Milo didn’t hesitate. He did as he was told. His gun went in the holster, and he backed away, hands held up in a halfhearted gesture of surrender. Blood had scabbed on his chin and his throat and was drying on his shirt.
“Who’s the woman?” Simon asked.
Simon felt the muscles under Shaw’s jaw flex as he swallowed. “You know I won’t tell you that. And I know you don’t want to deal with the police any more than I do. Considering your boyfriend is the prime suspect, and your boss is implicated, they’ll be real interested to find you here, won’t they?”
True, unfortunately. Simon licked his lips and weighed the likelihood that he’d be able to convince the police of his version of events. It wasn’t good, and the sirens were too close to give him time to plan.
“You can’t fix this, Ramsey,” Shaw said. “It’s too late for that. All you can do is try and let it be as painless as possible. It’s just business.”
“It’s my family, the people I love,” Simon said. “It’s my life, Shaw. It’s not happening. I don’t care who it hurts.”
He shoved Shaw and released his chokehold as Shaw lurched forward. Before Shaw could regain his balance, Simon turned and ran. He wasn’t fast enough. A gun barked once, and he felt the punch of it hit his leg. He staggered, caught himself, and dodged down the narrow alley between two buildings. His leg felt shocked and numb under him—wet and warm—but it didn’t hurt. Yet.
The sirens screamed, and Simon could hear the police yelling orders and instructions out on the road. He pressed the heel of his hand to his thigh and tried to hold the blood in. It was hot as it bubbled through his fingers.
“Sooner or later, Ramsey,” Shaw yelled after him. “Unless you back off, I will get another chance to kill you. So tell you what. Crawl back into your bottle and stay out of my way.”
His leg started to hurt. Simon took his jacket off and ripped the lining out of it to pack into the wound. The bullet had punched a wormhole of flesh from the meat of his outer thigh, missing bone, muscle, and arteries. It was bleeding wet and red, soaking through the silk of the lining with disheartening speed, and throbbed with pain in time to his heartbeat.
It could have been worse.
He put the jacket back on, buttoned it to hide the gun and the torn lining, and pushed himself off the side of the house. Three deep breaths and then he made himself walk out into the street. He ignored the hot-burn pain of traumatized flesh that wanted to hobble him.
People stumbled out of houses—parents with children hugging their legs, teenagers with their cameras held up to catch the action, shuffling, squinting night-shift workers shocked out of what was their midnight. Simon slid into the flow of bodies and let it carry him behind the barrier of police cars and bodies.
Shaw had told him who “the bitch” was, after all. He had too much information. Back when he’d been in the Marines, Simon hadn’t had any hobbies and his vices had been tame. He hadn’t been a drinker. He certainly hadn’t been a drunk. His vices weren’t a secret, but nobody who’d just read his military record would think he’d ever crawl into a bottle, never mind that he’d already crawled back out of it. Only someone who knew him later—someone who had access to Syntech.
Jacob knew he drank, and he was an untrustworthy sham of a human being, but Simon trusted him anyhow. It might not be his first instinct, but he did.
Dev had access and knew Simon, but Lau had been recruited when Becca was dying. Maybe Simon could wrap his head around Dev committing corporate espionage and killing Clayton in a grand fuckup. The idea that he would have left Becca and Callie to do it? No.
Neither of them were women. That only left one option.
His train of thought faltered, derailed, and he staggered into a yawning man in sleep shorts and badly done tattoos. The man glared at him through bloodshot eyes, shoved him away, and grumbled under his breath as he stomped across the rough asphalt on bare feet.
Simon stood where he was, frozen in the middle of the street as his brain finally found the matching piece for the hole in what they knew.
He knew who’d stolen Clayton’s project. He had no idea why, but he knew who.
“Hey, move,” a woman with a squawking toddler on her hip snapped impatiently. She shoved at Simon until he stepped out of her way, and then she dragged her kids past him. Jarred out of his thoughts, Simon quickly started to walk again. The brief respite had given his leg time to decide that it did really hurt, and it cramped with pain as he pushed his way through the small crowd of residents.
Dev needed to know.
Simon pulled his phone out of his pocket and grimaced at the spider-web-smashed screen. That wasn’t going to work. He dropped it back into his pocket and turned around to scan the crowd. The man he’d bumped into earlier was leaning against a battered Ford pickup, drinking something out of a Starbucks cup and scowling at the cops.
“Hey,” Simon said as he walked over. “Could you give me a ride into a town? I have a meeting to get to.”
Tattoos drained the Starbucks cup with a grimace and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “You don’t have your own car?”
Simon didn’t lie as reflexively as Jacob, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t. He jerked his thumb toward the cars. “It’s in there.” He just didn’t see why he needed to. There were easier ways to get people to do what you want. He pulled out his wallet and tugged a wad of cash out of it. “I can pay.”
Tattoos rubbed his chin and weighed the money against the possibility that Simon was shady. The money won. He boosted himself up into the car, crumpled the Starbucks mug up, and tossed it over his shoulder.
“Get in,” Tattoos said as he flicked the driver’s side visor down. A spare set of keys fell into his waiting hand. “Where do you want to go?”
“Town,” Simon said. The anesthetic effect of shock had worn off. It felt like someone was poking hot pliers into his leg. He’d had worse, but the combination of pain and adrenaline made his brain twitch. The back of his tongue felt gritty with sand, and he could feel the blood itch in his ear. A quick rub of his hand confirmed there wasn’t any there. He licked dry lips, reminded himself he was crazy, and smiled thinly at Tattoos. “I’ll tell you where when we get there.”
Chapter Nineteen
