by Audrey Faye
I did know—I just wasn’t sure what to do about it.
Apparently, the kid in the rear did. “You’re the brains, she’s the knife.”
Carly smiled at an innocuous stretch of roadside. “Something like that. Jane’s our strategist. She figures out where we can make the biggest difference. Where we matter.”
“She keeps you from being stupid.” Lelo nodded sagely. “I bet that’s a full-time job.”
“Hey.” My partner sucked back the last of the kid’s root beer. “Careful, brat. I have knives and I know how to use them.”
The banter caused a weird squeezing in my insides. They were so easy with each other already, while part of me still wanted to slide down into the wheel well and hide. Traveling around the country in a VW van is only one small step away from hermitude, at least the way I went about it, and I liked it that way. Lelo was way too full of quirky energy to sit comfortably in my odd, insular world.
All of which was just a sad excuse for the real cause of my nerves. She’d looked at the two of us and seen beyond Carly’s knife. I wasn’t used to being seen. Not these days, anyhow.
And I wasn’t at all sure I liked it.
~o~0~o~
Carly pulled into a vacant twenty feet on the curb, utterly unfazed that we were now blocking some poor corner store’s delivery ramp. “I gotta pee. Be right back.” She gave me a look, pulled out her earbuds, and opened the van door without a single glance to check for marauding semi trucks or kids on bikes.
She’s got a van angel, I swear. Maybe a whole platoon of them.
I shifted in my seat, taking a good look at Lelo. I knew why we’d really stopped, and I knew my job—to make sure our passenger didn’t figure out that Carly’s next few minutes were on the job.
Lelo glanced up from whatever she was doing on her tablet. “She’s peeing again? Her bladder’s the size of a shriveled orange.”
“There’s a visual I don’t need.” I was growing kind of fond of the kid’s sense of humor, though. “You hungry?”
“Always.” A stray hand reached out and patted her backpack. “Fully stocked, though. Want some kale chips?”
Not even if Carly had her knife at my throat. “You vegan or something?”
Lelo snorted and looked up fully this time, amused. “I ate raw fish last night—what do you think?”
I put on my best poker face. “A confused vegan?”
This time, she laughed—and something inside my ribs lightened along with the sound that belonged to carefree summer days and barefoot girls. I squashed the visuals. Visuals led to songs, and songs were dead. Mine were, anyway.
Her forehead creased.
Dammit, I’d always sucked at poker. I stuck my face into a random road map. “We’ll pick up something once we get back on the highway.” Truckers ask less questions than small-town waitresses, and the food comes in portions that might actually keep a teenager full for a few hours.
The creases stuck around another moment. And then Lelo looked back down at her tablet, but not quite fast enough to hide her smirk. “We’re not in Alabama. And your map is upside down.”
I restrained the urge to crumple it and pitch it at her head. We would need to keep an eye on this one. Way too damn smart for her own good. However, hopefully I’d managed to distract her from the main act. I could see Carly heading back to the van, strolling with nonchalant ease in a turquoise sundress that left very little to the imagination, as evidenced by all the tongues hanging out as she walked by.
How little they knew. However much Carly might be enjoying herself, I knew the show had been for one guy only. Rick owned a little fishing shop halfway down the block—and a nasty gambling habit, one we’d tried to put into permanent remission four months ago at a casino somewhere in the boonies of Nevada. His wife still thought he walked the straight and narrow, but Carly’s alerts on his bank account said otherwise.
Hopefully the sight of my partner waltzing past his shop window in the same dress she’d worn into the casino would make it stick this time.
I hoped so, even if my pessimist guts thought otherwise. He had a sweet kid with a mop of adorable, sandy curls and a baseball glove permanently attached to his hand. He didn’t deserve to see the guys with bats land in town and go after his dad’s knees.
Carly swung into the driver’s seat, ignoring the gawking eyes watching her from the sidewalk, and tossed a bag that smelled like heaven onto the console between us. “Crullers.” She looked in the review mirror. “Three of them, but don’t get excited, kid. I’m still pitching you out on the sidewalk at the first opportunity.”
