You Get Full Credit For Being Alive

Chapter One

I was born in the middle of a desert, at a gas station on the side of the road. At least that's what they told me when I was young, and still stupid enough to ask. Born abandoned, to a poor country girl who couldn't make it to help in time. Born with no father, no name, and no future. Born with no hope, so I should be grateful for what I was given, damn it, and stop asking questions.

I suffered through my youth in the desert, I joined the army and was sent to the desert, and a hell of a lot of my freelance work took place there too. For some reason it's a lot harder to get a job to kill someone on a tropical island than it is in the middle of a godforsaken wasteland with nothing but sand, rocks and sun to recommend it. Oh yeah, and oil. That was usually the deciding factor.

I was sick to death of deserts, literally. They were just killing fields as far as I was concerned, and so when I retired— by which I mean ran as hard as I could, covered my tracks and didn't look back— I chose the Pacific Northwest as my new home. Nothing but rain and trees and mountains. It had cloudy skies, cool temperatures, and plenty of isolation if I wanted it, which I did. I found a fixer-upper on the east edge of Renton, Washington, under the shadow of Mount Rainier. I modified it to my specifications, moved in everything I owned (a U-Haul trailer carrying more weapons than clothes, and no furniture) and accidentally ended up with a dog, too. The dog wasn't my idea; she was a stray, a bruised and whimpering thing I'd found hunkered down in my driveway. I had never had a pet before and had no intention of starting, but the lure of company won out over the inconvenience in the end. That was how I ended up tramping along the trail behind my house late at night about a year after I settled there, walking my damn dog in the drizzling rain.

Della was a good girl, don't get me wrong, but she was young and training was going a little slowly. I still didn't trust her not to get distracted and run off if I let her out at night on her own, so I went with her. It was Della who found the body, suddenly straining against her leash in a way I'd almost broken her of, whining and eager. Her gangly paws dug into the leafy trail as she pulled against my grip.

"Heel," I told her, forcing her down by my side. She subsided, but was still quivering. "What's your problem?" I muttered, looking forward into the misty gloom. It was early spring, still cold by my thin-blooded standards, and the only light around came from my flashlight. "What?" I thought it might be my neighbor's dog Princess; Mrs. Carlsen and her cocker spaniel went for walks around the woods here and our two dogs played together sometimes, but Princess was a barky little thing, and there was no noise other than the patter of rain on leaves right now.

Della whined again and made an abortive little twitch like she wanted to spring forward, and I let her this time. She pulled me the next twenty-five feet at a brisk pace before stopping abruptly at the base of a thick tree. Something was propped up against it.

Not something. Someone.

Now that I was closer I could smell the blood in the air, that telltale tang that you never can forget. There had to be a lot of it, for me to smell it over the rain. I told Della to sit a few feet away, so she wouldn't get any ideas about whether this was a good time to try licking the body, and shined my flashlight down at the corpse's face.

His skin was so pale it was blue, his lips gone purple. A sticky river of red trailed from somewhere in his thick brown hair down the side of his face, darkening his neck and the collar of his uniform... oh, fuck me. His police uniform. This was a cop. I had a dead cop less than five hundred feet from my house, from my safety net. How the fuck had he gotten out here? Who would go to that kind of trouble? More to the point, did it have anything to do with me? There were plenty of people I preferred to remain anonymous to in my new, civilian incarnation. If one of them had found me, and he was some kind of warning—