Sting by Sandra Brown Page B

they were referred to, but that was what they were—realize how many dozens of passwords, account numbers, credit card numbers, and such were committed to the hard drive of his memory.
    Over the past six months, he could have outfoxed his guards and fled at any time, but he’d bided his time until a routine had been established, monitoring had loosened up, and the hubbub surrounding his turning FBI informant had died down.
    Not that he’d been lax for that half year. He’d used the time to gradually alter his appearance. Pleading dry eye, he’d exchanged his contacts for eyeglasses. Pleading a loss of appetite for food as well as for life in general, he’d dropped the soft twenty pounds that had collected around his middle while he was cooking Panella’s books.
    Always before he’d been clean shaven, but he’d let his personal hygiene routine slip and shaved only every few days. His stubble grew in an unexpected ginger color, so even close acquaintances, and they were few in number, would recognize him unshaven and bespeckled.
    He’d prepared well, and last Tuesday morning, he’d made good his plan.
    He’d removed his ankle monitor, which was supposed to be impossible, but wasn’t. Wearing two day’s growth of reddish whiskers, and taking only a backpack full of things he’d pilfered over time, he’d slipped out of the second-story bedroom window and made it to the nearest highway on foot.
    For the most part, the people of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana were friendly sorts. In a time when whack jobs would settle unfounded grudges with a grand-scale slaughter of strangers, Josh had counted on the milk of human kindness to help him escape and evade recapture.
    Sure enough, in no time at all, he had hitched a ride with an old-timer in a pickup truck who was taking his pack of hunting dogs home after a month of training in Georgia. Every once in a while the hounds bayed from their kennels in the pickup bed, and Josh learned much more about blueticks than he ever wanted to know.
    He and the dog owner parted company in Greenwood, Mississippi, where Josh went into a filling station men’s room and applied a temporary tattoo to his neck. He put on sunglasses and a dirty, worn baseball cap that he’d swiped from a charity box while out shopping one day with his guards. So disguised, he walked to the center of town and joined the barely controlled chaos in a busy, crowded unemployment office.
    He spent the remainder of the day filling out endless forms with information he made up as he went along. He was shuffled from one long line to another like dozens of other people being assisted by impatient and uncaring bureaucrats. It was an excellent hiding place.
    When the office closed for the day, Josh tossed his stack of forms into the nearest trash can and used another men’s room to wash off the tattoo and shave his whiskers down to a five o’clock shadow. He walked a few blocks to a motel, where he checked in under a false name and using a credit card that he’d successfully smuggled in his duffel when taken from New Orleans.
    He’d spent most of Tuesday evening flipping through the channels on the TV. There was no mention of his escape on any of the news sources. He figured the U.S. Marshals Service didn’t want to publicize their screwup. Law enforcement agencies would have been alerted to be on the lookout for him, but he hoped now, more so than ever, that he would blend into the woodwork.
    It shouldn’t be that difficult. He never courted attention. Indeed, he’d spent most of his life shunning it, avoiding it at all costs. He was so practiced at making himself invisible, he should easily slip through the cracks of everyday life.
    Even so, he decided he’d rather be cautious than caught, so he opted to stay put and spend two more nights in that motel before moving on.
    Friday morning, he dressed in his unemployed-burnout getup, but omitted the tattoo and liberally applied grease to his hair, so that