“So what are you driving these days?” She was damned curious.
He grinned and settled back in his chair. “A midnight-blue 1967 Pontiac GTO. I named her Corinna.”
And lo and behold, he was still driving the same damn midnight-blue 1967 Pontiac GTO.
Stick with him—that had been her plan, her only plan, but it was looking a little shortsighted now. Corinna had hit sixty miles an hour for a stretch there back on 15th, blowing through a couple of lights and redlining Jane’s pulse. Sixty wasn’t much on the highway, but in downtown traffic, it was a thrill ride plus.
“What’s his name?” J.T. asked, nodding at the 454 Chevy idling at the curb, facing him off on the other side of Vallejo Street.
“Creed,” she said, her spirits sinking even lower, knowing he meant the guy sitting like the badass messenger of “shit outta luck” behind the wheel of the black-cherry red Chevelle. “Cesar Raoul Eduardo Rivera, Creed for short.”
This was awful. He didn’t know Creed, and if he didn’t know Creed, one of the best friends he’d ever had, then who the hell was he really? Even if he’d been J.T., was he still J.T.?
“Creed Rivera,” he repeated, seeming to give her answer some thought. “Back at the Quick Mart, you said you wanted to wait for Hawkins. Who is Hawkins?”
Another terrible question. She tightened her grip on her zebra purse again, just because it was something to hold on to.
“Christian Hawkins,” she said. “Sometimes, on the street, they call him Cristo, and all the time, they call him Superman.”
That got her a subtle snort of disbelief. Superman, she could almost hear him thinking. Yeah, right.
But it was “yeah, right,” all the time, and J.T. would know that.
“Is he in one of these cars?” he asked, lifting his hips partway off the seat and shoving a hand into his front jeans pocket.
“The green Challenger.” This was all so wrong. Roxanne and Hawkins were like peanut butter and jelly, and J.T. would know that, too.
“So Hawkins is one of the guys from the garage.” He pulled his hand back out, and when he opened it, she saw a dozen or so brightly colored gelcaps in his palm. “The guy who was on the stairs, right?” He picked out a couple of green ones, tossed them in his mouth, and shoved the rest back into his pocket. “I saw him make a run for the Challenger when we were leaving.”
Yes, the guy on the stairs in the garage, she thought. The one you threw a grenade at—cripes.
And what were those pills all about? The colors were almost iridescent, but it didn’t make them look pretty or fun. They looked dangerously serious, intense, even toxic, as if even a little bit might kill you—and he’d popped those two green ones like candy.
He shot her a brief glance, his eyes the same depthless hazel she remembered. He was J. T. Chronopolous, so help her God. He had to be.
“He called you Jane.”
“Yes. That’s my name,” she said, then went for broke. “What’s yours?”
It took him a few seconds to answer, and for a moment, she thought he might not.
“Con,” he finally said.
Con. A long sigh escaped her, and she brought her hand up to cover her face.
Well, this was all so perfect. They’d gotten the introductions out of the way, sort of. She was Jane, and he didn’t know who he was. She was only about half sure herself. No matter who he looked like, he didn’t know Creed, and he didn’t know Hawkins, and he didn’t know his own name, and to top it all off, unbelievably, he’d taken her knife, and he’d taken her gun.
She was smarter than this, savvier than this. She’d been on the streets most of her life and knew how to take care of herself—except, she guessed, when people were throwing grenades and were superhero fast. She’d never seen anyone move like him.
Well, actually, now that she thought about it, she had seen one person who moved like him, with that much speed and grace: Red Dog, Gillian Pentycote. But Gillian had suffered a run-in with some real twisted people, and the whole experience had changed her from the inside out. She’d been tortured with drugs and lost her memory.
Oh.
She went very still over on her side of the car, then lifted her hand just enough to angle her gaze over to Con’s side of the car. Oh,