This chapter is dedicated to The Tattered Cover, Denver’s legendary independent bookstore. I happened upon The Tattered Cover quite by accident: Alice and I had just landed in Denver, coming in from London, and it was early and cold and we needed coffee. We drove in aimless rental-car circles, and that’s when I spotted it, the Tattered Cover’s sign. Something about it tingled in my hindbrain — I knew I’d heard of this place. We pulled in (got a coffee) and stepped into the store — a wonderland of dark wood, homey reading nooks, and miles and miles of bookshelves. The Tattered Cover http://www.tatteredcover.com/ 1628 16th St., Denver, CO USA 80202 +1 303 436 1070]]
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one of the three guys were around at the moment, so I took off. My head hurt so much I thought I must be bleeding, but my hands came away dry. My twisted ankle had frozen up in the truck so that I ran like a broken marionette, and I stopped only once, to cancel the photo-deletion on Masha’s phone. I turned off its radio — both to save battery and to keep it from being used to track me — and set the sleep timer to two hours, the longest setting available. I tried to set it to not require a password to wake from sleep, but that required a password itself. I was just going to have to tap the keypad at least once every two hours until I could figure out how to get the photo off of the phone. I would need a charger, then. I didn’t have a plan. I needed one. I needed to sit down, to get online — to figure out what I was going to do next. I was sick of letting other people do my planning for me. I didn’t want to be acting because of what Masha did, or because of the DHS, or because of my dad. Or because of Ange? Well, maybe I’d act because of Ange. That would be just fine, in fact. I’d just been slipping downhill, taking alleys when I could, merging with the Tenderloin crowds. I didn’t have any destination in mind. Every few minutes, I put my hand in my pocket