Every night, Livia slept curled up behind Nason, whispering her name and stroking her hair until she herself was overcome by sleep. During the days, she never left her side. And when the men came with food and water, Livia made sure to stay as far to the back of the box as possible. When she heard the bolts scraping open, she would stand Nason up and gently ease her against the wall, then position herself in front of her. That way, if the men tried to grab Nason, Livia could see it coming and fight them. She didn’t have the can top anymore, and the men had been opening the cans themselves and keeping the tops since Livia had cut them. But she still had her teeth. She could leap at them, and bite their noses and ears and lips.
But the men must have known what she was thinking. One morning, they came in and began handing out food from the back of the box, rather than from the front where they usually positioned themselves. Dirty Beard stood to Livia’s left and Square Head to her right while Skull Face stayed in front of the door. She felt something was wrong, that they were trying to trick her, and as she swept her head from one side to the other, trying to watch both men at once, Dirty Beard stepped in and grabbed her hair. She screamed and twisted toward him, terrified they were going to take Nason again. Square Head gripped her shoulders from behind and pulled her to the floor. Panic surged through her and she squirmed to her stomach and tried to bring her knees forward. But one of the men knelt on her back, pinning her to the ground. She grabbed for Nason’s ankle, as though she could fuse them together and stop the men from pulling them apart. There was a sting in her neck, and all at once her limbs felt heavy, too heavy to move. The weight on her back seemed to spread all over her body, as though she was under the box instead of inside it.
“Little bird,” she whispered, and then she was gone.
13—NOW
Barnett’s funeral was everything Livia had hoped for.
It was a perfect spring morning in Crown Hill Cemetery—cherry blossoms blooming, birds singing, a breeze stirring the tree branches. Over a hundred Hammerheads were there to pay their respects to poor Billy, some rolling in on Harleys from as far as Reno and Missoula. There were denim kuttes heavy with Confederate flags and Iron Crosses. Lots of tattooed arms, and a good number of faces and necks, too. Steroid-swollen bodies. Bourbon toasts and Sieg Heil salutes. Livia recognized most of the local leadership, having spent a year with the gang unit before making detective. The G-unit’s mandate was to know everything about Seattle-area gangs, and to make sure the gangs knew they knew, as a means of deterring violence. Livia had wanted access to that intel, so that when she was finally able to get to Weed Tyler, she would be ready.
A hundred mourners logically meant an equivalent number of cell phones, but the Gossamer picked up half again as many. Burners. The gangbangers knew better than to carry their personal units alongside the disposables they used for business, but it was a pain to switch off one phone every time you were going to use the other, or to leave one at home when you were out on your hog and didn’t know who might be trying to reach you on which. And switching burners frequently was a hassle, as well—so many people to apprise of your new contact information. So in the battle between security and convenience, sooner or later convenience almost always emerged victorious. And it only had to win once for the cops to own you.
Livia kept a discreet distance from the funeral, dressed in a conservative skirt and blouse and wearing dark glasses against the late-morning sun. She even laid flowers in front of a marker, standing with head bowed for a few minutes as though in silent contemplation. Which was more than enough time for the Gossamer nestled in her purse to identify every cell phone in the cemetery. She confirmed the data had been stored in the unit, then headed out, face downcast, just another bereft visitor weighed down by the cemetery’s solemnity.
She didn’t go straight back to headquarters. Instead, she drove to the loft, the top of the Jeep off to take advantage of the weather. Ordinarily on so fine a day, she would have used the Ducati, but changing in and out of leathers wasn’t always feasible, and she’d seen enough horrific motorcycle injuries to refuse to ride without the proper equipment.
A couple of the guys on a smoking break outside waved as she headed in the first-floor entrance. Everyone knew she lived on the third floor. She imagined they must have speculated about her solitary existence, but it didn’t matter. They were friendly enough. She waved back and took the stairs three at a time, unlocking and then double-bolting the door behind her.
She laid the Gossamer on her desk, brought over a set of watch-repair tools, and removed the back of the unit. From her gun safe, she retrieved a circuit board she had created from parts purchased from Radio Shack—battery, transistors, memory card, antenna. Visually, her homemade board was a clone of what she had observed on a previous experiment opening up a Gossamer. Of course, hers was nothing but a simulacrum, but it didn’t need to function. It just needed to look right.