by Audrey Faye
“Oh, no—you didn’t get our letter?” I tried to look confused and contrite, and fished in my folder for the very official document Lelo and Rosie had amused themselves forging. “I have a copy right here. We’ve got sixteen hours of bliss lined up for you over the next three days, Ms. Ferrillo. The seaweed foot scrub is my favorite.”
Danno’s sister scanned the text. I hoped like hell she liked surprises—or at least the very obvious chance at escape that I offered her.
“The hell, Shelley?” An annoyed male voice from the hallway heralded Rick’s arrival.
I saw her take in his obviously irritated confusion, and then look back at me, eyes weighing. Measuring. Figuring out whether what my piece of paper promised was worth the price the guy behind her might exact. I’d seen similar looks a whole lot of times before, and I hated every one of them.
Then she squared her shoulders and the look I hated fled. She held the paper out to Rick. “I won a spa weekend, and they’re here to pick me up.”
He looked me up and down about three times. “Maybe I should come with you.”
Eww—that was totally not a complication we’d planned for. I mentally cursed whoever had added two more socks to my fake-boob stuffing. “It’s only for women. Kind of a spa-retreat thing—she’ll get a free cucumber facial and yogurt pedicure when she arrives.” I had no idea what spas used for pedicures, but I figured he didn’t either.
Rick scowled, his face fifteen kinds of skeptical. “This sounds like a scam.”
Not the kind he imagined. I hugged Rowena’s bouquet and looked the asshole in the eyes. “No, sir. Scammers don’t drive stretch limos.”
His eyebrows rose—and then I saw him turn off, stop caring. He looked down at the woman beside him. “Whatever. Be home in time to cook dinner Sunday—the guys are coming over.”
“Always.” Shelley reached up to kiss his cheek on the way out. But when she turned and I could see her eyes, they were anything but docile.
That wasn’t a look I saw nearly so often. Danno was right—Shelley was smart and tough and she totally knew I was up to something.
The door to the house closed behind us before we’d walked three steps. Rick, checking out. I kept moving—we weren’t nearly out of danger yet.
Shelley glanced at me and spoke in a bare whisper. “Who the hell are you and why are you peddling bullshit about yogurt pedicures?”
Damn. I needed her in the car and the hell out of here. So I tried the only answer that might work. “Danno sent us.” Which wasn’t exactly a lie, but I hoped like hell she didn’t have him on speed dial. We hadn’t filled him in on this part of the plan just yet, and I didn’t want to be standing here explaining yogurt and stretch limos.
Fortunately, her brother’s name seemed to be the magic wand. Eyes shimmering with tears, Shelley climbed gracefully into the back of the limo and then plastered a smile on her face, waving out the backseat glass like a dutiful woman on her way to a surprise weekend of pampering and cucumbers, just in case Rick happened to be watching out a window.
She held it together all the way down the block. And then I heard the tears start.
I just kept driving. Sometimes tears needed a place to land where nobody else was watching.
-o0o-
Shelley followed me in the door of our weird warehouse safe house and stopped dead, eyes widening. And then her brother stepped out of the shadows, and I watched those wide eyes fill with tears.
I had no idea who had gone to get Danno, but at this point, I was ready to anoint them a freaking genius.
“Sshhh. These are the people I told you about.” Big arms held his sister tight—and dared every one of us in the apartment to let either of them down.
We were going to do our very best to avoid that, even if it broke every sacred assassin rule we had.
Shelley pushed away from her brother—gently, but with the kind of firmness that told me she had a lot more spine than I would have had in her shoes. Her eyes traveled the floorspace again, assessing this time, taking our measure. “Wow. I didn’t expect this many of you.”
“Oh, we’re not all full-time assassins.” Lelo grinned from her station at the foot of the king-size bed and held out a bag of kale chips. “Some of us are just the occasional hit squad.”
Carly snorted. “Whatever, skinny girl. You’re more like the kid Friday who won’t go away.”
