by Audrey Faye
That had definite possibilities. Except for that stupid thing in my gut that wanted Lelo’s eyes to stay starry. “She packed us kale chips.”
Carly’s eyes flared—and then anger died, and in its place landed something that looked almost fragile. “Shit.”
Yeah. A great, heaping pile of it.
I kicked the blanket into the back of the van—soggy ends, worm hitchhiker, and all. One picnic, thoroughly over.
-o0o-
I stared at Lelo’s face on Carly’s computer screen. Voodoo technology. The idea of video chatting with someone we’d left several hundred miles behind was thoroughly weird—unless that someone needed a good yelling at from the backseat of our van.
A message that Lelo, happily chatting away on the screen, clearly hadn’t figured out yet. I shook my head, trying to follow the babble of words that were currently bossing around this conversation. “You did what now?”
“I’m helping. With the online stuff.” Lelo grinned, emboldened by the protective barriers of several hundred miles and sixteen-year-old chutzpah. “I created a profile and hit a bunch of the sites Carly plays on.”
My partner scowled at the last. “I don’t need a stalker.”
“You already have at least three of those.” The kid’s voice was brisk now, almost businesslike. “One of them is an idiot twelve-year-old in Nebraska. Hot computer skills, but he’s harmless—his mom still makes him get off the Internet so he can make friends in real life. Want me to track down the other two?”
I blinked. We’d visited Nebraska in the summer—and Carly’d had herself a good sit-down with a gangly kid in braces.
“No.” Carly’s voice was firm and final. “If you can track them, they can track you. Stay the hell away from the others.” She lifted a very meaningful eyebrow at the face on the screen. “All six of them.”
Lelo looked crestfallen. “I only found three.”
I eyed my partner—we were going to be having a little chat later, and not about Lelo’s antics. I’d had no idea she had an online posse on her tail. Maybe having a sidekick with enough computer skills to follow Carly around and keep her out of trouble wasn’t such a bad idea.
Then again, given the gleam in Lelo’s eyes, staying out of trouble wasn’t high on her list of priorities. I could only imagine the virtual dark corners Carly wandered into on the days when what lived inside her hadn’t found a reasonably healthy place to go.
“Stay away.” My partner’s voice was assassin-flat. “From the forums, from my trail, from all the shitheads who hide in the deep holes of the Internet and eat stupid kids for breakfast.”
“I’m just trying to help.”
It was the waver that did it, the quick hitch in the kid’s voice that had Carly’s fists clenching and me leaning forward, wanting to offer the sweet puppy a bone. “Pick some other way to do it.”
Lelo raised a skeptical eyebrow, face headed deep into sulk mode. “Like what?”
I had no flipping clue. “We’ll think about it.”
Her second eyebrow joined the first, and the sulk ratcheted into high gear.
Dammit. We would think about it, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t going to generate any magic answers. So I took a deep breath and did what smart, avoidant hermits do when their backs are to the wall—I threw somebody else under the bus. “You could send us more kale chips. Carly really likes them.”
I grinned as Lelo laughed and my partner spluttered. Sometimes it’s really good to know where all the knives are hidden.
3
New night, new roadside motel. Story of my life—a whole lot of our work gets done on lumpy beds with a redeeming WiFi connection.
Carly was trolling the web, laptop in one hand, phone in the other. Cleaning up behind Lelo and looking for something to do while she was at it. Not our usual method—most of the Internet thinks we’re chicks who sell cool t-shirts, but there’s a quiet underground that knows differently. The people who need us seem to find us.
If one of them didn’t find us soon, we were going to be assassins with mental health issues—the sounds coming out of my partner almost qualified as growls. I glanced over at the phone that seemed to be the object of her current disaffection. Texting was a foreign country to me, but growls were pretty clear. “Somebody not seeing the light?” Or maybe they were like me and simply ignored the messages landing on their phone screen. If a person wants to talk to me, they need to use old-fashioned technology. Words. Morse code. Songs.