I kept my eyes carefully facing forward as I rolled them. If she hadn’t been more convincing than that with Rick, he’d be halfway to Atlantic City by noon.
CHAPTER 6
My butt was numb from way too many hours on the road. Which didn’t make me any more eager as I crawled out of the van into the hubbub of main street Lennotsville.
It was a surprisingly cute little town. Some old buildings, the kind that said once upon a time, the people who had founded this baby metropolis had expected it to matter. Or they’d had their hands on an inordinate amount of cheap brick and nowhere else to use it, but probably the former. The street was lined with little shops that had what were almost certainly character-filled, temperamentally heated apartments above them. Pots of flowers steered passersby toward pretty, enticing window displays.
A sleepy little town, one that was close enough to Philadelphia that it might have been swallowed in mental suburban sprawl, but the number of locals on the street suggested pride and independence lived here yet.
Carly looked almost gleeful as she surveyed the storefronts. “Nice place.”
I hunched my shoulders in painful anticipation of the shopping in my near future. I hated shopping. People insisted on talking to you in the chirpy, inane voices they usually reserved for small babies and senile old ladies, and then they tried to steer you to something they figured you wanted to buy.
They never figured the woman in flannel for the whimsical whatever tucked in a back corner.
I turned to find Lelo’s eyes on me again. The kid spent way too much time paying attention to what I was thinking. “They got any decent food in this town?”
“Yeah. Or I live up just up there.” She pointed at the character-filled windows above the butcher shop. “We can get some supplies at the market and cook dinner.”
Carly and I both stared at her like she was speaking Zulu.
My partner dropped an arm over Lelo’s shoulder. “We’ll probably all get poisoned that way. Where’s the nearest diner?”
“I haven’t poisoned anyone in at least a decade.” Our teenaged tour guide frowned. “Wait—didn’t you do the whole chef-school thing?”
I choked on a snort. Only a hungry teenager would have stored that as the most salient detail of the morning’s van chat.
“I studied a lot of things in college.” Carly grinned, surveying the street for hopeful signs of food-in-progress. “I think I lasted for about three weeks at the chef deal. Never got past chopping vegetables. Kept the knives, though.”
“I bet,” said Lelo dryly. She looked over at me. “I suppose you can’t boil water either.”
I was a decent campfire cook, but this wasn’t the time to fess up. “Nope. I guess that makes you the designated chef, huh?” Homecooked sounded fabulous, assuming the kid wasn’t stringing us on her skills.
“Excellent.” She rubbed her hands together. “Captive dishwashers, I like it.”
Carly sent her a look that should have melted teenage smartassery into a puddle of quivering goo.
Lelo only grinned and then nodded my direction. “Come on. We’ll hit the grocery, get some basics. You guys like risotto?”
My partner raised an eyebrow. “Dunno. What part of a cow is that?”
I swallowed yet another snort—it was getting to be a habit. Carly might not have survived chef school, but she was a total foodie, one who kne
w where to get the best burger in truck-stop America or to-die-for chiles relleno in the middle of Wyoming.
“I can make it with cow.” Lelo had a great deadpan thing going when she wanted to. “Tastes better with bacon, though.”
Carly slung her arm back over the kid’s shoulder. “Everything tastes better with bacon.”
I moved to fall in behind the pair of them and nearly mowed them down. Lelo had frozen, one foot halfway up onto the curb.
Instinct had me sliding casually sideways, seeking a clear line of sight. I slung a hip on a monster pot of peonies, trying to get the lay of the land. Trying to get a read on Lelo’s face.
The kid didn’t play poker any better than I did. Her eyes were burning a hole in something up the sidewalk.
I tracked her gaze and moved in a step closer. To do what, I wasn’t sure, but I was damn positive we were getting our first look at her sister’s knight in shining armor, and it was doing funny things to the hair on the back of my neck.
