Outrage by John Sandford

get as far away as you could as fast as you could right after. Everyone tracks purchases. Verizon and AT&T track purchases and know where you’re at.”
    “We’re going to need more cash,” Twist said.
    Shay said, “There was a thousand dollars in West’s wallet, and I had the money you gave me. I spent like a hundred bucks on a motel room, plus hair dye and a phone and some food for X and the bolt cutters—”
    She pulled the cash out of her pocket, some of it still dappled with dried blood. “It’s got some blood on it, from West,” she said. “We should rinse it off. God…that’s just awful.”
    “I’ll take care of it,” Twist said. He slipped the money in his jacket. “It’s good enough for a while, but these three rooms are costing us five hundred bucks a day. I’ve got a stash back in L.A., and I’m thinking of going down to get it tomorrow afternoon, after Cade gets back. Cruz and I could run down, be back in ten or twelve.”
    Cruz nodded. “I know where we can pick up some cold plates for West’s Jeep, and some good-looking registration and insurance papers. Then the Jeep really would be ours.”
    “How will you get into your hotel?” Shay asked. “They’ll be watching for us.”
    “I got an idea for that,” Cruz said, breaking out a wicked grin.
    “I’m not going to ask…yet,” said Twist.
    Odin had been tapping along on one of the Sonys and said, “Guess what? Rachel’s been using the Wi-Fi at the Pasadena Public Library on Hill Avenue, always in the evening. She’s in L.A.”
    “If you really need your old laptop,” Twist said, “you could come with Cruz and me, we could see if we can find her.”
    “I think I will,” Odin said. “We really could use my tools.”
    —
    They’d talked about taking the night off, but it was impossible. They were a restless bunch. Shay poked through West’s external drive and found thousands of files, all apparently from Singular’s logistics department.
    “It’s like reading the Yellow Pages,” Shay grumbled.
    “There must be stuff in here that we can use,” Odin said. “You read, I’m going to crack his laptop.”
    They worked on the files long after midnight—Odin cracked the laptop in a few minutes, working around the password, and found that West had encrypted some files, but most were not. Unfortunately, the open files weren’t particularly interesting.
    Twist and Fenfang did what they could to help, and at one point, Cruz went out to a twenty-four-hour office supply store and bought a small printer so they could move some files to paper, the easier to read. But eventually, they began to drift away from the computers: files were coming up, all good evidence, someday, maybe, but nothing that would break Singular right now. And they were tired: too much running, for too long.
    They went to bed.
    And dreamed of hard times. Shay, of the shooting that left West on a basement floor; Odin and Fenfang, of their treatment at the hands of Singular; Twist and Cruz, of gang fights from their past—Cruz, the barrio war that killed his brother; Twist, a beating years before that nearly left him dead and that he never discussed.
    In the morning, still tired and anxious, they went down to the hotel restaurant, ate breakfast, went back to the rooms, and read more files.
    “It’s like going into a library and trying to find a book by the last sentence in it,” Odin told Twist. “You can go through all the books, one at a time, but if the library is large enough, it’d take forever. We don’t have forever.”
    “I’ll think about it,” Shay said.
    She did. She kept coming back with ideas, and Odin kept saying, “I thought of that.”
    “Listen, do you want me to keep working or not?” Shay asked.
    “Yeah, yeah, don’t get all snarly. Just don’t think the same things I do.”
    They sniped some more, like brother and sister, with X showing a little anxiety about it, but they gave him a three-way group hug, which he liked. As he