“That’s one way to describe it,” James muttered. “Since we’re taking a road trip and we’re heading to Texas, we’re going to grab some barbeque along the way. I can also drive a lot of the time. I have tools that make it so I don’t need as much sleep.”
He didn’t want to explain that he could use Whispy to avoid fatigue. The less Harper knew about his true capabilities, the better.
“That’s cool.” Harper gave him a pained look. “But barbeque? Do we have to stop?”
James frowned. “Yeah. Need to eat, and I like barbeque.”
“Everyone knows you like barbeque, James. I’m sure if there are aliens out there on some distant planet, they probably know it too, but I’m a vegan.”
James barked a laugh.
Harper scoffed. “It’s not that funny. I’m just saying. What am I supposed to eat?”
“If you hadn’t been helping those evil fuckers smuggle a death factory, you wouldn’t be on a barbeque-heavy road trip with me,” James replied. “So I don’t give two shits about your eating preferences. You convinced me to help, so I’m helping, but I’m not even getting paid for this, so the least you’re gonna do is buy me barbeque. If you don’t like it, eat some potatoes and salad and shit.”
“Fine.” Harper’s easy smile returned. “You’ve got a point. I’m asking a lot of you, and I do owe you.”
“I’m glad you understand because I want to make this very clear. I’m only doing this because there are a lot of lives on the line and my wife told me to do it. Once this is over, I better never, ever see you again if you want to keep breathing. I don’t like people complicating my life with their fuck-ups, especially when they happened because they got greedy.”
Harper tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. The woman possessed a delicate beauty, but James barely noticed. He had Shay. He didn’t need to look at any other women. Alison, as his daughter, didn’t register the same way, and most of the women at the agency he just thought of as “one of the guys.”
“You can’t totally blame me, you know,” the courier offered quietly. “I mean, it’s not like I go out of my way to take jobs from evil dudes. Plenty of legitimate people hire me because of my particular specialty. It just so happens these were a nasty group of guys who wanted a nasty artifact.”
“Listen to yourself.” James scoffed. “Nothing’s ever your fault, is it?”
“Oh, come on.” Harper offered him a playful grin. “I get that you’re the Barbeque Ghost now instead of the Granite Ghost, but are you trying to tell me you’ve never taken a job that was questionable?”
“I hunted bounties,” James replied, looking out the window at the dense traffic in the other lanes. “I still do on occasion. If I go after someone, it’s because they’ve done something to earn a bounty, or they fucked with me or people I care about. That means they brought it on themselves.”
“It must be wonderful to be so perfect,” Harper replied, a hint of mockery in her voice.
“I’m not perfect. I’m a sinner. That’s why I go to church.”
Harper laughed. “Oh, come on. Let me talk about it another way. Not all bounties are horrible people, right? Maybe someone got framed, but you went after them. Some poor schlep who is afraid, and the next thing, James Brownstone’s shooting him in the knee. You telling me that never happened?”
“I took on jobs with full knowledge of what was involved.” James shrugged. “If I ran into someone and I had some reason to let them go, I did it with full knowledge of the implications, and I made sure to keep them in check if I thought they were dangerous. The few times I took on a blind job and it ended complicated, it wasn’t because the people who hired me were the trouble. It was because someone else didn’t know when to back the fuck off.” He frowned at her. “Taking on a blind job like you did involving such a dangerous artifact makes you stupid, and for all I know, you’ve carried some artifact for dangerous fuckers who’ve hurt people before. If you want to convince me we’re the same, give it up. If you want absolution, talk to a priest.”
Harper sighed. “You’re a barrel of laughs. I don’t understand how you landed such a hot wife. Fine, James. Let’s just get to Texas and take care of the Seasons, then you never have to see me again.”
Chapter Twelve
James pulled the car into the parking lot of the Bobby-Q BBQ Restaurant and Steakhouse in Phoenix. They’d switched drivers about two hours prior, at his suggestion. The less direct control Harper had, the more comfortable he felt, especially since he wasn’t about to spend the entire time bonded to Whispy. The symbiont didn’t always shut up when it would be good for him to, and he didn’t want to listen to hours of requests for him to murder Harper.
