by Audrey Faye
Her eyebrows flew up. “Wow—what got into you?”
Nothing I knew how to explain. “A half-drunk zebra baby can use a damn cell phone.”
Carly took a big bite of her cinnamon bun and chewed it very slowly, watching me the whole time.
The woman knew how to make someone squirm. I chewed a bite of mine equally slowly and tried not to let the belly fire I’d walked in with die a spluttering death.
That’s the thing about bravery. It requires oxygen, just like songs do.
“Okay.” Carly held out her phone. “Want me to come up with a good list of threats for you to use?”
No, dammit. Carly’s pretty creative with her threats. There are a whole lot of guys who don’t ever want to meet up with her in a dark alley—or a well-lit restaurant, for that matter. But I was a cinnamon-drunk zebra baby, and I could threaten my own scumbags. “I’ll manage.” I indicated a corner of the very floral bedspread with my chin. “Put it there—my fingers are lethal weapons right now.” I was pretty sure I had sticky juice on every square inch of my fingers, and probably my elbows, too.
“Okay.” My partner looked amused, but she put her phone where I’d indicated.
I scrolled to the first guy on her list with the side of a relatively clean thumb. Asshole type. Brand-new convertible and six years of child support arrears. I clicked on the text link and typed one painful letter at a time, cursing my big thumbs and the dastardly little brain in the phone that tried to guess what I wanted to say and never got it right. And finally got my message written.
Pay your backed-up child support, or your nice new ride will find itself full of zebra poop.
Carly would have included knives in there somewhere, but my creative juices just aren’t the same as hers, for which the planet should be thoroughly grateful. I grinned and hit send. One cinnamon-stoked zebra baby on her maiden voyage. Carly wasn’t the only one finding a way to give futility a kick in the knees this morning.
I was the captain of my own ship, dammit. And today, maybe I’d managed to actually put my boat in the water.
-o0o-
I ditched the cinnamon-bun bag with a high drop shot that neatly swooshed into the trash can through my imaginary rim.
Carly was still back in the room, but I’d needed some fresh air and a lack of audience for my garbage-disposal antics.
I’d sent fourteen laborious texts to twelve different dirtwads and gotten six replies—five suitably chastised, and one who had been dumb enough to laugh at zebra poop.
He’d stopped laughing when I sent him a picture of what zebra hooves do to leather car upholstery. Which is good, because attaching a picture took me three tries and swearing in four languages to accomplish.
I was still a hermit, still the woman who worked far back of the front lines. But today, this hermit had maybe traded her shell for one that didn’t pinch in quite so many places, and it felt good.
I turned back around, skirting the garbage bins at the end of the alley—and realized I was humming. Under my breath, and not loud enough for anyone else in the universe to hear, but humming nonetheless.
I turned, one slow revolution, studying the walls of the dingy hotel and the even dingier alley, my eyes making a memory stamp of the place where one baby zebra had found herself the beginnings of a melody. And then I stuffed my muse back in her casket, because however cool baby zebras might be, they don’t sing.
I might, however, occasionally let her hum a line or two.
5
I sat down on the chair to Carly’s left, shaking my head at the face on her laptop screen and wishing I’d had time to hit Simone’s for more cinnamon buns—8am video conference calls surely deserved them. I stared blearily at the chirpy face on the screen. Our recently fired assassin-in-training, insisting she had something important to tell us.
She held up a plate and waved it our general direction. “Cheese scone?”
Low blow. “I hear you can express-mail stuff like that now.”
Her lips quirked. “I hear you can cook stuff like this now.”
That was going to happen shortly after we started a training school for ninety-pound sidekicks. “No oven here.”
“You need to pick better motels.” A sly look. “I could find some for you, if you let me know your route.”
Carly raised an eyebrow. “Sure. Right after you convince the world to give up potato chips for the glories of kale.”
Lelo snorted. “Rosie likes kale chips.”
Rosie probably fed the green stuff to her cat when Lelo wasn’t looking.
