Page 210 of Deep Cover

15

Annie

The run had been everything I thought it couldn't be. The jog bra wasn't right. It was too small, which should be impossible. I never weighed much, never had much, and had lost weight in captivity.

The shoes were okay. The shorts. The company? Not so much. Neither Kie, who was an okay runner, or the men with guns, who acted like they were doing us a favor.

What Vincent was thinking was beyond me. Maybe he wanted one or more of us to take a chance and try to actually run. As in run away.

Neither of us did. Kie was a bitch and a half. She wasn't someone I could ever trust enough to ally with. But she wasn't stupid.

Beautiful spring day. Beautiful route past flowering trees and into a park. Beautiful fantasies in my head, that we'd come around a corner and there'd be Cole. Or the world's most sympathetic and fast-to-get-it cop.

That didn't happen. We ran past patisseries and boulangeries and coffee shops and bookstores and into the green and pink and white of the park and out again. We ran past a cop and he didn't even blink at the men following us on foot or the car cruising a bit too slowly in our general direction.

Some of the cuts split open, the deeper ones Vincent had made and I arrived back at the house feeling hopeless and covered in little blooms of blood, my sweat mixing into it like salt in a wound.

Insult to injury.

The run was like a taunt. Maybe it was. I didn't know enough about how a true sadist's mind worked. Cole wasn't anyone I could use as a yardstick to measure Vincent against. Vincent was in a class by himself.

I just knew that the day after the run I didn't want to eat or drink or shower or stand up. I didn't want to get off the couch which was as close as I'd come to going to bed.

Cole wasn't coming. For the first time maybe ever, no one knew where I was. There was no handler in PD who could be trusted to know my deep cover whereabouts. There was no Cole, tracking me through a device he'd implanted in me.

Not Mark. Not my father. Not anyone.

I didn't bother to get off the couch.

Kie came in mid-morning.

"I brought you tea. With cream, the way you like it."

I just looked at her. The run hadn't been bad and since apparently she hadn't hoped for a white knight on a big white horse carrying us to safety, she was still functioning. Or maybe she was that fucked up she thought she was happy here.

Maybe she was so fucked up she really was.

Now she rolled her eyes at me. "There's nothing in it but tea. Do you want me to drink some?"

If she was remotely human, I'd ask her to stay and have a cup with me. If I thought that I wanted a cup.

I said thank you, which seemed to shock her as much as it did me.

She came back with lunch and took away the unconsumed tea.

She came back with dinner and took away lunch.

She came back after dinner and sat down and stared at me. "Are you going to starve yourself?"

It wasn't worth rousing myself to reply. "Of course not. I'm just not hungry."

It wasn't even worth wondering what had gone wrong in the world that Kie seemed concerned about my welfare.

I was just grateful when she went away.

And not at all thrilled when she came back.

She didn't look happy, either. She was carrying an assortment of things I didn't bother to look at closely. The shoes I'd worn to run in. A leash. A small brown paper bag.

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