Read Online Magic Line by Elizabeth Gunn - Free Book Online

people yelling all around and horns and sirens sounding, might see a guy with a clean shirt and wish they had it but think there was no time for that. Robin made time, almost literally – by not hesitating, he created little pockets of time that most people didn’t have. When he saw something he wanted, if nobody stopped him he took it right away. He had been hurt a few times while he learned how fast you had to be, but the reward was worth it – he often threw people off balance by the audacity with which he put his own desires ahead of everything.
    The cop whose face he’d smashed was yelling something in the van. It sounded garbled – he must be choking on his own blood. He hadn’t followed them out yet so he probably wasn’t coming at all. With no cop to worry about and the driver climbing back into his seat, Robin stood still and pulled off his bloody shirt. He started to drop it right there, but then he heard that doctor in the rescue van begin yelling for help on the radio. So now a lot of people were going to be looking for the missing patient, right here. Better if they didn’t find a bloody shirt in this entrance.
    He rolled the shirt up and got ready to toss it into a big garbage receiver beside the emergency entrance. At the last second he remembered the little radio in the sleeve. He pulled it out and stuck it in his pants pocket, giddy at the thought of how close he’d come to forgetting his favorite small device. He used it all the time, loved it because it kept him in touch with the world but didn’t leave a trail or need to be plugged in. Secretly, to himself only, he called it ‘Little Brother.’
    There, the bloody shirt was out of sight.
    He still didn’t know where he was going. The street was full of crazy traffic and offered no cover. There were small bushes and cacti all around this driveway but they wouldn’t hide him for more than a minute. The van he’d jumped out of was beginning to move into the building under the emergency sign, so he couldn’t go there. He pulled on the clean shirt and walked around the building, toward the front.
    He knew he had blood on his pants but they were dark. Indoors out of the sun, the stains probably wouldn’t show.
    Nobody stopped him on the steps. He took a deep breath and opened the front door. Look as if you know what you’re doing.
    Inside was a lobby with a long desk. There were many people – all too busy to look at him, good. He saw a sign that said, ‘Restrooms,’ and walked toward it briskly, eyes straight ahead. Inside the men’s room, he used the urinal and cleaned up at the farthest sink from the door, using wet paper towels so the blood wouldn’t show in the sink. Another good thing: men were mostly uneasy in public toilets these days, not wanting to look at each other. Several came and went, paying no attention to him.
    When he came out he walked past the desk to the elevators, got in the first one that opened and rode to the third floor – high enough to see his surroundings, not too far to run down if something spooked him. He didn’t know the building and was basically surfing. But he found the first thing he wanted quickly, a service desk where people in scrubs came and went and patients’ charts were stacked in a rack. He set an oblique course for it, slowing down while two aides conferred there, speeding up when they walked away. As he walked past the desk he picked a chart off the rack and walked straight on to a door marked, ‘Stairs.’
    Climbing to the fourth floor, he felt his confidence soar. He was doing very well, wearing a dark blue uniform shirt that said he worked for the Tucson Fire Department, and carrying a chart he could look down at and appear to study. That was cover enough to allow him to walk these halls till he decided where to go next. He could even stand still for a couple of minutes, pretending to look at the chart