Small Things by Robert J Crane

Author:Robert J Crane [Crane, Robert J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Goodreads: 34457392
Publisher: Ostiagard Press
Published: 2017-05-16T06:00:00+00:00

39.

Sienna

I sat on the couch in my safe house—an actual house, this time—up on the hill in Juneau, Alaska, and pumped my iron furiously as I watched the cable news cover the incident in East LA ad infinitum.

Sienna … Harmon said as I completed my two thousandth lift. The dumbbells were about as good as I could have asked for. Clearly my minions who were responsible for setting up these safe houses were following specifications, which was good, because I needed failure in that regard right now like I needed another kick in the teeth.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, continuing to pound out my reps. There was no point in discussion, after all. East Los Angeles had just taken a nuke in the middle of a public street because of me. There wasn’t much to say after that.

Sienna … Gavrikov said.

“You’re the last person who should be saying anything to me right now,” I threw back at Gavrikov pointedly. “Remember a town called Glencoe, Minnesota? That used to exist before you decided to annihilate it into oblivion to prove a point to me and Old Man Winter about how badass you are?”

Then I am the perfect person to carry this message, Gavrikov said, apparently finding his courage. You cannot control the acts of every madman to walk the earth.

Also, Zack said cautiously, apparently more worried about pissing me off than Gavrikov was, this assassin of yours went to some pretty serious lengths to try and minimize civilian casualties. No one died, so …

Why are you acting like the entire city went up? Eve threw in helpfully. There was a pause as my souls gave her baleful glances. What? We were all thinking it.

I pumped my iron in the silence, driven by the anger that was rolling its way through my veins. “Because dammit, Phillips had stopped the shit. Or at least the shit had stopped. No one was chasing me anymore. I was sitting in my safe houses and I was feeling—safe.” My arms collapsed, maxed out from however many thousand reps of five hundred pounds, and I barely got them to the ground before my shoulders started quivering. I’d been treating this like a cardio workout, and I’d found my upper limit of endurance.

The US Government doesn’t just forget about its fugitives, Harmon said.

“Yeah, but the heat had died down,” I said, sinking back into the overstuffed couch, which was layered in a corduroy upholstery. The safe house was bare bones, not a single piece of décor on the walls, which was how I liked them. “There were websites out there where they were calling me a folk hero, uploading footage of me trying to save lives. I had my lawyers on appeals to clear my name.”

I closed my eyes. “Now a nuclear bomb goes off in East LA, and everyone’s blaming me for it—wrongly, I might add, but what the hell else is new? I’m back to square one. I’m the evil monster that

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