Lelo glanced pointedly at the plate of cheese scones. “If I did, you’d starve.”
“Point. But at least I’d die quiet and happy.”
Lelo snickered and made some kind of teenage gesture nobody else in the room understood.
My partner shook her head. “Whatever. You done with the template yet?”
“Nope. Soon. Genius takes time.”
They had the whole room in the palm of their hands with their patter—and I wasn’t even sure that’s why they were doing it.
Carly’s eyes glinted with fun and something a little deeper. “It’s a freaking form, smartypants. Just make it functional for six people to use at the same time and we’re good.”
Shelley’s head followed the dialogue, face growing more confused by the minute. “Wait—you’re all going after Rick? You can’t.” She looked at Lelo in total distress. “You’re just a—”
I gave her bonus points for knowing better than to finish that sentence.
Rosie, who’d been on laptop-requisitioning duty, herded Shelley to the only chair in the apartment that looked safe to sit in. “We’re all going after him, and nobody’s leaving this place to do it.”
Except me, but no one else needed to know that.
“He writes food reviews.” Carly started the briefing, sounding just like all the tough-ass good guys on Law & Order. “He passes messages to the bad guys that way. We’re going to change the reviews and clog up his communications.”
“Food reviews?” Shelley’s eyebrows headed skyward. “Rick can’t tell the difference between ketchup and hot sauce.”
We’d noticed.
“He’s faking it,” said Carly. “So we’re going to fake it some more—substitute his reviews with new ones. Decent ones this time, ones that sound like we’ve actually eaten there.” She held up a piece of paper. “Ones that don’t claim he ate a burger at Denver’s best Thai food joint.”
There were crimes we didn’t forgive.
“1,321 reviews to write, and two days to do it.” My partner reached for the plate of scones, palming two and tossing them to Shelley and Danno. “Cheese scones are hereby rationed. One per every ten reviews you write.”
Shelley caught the flying scone and stared at it, eyes blank. And then she closed them, ribs rising and falling in the slow rhythm of a yogi about to meditate—or a woman about to have a panic attack.
“Shelley.” Danno’s voice was low, fierce, and worried as hell.
Her eyes opened again, and I realized just how far away from panic she was. I knew that look—I saw it on Carly every time she picked up a knife.
A woman who had seized her power.
“I did a summer working as a court reporter,” she said quietly. “I type two hundred words a minute. Tell me where to start.”
“Score.” Rosie dropped a laptop in her hands and held out two sheaves of paper an inch thick. “You want to start with burgers or Mexican?”
I saw the first smile I’d ever seen on Shelley’s face. “I grew up in Wichita. I’ll take the burgers.”
“Dibs on Mexican.” Carly, already typing with one hand, didn’t even look up. “And sushi.”
It figured she’d take the ones where knives mattered.
“Here.” Rosie handed Danno another stack of paper. “You get the chain restaurants. Boring stuff, mostly—sorry, but Rick reviewed a lot of those.” She looked him straight in the eyes. “So every word you type will help take him down.”
I guess we knew who was in charge of team motivation.
I held out a hand. “What does that leave me with? Onion-ring dealers an
d seedy bars?”
“Nope, those are in Lelo’s pile.” Rosie grinned. “You and I get the weird-ass places that serve food nobody can pronounce.”
Of course we did.
16
“I think my fingers are broken.” Lelo waved her maimed digits in the air, looking for sympathy.
I had none. 186 painfully typed reviews and I was ready to kill the next person who so much as daydreamed about food. Or cleanliness—foodies had obsessive tendencies on that front. So long as there wasn’t cat hair in my soup, I didn’t ask too many questions.
Rosie closed her laptop with a sigh. “Whatever we’re doing next, the menu better not be in French.”
“At least you didn’t get Japanese,” said Carly wryly. She’d had the sushi joints.
We were overachievers, the lot of us. We’d consulted menus and other review sites, looked up the proper ingredients for obscure dishes, and in Lelo’s case, even tried cooking a couple. The best 1,321 reviews ever written by six people hiding in a warehouse all weekend.
