by Audrey Faye
I blew through the door of the hook-and-bullet shop, virtual guns blazing, took advantage of the shock factor to peel Carly’s hands off a blade longer than my arm, and held on tight. “Time to go.”
The eyes of the two guys behind the counter clearly said I was stark raving mad. And that was before my partner started spitting nails. She didn’t bother trying to shake me loose. She just hissed.
I gave her arm a good tug. “Now. Unless you want to have this fight here.”
The smarter of the two dudes behind the counter looked decidedly worried.
Carly was made of sterner stuff. “Who says we’re having a fight?”
“Me.” I planted my feet and tipped us over the edge into the brawl she needed. “You’re being an idiot, and you know it.”
The hiss morphed into something promising molten lava and ash and eased the tight feeling in my gut considerably. Power, back where it belonged.
In the hands of an irate woman in a shop full of knives.
“Let’s go.” Outweighing Carly has been an advantage more than once in the last three years, and this time, I threw every extra pound into hauling her butt out the door.
She didn’t make it easy. Her elbow nearly connected with my nose, and that was before she got serious.
I kept going, well aware the only reason I could move her at all is that she wasn’t really in Lennotsville anymore. She was back at a frat house that had taken a Lesbian, Sorry t-shirt as a dare. “Cut it out,” I wheezed in what I hoped was her ear. “He’s not the one you really want to fight.”
“Like hell he isn’t.” Her wheeze was way meaner than mine.
“You want this on the town record?” Because if I couldn’t get her the last ten feet out the door, the two guys behind the counter were going to have this story all over greater Lennotsville by sundown.
It was a low blow and an effective one. Carly stopped dead, and then put herself back together as if she’d been dusted up by a small, really lost tornado and now it was gone. With quick, efficient movements, she reassembled her hair, her dress, and the small black bag that wasn’t big enough to carry any but the smallest of her weapons, and gave the two guys behind the counter a flirty smile that erased memories far better than the Men in Black gizmos ever had.
And then she gave me a look that could have frozen Hawaii, volcanoes and all, and marched out the door under her own steam.
There isn’t enough hazard pay in all the world for me to have followed her, but unfortunately, I’m also her friend. I gave the guys behind the counter a much-less flirty smile and got the heck out. And kept going, right past her wildly pissed-off nose, because I wasn’t a complete moron. This town had to have a good, quiet alleyway somewhere.
I wasn’t at all surprised when Carly marched past me, flaming vengeance in high heels—but I was mildly taken aback when she veered off into a field. “Where the hell are we going?”
She spun around long enough to shoot me with photon-laser eyes. “Somewhere I can yell really loud.”
I felt momentary pity for the neighborhood livestock. Carly has lungs. Loud ones.
About halfway across the field, she turned, rage still swirling like open flame. “So go ahead. Tell me why I’m being an idiot. And then tell me why I shouldn’t stab you and leave you for cow food.”
This wasn’t the time to point out that cows are vegetarians. I went with another, far more important truth. “You’re letting a slimebucket make you feel weak.”
Something green and sick crawled into her eyes. “He won’t think I’m weak the next time we meet.”
That’s exactly what I was afraid of. “You’ve got the moves. We both know that. We know you could make him pee himself in a back alley somewhere and never forget your face.”
“Damn right.”
This wasn’t a pep talk. “And that would be totally stupid.”
The hissing volcano was back. “He’d never fuck with me again.”
I wasn’t scared of the hiss. Much. “Right.” I waited a beat. “So who do you figure he’d fuck with instead?”
She stared like I was speaking ancient Viking dialect.
“He’s not like the others, C.” Conviction had landed in my gut like a ton of bricks. “The guys we can change? They know they’re screwups. They know they’re scum. So they crawl out of the alleyway, and some of them start acting like decent human beings because at the core of it, they know we’re right.” And that made them afraid.
The stare hadn’t flickered.
I kept going. “Chad? He’d go kick at Ally or Lelo or some kid with an ice cream cone just because he can. And then he’d go call the cops and have you charged with assault, because he doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong, and the cops would lock you up and throw away the key because the law would agree with him.”
“They’d have to find me first.” It was bravado talking now, but I could see her gears turning.
When you’re arguing with a volcano you take progress any way you can get it. “If the law starts looking at us hard, we’re screwed. You know that.” There was a big difference between being nomads and being on the run. Effective assassins stayed off the radar, always.
She was following me now. But she was still pissed.
That was the pragmatic stuff, and it mattered. But I had more ammo, and it was time to use it. “And the knife wouldn’t work, even if you leave him sitting in a back alley in his own piss.”
“Why?” One word, loaded with enough venom to slime a galaxy.
“Because he doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong.” I repeated myself, and let some of my own frustration loose this time. “What are you going to tell him while you have your knife at his throat? To go forth and stop glaring at little kids with ice cream cones?”
“He’s an asshole.”
“No argument. But there’s no measuring stick for that. And he hasn’t done anything wrong—not the big kinds of wrong, anyhow.”
“Yet,” added Carly darkly.
“He might change.”
