Read Smokescreen for Free Online Page B

said, “I don’t suppose you are.”

Chapter 3
    H e led her not to the shelter itself, but to the dark empty lot beside it—a burned-out shop torn down but not completely removed, making for piles of old construction material, piles of garbage and piles of people. Veteran street people, mostly, those who conformed so poorly to society that living this way had turned into a default choice. They were angry tonight, huddled by their carts and beneath their cardboard and eyeing Jethro balefully from beneath prodigious layers of clothing. Sam came in behind him, making herself unnoticed —letting him draw all the attention and watching the results with sharp eyes.
    These were not hateful people; their community had its own sort of unspoken order. But they didn’t like Jethro. They didn’t want him here. Several of them pulled their own disappearing acts, sliding completely into their makeshift shelters—or simply closing their eyes to pretend they weren’t there.
    Sam knew that trick, too. It was the first guise she’d learned.
    “Over here somewhere,” Jethro murmured, heading for the back of the lot. The night had turned sour, carrying the smell of old alcohol and rotten garbage andthe accumulation of the unwashed, but he didn’t seem to notice.
    That, Sam decided, putting the fingers of one hand over her mouth and nose, must be what the mustache was for. Air filter. Fingers in place, she smelled nothing but the faint scent of her own blood and the leather of the glove. Used, worn leather, imbued faintly with the scent of aftershave.
    “Here,” he said, and then he frowned. He crouched down by a cart that had been filled with old flip-flops—outrageous colors, sequined thongs, giant flowers hanging limply from the toes. “This is hers,” he said, and looked around at the various nearby lumps of sleeping humanity. “She seemed pretty possessive of it. I wouldn’t have thought she’d—”
    “There are two of you!” someone said, an accusing tone.
    Whoops. Someone who could see Sam. Someone who could not only see her, but who could perceive she’d made an effort to go unnoticed. It happened now and then, most often under circumstances just like these. Someone not well. Someone off their meds—or someone on someone else’s meds. Sam dropped the guise, such as it was, and by the time Jethro turned around, raised her eyebrows at him in question. “Your source is here? ”
    “That’s better,” said the voice, muffled by whatever concealed its owner. “Now take care of her.”
    “She was here,” Jethro said. “And this cart is hers…”
    “Stupidstupidstupid,” said the voice.
    Sam was beginning to think the same…and yet she also couldn’t ignore the little frisson of warning that tightened her shoulders. She gestured at the lumps of sheltering humanity. “Then we’d better start knocking on doors.”
    He winced. “I hate to bother them.”
    “Bother them,” Sam said flatly. “There’s plenty at stake.” And she stood back and crossed her arms, because there was no point in bothering them with two strange faces when only one would recognize their quarry.
    Jethro took a deep breath. His determination—that which had been so obvious when Sam had accosted him on the street these two past nights—returned, squaring his shoulders in the darkness. He lifted a flap of cardboard here, pulled aside the corner of an old blanket there. And in a moment he muttered, “Damn.” A spare, short word so grim that Sam instantly came to join him.
    He moved aside so the faintly available streetlight crept across the woman he’d found. At first Sam thought her old; then she realized the woman was merely worn. And beaten. Oh, yes, quite thoroughly beaten. Both eyes too puffy to open, tears of blood and salt mixing with the grime on her skin, her nose misshapen and her lips no longer apparently human. Her hands, cradled at her breast, displayed the lumpy asymmetry of broken bones. She muttered something