“You had raw fish.” Rosie flashed my partner a saucy grin. “How hard can that be?”
“Sushi’s all about the knife skills.” Carly sounded almost plaintive. “How can I tell that if I’ve never been within twenty miles of a place?”
“Perfectionists, much?” Lelo was pulling something out of the fridge that looked delectable and smelled nothing like raw fish. “Most online reviews are utter crap. Yours will be way better than that unless you two got your escargots and tamago mixed up.”
She was a lot braver than I was. None of us had missed the feisty sparks in the air every time Carly and Rosie got within ten feet of each other, but the rest of us had joined an unspoken pact of avoidance.
Apparently teenagers like poking things.
Shelley looked at the plate in Lelo’s hands and breathed in deeply. “I’ll have some of that, as long as it isn’t made from any part of a cow.”
Danno’s sister had typed more words in the last day and a half than the rest of us put together. But it wasn’t her clacking fingers that had earned her a share of whatever was on that plate—it was the unrelenting fierceness in her eyes. This wasn’t a woman who had been held under someone’s thumb easily, and now that she saw her way out, she was taking it with two hands and a sledgehammer.
But I still didn’t really know what to say to her. I watched as she helped Lelo load food onto the various things we’d conscripted as plates. Easy teamwork. I tried not to let that give me the jitters.
“So.” Shelley slid onto the couch beside me, bearing the only two actual plates in the joint. “What happens now?”
I took one of the plates and watched her fingers clench and uncurl, working out the kinks of a hundred thousand words pounded into a keyboard. “Carly uploads the reviews.”
Her fingers stopped moving. “They’ll kill him.”
We’d hoped she wouldn’t be that sure—but she’d probably looked enough of the bad guys in the eyes to know. I glanced her direction, trying to get a read now that rubber was very close to hitting the road. A lot of women wanted their particular asshole dead in theory. A lot fewer wanted him dead in practice. “They might.”
She was silent a very long time. “I don’t think I’d stop you. He’s an evil, dangerous man, and I’m not the first woman he’s held captive.” Her eyes rose to meet mine. “But I don’t think that’s your plan.”
Dammit, what was I, easier to read than a Dr. Seuss book? I returned her gaze, dead serious and wanting her to know it. “We’re taking him down, Shelley—I promise. That’s all you need to know.” She could suspect all she wanted, but I didn’t want her knowing the details. The feds would never track down a random woman in flannel, but they’d almost certainly talk to Shelley, and we’d already pulled her across plenty of lines. If we guessed wrong and Rick talked to the authorities about us instead of his crimes, I was pretty sure nobody was going to prosecute her for writing food reviews, but they might not look so kindly on putting a cop in the line of fire.
It was my job to make sure one cop never let it get that far.
Shelley reached out a hand and set it on my arm, feather light and titanium tough. “Will you see him?”
I stayed mute. She could read into that whatever she wanted—she wasn’t going to believe any of my non-answers at this point anyhow.
She waited out my silence for a bit, and then she nodded. “When you do? When you tell him that he’s going down, and there’s nothing he can do about it?” Her breath hitched. “You don’t have to say anything more. But if you could maybe just let your eyes be mine for a moment, so that somewhere in his shriveled coward of a heart, he knows that I helped—I’d really appreciate it.”
Damn. I wouldn’t do it, because no way, no how were we putting her in the sights of any of the bad guys who might still owe Rick something at the end of all this. But I wanted to.
Taking a hundred-thousand-word swing at him would have to be enough.
-o0o-
It’s all fun and games until someone pokes out an eye. I could hear the sturdy New England ghost of my grandmother saying so as I watched Shelley and Carly dance around the table with two butter knives.
A quick lesson, just in case Plans A, B, and C failed and somehow Rick showed his face in Shelley’s life again.
