Instead of answering, Joey said, “Are you fucking stupid?”
Well, yeah, that was a possibility. But I wasn’t the one tied up in a ditch. I couldn’t be that stupid.
Eduardo worked his mouth around, gathering saliva on his tongue, then spat on the ground at my feet.
Nice.
Stonecrow jiggled my shoulder before I could ask more questions. I brushed her off, but she did it again. “What?”
“Shouldn’t we be leaving?” She was looking at the abandoned SUV.
She had a point. All of the OPA’s cars had GPS trackers in them. Just because we were alone for the moment didn’t mean that we’d be alone for long. “Works for me.” I patted my pockets to make sure my notebooks were where I’d put them. I’d grabbed all of my stuff out of the SUV while looking for the zip ties, and the desert would’ve been a bad place to accidentally drop them. “Let’s get out of here.”
“You can’t just leave us!” Joey cried as we walked toward the car.
I didn’t tell him we could. Actions spoke louder than words.
Anyway, it wouldn’t be long before the union picked them up.
Unfortunately.
I yanked the cable to the GPS tracker under the car before taking off again.
Once we were back on the highway, I pulled the phone out of my pocket and tossed it into Stonecrow’s lap. “I’ll read you a number, and I want you text this location to the number.”
“What location? I’ve got no clue where the hell we are.”
I parked the car by the side of the road. “Here, I’ll do it.”
She didn’t let me pull the phone from her hands.
I rubbed my forehead then winced. I was still covered in blisters. The sun had only made it worse. “You can pull our coordinates up on the app on the phone. Give it to me.”
She scowled but obeyed. I grabbed our coordinates from the phone and texted them to Suzy with a short message: “Eduardo and Joey tried to kill me. Get to them first and find out why.” I waited for the message to go through, then handed the phone back to Stonecrow.
“We should get rid of that,” I said. “It has a GPS tracker, too. I’ll let you decide how to trash it.”
Stonecrow stepped out of the car and ducked. When she got back in and closed the door with a solid thump, I raised an eyebrow in her direction. She said, “Under the tire.” The corner of her mouth twitched as she surveyed me. “You look like shit.”
I angled the rearview mirror. Yep, still hamburger-faced. “Wonder why that is.”
“I can fix it,” Stonecrow said. “I just need some herbs.”
Her tone wasn’t exactly friendly, but she didn’t sound pissed at me now. It was a start. And if she could heal my face? Better and better.
The phone crunched when I pulled away.
We rode in silence, Stonecrow only moving to turn on the air conditioning. The quiet lasted on the road back to town for about five minutes or so when she said, “So…Cèsar, right? You didn’t kill the agents back there. Because you work with them?”
“I don’t know if they deserve killing. And that’s not something I do, anyway. But yeah, I kinda work with them—or at least I used to. I’m currently taking what you might call an unscheduled vacation from the Office of Preternatural Affairs.”
“Why?”
No nice way to say it. “Because I’ve been accused of murder.”
Stonecrow leaned toward her window a few inches.
“Oh.”
“I didn’t do it,” I said. “That’s why I need your help. I need you to talk to the victim and find out who did kill her. It’s the only way I can clear my name.”
She let out a shaky breath. “Okay. Tell me what happened. Tell me about her.” I gave her the short version of Erin’s story. It wasn’t much shorter than the long version. When I finished, Stonecrow was frowning more than ever. “So you…you didn’t kill this waitress?”#p#分页标题#e#
Could she have tried to sound a little less skeptical?
“No. I didn’t.”
“And you want me to talk to her.”
It was like we were talking in circles. “If you can do what you say you can.”
“I can,” Stonecrow said, tapping her finger thoughtfully against her chin. “I just need to get close to her remains, preferably within touching distance. You think you can pull that off with people gunning for your head? Do you think you even want to? It’d be much safer to run.”
“I’ve gotten this far. I can’t stop now.”
She sighed. “Okay. Let’s go talk with Erin.”
Nine by Night: A Multi-Author Urban Fantasy Bundle of Kickass Heroines, Adventure, Magic