Page 82 of I Will Ruin You

“When you do talk to her, what do you talk about?”

Digby shrugged. “Like, how are you today? What shows you watching? Shit like that.”

“If you hear from her, I’d like you to give me a call right away,” Marta said, handing him a card.

He gave it the quickest of glances and tucked it into the front pocket of his white pants. “Anything else?” he asked.

Marta shook her head slowly.

She took the elevator back down to the first floor and was twenty feet from the reception desk, on her way to the front doors, when she stopped dead.

That woman asking questions at the desk. Holding a bouquet of flowers.

If it wasn’t the woman from the bar Saturday night who’d knocked her out, it was her twin sister.

And then Marta looked down at her shoes.

Converse sneakers.

Marta placed a reassuring hand on the weapon attached to her belt. She held her ground another moment, waiting to see whether the woman would turn this way, give Marta a better look at her face.

She could hear some of the conversation.

“So she does work here?” the woman said.

“Yes,” said the receptionist, tapping away at her computer. “If you’d like to leave those with me I can make sure she gets them.”

“I’d really prefer to give them to her in person.”

“Why don’t I call down to the cafeteria and see if she’s on today. No sense sending you all the way down there if she hasn’t come in for her shift yet.”

“Thanks, I appreciate—”

The woman must have noticed someone was standing off to her left. She glanced that way and saw Marta.

The glint of recognition didn’t take longer than a millisecond.

Marta said, “Nice shoes.”

The woman dropped the flowers and bolted.

“Stop!” Marta shouted. “Police!”

Others in the reception area froze, looked around, watched as the woman was forced to wait half a second for a set of sliding glass doors to retract, only to encounter an elderly man on crutches in her path. She shoved him out of her way and he went down, collapsing on the floor in front of Marta, who was torn between helping him and continuing her pursuit.

It’s a fucking hospital, she thought. Someone will tend to him.

In the moment it took to make that decision, the glass doors had slid shut. They began to retract again as Marta took a step toward them, but goddamn, they were slow. Marta squeezed through before they’d fully reopened, and came tearing out of the building at a gallop.

Would have really helped Marta if those Converse sneakers had been on her own feet.

She lost sight of the woman as she reached the bottom of a set of concrete steps and turned right onto the sidewalk.

“Stop!” Marta shouted again. She didn’t know whether the fleeing woman was armed, but Marta had her gun at the ready. Not that she was likely to be able to use it. She couldn’t shoot a suspect in the back. She couldn’t risk hitting someone else on the street.

The woman was sixty feet ahead of her, arms and legs pumping hard. She was a scrawny thing, Marta thought, and fast. But Marta was no slouch herself. She ran three mornings a week, usually four miles, and believed she could keep up this pace for as long as it took.

But then the game changed.