Free Short Squeeze by Chris Knopf Page A

looked worse than it felt, and it felt really bad. I checked around the rest of me and found a few more ugly red splotches, though in less intimate places.
    I examined my face, calming the irrational fear that somehow the crash had dislodged all that lovely plastic surgery. It hadn’t, of course, but that’s why it’s called an irrational fear.
    When I went to get dressed, a bra was out of the question. Just looking at it made me wince. So I went for a tube top, baggy shirt, and loose jacket combo that looked so good I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before.
    A little concealer from a tube—almost dried into stone for lack of use—was all I needed to dab out the welt on my forehead and be ready for public consumption.
    And Harry.
    “You did what?” he asked when I called him on my cell phone.
    “I didn’t do anything. It was done to me. I’m okay. Just a little banged around. The truck, on the other hand, is a goner.”
    There was a moment of silence on the line.
    “I need to come over there.”
    “No,” I said, before he barely had the words out. “You don’t need to come over here.”
    “It’s not safe.”
    “Yes, it is. It’s safe if I keep moving,” I said.
    “I want to see you.”
    “I’m going over to the Volvo dealer to buy a car just like yours. We’ll match.”
    He pressed me to describe the accident and my actual condition. I got him off the phone by promising to tell him everything, in person, as soon as I had the chance.
    “I’ll pick you up in my new car,” I said.
    I’m not sure where I stand on big, strong men. If you pay attention to the words, it makes some sense. Big, strong men. When you’re feeling threatened, there’s just nothing better. This wasn’t the first time I’d attracted murderous attention, so I knew that well enough.
    But if I gave in to that now, there’d be no going back. Harry couldn’t follow me around all day, and Sam wouldn’t. Eventually I’d start resenting the constraints on my freedom and get all twisted up in gender angst and be worse off than if the truck had done a proper job running me off the road.
    So when the cab arrived, I ran the ten yards and jumped in the rear seat as if a thunderstorm was raging, but I did it on my own.
    As it turned out, I picked the right mood to negotiate for a new car. Testy paranoia, seasoned with a feminist rage that would’ve embarrassed Bella Abzug. I got the car I wanted, at the price I wanted, andlikely paved a less condescending path for the next unwed sister who wandered into the dealership.
    The Internet has made it impossible to hide anymore, unless you intentionally change your identity, and that isn’t easy. If you’re a regular law-abiding member of society, I’ll find you. The more active you are in the world, the easier it is to pin you down. I’ll know when you were born and your parents’ names and their parents’ and your other ancestors’ as far back as I have time to look. If you go to school, graduate, get married, buy a house, get a job, get a promotion, get divorced, get fired, get foreclosed on, get arrested, sued, or released on parole, I’ll know about it. If you’re famous, or you come from a famous family, I’ll know even more and twice as fast.
    Wendy Wolsonowicz would probably find that appalling, given where she’d decided to live. She was the only one of the immediate family I hadn’t talked to, so I picked her as my next stop.
    She’d moved to Shelter Island from Arizona about the same time as her adopted brother. Shelter Island is a big landmass wedged between the North and South Forks of the East End. You can only get there by ferry. This is one of the reasons it’s escaped some of the more rapacious development out here, but there’s also not a ton of land you can develop, since a huge hunk of the place is wildlife preserve. Wendy had somehow managed to buy the only piece of private property within the largest preserve, an island itself surrounded by a couple