Heart Song Anthology

by Carolyn Faulkner

  In Cora’s mind Genevieve was an ordinary student just working through school as a nail technician, but perhaps she needed to throw in something interesting. Just some flare to make her more believable as a real person. Cora would give Genevieve a little of her own personality, including her accent since there was little point in hiding it now that she had let it slip. “Just give me a moment to finish with my current client and I’m all yours.”

  Cora went back to work and Gloria sat down in the waiting area, flipping through magazines nonchalantly, but Cora felt there was a distinct stiffness about her that counteracted her indifference. Or maybe Cora was just overthinking. She was hyper aware of Gloria as she finished with her current client, then smiled at Gloria, beckoning her over.

  Cora kept her expression polite, just another client, definitely not an assassin there to hunt her down and kill her. Certainly not.

  Gloria took a seat gracefully and presented her already perfectly manicured nails. “So, what made you choose me today?” Cora asked casually as she began removing Flora’s hard work.

  “I wanted something different.” Gloria shrugged. “You aren’t from here.”

  “New Jersey,” Cora provided as if it weren’t a telltale sign that she was the bounty hunter from Florida that Gloria may or may not be after. “United States.”

  “I went once. Ever been to Florida?”

  Cora kept her face relaxed, a polite smile slightly upturned on her lips, ignoring the urge to brush the sweat off her brow. I am a professional bullshitter, dammit. I can do this. “No, I stick to the north. Too hot that close to the equator.” And God do I miss it!

  “That’s the only state in the United States I’ve been to. I did an exchange program but it was too swampy for me.”

  “I’ve heard it’s quite the marsh,” Cora said.

  “It is,” Gloria chuckled. There was a pause as Cora worked on removing the polish from the last nail. She just had to get through this encounter and she could tell Asher that she may have been made. She wasn’t sure what he would insist on doing, but she figured he would want to be safe and run again. He didn’t take risks when it came to The Company. He had seen what they were capable of just as she had. A shudder rose goosebumps along her spine and she felt the distinct urge to rub at the scars on her arms.

  I am a professional, she reminded herself. I am not scared. I am not going to fall apart. I am a professional.

  “So that guy who was selling cigarettes outside the school,” Gloria finally said, breaking the silence. “Why did you run after him?”

  Because I’m a reckless idiot, she thought, mentally kicking herself for being so stupid. Of course The Company could be watching them, Cora and Asher had been running from them for months and yet she had basically shined a beacon on her true identity by chasing a dangerous criminal. It was still just so natural for her to take action. She still lacked the instinct to stand on the sidelines and do nothing. Something she had once been proud of, but that she now clearly needed.

  “To protect the children of course,” Cora answered smoothly.

  “Do you have children of your own?”

  You know I don’t, you forced-sterilizing bitch. The Company Asher had once belonged to had given him an irreversible vasectomy to keep him from ever having a family that might coerce him away from his responsibilities as an assassin. If Gloria was an assassin, too, she knew Asher was sterile and was just taunting Cora to get a rise out of her. It almost worked.

  “Not yet, but my husband and I are trying.” Cora gave Gloria her brightest smile, the one that made her eyes twinkle even when she wasn’t feeling it. Cora had never particularly seen herself as a mother, but knowing that choice had been stolen from her and Asher angered her. Though Asher spoke as if he had never considered kids, there was a definite sadness whenever he saw children with their parents. It could be because he’d never had a conventional family, but Cora suspected it was more than that. Cora suspected he did want a family of his own and while he had been the one forced to undergo surgery, he just seemed dejected while Cora was still furious. Maybe Asher had been furious once, but that rage had faded into sadness over time.

  There was another silence as Cora ground her teeth to overcome the mounting rage. She hadn’t needed to prep Gloria’s skin for her manicure as she had been well groomed the day before, but part of her considered clipping her cuticles again and accidentally nicking a blood vessel or two.

  “So, did you catch him?” Gloria wanted to know.

  Cora looked up then, into those blue eyes twinkling with interest. Not interest in her, but interest in the gossip. She loosened the tension she’d held caught in her chest since Gloria had announced she’d wanted Cora to do her nails. Gloria was just a normal, bored housewife who wanted to know the drama around town. The first half of the conversation had just been small talk, and now she was getting to what truly interested her.

  She felt foolish, and Cora was damn tired of feeling foolish.

  He was dead dammit. Krone was dead and he was the one with an obsession with Asher. Maybe The Company they’d worked for didn’t care as much as Krone had made Asher believe. They hadn’t had anyone come after them, as far as they knew. There had been no real sign of trouble outside the trouble their imaginations had created.

  She was sick and tired of being afraid and letting her fear play tricks on her. She was going to do what she should have done from the very beginning of this circus and take control of her new life. They may have come to Denmark to escape and to hide, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t an opportunity for a new life, and life was whatever you made it, right?

  Cora released Gloria’s hands and sat back, loosening a deep sigh. “No, I didn’t catch him, but I will.”

  Gloria tilted her head slightly, puzzled.