Shelley wasn’t all that graceful in the weapons department, but she had a solid helping of the most important skill with a knife, and the one I most lacked—deadly intent. Especially if going back to Rick lay at the losing end of her blade.
Desperation makes some people better fighters. The rest of us just run and hide under rocks.
Carly lunged across the table and startled Shelley into a pretty effective knife block. Which made Danno hiss, Lelo applaud, and Shelley crack the first grin I’d seen in an hour.
“She’s gorgeous.” Rosie stepped up beside me, holding out a steaming mug.
I didn’t know what to make of the tenderness in the big gypsy’s voice—and I had no trouble figuring out who she was talking about. “She’s scary as hell.”
“That too.” Rosie smiled wryly.
This conversation was rapidly heading down roads I didn’t want to travel.
“She’s doing pretty well taking the backseat this time.”
Somehow, that grated—and made me talkative. “She does it more often than you think.”
“Stand down, lady.” Rosie nudged me gently. “I’m not accusing Carly of anything. Just guessing it’s not all that often that she holds the cloak while you ride into danger.”
Pretty much never. And that suddenly grated worse than anything else. When had I turned into a shrivel-hearted coward?
“Do you always beat yourself up this much?”
I glared at Rosie. “Stop reading my mind.”
She grinned. “Stop making it so obvious on your face.”
Advice I sucked at for both life and poker. “She’ll be fine. It’s me quaking in my boots.”
“There are all kinds of bravery.” Rosie nodded toward the duo with the butter knives. “That’s just one flavor.” She eyed me carefully. “And I don’t think you’re quaking at all.”
For reasons I couldn’t make sense of at all, she was right. “I should be.” My nerves were a good part of the reason we were still doing the assassin thing—they kept us careful.
“Rick took Shelley for granted, figured she was a harmless kitten.” Rosie’s smile was deep and dangerous. “I think he’s going to regret thinking the same thing of you.”
Damn. Rosie had good eyes, and I hoped she was using them on my partner with half the focus she’d turned on me.
Or preferably, instead of looking at me. I didn’t need someone waltzing into my crab shell—but Carly did. My partner waved a knife so no one looked too closely at what lay underneath, but that was all cover for a heart who ached to be seen for what she truly was.
Carly wasn’t easy to love. But if I read two-hundred pounds of determined woman rig
ht, she was considering giving it a try.
And I had no business at all giving anyone advice in that department. Back to the job. “We’ll have a big party when I get back.” After we took the butter knives away from all the helpless kittens.
The sexy gypsy looked at me, deep curiosity swimming in her eyes. “I’d have loved to have been a fly on the wall when you used to sing.”
I could feel the reverberations as my armor clanged into place. “That was a long time ago.” Back behind the Keep Out signs in the lands we never talked about. New friends with killer cheesecake recipes needed to read the big red letters.
“The stories of how we got here always matter.” Rosie slung a leg nonchalantly off her bar stool and stood up. “I used to deliver singing strip-tease telegrams.”
I stared at her riotous curls as she walked away, hips swinging and message firmly delivered.
She didn’t give a damn about Keep Out signs.
17
Assassins don’t walk into police stations. Not voluntarily, anyhow—and not with a chip on their shoulder the size of a small country.
Well, maybe that last part wasn’t quite true. I couldn’t imagine Carly walking in anywhere without at least some of her bravado on display. It’s more essential to who she is, more welded to her soul’s core. For me, it’s just a costume, something I play with in the mirror and the occasional dark alley because it works, and whatever else I am, I’m a woman who likes to be decently good at her job.
But today, the feisty set of my shoulders seemed to be driven by something else. I hunched them over—the whole point of sending me on this little jaunt was that I’m totally unmemorable, and attitude is something people remember.
The bored face at the reception desk said I was pulling off uninteresting well enough. I pitched my voice higher than usual and borrowed the slightly flat accent of my best friend growing up. “Detective Booth’s desk?”
“That way.” A grunt, accompanied by a thumb over the shoulder that pointed straight at a wall.