He was pretty, she’d been right about that. Classic prep-school sailor looks, with a lock of blond hair falling fetchingly into his eyes—one I presume he left there to look fetching, because everything about Chadwick Berrington looked purposeful. The way he walked down the sidewalk, expecting traffic to part to let him through. The casual glances at people who called his name, bestowing smiles on those important enough to rate in his world. The thinly veiled disgust as he moved to skirt a toddler with a very messy ice cream cone—even as he winked at the child’s mother.
He spotted Lelo, and that managed to crack his polished façade, but not much.
“Asshole.” If words could kill, the kid wouldn’t need herself a pair of assassins.
Chad’s polish slid back into place. A quiet word to a middle-aged woman stepping out of the bank, and then his eyes shifted to Carly. Appreciation now, from a man well used to letting his eyes enjoy what they liked.
He rolled to a halt and held out a suave hand. “You must be new in town. I’m Chad Berrington.”
Lelo stepped up onto the curb. “She’s a friend of mine. Beat it, Chadwick.”
The glance he flicked her direction was clearly one he kept on tap for bugs on his windshield and other minor pests.
The anger in Lelo prepared to go nuclear.
Chad smiled at Carly, one pretty person to another. Dismissing the peons, even the angry, vengeful ones. “Maybe another time. Ask around if you need to find me.”
“Oh, I’ll do that.” Carly nearly purred—and I was probably the only one who heard irate jaguar instead of sexy kitten.
He flashed a second smile, higher on the amperage scale this time, and walked away. Swaggered, really, leaving a trio of fuming women in his wake.
I let out the lungful of stale air I’d been holding and slithered back a couple of steps, well aware he’d considered me no more worth his notice than a rusty hood ornament. Just the way I liked it, usually. Right now, I wanted to plant him headfirst into the peonies for it.
This man was going to push every single button any of us had. We should be walking away from this one. We really, really should.
CHAPTER 7
I climbed out the window of Lelo’s kitchen, cursing to myself as my ass landed unceremoniously on the wide brick ledge outside.
Lelo flashed a grin from her post by the sink as my curses got more imaginative. “Head up two flights on the fire escape—you can’t miss it.”
My ass wasn’t impressed with my current quest, but apparently there was a rooftop deck somewhere above my head and my assassin partner had taken up residence in its weeds. I sent a few mental curses Carly’s direction, too—her ass probably hadn’t collected brick imprints on the way up. “If you’re alone in the morning, have mercy and push a cup of coffee out the window.”
“Will do.” Lelo grinned again. “Good night, sleep well, all that stuff.”
That seemed fairly unlikely. Nothing about this evening was working out like I’d hoped, and in a moment of tired and cranky denial, I wanted to blame Chadwick. He’d objectified Carly, dismissed Lelo, and treated me as invisible, if he’d even noticed me in the first place. Left us all angry and more shaky than any of us would admit, and both those things were damn dangerous.
The shaky part had lasted just long enough for Lelo to herd us into her tiny apartment and somehow convince us to spend the night. We’d eaten spicy sausage sandwiches good enough to make a lumberjack beg, accompanied by glasses of something bubbly and tart that I suspected Lelo brewed up in a cauldron somewhere.
Like I said. Dangerous.
And somewhere in the midst of all that, Carly had fetched her sleeping bag from the van and headed up to the roof.
I huffed my way up the last of the two flights of fire-escape stairs and peered over the edge, expecting cracked pitch and gravel and a few desolate things that might have once been green.
What I found was Carly, cuddled in her ratty robe and slippers, a half-empty bottle of red wine at her feet, nestled into an oasis of Zen. Green ferns and bright blossoms caressed the night, dancing in and out of stunted trees with curvy branches and limbs that spoke of tough hope and survival.
I don’t know anything about plants. But I know what it is to take the fog of your soul and put it out into the world so everyone else can see it. Someone had written their song with this garden, told the truth of what tumbled in the molecules of their own inhales and exhales.
If it was Lelo, we were in way more trouble than I’d originally thought. “It’s beautiful up here.”
“Yeah. Not exactly what I expected.” Carly smiled wryly and held out a glass. “Want some wine?”