  “I’m going to catch him because I can’t just sit back and pretend someone else is going to do it for me. I can’t just shrug it off and say that the police will take care of it because honestly, they won’t. I’ve been pretending to be someone who pretends everything is out of my power and it’s not.” Cora stood and turned to look at Flora who sat agape, staring at her. “Which means I need to leave this job and start looking into something more my pace.”

  She didn’t stick around to discuss it with anyone, she just bent down and retrieved her bag before exiting the salon and immediately she felt a weight lift off her shoulders. It hadn’t just been Krone or the ever-looming threat of The Company. It wasn’t just missing her old life, it was this role she had been trying to play. Genevieve had to be so unlike Cora so that she wasn’t discovered, and in the process of pretending to be someone else, she had forgotten who she truly was.

  She was Cora Santos, bounty hunter who doesn’t take shit from criminals. She needed to make Genevieve more like her, and find a profession that was a bit more her style, but for now she needed to catch this lowlife selling cigarettes to children.

  6

  Love Not Lost

  She returned to their apartment and headed straight for the bedside table where she opened a single wad of bubblegum. The sugary sweet scent had always been soothing to her nerves and had long since been her only vice.

  She stuck the wad between her teeth and groaned at the blast of flavor. Even with time, her sweet tooth had not faded, and now she was ready for business.

  She sat on the bed, there being limited furniture inside the apartment, and retrieved her phone from her bag. Blowing a bubble, she snapped her gum back and forth between her teeth as she absentmindedly sifted through the hidden camera footage.

  Twig in the breeze. Twig in the breeze. Parent dropping their kid off. Kids playing outside. She cursed as she scanned through each video and found that not a single one contained her culprit. She was beginning to wonder if she had placed the camera in a good spot. She thought that was where he had been standing before she had chased him.

  She blew another bubble, but sucked it back in before it could pop in her face, her brow furrow
ed in concentration. Surveillance had never been her favorite, a lot of waiting and watching and not much action, but it was necessary that she be patient; so she would be, for a while, then she would try to find an alternate method to catch this creep.

  Luckily, patience did pay off. After a few more false alarms, Cora leaned into the screen and smiled in triumph. There he was, facing away from the camera. She recognized his back from running after him, the familiarity startling. He was wearing a baggy sweatshirt, a ball cap shading his features so that all she could distinguish was a scraggly beard and long, thick hair with a slight curl where it flowed from under his cap.

  She wrote down how tall she believed him to be: five ten at the most. How heavy: about two hundred pounds, all muscle she guessed, even with his baggy clothes. She even wrote down the brand of jeans she believed him to be wearing, and then waited for him to turn around. If she could get a logo or something off of the ball cap or hoodie he was wearing, she would have a great starting point on where to look for his name. Any clue could be the key to finding him, so she wrote down every detail.

  “Turn around,” she grumbled at the monitor.

  He did. As if hearing her command, he spun slowly and gave her a good view of his profile beneath the ball cap, then a good view of what was written on it. The ball cap read, “D’Angleterre.”

  Squinting to make out each individual letter, Cora copied it down onto her notepad and waited. It took about an hour for the kids to be let out of school, and when they were, many of them flocked straight to him. They excitedly approached him with no tact as he held out a fist full of white cylinders and each youngster took one with the enthusiasm of getting candy.

  “Sick,” she spat, disgusted, although also suspicious. She saw no money exchange hands.

  When all the children had dispersed, he also left and the camera was again only focused on an empty courtyard. Cora sat back, puzzling over her notes. A healthy-looking man was not exactly selling cigarettes, just handing them out outside of a school. What was the incentive in doing that?

  She tapped her pen against her bottom lip and pulled up Google. When it came to finding out information, Google was Cora’s best friend. The only thing in her notes that really jumped out at her was the logo on the hat. “D’Angleterre.”

  Maybe it was a gym, or a favored café, or... a hotel chain?

  An expensive one. What is someone supposedly selling cigarettes to kids doing with a hat advertising one of the most expensive hotels in Copenhagen, Denmark?

  She puzzled over this, googling the hotel and taking a virtual walkthrough to try to make sense of it, when the front door opened and both she and Asher jumped.

  “Shit,” she grumbled. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

  “I could say the same to you.”

  Cora turned back to her notes. “I quit today.”

  To Asher’s credit, his eyebrows only raised a fraction of an inch in response. Though Cora supposed that that was his equivalent to full shock. “What do you plan to do then?”

  “Catch this asshole for starters,” Cora said, holding up her notes. “I got him on camera and he was wearing a hat that advertised this swanky hotel. Kind of a fancy place for such a degenerate, but now I’m not really convinced he has been selling the kids anything.”

  “What makes you say that?” Asher asked.

  “The footage. I didn’t see any money exchange hands. Plus, I know scum and this guy didn’t seem so scummy.”

  “But if he wasn’t scummy, why did he run from you?” Asher pointed out.

  She blew another bubble between her chapped lips. “Well, if you haven’t noticed, I am quite menacing.”

  Asher smirked at this, as she stood and pulled her jacket tighter around herself so she could zip it. “Where are you off to now?”

