks of my keys move me into another room, so I can watch her as she walks around the house, cataloging everything as if she can sense I was there.
“You know I was there, poison,” I whisper. “I’m always lurking.”
After watching her get ready to leave, I log off and walk to my room, practically falling into my bed from exhaustion.
The mid-morning sun bleeds through the blinds as I instantly start dreaming of Greer and our final moments together.
It’s as if she’s all that matters, but that’s utter nonsense.
I startle awake and reach for the gun beneath my pillow, clicking the safety off as I look around the room.
It’s dark out as I come around and realize there’s no one here.
“Fuck,” I moan, putting the safety back on and replacing my weapon.
The clock reads 9 p.m., and I realize how much time I lost sleeping like the fucking dead.
I rush to my cameras, worried that I’ve missed some part of Greer’s day. I find that a few emails from Joe are open as if I meant to work last night, but got too distracted, which is precisely what happened.
Checking my phone, I don’t see any missed calls, but I see one missed text.
I don’t see Greer on any of my feeds, so I type in my passcode on my phone and open my messages app.
Were you even real?
My heart races as I read it over and over.
She’s never texted back before.
She didn’t know me before, I remind myself.
I open Joe’s emails. Two of them have pieces of information I asked for on the Nameless Collective, and some tidbits about the angle Helms was working on with Lasko before he handed the shitshow over to me.
The last email from Joe confirms that I’m scrubbed from the Oakland database.
It’s like I was never arrested and detained at all, so that Allison Cheney wouldn’t have gotten even the tiniest morsel of information for her friend.
I hate to do that to her, but I have to fly under the radar. It’s how I stay alive.
My phone pings as I’m sifting through Helms’s documents on Lasko.
I can see you read that.
Damn, it’s not like me to have read receipts on for texts, but with the new iPhone updates, you can turn them on and off for each thread. It seems Greer’s slipped through the cracks.
And that…
I grin.
I’m as real as you are.
Then why aren’t you in jail? Why doesn’t anyone Allison speaks to know where you are?
I don’t know how to answer, and texting has always been and will always be dangerous, so I put my phone down and hope she’ll give up.
When I look up at the feeds, I find her curled on the couch, where she hadn’t been a moment ago. She’s staring at her phone, biting the edge of one of her fingernails.