She gaped at me like I’d suggested group sex with the cows. I shook my head a little. “It happened to both of us. A few hours one afternoon changed our lives.” I’d have given a lot to keep the hurt out of her eyes—but I’d learned in the last three years that sometimes life requires pain. “We make it happen every day. We take guys down a dark alley and some of them walk out different.”
“They walk out scared.”
“That too. They change because they’re afraid of us, but they also change because they know what they’ve done wrong.”
“Men don’t change.” Carly’s voice was full of the iced hate that stood at the gates of her deepest hurt. “They just behave because otherwise I’ll come back and run a knife up their ass.”
I watched her, wondering. Calculating. Maybe it was time.
“What?” Her eyes slid into slits. Viper in full regalia.
I wasn’t scared of the snake, but I didn’t know if it was time yet to poke at the hurt. You don’t wear years of flannel-clad recluse without understanding that sometimes things need to stay buried.
She stared, unblinking. Unafraid and terrified, all at the same time.
I said a prayer to whoever the hell might be left listening and prepared to strip a deep wound of its fragile cover. “You know that’s bullshit, right?”
Now she blinked. “What is?”
Vipers don’t hold their trains of thought for very long. “That men don’t change. You don’t believe that.”
“The hell I don’t.”
Shit. Dumb idea. “Fine. Never mind.” I moved to take myself somewhere else. Anywhere else. Some place with zero cows.
“Don’t you dare do that.” Carly moved to intercept, but it wasn’t her feet that stopped me—it was the pissed-off compassion riding in her eyes. “You walk out of here, you’re just going to go kick something and break your toes.”
I had, once—in Minnesota, in the depths of winter. My toes still twinged some
times when it got cold.
She nodded as I stopped. And gentled the viper some. “I’ve got pretty good reasons to know that guys can dude themselves up, make themselves all shiny with money and power and donations to some charity that serves the people they step on—and underneath, nothing really changes.”
She’s my very best friend. And she’s believed this shit for way too many years now. “Yeah. You have reasons. But you’re still wrong, and you know it.”
Temper flared, in her eyes and in her fists. I had a moment to be glad the knives were in the van, and then I did what I had to do. I told the truth. “I believe people are mostly idiots. And that doesn’t really change, because you can’t grow someone new brain cells. But you…” Honesty freaking sucked. “C, you hold a knife to a guy’s throat every damn week, and you don’t slice them all up into fish food. Have you ever thought about why?”
That had her gaping like a fish.
And because at deep-down bottom, I’m not all that bright, I kept going. “You have a guy in your armlock who beats his wife or abandons his kids, and you don’t leave every last one of them dead in the alleyway.”
Her eyes flattened. “They think I will.”
“Yeah.” She made sure they did. “But you let Melinda’s asshole walk away. Why?”
Her fingers were moving now, tracing the outlines of some invisible knife. “We make sure lots of them walk the hell out of town.”
We did, and they left because they’d finally run into something smarter and scarier and bigger than they were. “But not all of them.” Some, we gave another chance at the whole dad-husband-decent-human-being thing.
She shrugged. Resisting. “That’s your call. You’re the smart one.”
We’d let that comfortable bullshit ride for too long. “No way. You let them go because you believe they can change.” I had a little viper of my own. “And if you didn’t agree with me on that, I wouldn’t be wearing this t-shirt and we wouldn’t be riding all over hell’s green earth in a van with a hinky transmission and an out-of-control gas habit.”
Her knees were literally shaking. “We do this to help people.”
I watched those knees and hoped like hell I’d done the right thing. “We do this because we believe that at least sometimes, a knife at some guy’s throat can make him change. And that helps people.”
She stared at me for a really long time, long enough to have my shriveled guts looking for a new home.
And then she smiled. “Whatever. You’re the one with the psychobabble. I’m going to go sharpen my knives.”
Thank the sweet baby cows. She’d just dumped us back on something that at least kind of resembled solid ground. I looked around for the fastest way out of the pasture and grabbed gratefully for nice, mellow, garden-variety assassin conversation. “We can’t stab a guy just for being a shit.”
“So, what—we walk away?” She was still pissed, but the viper was curling back up in its basket.
Smart assassins would. Hell, even pretty dumb ones would be out of town before the crack of dawn. “No. But I don’t think we can make this happen with a knife.”
“With what, then?” She was still frothing with some pretty decent frustration and bewilderment and leftover anger. “Text messages? Flower bouquets every other Tuesday?”
“I don’t know.” I tried not to wilt under her still-formidable heat and the memory of the shaking knees. “I don’t. I just know we need to do something different than we usually do.”
“Really.” If doubt and sarcasm were weapons, hers had just been freshly sharpened. “And where exactly do we find this genius new idea?”
“I don’t know.” I took the four steps forward to close the gap between us and laid my forehead on hers very gently. “So we do what we usually do when life’s a mess. We drive.”
And sometime after that, we’d think.
CHAPTER 13
“Here you go.” Carly reached in through the side window of the van. “Onion rings. Drowning in grease, just the way you like them.”
They were the first words she’d spoken to me in an hour. Some people are the simmering kind—they go up slowly and come down that way too. My partner’s temper was usually the spiky kind that disappeared fast, but in this case there were a whole lot of after-tremors.