“No, this scumbag just paid his child support for three months in advance.”
It was a weird day when we were complaining about being successful. “And this is a problem how?”
Carly scowled at her phone. “I want someone I can’t fix by texting them.”
The bored-assassins thing was getting dangerous. “We’ll pick up a new assignment before long.” Most weeks, we were snowed under with too many scumbags and not nearly enough time, miles, or sharp knives to deal with them all.
“I know.” She sounded like a petulant two-year-old who had just flushed all her marbles down the toilet.
Unfortunately, I pretty much felt the same way—I was just hiding it better under a couple of layers of flannel and life-weary pessimism. I don’t drive around the country in a beat-up van with more knives than your average flock of sushi chefs just for kicks. I do it to make a difference. And when we aren’t making a difference, we at least usually manage to stay busy. Neither Carly nor I do well in the black hole of boredom—we both store way too much gluck in its dark recesses. “Maybe we could take a vacation.”
She looked at me like I’d grown a second head and started singing Barney duets.
“It could work.” I tried to imagine some place we might want to go that we hadn’t already been. Definitely not anywhere we could go in a van. “How about Tahiti?”
“It’s okay, sweetie.” Carly slid onto the bed beside me and patted my hand reassuringly. “The aliens will give you back your brain soon, and everything will be all right.”
Apparently, Lelo’s brat genes were contagious. “I’m serious. We could go somewhere warm and sunny and swim in the ocean with big turtles or something.” I had no idea whether Tahiti had turtles or not—I just knew that it was really far away, and Carly couldn’t take her knives on airplanes.
Flannel can go anywhere.
“I hate swimming.” Her face wore a strange combination of alarm and amusement.
Huh. In three years of living in each other’s pockets, I hadn’t actually heard this before. “You can’t swim?” Where I grew up, that would be tantamount to admitting you couldn’t read, but New York City grows their kids really strangely.
“Can. Hate it.” My partner looked almost embarrassed. “I look funny in a swimsuit.”
When the most gorgeous woman you know says that, the rest of us are doomed. “So swim in a sexy dress. We’ll be in Tahiti.” This discussion was rapidly bordering on inane, but it was making both of us feel better. I cuddled in next to her on the lumpy pillows. “Besides, I’ll be standing beside you in my flannel, and you’ll look sexy as hell.”
The sound that came out of Carly sounded almost like a giggle. “You can’t swim in flannel.”
“I’ll take that bet.” I had vague memories of some lifeguarding test that had involved swimming half the lake in my jeans. Flannel had to be easier than peeling off skin-tight teenager denim while treading water and trying not to get pantsed by Tommy Bowman.
Carly snorted. “Do you even own a swimsuit?”
No, but I’d get one if it kept this light, happy feeling going. “Maybe one from the 1970s.”
“Vintage. Perfect. Does it have stripes and legs down to your knees?”
I was pretty sure she was off by at least a couple of bathing-suit decades. “Yup. And you would need shrink wrap and baby oil to get me into it.” I’d been a lot less curvy in 1973.
Carly was full-on grinning now. “The baby oil has to travel in your suitcase.”
“I dare you.”
Taking a dare wasn’t any smarter now than when I was fifteen. “I will if you will.”
“Deal.” Carly picked up her phone again, eyes gleaming.
I knew better than to ignore that kind of glint. “What are you doing?”
“Googling flannel bikinis. And plane tickets to Tahiti.”
Something inside my ribs suddenly wanted, fiercely, to be immersed in warm cerulean waters, hot sun, and utter escapism. Maybe I’d be a whole new Jane by the time I found my way back to shore and this thing called real life. Or maybe I’d just stay, lost in warm blue nirvana.
I shifted on my pillow. This was starting to feel uncomfortably like my recurring dream with the two big hunky men and their pot of chocolate.
“Found one.” Carly’s laugh was wicked, almost like she knew about my two guys with a chocolate fetish. “You want red plaid, or”—she turned her phone sideways and squinted—“something that might be penguins having sex?”
