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The first thing he did was call Dot After all the years they’d worked together, that was pretty much an automatic reaction He picked up the phone, hit Redial, and let it ring Voice , and he sat there with hise He closed the phone and sat there, looking at the TV some more

Tena shower

He’d resisted the idea at first, dee to do with his ti channels until he found one that would proclaim his innocence? Hop in the car and le hi, he didn’t really need a shower, but who could say when he’d get the chance to shower again? Maybe he’d be living in subway tunnels and sleeping in his clothes, ht as well stay as clean as possible for as long as he could

Or was he running a risk by showering? Hair fro down the drain and get caught in the trap, and a CSI crew could recover it and determine his DNA But he’d already showered several times in the course of his stay, so the trap was probably overfloith his DNA

For a et rid of the evidence, but then it struck him that DNA was the least of his worries They already had his fingerprints, so what possible difference could it make if they had his DNA as well? Once they picked hiot their hands on hiure in the equation

He got out of the shower and stood in front of the sink and shaved He’d already done so a few hours ago, he could barely feel any stubble even against the grain, but ould he get to shave again? And why not leave a little more DNA in the sink trap, just for the hell of it?

He got dressed, and packed his bag He ured out what to do next and when to do it, but it wouldn’t hurt to be ready to leave at awas black, like everybody else’s, and had wheels and a handle It was sh to carry onto an airplane, and would fit easily in an overhead co as dangerous as a pair of stael would send the airport security people into a frenzy And when they spotted his Swiss Army knife they’d call out the National Guard

If he’d known he was going to be checking it all the tiht another color It seee carousel were essentially indistinguishable froarishly colored ones that you sa and then To ht a flae device to wrap around the handle, and it helped Dot had assured hiht help keep so his suitcase for a deer

Dot He picked up the phone, hesitated, then hit Redial It rang four times and switched hi hiainst it, and was about to ring off when he noticed an icon on the screen indicating that he’d received a voice e himself It took him a moment to rees," a recorded voice inforht

And then there was silence, ten or fifteen seconds of it, enough to e after all And then a coht out of a science-fiction movie, pronounced a series of words one at a time:

"Ditch The Phone Repeat Ditch The Daht have stared at a talking dog It was Dot, it could only be Dot Nobody else had his cell nue and inserted daed to turn herself into a robot?

Then he remembered A neat trick she’d discovered in one of the applications she ran on her co or other, and the computer read the words aloud in a voice all its own Just Like That One Robotic Word At A Tiuarding against You could beat voiceprint identification by whispering, or at least you used to be able to, but who kne much better they’d ain, listened to the ain, and this time when the voiceor erasing the e is erased," she told him, and the little voice mail icon vanished from the screen

Ditch the phone Ditch the damn phone

How? Just toss it?

If someone found it, and if FBI technicians went to work on it, who could say what it would tell them? They could find out the number he’d called and when he’d called it They couldn’t recover the actual conversations, at least he didn’t see how they could, but why leave anything to chance?