Black As Night (Quentin Black Mystery #2) Read Free Page B

identities before getting into a strange car in a country where you don’t know the language.
    I’d have to be more careful, at least until I could get some sleep.
    My flight ended up being almost twenty-five hours––including layovers––with one stop in Tai Pei before arriving here. I’d spent a good chunk of the longer leg of that flight watching movies since I’ve never been any good at sleeping on planes.
    I found myself thinking about Black now, as I stared out the window of the car, only seeing a blur of green broken by buildings and roofs as my mind wandered.
    I really barely knew him. I’d barely even seen him since the whole Wedding Murder thing went down. Probably a full week passed before my body recovered enough for me to think about going back to work. Then I’d spent another week or so buried in reams of paperwork and security clearance crap for his company. That included everything from stacks of forms to fill out to range and written tests for firearms permits, tours of the databases and encryption software utilized by his team to conduct research, obtaining my own passwords, desk, phone and chair, as well as a small office in the main building on California Street.
    Black also requested that I go through a medical examination by his team. When I agreed verbally, he also had me sign yet another written document that in part assured me the contents of that exam would be confidential and destroyed were I to leave his employ.
    I didn’t see much of Black himself during that time.
    He was around, but I don’t think we had a single real conversation over those few weeks, not even a work-related one.
    We definitely hadn’t talked about anything else.
    Hell, I don’t think we’d even been alone together.
    He’d kept his promise about not bothering me in the apartment he set up for me in his building. In fact, if I were being completely truthful, he kept that promise a little better than I wanted...and definitely better than I expected. Since I lived under the same security protections in place both for his office and his own residence, he seemed to think that my being safe and under his direct purview was enough.
    More frustrating still, I hadn’t gotten a single opportunity to ask him the million or so other things I wanted to know about him––meaning about who and what he was, or what he claimed to be, at least. He’d told me before that we’d talk about those things “later” when we had time to get into it all in more depth.
    But that “later” never came.
    He’d disappeared not long after the last time I tried to pin him down on a time for us to talk, and until his phone call of the day before, I hadn’t spoken to him.
    When Black hadn’t reappeared after fifteen or so days, I’d moved out of the building on California Street and back to my own place on Clement in the Inner Richmond.
    I’d decided to keep my old office on Fillmore too, since I didn’t want to dump all of my therapy clients––at least not overnight––and I was paid up on a year of lease. I’d been working out of there primarily for the past few weeks, rather than the building on California. One of Black’s tech guys even came and set me up to use the databases and the software encryption there, so I had to assume Black knew, or at least was okay with the move in theory.
    His disappearance stung a bit though, I admit.
    Not the fact that he’d left for work, which he’d already warned me he would do on a fairly frequent basis, but more the fact that he hadn’t bothered to tell me before he did. Also, if I were being totally honest, it bothered me that I hadn’t heard anything from him in the time since.
    I don’t know what I expected when I went to work for him exactly, but I think some part of me thought he’d loop me into his plans a bit more.
    More precisely, I thought he’d finally tell me some things.
    When I first met him, he’d intimated a lot about who he really was, who he thought I was,