What the heck. I propped myself on the edge of a small table, avoiding the comfort of the big, squishy glider and its pile of pillows, and took the glass. “We should be in our van at the crack of dawn tomorrow. This case fails pretty much every criterion we have.”
“We don’t know that yet.”
We knew enough. “It fails on the most important one. Lelo’s sister doesn’t want help.” We were assassins, not puppet masters. I’d put together a decent picture of Ally Kramer in the last few hours. Pretty, well liked, and used to tuning out uncomfortable details. Knives don’t change that.
“She doesn’t want help yet.” Carly poured herself a little more wine. “Maybe this is a chance to stop the cycle before it gets really ugly.”
We helped too many people wearing bruises, the visible kind and the ones that don’t fade nearly as fast. The temptation to be a hero was huge—and a siren call of wrong.
Not all songs that tempt your heart are worthy of being followed.
Carly was watching me, eyes more sober than the mostly empty wine bottle would suggest. “He’s bad news, J. You saw his eyes.”
I had. Easy superiority and a hint of something darker. Avarice. A desire to own. Maybe he hadn’t acted on that hint yet—or maybe he had. But neither of us was in any doubt that someday he would.
However, we’d learned some hard lessons over the years. “We take on the cases we can win so that we can keep winning. We don’t win unless the person we’re trying to help wants us to.” Ally didn’t, and I didn’t want to throw myself on the sword of Chad Berrington. Assassins have to be pragmatists. “Think about Talia and Benji.” I’d spent more time than I cared to admit staring at the photo Carly had emailed me of the gap-toothed little girl and her adorable imp of a baby brother.
Those two kids would have a whole lot less bruises thanks to us, and there were more kids out there we could help if we didn’t get stupid, more women who wanted a life and needed our kind of persuasion to get it. We couldn’t get distracted by every jerk in small-town America.
If I’ve sung anything in the last three years, it’s the chorus to that song.
“I know.” Carly tilted her head back to look up at the stars and sighed. “But I can’t walk away from this one.”
I opened my mouth to sound off and caught myself. Another one of our rules—we have to he
ar each other out. “Why not?”
She extended her legs, sliding into full stargazing mode. “Why do you think we should go?”
I hated it when she did that. “Because he’s slime, and he’s the dangerous kind. The kind who pushes both of us off our game at the same time.”
Assassination wasn’t a game you played with shaky hands.
Carly tilted her head my direction again, movements slow and deliberate. “So we lock it down, keep it professional.”
We’d tried that before. There was only so much locking that could be done when you carried as much shit inside you as the two of us did. “He’s not the guys who fucked with you, Carly. And he’s not Johnny, either, but he reminds both of us too much of those guys.” And in every damn last instance in the last three years where we’d gotten ourselves into trouble, that had been the precursor. “We need to be smart about this.”
Even as I said it, I knew I’d given in.
“So make us smart.” Her hands slid into her robe’s tattered pockets—but not before I saw the fists. “We can’t be cowards, J. Not this time.”
Not any time, but I’d never been able to convince her that walking away to fight another day was a kind of bravery too. Unfortunately, this time I kind of agreed with her. “Lelo won’t walk.”
“I know.”
The rest didn’t need to be said. Whatever we were, we weren’t the kind of women who left a sixteen-year-old facing down Chadwick Berrington on her own. Especially if she was likely to get stupid.
“Hey.” Carly shifted, attention suddenly somewhere else. “Hear that?”
She had ears like a paranoid cat. “No.”
“Some guy’s singing.”
I started to make a crack about mostly empty wine bottles, and then I heard him. Some drunken wanderer, singing himself some Sinatra.
Carly grinned and made her way to the rail, humming under her breath. I moaned, already resisting the music—and the upcoming mangling of it. It’s not just my partner’s ears that remind me of a cat. She started to sing, her duet long on enthusiasm and very short on a sense of what notes are meant to hang out in the universe together. The guy down on the street didn’t seem to care—and he had some moves, even piss drunk.