The kid looked down at something in her lap, suddenly avoiding eye contact. “When do you think you might be swinging back this way?”
Two grown assassins, up way too early, squirming in their boots. Carly eyed the plate of scones still visible on the side of the screen. “As soon as we can, but only if the kale chips are locked up in the dungeon for the weekend.”
“Soon as in this week, or sometime this year?”
Such eager eyes. They tore little tiny holes in the flannel that covered my heart and scared the sweet living crap out of me. “I don’t know. We need to follow up on a couple of cases first.” And find one that would help lift our sense of assassin self-worth out of the compost pile. Zebra-poop texts could only carry us so far.
Her gaze ducked again. “Are you going anywhere near Boulder?”
Carly frowned. “The one in Colorado?”
“There’s more than one?”
I wasn’t missing the pseudo-casual tone or the way my assassin senses were tingling—and I suddenly found myself impatient with the dance. Cinnamon withdrawal, probably. “What’s up, kid?”
Lelo’s shoulders squared. “I found you an assignment.”
Five pretty innocent words, unless you saw the body language attached to them—and the body language attached to the woman at my side who had told a certain teenager to stay the hell out of assassin territory two short days ago.
Carly was already growling. “I told you to keep out of the forums.”
“You told me to keep out of trouble.” Lelo’s eyes flashed defiance. “And I have. I uploaded a new avatar that won’t attract attention, and I’m using proxies and a whole bunch of other stuff so nobody can track me. The friend who helped me find you a few months back worked on it with me—he says I’m totally stealth now.”
Even I know there’s no such thing as totally stealth. Everyone leaves footprints, even hermits. Depending on the context, most especially hermits—sometimes nothing speaks louder than a carefully engineered attempt to hide.
Carly leaned forward, eyes flashing impending murder, and I winced, knowing what was coming next, knowing how much it needed to happen, and knowing I wanted to be anywhere but in the chair beside her while she did the dirty, mean work that would keep an undersized friend safe.
It almost happened. I saw the words of harsh truth fully formed in Carly’s throat and ready to lash out. And then something in her softened. It wasn’t obvious unless you were a foot away, and even then all I saw were her clenched fingers loosening some. I watched, fascinated, as she sat perfectly still and unfurled a kind of calm I’d never seen her wear. When she spoke again, her words had backed a whole football field away from violent. “Tell me exactly what he set up for you.”
Lelo gaped—she’d seen the volcano rising as clearly as I had. And then she pulled her shit together and started to talk, babbling gratitude mixed together with technical mumbo-jumbo destined to make my head ache before it even arrived.
I tuned out the content, knowing I’d only understand every fifteenth word anyhow. Instead, I listened to what traveled underneath. My partner, holding out kindness and patience and a reluctant respect for persistence, even the kind that rode the edges of stupid. Sixteen-year-old eyes offering humility and a touch of hero worship in return. And somewhere in there, a kind of truce forming that I was pretty sure meant Lelo wasn’t going to die this day.
Heck, if I understood any part
of what they were saying correctly, she wasn’t even going to get kicked out of the forums. Carly didn’t impress easily, but as Lelo reeled off the string of precautions her friend had helped put in place, that’s exactly what was happening.
Which meant it was going to land on me to be the nasty assassin with the big bad reality-check hammer. I don’t care how many tech safetyguards a teenager has in place—she still has a teenage brain, and those are about as stable and trustworthy as a hungry monkey in a banana factory. I watched the play-by-play as the assessment of Lelo’s security vulnerabilities wound down.
The kid’s eyes swung my direction. “Jane doesn’t have any clue what we’re talking about.”
Carly kept her gaze on the screen. “She trusts me to know.”
Lelo’s head tilted to the left. “Just like you trust her to see stuff straight.”
“Yeah. Just like that.”
“Good.” Lelo paused for a second, and then her words rolled out double-speed. “Then I trust her too. Let me tell you about the case I found.” She looked at me, eyes earnest and pleading. “And if Jane thinks it’s a bad idea, then I won’t say anything else and you can totally go find your own dickwads to mess with.”