  “To the only lead I’ve got, to this hotel to get some answers on who this dude might be so I can ask him myself if he is scum or not.”

  “And what do you intend to do if you catch him?”

  She answered by slipping some zip ties from her pocket to show him. “Catching bad guys is like riding a bike, once you know how to do it you never lose the talent.”

  “May I remind you that we are trying to keep a low profile?”

  “What good has that done?” Cora asked.

  “Kept us alive.”

  Cora snorted. “You call this living? So terrified by what could happen that we don’t do anything?”

  “Still alive,” Asher said stiffly.

  “Well, I want to feel alive so I am going after this guy unless I discover him innocent.” She started towards the door, her hands jammed into her pockets to keep them warm in the frigid outside air.

  “How about you take the night and think on it?” Asher suggested quickly.

  Cora turned back to him, her eyes flitting up and down him suspiciously. “Nothing is going to change my mind.”

  “Woman, sit down or I’ll make it so you can’t for a week,” Asher commanded.

  Cora’s eyebrow quirked, her chin dipping saucily. “Okay, what’s going on? You seem on edge which is odd for you.”

  “I want you to be careful and–”

  “I’m always careful,” Cora interrupted.

  “You’re never careful.”

  “Even as damaged as I am from Krone, I can still handle myself.”

  She watched Asher’s throat bob as he swallowed. Krone’s name still made him uncomfortable, which made Cora feel a little guilty for bringing him up, but she also knew Asher could never argue against her once he was mentioned. Asher blamed himself for what Krone had done to her, she knew it and so she used it... but only a little.

  “I’m going to the hotel to do some digging, you can come if you feel like you need to protect me.”

  Asher made a show of considering this, before he sat down and shook his head. “The two of us together will definitely draw more attention. Besides, you seem like you need to do this on your own.”

  Cora nodded. “I need to prove to myself that I still can.”

  She and Asher stared at each other for a few moments, just weighing what this decision meant and what could possibly happen because of it. Then she finally left and once the door had closed behind her, Asher groaned.

  Dammit. He had not expected her to declare she was going after him so soon. He thought he at least had another day before she started gearing up to take down a criminal. Asher had known she wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation eventually, because even with the fear crushing in on her, she was always going to be the badass bounty hunter he had come to love. He’d just thought there would be more of a conflict within her, but he had been foolish to think so. She always went after the danger immediately.

  “Well I guess it can’t be helped,” he grumbled as he got to his feet to follow her to the hotel. It was a day early, but he supposed he could let her catch him and they could enjoy her Valentine’s Day utopia straight through into the dawn of the day itself.

  7

  Valentine’s Utopia

  When she had lived in Miami she had rocked some truly short, flowing dresses that went with the Miami atmosphere. Because no one would instantly take her for a bounty hunter, or even a threat, those colorful dresses gave her an edge. No one saw her coming until she was there, and taking them down to the station.

  Now in Denmark in the middle of February, the weather was less than ideal for wearing skimpy little dresses, so Cora had to get creative.

  It was a common misconception to believe that you could just walk up to someone and start asking them questions, when in reality, if you try to grill them for answers they lock up faster than the state penitentiary after a riot. No, she had to have a lot more tact than that to get answers. She had to finesse them. Made her miss the days bounty hunters could bind someone to a chair and refuse to release them until they talked. Simpler times.

  Now she had to invest in a disguise, one that encouraged trust in some unsuspecting witness, somet
hing like a pregnancy belly shoved under her winter coat. She could put that on and walk with a hobble and suddenly everyone would want to talk to her. Of course, they’d want to talk about the upcoming delivery of her imaginary child, but they’d be more responsive when she slipped a few questions in there about possible suspects.

  The fake pregnancy belly cost her no more than twenty dollars, and the fake glasses she put on were barely a dollar at a tourist stand. All in all, she was pleased that her disguise fell into her budget so well. She approached the hotel with a fat belly, fake hobble, and shopping bags weighed down with rocks to ensure one of the staff noticed her quickly and rushed to her aid.

  The Hotel D’Angleterre was extravagant with lace embroidery, satin curtains extending all the way to the floor, and everything was in white for Danish Valentine’s Day. Cora glanced around, puzzled even further by the fancy atmosphere, as it was not at all what she would associate with the person she was looking for. Or the type of hotel which would have a logo written on a ball cap.

  “Ma’am?” asked a short, stout woman in a thick Danish accent, as she approached the fake pregnant woman struggling with heavy shopping bags. Her name tag read, “Greta.”

  “Hello,” Cora breathed, slightly exasperated. “I am just an absolute mess; do you work here?”

  “Ya, can I be of assistance?” With some concern, Greta reached for the bags.

  “What?” Cora asked, being sure to look extra dumbfounded – just a ditzy pregnant woman, lost in a massive hotel.

  “Heavy lifting no good for your condition, eh?” Greta explained as she managed to grab a few of the bags. The rocks rattled slightly inside the shopping bags but neither woman paid the sound any mind.

  “Oh, thank you!” Cora placed her hand to her belly to really sell the “oh God, I am so pregnant and achy and miserable,” act.