His Princess (A Royal Romance)(75)

I let the car roll inside and remember at the last second what brakes are for, and manage to stop before crashing into the far wall. I manage to get the car in park and get the door open before I collapse rather heavily onto the concrete floor, and hear Dale calling my name.

Next thing I know I’m lying on his couch. There’s whole blood in a bag on an IV stand next to me and I’m too stiff to move. He’s got me down to my skivvies, and as I sit up I notice that he’s doing something interesting to my leg involving a really big, hooked needle.

“Don’t move.”

For a dumpy, five-foot-six guy who looks like the poster child for computer-science classes, Dale has something of an air of command about him. I flop back against the arm of the couch and wince every time I feel the needle slide into my flesh and the thread draw the wound tight. He takes his freaking time before finally wrapping a clean bandage around my leg.

We’re in his living room slash office, a utilitarian space with concrete walls, used couches, shelves and shelves of gear, computers, and enough firepower to overthrow the Bolivian government. Harsh lamps burn at my eyes when I lie back, so I drape my bandaged arm over my face.

“What the f*ck happened, Quent?”

I wince at another stitch. “I met the contact at the hotel. The contact sucked my dick, then tried to kill me.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Tried to strangle me with a bondage rope, then went Benihana special on me.”

“I’d say so. You’re a lucky man, Quent. So she sucked your dick.”

“She tried to kill me afterward.”

“Still counts, man.”

I start to sit up, only to fall back.

“Fuck,” I mutter.

“Yeah, so,” he says, rising. He presses his glasses up his nose. “They tried to kill you. What’s the story on that?”

“I don’t know,” I lie.

It was because the girl looked at me. She had green eyes, full of fear, and resignation. It’s come to this. I’m next.

“When they try to kill you, that usually means unsatisfied customer.”

“Yeah.”

“You have a reputation, man.”

“Yeah. She said she’d be coming after me again.”

Dale sputters. “Jesus, Quent. You didn’t finish her off?”

“No.”

Dale gives me that look and shrugs his round shoulders. “Fine, whatever. Even if you had it wouldn’t take them long to figure out something went wrong. You’ve just given yourself less time to get gone before they come after you.”

“Right,” I sigh. “It’s time, Dale. I need to disappear.”

“Got it. I’ll set you up,” he says.

Dale is one of the best forgers on the East Coast. In this era when everything is so heavily hooked into everything else and there are databases of government information detailing everything from your favorite porn sites to the last time you shaved your ass, it’s tough to create a fake identity. The main problem is that the identity will be clean, and that’s more suspicious than a lifetime of dirt.

If you just suddenly walk onto the world stage and say, “Here I am!” like you’ve been living off the grid your whole life, it raises more red flags than if you’d just gotten out of prison. Dale is the solution to that problem. He does more than work up a fake driver’s license and passport. He can fake a whole history behind a name given enough time. Besides identity papers he’s my major supplier for weapons, and so on, and so forth.

He doesn’t hand me a driver’s license. Instead, he hands me a key, drops it on my palm. Attached is a little tag with an address on one side and a pass code on the other.

“I knew this one was coming for a while,” he says sadly. “You’ve been lucky so far, but…”

“I know,” I say sharply.

This is something of a sore point between the two of us. I have scruples. Dale…doesn’t.

By the look of him you’d think, oh, what a dumpy little geek. Thing is, that dumpy little geek worked for some very shady people until a back injury took him out of the game. I’ve been trying to pry his story out of him for years, and succeeded at only chipping away at it. Sometimes he mentions El Salvador, or Saudi Arabia, offhandedly with the familiarity of someone who’s been intimate with a place.

Bloody intimate.

Deep sigh.

“I need a place to stay.”

“All taken care of. I took the liberty of charging your account and I’ve set up a transfer to your backup holdings. You can’t take it all. Did they pay you before they tried to kill you?”

“Yeah.”

He nods. “Insurance. If the one they sent after you failed her job, they can trace it if you try to move their payment into another account. It’s gone, Quent. Let it go.”

I nod. I’m going to miss that half a million dollars, but I have enough saved up to get by on in a pinch. You don’t do a job like mine without a lot of insurance policies, contingency plans, and a few Hail Marys to throw if shit really hits the fan.

“How long can I stay here?”

“It’s better if you go as soon as possible. Take a nap, see if you can walk okay when you wake up. I’ll be over in the other room.”

I let out a long sigh as he flicks off the lights and let my head fall back against the pillow. Sleep lands on me heavy and hard.