Duh. “The penguins.” If you’re going to buy an imaginary bikini you’ll never wear, you might as well go nuts. “You’re getting the one with the pink flying pigs, right?”
“Nope.” Carly was rapidly thumb typing on her phone. “The ninja unicorns. In black.”
It occurred to me, far too late, that she wasn’t actually kidding. “Wait—this stuff actually exists?”
“Totally. You want extra-fast shipping, or is next week soon enough?”
I tried to imagine myself on a warm beach clad in tiny triangles of boinking penguins. “Do they have a ship-by-slow-turtle option?”
Carly just laughed.
Apparently not.
4
There are lots of things I avoid in life. Carly in supreme high-efficiency mode is one of them, and this morning, she was on an unholy rampage.
Which, given our lack of actual work to do, meant she had turned into a technological hurricane. It’s always bad when my partner has more devices out than she has hands. It’s particularly bad when she’s using all of them at once.
Usually, I just take a long, hot bath when she’s in this mood, but today I was as restless as all get-out and I wanted to get rolling. And that looked like it was going to crash hard into my partner’s need for free hands and fast WiFi.
I shifted off my spot on the wall and winced at the energy steaming out of her pores. “What are you up to?”
“I’m prowling.”
The patron saint of assassins was clearly on her annual holiday. “Don’t you still have Lelo cleanup to do?”
“Nah.” Carly shrugged, eyebrows quirking at whatever rode across her tablet’s screen. “She has pretty good sense for a kid. Not much mess.”
That seemed unlikely, but questioning my partner’s computer skills was a one-way high-speed ride to insanity. Especially if she was on the prowl. “I thought we were going to ride the range and herd strays.”
“Tomorrow.”
“C.” I waited until she looked up at me and put on my best stern lumberjack voice. “We can’t stay in this hotel room all day.”
“Can. Gonna.”
Damn. I knew better than to try to negotiate with asteroids, two-year-olds, or Carly in one of her moods. However, just like with asteroids and toddlers, sometimes it worked to apply a new gravitational force. I slid into my fleece-lined flannel and stuffed a handful of cash in a pocket. “I’ll be back.”
That didn’t even get me a grunt.
I walked around the corner of the concrete walls that housed our current abode and spied one of the cleaning staff stuffing dirty towels into an enormous gray bag. Perfect.
She looked up as I got closer, offering a tentative smile. “Good morning.”
I was hoping to turn it into one. “Have you worked here long?”
A puzzled eyebrow went up, but the eyes said she still thought I was harmless. “Six years. They pay well, and I live close enough to walk.”
“Nice.” Which filled my small-talk quota for the day. “Where’s the best place to grab breakfast?”
She tightened the drawstrings on the bag and paused, thinking. “Eggs or sweet stuff?”
Eggs win for me every time, but I was looking for bribery, not sustenance. “Sweet stuff. The gooier the better.”
“Simone’s, then.” A quick grin. “Head north three blocks and then hang a right and follow the smell. My sister-in-law bakes the cinnamon buns—they’re as big as your head, and my husband says they’re good enough to make grown men beg.”
Excellent. We’d see what they did to one hundred-and-twenty-pound assassin.
I waved and noted the direction she headed with her cart. The cash in my pocket was enough to bring back an extra cinnamon bun or two, along with the dozen I planned to use to lure Ms. Efficiency out of her lair.
-o0o-
The problem with bribery is that you have to hold your own drooling glands firm long enough to deliver it. As I waited in line at Simone’s, I was fairly certain that was going to be a problem. Whoever did the baking here had clearly missed her calling as ruler of the culinary universe.
She also had a really quirky idea of what belonged in a bakery—or rather, what belonged in one bakery. Indian samosas sat side-by-side with incredibly flaky croissants and some little puff pastries I’d last seen at a tiny Korean shop in L.A. The cinnamon buns were nestled up to loaves of dark rye bread that looked like they’d landed straight from Eastern Europe.
The woman behind the counter met my eye and smiled. “We have something for everyone.”
