and there was no reason on earth for it to bother him, but it did.
“A date,” she said, checking her watch, her brow furrowing. “Damn.”
Well, hell.
“I live just a couple of blocks from Steele Street,” she said, opening her purse and rummaging around inside. “So it wasn’t really out of my way, and when I saw you, I knew I had to … well, I had to, uh, go tell Superman.”
“Superman,” he repeated, hearing her whisper another damn under her breath while she continued digging through the contents of the zebra bag. “You mean the Hawkins guy in the green Challenger?”
She nodded, starting to pull stuff out of the purse—a makeup bag, a wallet, what looked like a day’s worth of mail—and piling it all in her lap, which reminded him that he had a few of her things himself. “He’s the best friend you ever had, right next to Creed, and that’s the God’s truth.”
So she’d said.
“Creed. The guy in the Chevelle Super Sport.”
She nodded. “You were all a bunch of car thieves in the old days, when you were teenagers, and then everybody got busted, but Dylan, the boss, made it all okay, and now I don’t really know what you guys do, but I’d lay money down on you doing it for the government, and the only reason I know anybody at Steele Street is because … well, you and uh … Superman ran into me, sort of, one night outside the Blue Iguana Lounge.” She was still piling things up in her lap, a small brush, sunglass case, coin purse, keys on an elaborate key chain with all kinds of charms and baubles on it. “And then a few years later, Hawkins married Kat, and a few years after that, when I moved up here from Phoenix, Kat hired me to work in her gallery—end of story.”
Geezus.
Nobody in his world blabbered on, not without a load of Sodium Pentothal jacked into their system. But more than likely, she was dead-on about the Steele Street boys working for the government if they were involved with Lancaster, and he knew for damn sure she was dead-on about the carjacking crew. He’d done it. He’d known it the instant the guy named Hawkins had called her name. The juice, the smell, the sound of ratchets and wrenches, of burning rubber and grinding gears, it had all suddenly been there in his mind.
“Didn’t anybody ever tell you not to talk to strangers?” Really, she was so far out of the box, it was a little unnerving.
“You’re not a stranger,” she said, letting out an exasperated sigh and jamming everything in her lap back into the striped purse. For a moment, she just sat still, her eyes closed. Then, after voicing a weary, muttered “What the hell,” she turned and faced him, meeting his gaze straight on. “You’re John Thomas Chronopolous. That’s your real name.”
John Thomas.
He sat back in his seat.
All right, sure, whatever she thought. Like he’d said, he must have been somebody before he’d become Conroy Farrel, and he guessed there was a ring of truth in the name somewhere … somewhere just outside his ability to verify.
John Thomas Chronopolous.
It beat the hell out of a lot of names he’d been called, but it didn’t quite give him the same memory jolt as when he’d seen Peter, Kid Chaos, standing in the garage. That guy’s name sure as hell had come to him in a crackling flash of light and truth, which was great, just what he needed, more crackling, flashing, lightning bolts of long-lost truth firing up the dead brain cells in his memory banks. Enough of those and maybe he’d figure out who he used to be and what in the world had happened to him between Then and Now, or he’d get the mother of all headaches and the pain would break him, crack his head straight open, from skull to gullet.
In the six years of life he remembered, there had been no shortage of physical suffering. For the most part, he’d been able to manage it with the dwindling stash of rainbow-colored gelcaps he’d taken from Souk’s lab in Bangkok. But time was running out on him, time and pills, and when his little rainbow beauties were gone, he’d be right behind them: gone. Before that happened, he wanted Lancaster dead.
John Thomas.
Geezus, he thought, reaching for his jacket and taking her gun out of the pocket. Very methodically, he released the magazine, let it drop