It was late.
The cameras were in place, laser microphones set to register off all the windows. A few days should do it, Hellscape—dressed again in black-on-black—thought as she leapt from roof to roof over the Boise skyline. A couple days would be enough to show Collins that Pancho German had no chance to win a dance off with Mikki Manning. The movement made her heart pound, the feel of her arms and legs, pumping, the air, cold and sharp, pushing through her body—frigid and warm, clashing in ways that made her feel alive. She cat-leapt a narrow alley, absorbing the impact with her legs before vaulting a ledge. A drop to a grass-patch garden gave her a soft landing.
The exercise was good.
It let her brain work in that way it does when you’re busy focusing on other things.
That was something she learned in Brighton back when Shae first taught her to free run. [<<< Seriously, dudes, watch that video] It was summer then, though, not winter like Boise was facing. She remembered the heat of July and August suns that had beat down on them when they were running together, and how free those days felt. How learning moves until they became muscle memory meant that, yes, her brain could run free to think about other things in her life. Back then, of course, other things were perhaps a little less complicated. Or not. She missed Shae, missed having someone to run with, but it was a doomed thing to begin with. They lived an ocean apart, and Heidi was there only for the semester.
Today her brain was locked on the video.
She’d taken the chip given to her by a young girl, and after scanning it a hundred different ways, plugged it into her screen to find that it was security video, labeled from a parking garage under Boise’s ballpark. F. Nephi Grigg Memorial Stadium. A man, wandering in odd circles, at first seeming to just tug at his pants pocket every step or two. Subsequent viewings, though, showed her that no—the man wasn’t just out for a self-inflicted good time in a semi-public place. He was dropping something in the lot. Letting something fall from under the pantleg to the concrete floor.
She was in a side vault over a rail that led to one of Boise’s park areas when it struck her. She’d seen something like it before. A video shortly after the Pig Shit Affair. Yes. But this was different, shot from a new angle—a side view.
She stopped running then.
Stood still while her heart pounded. While her breathing rose and fell and the idea pounded in her brain.
Yes. She had to go back and look for sure, but something inside her mind told her she was righter than right. The ball cap the man was wearing, if it was a man, anyway. It was dark, but she was pretty sure the image enhancement programs she’d gotten from TripleAxe would prove her mindsight correct: it was an Omaha Hawk cap. She was also sure, though, that the angle of this second view would show a second, more valuable image.
She thought about Eiji Murata and his ride home from Chicago. “Two of them kept talking about Boise,” he’d said. And she thought about the guy dropping shit on the floor of the parking lot.
Ashes.
Yes. She was sure of it.
Determined, now, Hellscape began a slow walk to her hotel, juxtaposed this thought with what her memory was telling her.
There was a car in the background as this guy spread the ashes—the only one in the lot, lights on, engine, she assumed, running. The door was left open. And, though the car was black and the logo was gray in the darkness, and though the video was in black and white, and though the distance made the whole thing blurry enough to miss it in natural viewing, she was also equally sure TripleAxe’s image enhancing program would show what her mind had already clamped onto.
The image was one she’d seen a hundred times before. The logo of the Chicago Black Sox.
Her jaw set as she stepped into the hotel lobby.
What did it mean that the car carried the colors of Chicago while the man wore Hawk shit? What did it mean that Kate was the one to send her the video? How did she get hold of it? Could it have anything to do with the porcine feces dump of a season ago? For some reason her mind snapped to Vinnie Vitale and his Sophomoric “Blueprint.” She remembered a discussion about Boise’s “Wheel” and some stupid shit about a “Wind” in California. She was pretty sure Nashville had once had a “Plan,” though now she wasn’t so sure.
“LaLoosh,” she finally whispered to herself, remembering the recent campaign that several Omaha insiders had recently undertaken to discourage voters from putting Yellow Springs superstar Lawrence Columbus LaLoosh into the Hall of Fame.
Jesus. How deep could this thing go?
That, she thought as the elevator doors closed, would take a lot of hours of free running to get her mind around.