The woman wrinkled her nose. “I can’t believe you’re making me eat at a steakhouse. This is almost cruel.”
“Life sucks, you accidentally release a dangerous artifact, then you die,” James replied. He nodded at the dashboard clock. “It’s a little past noon, and we’re making good time. Let’s just eat and get out of here. According to the last message I got from my people, they can’t get a decent direct satellite image of the place, but there are a lot of weird energy readings, even if they’re contained in a small area.”
“That’s good. I’m using up a lot of expensive, limited artifacts to keep the Seasons in check. I’m glad they weren’t a total waste. One thing, though.” Harper placed her arm on his shoulder. She withdrew it at his glare. “We didn’t bring your truck along to draw attention, and people can’t see into the car well enough to tell it’s you when we’re driving. If you march into a barbeque place looking like you, people will take pictures, and if the Southguards figure out you might be involved with this at all, they’ll have an arrow pointing toward the Seasons. Besides all their artifacts, they have mercenary wizards on their payroll.”
James shrugged. “I can call in an order, and you can go in there and pick it up.”
“And deal with that smell in the car for the next few hours? No, thank you.” Harper reached into the back seat and pulled out a fedora. She handed it to James. “Put this on. It’ll disguise you.”
“Just putting on a hat isn’t much of a disguise.” He took the hat and turned it over a few times. It was a gray felt fedora. There was nothing special about it that he could tell.
“Glasses were good enough for Superman,” Harper countered with a chuckle. “And it’s not just a hat. It’s an artifact. It’ll make you look plain. It’ll even fool cameras.” She unbuttoned her sweater and tossed it on the floor. She was wearing a tight pink T-Shirt for the band Atlantis and Doom underneath. “I’m hoping nobody attacks us in there; if so, I’m really going to regret leaving that thing in here. If I can drop my enchanted sweater, you can put on the hat.”
“Why not just wear the sweater?” James asked.
Harper pointed to the temperature readout on the dash: one hundred degrees. “I think people will kind of question why I’m wearing a sweater in Phoenix in June. I’m ditching my sweater, and you’re putting that hat on.”
James grumbled but slipped on the hat. His body shimmered for a moment, then his coat, shirt, and pants vanished, along with the hat. They were replaced by a white button-up shirt and blue slacks. His tattoos were gone. He looked into the rearview mirror. His face was subtly altered. If he squinted, he still could see the resemblance, but Harper had been right. It was like every distinguishing feature had been replaced by something more generic, like he was twenty different men averaged together.
“It’ll wear off in an hour, so we need to be in and out by then,” Harper explained.
“Fine,” James replied. “Let’s get some food.”
Neither James nor Harper spoke more than a few words to each other for the next fifteen minutes. Their discussion with the waiter lasted longer. Conversations flowed around them, mostly about mundane work, sports, and entertainment. They sipped their waters, each watching the other, James with a scowl on his face, Harper with a soft smile.
I hate h
ow she’s always smiling like she knows what’s going on. Like everything’s a big joke to her.
She reached into her pocket, pulled out a small silver cube, and set it on the edge of the table. “If you’re worried about being overheard, this will take care of it. It filters out sound, and this version even feeds false sound outside. If people are listening, they’ll overhear a slightly strange conversation about the weather.”
James’s gaze traveled from the cube to the woman. “You’re ex-CIA?” He stopped himself before he asked if she had worked as an alien hunter. The silence cube technology wasn’t necessarily limited to that division of the CIA. It just so happened he’d almost exclusively had contact with them.
“Me?” Harper laughed and shook her head. “I wouldn’t last a day working for the CIA. No, I was dating a guy for a while who worked for the CIA. He gave me this one day, disappeared, and told me never to look for him.” She shrugged. “Spies! What are you going to do, right?”
“You do realize he’s probably dead.”
She doesn’t look old enough to have been dating anyone when Fortis was still around, but who knows?