Maybe onion rings would help—grease usually did. I waited until she climbed back into the driver’s seat and went through the strange ritual that is Carly putting on a seatbelt. “Want one?”
She was already reaching into the bag. “I got carrot sticks too.”
I was pretty sure that the karmic balancing act in the sky didn’t weigh things that way, especially when the carrot sticks were this anemic, but I didn’t complain. She’d gone on a bell-pepper kick the last time we’d driven through Texas—at least carrots were mildly tasty.
I leaned against my headrest, damn grateful to be back in comfortable territory. There’s an art to road tripping well and the two of us had mastered it years ago. The rhythm of the miles, the timing of the stops, the moments of serendipity that pull you off the road for a while to gaze at high mountain vistas or fairies carved by some bearded dude with a chainsaw.
I was pretty sure the next time we saw Beardy Guy, his fairies were going to have Carly’s face.
He hadn’t been a jerk, though. He’d made her laugh, and that had been back in our earlier days when amusing her wasn’t so easy to do. On the other hand, he’d let her hold a chainsaw and wave it at a couple of big stumps, which probably suggested diminished capacity in some form or another.
I watched the miles slip by out the window, letting the onion-ring grease settle in my belly and seep into my fingers.
Sanity. Our version of it, anyway.
I glanced over at Carly, who still had her eyes pointed straight down the road to nowhere in particular.
This case had made her knees shake, and it took a lot more than just Chadwick Berrington to do that. Lelo was a part of the shaking too—and a sexy gypsy, and philosophical thoughts on a rooftop deck. Five years ago, Carly’s life had honed down to a very focused edge, one that gave her purpose and power and a way to beat back the shadows and things that went thunk in the night.
But here in Lennotsville, something different was happening. Sixteen-year-olds with quick brains and quicker grit. Florists who let the world see exactly who they were and didn’t much care if it all fit together neatly. Little dents in Carly’s focused edge. Hints of a life that could be.
Which is why we were on the road, running away from Lennotsville as fast as Carly’s bet-impaired foot could take us. Two assassins scared shitless of anything more complicated than our next assignment.
She waited until the end of the bag of grease before she looked my way. And when she did, it was just one quiet word. “Thanks.”
When someone is your best friend in the world, that’s all it takes.
I let myself smile a little at my reflection in the window. Another hundred miles and I’d start the conversation about maybe heading back.
~o~0~o~
“Oh, crap.”
I woke up from my onion-ring-drugged daydreams and looked out the window. “What?” The road ahead was dead empty of anything worth talking about.
“Not in front of us,” said Carly dryly. “Check the rearview.”
VW vans of this particular vintage generally have wimpy mirrors, but we’d fixed that after a few near misses with other travelers on the road. I peered into the oversized mirror on my side, trying to make out the car behind us. I assumed that was the focus of our attention, since other than that, the road behind us was empty too. “That’s a really big car.” The kind that mostly lived in old movies and certain rougher parts of LA.
“Kindly direct your attention to the person driving the really big car,” said my partner in her best airline-attendant voice.
I couldn’t make out the driver—two really big pink fuzzy dice got in the way. It was clear, however, that the car was trying to go around
us.
“Good grief. If they try to pass me in that boat, we’ll all die.” Carly sounded more amused than aggrieved, which had me craning my neck to see around the fuzzy dice again.
And then I caught sight of a familiar silhouette in the backseat. “How the heck did Lelo find us?” And who had she kidnapped to do the driving?
Carly snorted and hit her brakes, heading for one of those weird random turnouts of gravel that show up randomly on remote country roads, like little landing strips for aliens or something. “I’m pretty sure Rosie’s flower shop is currently closed.”
My onion rings weren’t sitting quite so well anymore. “Nuts.”
“Yeah.”
I seemed more bothered than the sexy chick with the knives. Which was weird, but I’d have to think about that later. Lelo and Rosie had pulled over behind us, but nobody was getting out. “Think they’re armed?”
“Maybe.”
“Dangerous?” It had to be said, even if it disrupted my bothered vibe.
My partner hid a grin. “Don’t worry, I hear Rosie doesn’t go for chicks in flannel.”
This wasn’t supposed to be funny, dammit. I shoved open the door of the van and landed two feet on gravel, digging up one of my back-alley scowls. Being an assassin had enough issues without getting tailed by kids and florists, especially ones driving wildly conspicuous boats.
Rosie had her window rolled down, and I imagined I saw a glint of humor in her eyes as I bent down to a level where I could keep an eye on the mastermind in the backseat too. “How’d you find us?” I had visions of cell-phone bugs and NSA satellite hacking, which probably wouldn’t amuse my partner a second time around.
Rosie shrugged. “There are only two ways out of Lennotsville. We guessed.”
Freaking lucky amateurs.
I tapped my fingers on the 1970s elephant of a car. “This your ride?”
Rosie grinned. “Nope, it’s Mrs. Beauchamp’s. She thinks we’re delivering flowers to the hospital.”
“We are,” said Lelo piously as she popped open her door. “Or she is. Right after I climb into your backseat.”