“Open spaces everywhere—” His voice sounded small in the rubbery silence. “—and he has to park between the two biggest cars here.”
At least he’d reversed in.
Jacob took a breath, exhaled, and puffed his cheeks out. It was the sort of moment where you remembered some nugget of folksy childhood wisdom from your dad. Except the only good advice his dad ever gave Jacob was “don’t work hard, work smart.”
“Yeah. Well, close enough, I guess,” Jacob muttered. He took a deep breath, peeled one foot up off the floor, and headed for the car. It was drive or admit he’d lied, and he had never willingly done the latter in his life.
There was just enough room to squeeze between the Lexus and the Jeep. Simon hadn’t been so careful, Jacob noticed. There were scratches all over the door of the Jeep, dug into the paintwork at about hip-height on a tall man. He supposed he was kind of pleased that Simon had been worried enough about him to be careless with a car. He reached for the door.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“I’M GOINGto die,” Nora said as Simon sliced up the seam of her trousers.
Her voice was scratchy and shaken. It was the voice of a younger Nora Reyes, the one Becca had known at school. The voice of the girl she’d shared a room and classes with, who’d ducked through the background of Skype calls when Simon talked to his sister and once tracked him down to get a taped birthday message for Becca.
Despite what she’d done, Simon couldn’t help but feel sympathy for that girl. He ripped the expensive strip of fabric off.
“You aren’t going to die.”
The words came out on autopilot—prestrung and loaded in his brain for just this sort of occasion. But this time it was probably true. There might be damage to the joint, but she wasn’t bleeding heavily enough to have damaged an artery. That meant she’d survive long enough to get treatment. He’d seen people take a lot more damage and walk, or at least limp, away from it.
He pressed the wad of fabric to the hole in her shoulder and blood squelched around his fingers. He glanced around and waited to hear the growl of the engine. Jacob should have gotten to the car by then.
“Not from being shot.” Nora nagged his attention again. She gave him a thin smile with lips that had blanched down to a pale, almost-chalky pink, and she flicked the fingers of her good hand out in a gesture that encompassed more than the garage. “From this. Either to stop me exposing them, or to make an example of me for exposing them.”
“This isn’t the sort of thing the US government murders people over,” he told her. He took his hand away, and she reached up to hold the makeshift bandage in place. “Trust me. You’re small potatoes.”
“People do kill each other over this, though,” she said. Her mouth tightened, and she added bitterly, “I did, didn’t I? Poor Harry. He died thinking he’d been a fool.”
“Wasn’t he?”
Nora shook her head. “No. Me and your thief have that in common. We started off by stealing something, but then we fell in love.”
“Jacob would be surprised to hear that,” Simon muttered and ignored the pinch in his heart at the idea. Nora ignored him.
“I should have told Harry what I’d done,” she said. “Except, it didn’t seem to matter anymore. I loved him, and he was helping meanyhow.I didn’t have to lie to him. He wanted to help me. So why rock the boat? Then I saw the files that the thief had accessed, and I knew it was about to fall apart. I just didn’t realize how… conclusively.”
“I’m not a priest,” Simon said. “And I don’t want to forgive you.”
She blinked at him and then lifted one shoulder in a resigned shrug. Her mouth pleated into a perversely amused smile. “Who else have I got to tell? All my friends are dead.”
“Nora—”
A punch of concussive force from above cut Simon off and made him stagger as the structure shifted under his feet. The shriek of disturbed alarms filled the air, along with the smell of burning oil and smoke. After a still moment, the building’s sprinkler system kicked in and pissed lukewarm water on him that did nothing to dispel theheat and dust on his tongue and the itch of his own blood ringing in his ears.Memory was stronger than the distant sensation of water misting on his skin.
Hewantedto yell for Jacob, but his brain was like a funnel. It squeezed in around the edges and left less and less room for anything that wasn’t a shopworn replay of old actions. He took a deep breath, held it, and struggled to hold on to control.
“What the hell,” Nora said, her voice scratchy and distorted through the static rustle in his ears. She was back on her feet but leaned heavily on the car. “What happened?”
His voice had to squeeze out of his throat. “Explosion. We have to go.”
“What about…?”
“He’s dead,” Simon said. It didn’t hurt. He just felt empty, and flat competency stood in for reaction. Maybe he’d feel something later, but whiskey could help with that. “We’re not. Move.”
He dragged her off the car, held her up by his grip on her bicep, and marched her toward the stairs. Under the cacophony of dueling alarms—horns and klaxons and wails—he caught the scuff of feet on stairs.
It could have been aid, but that was… convenient and fast.
