Recovering Read Free Page B

out
and stroke my rabbit’s soft gray fur. It only takes three strokes before he’s
making a happy chewing noise with his back teeth.
     Sir Hopsalot
is the best. Period. Sure, as sidekicks go, he can’t do much heavy lifting and
tends to hide under the bed in response to loud noises, but I’d choose him over
a Robin or Speedy any day.
     As I pet Sir
Hopsalot, I decide that I’m going on the next mission. I don’t give two shits
what Maya and Tarren say. I can withstand Maya’s big weepy eyes. Tarren will spew
out all this logic about how I’m a liability and angels will descend upon me
like a wounded baby deer. Just words. I’ve been pissing Tarren off since the
day I was born. No reason to stop now.  
     So my
hand-to-hand combat is a little rusty, and I can’t exactly sprint across a
whole city anymore. No biggie. I can still do plenty, like play lookout, take
sniper duty, or flash my pretty smile as angel bait. I’m great at angel bait. Course,
I can’t really start humming the theme music if we don’t have a mission.
     “Got to find
some angels,” I tell Sir Hopsalot.
     When I sit
up, he jumps down from the bed and hops into the big hay bin in the corner of
my room. He starts munching his heart out on hay. Little guy loves the stuff. I
tried it once and honestly wasn’t too impressed. Slap me down a juicy steak and
a couple shots of whiskey over hay any day.
    I flip open
Starbuck, and my beautiful girl hums in greeting as I put in her password. She
may not look like much on the outside, but below the hood, I’ve upgraded my
laptop with the latest cache, a processing speed so high it might break the
sound barrier, and enough memory to make tomorrow’s gamer drool. Oh, and the
hard drive is practically big enough to park a school bus. In other words
Starbuck is the shit, which is a good thing since finding angels is pretty much
the most important part of the mission, not that you’d get Tarren to admit that
even if you pulled out all his fingernails under torture. It’s all cool to go
stalking the night for justice and take the kill shot, but day-saving doesn’t
happen without solid detective work first, and that’s what I do.
    Starbuck and
I get to work. I’ve got Google alerts set up to send me obituaries from all
across the country. They filter into my database, and my algorithm runs through
them, prying secrets from the dead. The equation is simple, if people under 50 in
close proximity to one another start dropping dead of heart attacks, they get
flagged. Then it’s all about finding a pattern, looking for dark fingerprints
across the maps. If the police report mentions a crazy low body temp at time of
death, then I win the bad guy lottery. Classic signs of an angel attack. Heart
gives out from the stress of the energy drain and body heat gets zapped away. 
    Problem.
    The angels
don’t want to come out and play today. I follow body after body and come up
with nothing but a lot of natural causes or trails that are stretched and
faint. Hardly enough to go galloping after, guns brandished. After an hour, my
brain starts to hurt and my thoughts keep wandering away like bored kittens. I
have to tear my eyes from the screen, breathe, and then go about collecting all
those damn kittens again. This is bad. I’ve always been a little ADHD…okay,
maybe more than a little, but my brain and I have been a good team. I should be
able to go hiking through the internet for hours, but now sixty minutes seems
to have eaten through my entire supply of concentration. Another shiny present
from the Head Injury Express.
    And what’s
with the angel no-show? Honestly, it’s become an all-you-can-eat bad guy buffet
these past couple of years. As their numbers grow, their discipline is going
down the toilet. In the good old days, the angels were careful with their
kills, made me work to find them. Nowadays, you’ve got Special Olympic rejects
running all over the place just leaving bodies in their wake like it