Chapter 3

I had to find a place to live. It would be defined by whatever the state decided to pay me as a salary plus the bonus of whatever I could 'arrange' from the investigations I made. So rather than contact Mission, I checked the balance on my prepaid credit card.

The balance had been $500 at the beginning of my job as a stripper. It was again $500 without any explanation. I didn't argue. Instead I tried to decide what to do with the money. It was hard since I didn't have any idea where I would be headed next, or how long it would be between jobs.

I had been given a temporary rotating email address. I had been told by the camp commandant the it would be good for 30days, if it was not compromised before then. Either was a new one would be activated for me when needed. The email I received at that address was simply two sets of numbers. I recognized it immediately as gps coordinates. When I applied them to a map, they appeared to be in the middle of nowhere. It appeared to be back in the mountainous area around church camp.

I doubted that it would be on the campus of church camp. I did expect that it was close enough for the staff at the camp to launch a rescue mission if needed. The trick would be for me to make sure it was never needed. I hope that I would never give up the camp either by accident or to save my ass. Of course one could not guarantee that kind of thing.

It had always been my understanding that I would park the Ford on the side of the road and leave the keys in it, when I was finished with the assignment. So I left it parked alongside the county road, which appeared to lead to the coordinates.

Thanks to Big X I was in good enough physical condition to move my clothes to the backpack in the Ford's trunk carry it away. I was pretty sure the hike was no more than three miles so I just started to walk.

"It's getting dark old girl better pick up the pace," Liam said. It got dark shortly after I got to the cabin.

When I got inside the house I found a video player on the table. "Ah a message from the boss," I said aloud. I opened it up and was immediately confronted with the need for a password. "Shit Liam, they never gave me a password."

"You could try guessing," he suggested. I took Liam's advice and began to guess. I made five guesses before I hit the right set of words. The password was 2ndhandrose.

When I got the file open I found the message was in the form of a pit bull animation. The talking dog said, "Remove your computer's hard drive and throw it down the well outside. You will find a new drive in the cabinet over the dry sink. Do it now Rose," the angry pit bull demanded.

The animation went on to give me a set of step by step instructions. When I was finished playing it three times to be sure I had done it correctly, I restarted my computer with a new operating system and files already installed.

When I left the cabin I carried the old hard drive and a plastic container to fill with water from the well. There was no pump, so I had to remove the cover and lower a bucket into the well. Then I had to haul the bucket of water to the surface.

Once back inside the cabin, I recognized the heater as a wood stove just like the one at church camp. I walked back outside and found the woodpile behind the cabin. I used the small hand ax to split some of the logs by driving a wedge into them. I wasn't as strong as the men, so it took me a while. I wasn't a bit cold when I finished. Since knew that I would be once I was inside the cabin for the night, I wanted enough wood for the night at least.

Inside I pulled a can of beans from the cabinet above the dry sink. I used the label as a fire starter. I was quite the woods person. When the fire was hot, I used it to heat the beans in a three inch deep skillet. I would liked to have had real food, but I could use what was in the cabin to stay alive. It would also help keep my weight down, I was sure.

I also found an old mayonnaise type jar filled with corn meal. I used it to make some muffins. The metal cups went into a kind of dutch oven device which also sat on the stove. "I see you learned your lessons well while you were in summer camp."

"Sure send your little girl to camp so she can learn to give blow jobs and kill. I was really grateful for the time I had spent at Church Camp. I found that I didn't mind being alone one bit. I had some healing to do after my club experience.

Speaking of that I had a pretty good idea that the metallic gold blouse and hot pants wouldn't be of much use in the woods. I took my underwear out of the back pack but left the fuck me clothes inside it. I hung the pack on a nail near the dry sink. I found jeans and a thick blouse made from something similar to wool.

"Since I am definitely a girlie girl, I hope this doesn't last long," I said aloud to no one.

"It is like putting a sweater in the closet. You take it out when you need it not before," Liam said.

I slept in my clothes that first night. It was a little chilly, but mostly I was afraid I might need to be on my feet, and then out the door quickly. I imagined everything from Alec, to a bear coming through the door. I wished at that moment I had a weapon. I was going to need to discuss that with mission, or maybe not.

Maybe she expected me to pick up what I needed the same way I got extra money. It took about about thirty seconds to convince myself. With that in mind I decided to actively pursue a weapon on my next job.

Without a firearm of any kind to make me feel better, I did the next best thing. I kept the small hand ax handy. It could be a formidable weapon. Especially in the hands of a trained killer, or just in the hands of a frightened bitch. I fell into the latter group, but I was sure I would not hesitate to hack off someone's hand with the ax.

After four days of eating canned food and drinking really awful coffee, there was a note in my of the dummy email. It said simply, walk to the road ... bring your clothes ... be sure the fire is out. It led me to believe I would not be coming back. The same nerdy looking driver met me in a small van type SUV. The good thing was he had a pepperoni pizza and a cold coca cola waiting for me.

I finished the pizza long before he finished the three hour drive. After the pizza I devoured the information in one of those brown envelopes. One that I couldn't take with me and the boss could deny existed. It wasn't the ideal situation but it was better than prison.

Somehow Mission had managed a job for me working in the Local police crime lab. Not as a scientific technician but as a photographer. She knew from my prison intake records, that I had taken several course in photography, before I crossed the line into pharmaceutical sales. I was a better photographer than drug dealers but the pay in photography was lousy. It was lousy compared to the pay for selling drugs anyway.