Bloody fleeping hell on a toothpick. “That’s not the way it works—Carly and I make decisions together.”
My partner raised a really noisy eyebrow. Lelo only snorted.
Dammit. I eyed the scarier of the two doubters. “You pick most of the assignments we take—I never even see the emails.”
“Sure, the easy ones.” Carly’s finger traced some kid’s initials carved into the cheap motel desk. “But you decide on the tough stuff.” She shrugged, looking several shades of embarrassed. “You’re kind of like our conscience.”
“I’m the person who washes our underwear and makes sure they put extra onions on your burgers.”
She nodded wryly. “That too.”
“You guys done with the love fest yet?” Lelo rolled her eyes. “Because I have this assignment to tell you about.”
I felt like part of a Charlie’s Angels briefing, except in an alternate universe where Charlie suddenly weighed a hundred pounds and his Angels wore hiking boots. “Possible assignment.”
“Unlikely assignment.” Carly leaned forward. “Snowball’s-chance-in-hell assignment.”
“It meets all your criteria,” said Lelo staunchly.
She didn’t even know what most of those were. However, I knew my job in the assassin duo of doom—back up and clarify the details. “So you found this case where, exactly?”
“I talked to a guy in a forum, and he needs your help. Well, his sister needs your help, but she’s too scared to come find you.” Her eyes were dead earnest. “It’s not like Ally and Chad—his sister knows her boyfriend is really bad stuff, but she can’t get rid of him.”
That had potential, which made me leery as heck. “What kind of bad?”
Lelo’s eyes hazed as she mentally assembled the story. “He seemed like a really nice guy at the beginning.”
They all do, or most of them, anyhow.
“Danno—that’s the guy I was chatting with—he says his sister is really smart, and she knows how to read guys and tell if she’s in trouble, but this time she didn’t figure it out until it was too late. But she’s not a wimp, and she’s not stupid.”
She had a brother who clearly loved her. “Not all women in trouble are stupid or weak.” And not all of us riding to the rescue were the stuff of heroes and ballads. If Carly and I had learned anything in three years, it was that being smart and careful doesn’t count for much in the end. Shit happens, it happens to some really good people, and there’s not a whole lot you can do sometimes to stay out of its way.
There’s sometimes not a whole lot you can do after it lands, either.
“So, he was a nice guy…” Carly waved a hand impatiently. “I assume he didn’t stay nice?”
Lelo shook her head. “Drugs, gambling, prostitutes. He steals from Danno’s sister, makes her cover for him sometimes. She thinks he’s into worse stuff than that.”
Danno wasn’t the name of anyone real. “Sounds like a peach. And Danno thinks we can set him straight?” One of my little conclusions after three years of collecting data—if a guy was wrong in one direction, he could maybe be cured. Once the wrong spreads, it’s usually better to just get any innocents who still love the guy the hell out of the way.
“Nah.” The kid seemed pretty convinced. “He’s all bad and the sister wants him gone.”
That was novel—usually women held on to their bad boys for far too long. “So why doesn’t she just leave? Or tell him to get lost?”
“She tried. But she takes care of their mom, so he found her and dragged her back and said he’d make her mom pay if she didn’t behave. And the dirtwad won’t leave because he likes having a pretty woman on his arm and someone to keep his bed warm. Danno says she’s like his cloak of respectability. When he’s not off snorting coke with a couple of prostitutes.”
Yeah, definitely a peach, but that wasn’t what I was focused on anymore—and judging from the way Carly’s fingers were idly braiding bits of drapery fuzz, I wasn’t the only one who had caught the stink of rotten. When you’ve been doing this for as long as we have, you know all the various ways potential assignments smell.
There was a catch here somewhere. Lelo didn’t know that yet—but we did.
And I was pretty sure it was going to draw us in like bees to honey.
6
I walked out of the bathroom, unreasonably pleased by a long, hot shower. Twenty years on the road with Johnny and three more with Carly had taught me a deep appreciation for happily boiled skin. I was clean, my belly was full, and all was right with the world.