Harper picked up her water and took a sip. “We’re not all James Brownstone. If he told me to stay away, I’m assuming he knew what he was talking about. I was going to break up with him in a few weeks anyway, so it was convenient. Win-win, you know? Well, for me, at least.”
James scoffed. “You really don’t care about anyone but yourself, do you?”
“If that were true, I wouldn’t be on this trip with you.” Harper looked to the side as the waiter approached. He set down a tray of ribs for James and a baked potato for her. She thanked him and touched his arm with a smile. The waiter smiled back.
James picked up a rib and took a bite, savoring the play of the sauce on this tongue and the fact that it came from a normal four-legged cow that didn’t taste like pineapple dipped in sugar. He polished off three ribs before speaking. “I’m still not totally convinced I shouldn’t call the PDA or FBI on your ass. I’d check for bounties, but I’m sure Harper isn’t your real name, and I don’t want to trip some system looking for you. I don’t need the Southguards blowing up the car on the highway.”
“Harper is my real first name,” she replied. “I’m not about to give you my real last name, but I can tell you there are no bounties on me. As for turning me in, I know how to work the Eye of Winter. Will your PDA agents know how to use it?”
James frowned. “If you care about other people getting hurt, wouldn’t you be willing to tell them anyway, even if you were in jail?”
Harper rolled her eyes and smirked. “Of course not. That’d be stupid, right? A girl needs to have a backup plan. Besides, I’m trying to do the right thing here. Don’t make it too hard on me.”
James grunted and picked up a fresh rib. “You only have to do the right thing because of your previous screwup while you were in the process of doing the wrong thing.”
“So judgmental.” Harper plopped in a forkful of potato into her mouth. “Probably because you eat all that beef.” She winked.
Does she really think she can flirt with me to get me to change my opinion?
“Yeah, keep telling yourself that, Rabbit Girl,” James replied. “I thought you had moral limits, but apparently, you’ll throw thousands of people aside as long as it means you don’t end up in jail.”
“Jail?” Harper blew a raspberry. “Jail I could handle, but this isn’t just about me screwing up some courier work. This is about me trafficking in high-level illegal artifacts. The government might even classify the thing as a Broken Wand.” She grimaced. “Oh, man. Now I feel bad. Just like that thing in LA, back in the day. Were you in the city when that happened? I was still a teen back then, but I was thousands of miles away.”
“Yeah, I was there.” James allowed himself a slight smile. He didn’t care that people didn’t know the truth about the Battle of LA. He knew he’d stopped the Vax, and that was enough.
Harper downed some more water before continuing. She shook her fork at James like a weapon. “The point is if the PDA or FBI arrests me, I’m not going to end up in county lockup for six months. I’m going to end up in an ultramax, or maybe even a place like Trevilsom. The Oricerans don’t take kindly to people trafficking in Great War artifacts.”
“You’re too dangerous,” James muttered before returning to his rib. “But fine. I need you for now.”
I can’t let this woman go. She’s gonna lose a magical nuke for the North Koreans next month.
The woman watched him for a moment, her lips parted and a playful gleam in her eyes.
“What?” James rumbled. He set his rib down. “Staring makes the food taste bad.”
“How about a magic trick?” Harper asked. She set down her utensil and waved her hands. “Magic,” she whispered dramatically.
“What the fuck are you going on about now?”
The corners of her mouth turned up in a grin. “It’s an impressive trick.” She picked up the fork and placed the tines against her head. “I’m going to use the metal in this as a telepathic antenna to reveal your thoughts.”
“Good luck.” James grabbed his rib. Quality barbeque was going cold while he wasted time listening to this woman’s bullshit.
“I’m going to turn in that hot bitch the minute this is all over,” Harper offered in a low voice, a sad attempt at imitating James’ speech. “I want to turn her in now, but I can’t because she has the Eye, so once the Seasons are disabled, I’ll knock her out, hogtie her, and deliver her to the nearest PDA or FBI field office.”