The instructions said I was being hired as an experiment with the Capitol City Police department. There had been some high profile cases overturned because of evidence tampering. The source of the tampering seemed to be the crime lab, or in the evidence room.

There were three theories. One was that the technicians compromised the evidence through sloppy work. That theory meant that a person or persons were going to lose their jobs.

The second theory was that someone tampered with the evidence to be sure there were grounds from a new trial or direct acquittal. That meant that if they were caught they were going to jail.

The third was that the evidence clerk was doing the tampering. That was the least likely but possible.

My assignment was just to lay low and look for anything that didn't seem quite right. The digital folder had a group of labeled photographs so I would know the players. When and if I found anything Mission would send in a team to investigate. She wanted to know where to look before she sent them in to find nothing. She wanted cloned hard drives and as much visual conformation as possible. In other words she wanted me to see what was going on and to steal the hard drive data as well.

"Most important of all," Liam said. "Is to not get caught doing it."

"Yeah, I know," I agreed.

"What was that?" the geek asked before dropping me in a Walmart parking lot with a set of keys.

"Nothing," I replied taking my backpack from the van. I clicked the button then looked for automobile headlights. The light that flashed belonged to an older Chevy pickup truck. It was nice to know that the State Police didn't have a loyalty to any one car company. I got into the truck and drove to the address which had been previously entered into the smart phone's gps. It was an apartment in keeping with what a recently divorced professional photographer might be able to afford. One whose ex was being a pain in the ass and ruined her business.

I was supposed to be an almost church lady. Well as close to one as a chick with false boobs and a talent for cock sucking could be. I was going to have to be an actress again it seemed. I had the biography in the cloud, so there was nothing on my computer but the address to the highly encrypted file. Yeah the SBI had some hackers who could break it, but it wasn't likely that some wacko drug dealer type or some lab geek could. Still seven day from that very night the cloud would lose it, as if it never existed. That is the length of time I had to became Naomi Roberts. I hated that name from the first time I read it.

"You just need freckles to match it," Liam said with a laugh.

The apartments were new just new to me. The building was at least twenty years old. "More like forty," Liam said. The apartment key had a paper tag with the number 23 printed on it. I went to apartment 23 then knocked. It would never do to rattle doors to strangers apartment. No one came to the door and there was no sound inside, so I tried the key. The door was hard to open, but that was just because it was old and swollen from several days of rain. The rain came from a tropical storm off the coast less than two hundred miles away.

I noticed immediately that the place was empty. Not just empty of people also empty of furniture. I had a new burn phone and a list of burn phone numbers, but they were not to be used for mundane things like a bed. For that I had an elaborate list of email address which changed routinely, or could be changed on a moments notice. They had devised a new twist, well it was new to me.

You know the controller has access to your email account as well as you?" Liam asked.

"Yes I know Liam. I leave the message as a draft and the controller answers by updating the draft. Since neither message was sent the odds of it being traced were minuscule," I explained

I found that I had a land line installed in the apartment, so I set about hooking the dial up modem. When I finally had everything working I typed the following draft message: Honey I'm home what about the furniture rent or buy,

I explored the 2nd floor apartment while I waited. I found it was actually two rooms. One was a bedroom with a small bath attached. Beside the bath was a walk in closet of an equal size. The second room was the one I had entered into. It was a living room with a wall of kitchen appliances on the end. At least the appliances are full size and I won't have to build my own fire, I thought.

After I saw what I needed I drove to the local Walmart store. I chose it only because I didn't know another store that might have everything I needed in one stop. I hated to go shopping all over town.

My shopping list at Walmart was

One Bed in a Box. Two lamps small and plastic. Two plastic shoe box racks each holding four boxes. One knock together plastic desk One very small flat screen TV A box full of plastic dishes A coffee maker. Two wooden TV trays. Two plastic chairs in that bean pod design.

I left a cart filled with those items in the front of the store while I went back for a second buggy of food items. When the cashier finished ringing the items they came to over three hundred dollars. I filled the bed of the truck and headed off for the apartment.

I pulled into my space in the underground apartment and began to carry things up to the apartment. It took several trips. The TV and the Desk each took a trip by themselves. After that it was five more trips of several plastic bag filled with cheap Chinese goods. Then cardboard boxes of furniture type things.

It was well after dark when I got everything put together. I found that I had cable TV and cable internet service. The cable TV was very limited service, but the internet service was unlimited.

I was too tired to either watch TV or go on line to look around. I was totally exhausted. I managed to slip into the shower after I hung the cheap plastic shower curtain. After that shower which I'm pretty sure I needed badly I found Liam sitting on the toilet fully clothed of course. He was looking at me naked and smiling.

"Liam you are a fucking perv," I said and laughed.

"Guilty as charged. You know looking is all I can do these days." I smiled at him as I walked naked into the bedroom and flopped onto the air bed, which lay on the floor. Even with Liam looking I fell sound asleep in seconds.

I slept long and hard that night. Since the next day was Sunday, I dressed in my running suit, but I went to breakfast instead of a track. I wasn't sure I wanted to continue to run every morning, but I did plan to look the part in case I decided to run.

My throat still hurt some, but it felt a lot better after the few days in the mountain cabin. I was at least 90% healed. I wasn't sure how ready I was to go out into the world again, but I would find out the next morning for sure. The day passed as I checked out the town a little. I found the mall and a couple of good restaurants. It looked like a pretty good place to live. Well I didn't much like where I was placed, but the town itself looked pretty good.