And then some. “I came for the cinnamon buns, but I think I need to come back at lunchtime.” For the next week of lunchtimes.
She laughed. “Don’t miss tomorrow morning—I’m making cream puffs with a recipe I found at an old Pennsylvania estate sale. They’re deadly.”
I grinned. “You must be Simone.”
“Am.” She was already loading cinnamon buns into a bag.
My songwriter’s heart couldn’t resist—she exuded something entirely contagious. “It sounds like you love what you do.”
She paused, cinnamon bun in one hand, overflowing bag in the other, and nodded, almost to herself. “I think it’s more than that, honestly. It’s that I love who I am when I’m here.”
Her words landed, oddly weighty, like one of those strange moments when your fortune cookie actually feels important and real. I stared, not at all sure what to do with the sudden bakery wisdom.
“Sorry. I always get philosophical on my birthday.” She shook her head, laughing, dropped in the last cinnamon bun, and handed my bag over the display case. “That’s $16.95—the amateur psychology is free.”
I took the treats, bemused. I’d just had my second voluntary conversation of the day, and I hadn’t even had breakfast yet. It felt good—and it had stoked my restlessness in a totally unexpected way.
I liked what I did. But I wasn’t all that happy with who I was.
Simone had made herself a life, one where samosas and cream puffs hung out in the same sandbox. Rosie had turned a flower shop into a biker-gypsy haven that let all her edges find somewhere to bloom. Lelo had figured out how to grow up too fast and still stay shiny. Heck, even Carly had a life, strange as it was, when I found her. I’d joined that life, welding myself into place as her shadow. Driver, moral support, and fetcher of cinnamon buns, all while studiously avoiding anything that required me to put who I was on the line.
I stared at the cinnamon goo on my fingers, bewildered at the person who had crawled out of my bed this morning and put on my flannel shirt.
The woman who had talked to two complete strangers and liked it.
The one whose old, stale heart was suddenly chafing in the shadows.
The person who had a sudden urge to do something.
In Vermont, we don’t blame this kind of stuff on menopause. We call it what it is
—temporary insanity. In my case, a little craziness fueled by too much cinnamon and a squirmy heart.
I scrunched my bag closed and strolled out the door. I was done thinking. Carly wielded a knife every damn day. If I was going to be stuck in this one-horse town for the rest of the forever, I could at least learn to send a decent threatening text.
-o0o-
Carly barely looked up when I got back into the room. No matter—I knew how to distract the Empress of Efficiency. “I found cinnamon buns bigger than your head.”
“Yumm.” Her left hand reached out for empty air. “Gimme.”
That wasn’t how the deal worked. “Not until you have at least one conversation, consisting of at least three complete sentences, with the person who found them.”
She managed to keep her face pretty neutral as she looked up, but there was no hiding the laughing eyes. “Thank you, oh great hunter of baked goods. May the gods favor you with many children and a sexy man to make them with.”
“That’s only two sentences. And I’m not making babies with any man, I don’t care how sexy he is.”
She only grinned at me. “I hear cinnamon’s an aphrodisiac.”
“Great.” I rolled my eyes and handed over the bag. “Just what we need—two sexed-up assassins with nowhere to go.”
“Speak for yourself.”
Maybe today wasn’t entirely doomed. “We get to bust out of this hotel room?”
Her response got lost in the bowels of a cinnamon bun. Something about responsibility, monkeyed accounts, a dude in Omaha, and a bucketload of guys who needed follow-up texts.
I lifted my own sticky, gooey monstrosity out of the bag and let it tempt me into dangerous lands. “I’ll do the texts.”
“I’ll do them.” Carly licked her fingers and typed with a mostly clean knuckle. “Soon as I get our emails cleared out. You can keep hunting food and stuff.”
That was my usual job on a day like today—take care of the world of mundania while my partner did the dark and dangerous and technological. In this moment, that suddenly grated on every nerve the cinnamon hadn’t already numbed. “I’ll send the texts.”