He pries her hand loose and gives it a squeeze. “Don’t worry, Hollyberry. No one’s breaking up the band.”

4

“Hello? Is that you, Dr. Z?”

Brady has no time to play games with her. The snow is thickening every second, and Z-Boy’s crappy old Malibu, with no snow tires and over a hundred thousand miles on the clock, will be no match for the storm once it really gets whooping. Under other circumstances, he’d want to know how she’s even alive, but since he has no intention of turning back and rectifying that situation, it’s a moot question.

“You know who it is, and I know what you tried to do. Try it again and I’ll send in the men who are watching the building. You’re lucky to be alive, Freddi. I wouldn’t tempt fate a second time.”

“I’m sorry.” Almost whispering. This is not the fuck-you-and-fuck-your-mother riot grrrl Brady worked with on the Cyber Patrol. Yet she’s not entirely broken, or she wouldn’t have tried messing with the computer gear.

“Have you told anyone?”

“No!” She sounds horrified at the thought. Horrified is good.

“Will you?”

“No!”

“That’s the right answer, because if you do, I’ll know. You’re under surveillance, Freddi. Remember it.”

He ends the call without waiting for a reply, more furious with her for being alive than for what she tried to do. Will she believe that fictitious men are watching the building, even though he left her for dead? He thinks so. She’s had dealings with both Dr. Z and Z-Boy; who knows how many other drones he might have at his command?

In any case, there’s nothing else he can do about it now. Brady has a long, long history of blaming others for his problems, and now he blames Freddi for not dying when she was supposed to.

He drops the Malibu’s gearshift into drive and steps on the gas. The tires spin in the thin carpet of snow covering the defunct Porno Palace’s parking lot, but catch once they get on the state road again, where the formerly brown soft shoulders are now turning white. Brady eases Z-Boy’s car up to sixty. That will soon be too fast for conditions, but he’ll hold the needle there as long as he can.

5

Finders Keepers shares the seventh-floor bathrooms with the travel agency, but right now Hodges has the men’s to himself, for which he is grateful. He’s bent over one of the sinks, right hand gripping the washbasin’s rim, left pressed to his side. His belt is still unbuckled, and his pants are sinking past his hips under the weight of the stuff in his pockets: change, keys, wallet, phone.