I wasn’t the only one who’d used the last hour productively—the sounds of intent typing from the bed suggested that Carly had found a direction for her energy too. My partner never stayed at loose ends for long, and while I didn’t love Lelo’s methods, she had given us something to do. I took a detour to my bag, wondering if I’d refilled my secret chocolate stash the last time we’d emptied it. I had another one out in the van, but I had the kind of boiled-skin lazy underway that didn’t really want to wander out the door and over to the parking lot.
Sometimes instant gratification is a near-necessary thing.
A growl from the bed interrupted my bag diving. It wasn’t a new sound, or a particularly alarming one—Carly has always believed that the little bits and bytes of the Internet can be intimidated, just like anyone else. Which sounds like the kind of argument that I shouldn’t lose, but three years of having it hasn’t turned out that way so far.
I studied my partner, taking in the intent curl of her body around her laptop and the flaring light in her eyes. The back of my neck started to twitch—we only had one thing on the go that deserved that kind of laser-focused attention. “What are you up to?”
A shrug. “Doing a little research.”
That could cover myriad activities, most of them playing in the gray shades of the law. The fine print of the criminal code wasn’t what worried me at the moment, however. I’m a little slow after a hot-water interlude, but my brain was catching up to the obvious. “C.” I waited until she looked up. “Researching who?”
She managed a weak imitation of Rosie’s poker face. “Just a little digging. Nothing serious.”
Checking out Lelo’s guy and the trail of the rotten we’d smelled. I paused, hand still in my bag, waiting to hear the reason for the growls.
And then I saw Carly’s eyes turn to ice.
I stood up, gut instinct and fear trampling one another to get to the front of the line. “What?”
She looked up, ice three feet deep. “Danno’s real name is Daniel Robert Ferrillo.”
He’d be our guy—when it came to this stuff, Carly never missed. I waited for the anvil to drop.
She swallowed, the glacier’s only movement. “He only has one sister. Her boyfrien
d is a cop.”
I felt my spine snap straight. “You’re following a cop around the Internet?” Cop was the kind of deal breaker that needed to have us fleeing to the next dimension. We break laws every day. Assassins and cops are opposing forces in the universe, and we didn’t take on that kind of physics.
Pragmatic assassins. All the other kinds ended up dead or locked up.
Carly hadn’t moved. “I’m not following anyone. I’m taking a tiny little look, all through legal channels.”
Danger flags were waving everywhere I looked. “Walk away, C. There are a hundred women within an hour of here who need our help just as much as Danno’s sister, and none of them are hooked up with cops.” There was so much good we could do, and being smart about where we did it was my single biggest contribution to our longevity.
Smart assassins didn’t fling themselves at windmills, especially windmills holding guns.
“I know.” Her eyes flicked down at her screen, fingers drumming restlessly on her keyboard.
My alarm bells started producing noisy, tap-dancing offspring. There was no point in telling her to stop. Not yet. “Be careful, okay?” I saw her shoulders hunch a little at my tone—and kept going anyhow. “Pretend it’s my butt you’re covering, not yours.”
It was my biggest ammo. Carly might play fast and furious with her own safety, but she took mine very seriously.
Her eyes flared a little. “I am being careful. I’m using my flaky-writer-chick profile. She’s researching an article on cops with unusual hobbies. Anyone checking my web history is going to think I’m slightly demented and harmless.”
Carly maintained several online personas to keep the NSA, FBI, and anyone else tracking illegal Internet activities way confused. Her flaky-writer chick was one of my favorites, probably because she’d been my idea in the first place. I’d spent one short summer after college working the reference desk in my local library, and one of the frequent visitors had been a local fiction author. He’d been quirky, grumpy, and full of crazy questions, and I’d somehow ended up the person doing all his research for him. In three months, I’d discovered how fast a person might bleed out from a stake through the leg, what spices are involved in making a really authentic Indian curry, and how many kids under thirteen know how to make a bomb.