James snorted. “’Hogtie?’ I’m from LA. We don’t say ‘hogtie.’”
Harper laughed. “Same idea. Tell me I’m wrong.”
He shrugged. “We all have to pay for our mistakes eventually.”
“It’s okay.” Harper lowered her fork to gather more potato. “I know that’s probably been your plan from the beginning, and I’m telling you this to prove I’m not the totally sociopathic bitch you think I am. For me, the plan is as follows. I’m going to use you as my meat shield. I’m going to go disable the Seasons, and then I’m going to skip out before you even know what’s going on. I’ll hide on some tropical island until the Southguards forget about me.”
James chuckled. “That’s your plan?”
“I’ve got a lot of money and artifacts stashed around.” Harper made a large circle in the air with her fork. “I could hide out for a few years.”
“It won’t work. I’ve heard this plan before. You want me to do a magic trick and tell you the future?”
Harper grinned. “A joke? You’re threatening to develop a personality, James. What do you see in my future? Me scrubbing toilets in an ultramax?”
“Nah.” James shook his head. “You convince yourself you don’t care about anyone, and you decide to go to that island. Maybe you fake your death first, decide to do a few other jobs in a different field. You end up making a few friends, including one who dedicates himself to making great pizza. Maybe an apprentice, too, and the next thing you know, you end up settling down with some guy and turning your back on your past. You retire to something that doesn’t involve dangerous magic at all.”
Harper blinked a few times. “Okay. That’s oddly specific, but at least it isn’t prison.” She tapped her watch. “Remember, we’re on the clock before your disguise wears off. That hat takes two hours to recharge for every hour you wear it.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be done in ten.”
She’s not a total waste of space. She is right. If she does have money, she could have just said fuck it and run. Maybe there is hope for her yet, but I’m not gonna let my guard down.
Chapter Thirteen
By the time James and Harper made an early evening stop at Borderland BBQ in Las Cruces, the whole road trip experience almost felt like a careful routine, complete with disguise hat and silence cube. He reached into his pocket to pull out an energy potion after a long yawn. He downed the
potion before preparing to chow down on some brisket. Harper continued her transformation into a rabbit with a salad. At least a potato was defensible food for a grown human.
Harper eyed the empty vial as James slipped it back into his pocket. “That’s your brilliant plan for staying awake? A potion? You could have just let me drive more instead of nap. Or taken a pill.”
“That’s just to get me there. Once we’re on-site, I’ve got a few other tricks,” James took a bite of his brisket. “It’s not a big deal, anyway. I’ve got a witch who makes them for me in bulk.”
“Aren’t we fancy?” Harper chuckled.
“Maybe.” James chewed for a moment and swallowed. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“Go ahead.” Harper shrugged. “You can ask whatever you want. I’m not saying I’ll answer, or tell you the truth, but I’m not going to care if you ask. I’m very hard to offend, unlike you.”
“I’m not easy to offend. Most people are just annoying.”
“Sure, sure,” Harper replied.
“You said you used to be a tomb raider,” James stated. He took another bite of brisket, chewing carefully while he waited for the answer. Something poked at the back of his mind, propelling him to want to learn more about his temporary partner.
“That’s not a question. That’s a statement, but it’s the truth. I was a tomb raider for three years, actually. I was the partner-slash-apprentice of a guy who’d been doing it a little longer than me.” A wistful smile appeared. “He wasn’t a bad guy, actually, but tomb raiding isn’t safe. He ended up dead. I didn’t. Plenty of stories end that way. I imagine it’s not all that different in bounty hunting. You’ve lost people.”
“Yeah. I have, and I think about them all the time.” James stared at her. “But I’m not you. Did you leave him to die?”
Harper’s omnipresent smile vanished. Her eyes grew stormy, and her mouth twitched. The crack in the persona was ephemeral as a new grin displaced her frown. “If he got killed, it’s his own fault for not being careful, right? He was the guy who was supposed to know what he was doing.”
Road Trip: BBQ Delivered with Attitude (The Unbelievable Mr. Brownstone Book 20) Page 10