by Audrey Faye
“Hello. I’m Rhonda, and I’m hoping you’re Daphne.” Her voice squeaked through the first few words and then settled down. “Can I buy you a soda? The coffee here is really terrible.”
That part sounded honest enough. “I’ll have whatever you’re having.”
That seemed to please her. “I’ll be right back—things arrive a lot faster if you go order at the counter.”
I bet. I watched as she scurried over to the register and had a brief chat with the bald man with a greasy head and glassy, bored eyes. He shrugged and leaned toward the shelves behind him, eventually coming up with a can of soda and a couple of glasses that didn’t look clean even from here.
This was just getting better and better.
Rhonda had her perky, confident mask mostly in place by the time she made it back over to the table. “I thought we’d share one soda for now—I can always get another one later if we’re still thirsty.” She paused, looking a bit worried. “Would you like a cinnamon bun? They’re not too bad here, except for on Mondays, when they’re stale.”
Judi’s largess clearly didn’t extend to a dining budget for either Rhonda or potential clients. “No, thanks.”
She gave me a sad, sympathetic smile. “Not eating too much these days, huh? I remember going for weeks on coffee and saltine crackers.”
I’d done about three days of that after Johnny left for the last time, and then I’d sworn off saltines forever. “Something like that.”
“We’ll help you with that.” She patted my hand awkwardly. “I talked with my partner, Judi, and she thinks we can get you a new life as soon as next week, if you’re ready.”
I managed not to squirm. New lives took work—I was still trying to find some of the pieces of mine. Carly and I offered help, not salvation with a patina of used-car shtick. Rhonda’s lack of skill with the shtick just made it worse. “I’m just not sure. And it’s an awful lot of money.”
“I know. I wish we could work for free.”
Rhonda sounded entirely sincere, but it was hard to be a Good Samaritan when you had a bank balance smaller than the cost of a decent flannel shirt. There were, however, other ways to earn a living. I needed to remember some of them and stop feeling sorry for her. “I think I can get the money.”
Her face lit up. “Oh, Daphne—that’s great news.”
Shit. Somewhere under all the scammy crap was a woman who was actually happy that she might be able to help. I gritted my teeth and thought of Seattle.
Rhonda was watching me carefully. “You’re still not sure, are you?”
“I don’t know. It feels like you guys are pretty small time. My Oscar, he’s got some scary friends.”
Her cheeks puffed up, a woman trying to be far braver than she was. “We can handle them. I know I’m not much to look at, but Judi’s not scared of anyone.” She leaned in, glancing around the shop again. “We’re going after a really dangerous guy this weekend. His wife’s been living in mortal fear of him for years now.”
She looked so damn certain they’d succeed. I didn’t bother trying to tell her about Loralee or the woman in Seattle she’d rescued. Rhonda was way too blind for actual evidence to matter.
And choosing to stay that way. Any pity I’d felt for the woman who’d had to try on confidence like a skin transplant was fading fast. She couldn’t possibly be totally unaware of Judi’s less-worthy antics—or her failures. However dysfunctional their relationship was, clearly they were tight.
At the end of the day, Rhonda was choosing not to see.
I watched her over the top of my lukewarm soda, resigned and a little sad. We weren’t going to stop the two of them here and now—Judi was the force to be reckoned with, and I still wasn’t sure how to take her out of the game. But I had intel and gut feelings, and an itch on the back of my neck about their weekend plans.
It was time to go report in.
-o0o-
“How can anyone make so freaking many spelling mistakes in one email?”
I glanced over at my partner, who was wedged into a corner of the van with her laptop, and decided it was a rhetorical question. And if it wasn’t, someone else could field it this time.
I looked out the window, still weirded out by the change of perspective. I wasn’t used to being tucked into the back seat when we were on the road.
We’d taken leave of our sanity and let Lelo drive. Rosie was riding shotgun because she was the only one who knew our destination. She’d listened to my pithy summary of the meeting with Rhonda and decided that she needed to do some scouting for a potential landscaping gig. Right now. Revamping the gardens of an old Victorian with a view of the lake.
Which would have been a nice field trip, if the nearest waterfront wasn’t a hundred miles away.
A certain sexy gypsy putting a lot of miles between Carly and potential stupidity. I’d known which side of that fence to sit on.
My partner had taken one look at our united scowls and then climbed into the van, muttering darkly about slow cellular download speeds. It had taken her about five seconds to start trolling through Judi and Rhonda’s emails, trying to sniff out their plans for the weekend. Lelo and Rosie had stopped asking how she got her hands on that kind of information. I’d stopped worrying that they’d crossed into our inner circle. Mostly.
Carly banged on a couple of keys and shook her head. “Dammit, their emails are barely literate.”
I rolled my eyes at the woman who had been known to freak out at a misplaced comma. “They’re an embarrassment to assassins everywhere.”
“They are.”
“You can give them a grammar lesson right after you convince them to take up a new line of work.”
Lelo snickered from the driver’s seat.
It’s always good to know you can amuse the sub-adults in your life.
Rosie turned around and handed back a bag of neon green Doritos. ”Anything useful in the emails besides crimes of punctuation?”
I stared at the bag, pretty sure I drew the line at eating anything radioactive.
Carly leaned forward and helped herself to a monster handful. “Lots of drivel, lots of making up sob stories to build trust with the people who reach out to them.”
That didn’t sit well with either of us. We broke lots of laws, but we never lied. Not to the women we tried to help, anyhow. We evaded, we avoided, we said things that probably led them astray, but we never lied. “Rhonda’s doing this too?” That took her squarely out of victim status in my book, no matter how her sad life had tugged on me.
My partner waggled a hand in the air. “She embellishes a little, but she’s basically telling the same story. Judi makes up all kinds of shit.”
That just told us what we already knew. “How about their plans for the weekend?”
Carly made a grumpy face and shrugged. “I’m looking, but it’s hard slogging when I don’t know what they actually have in mind. They don’t generally email each other, so there’s no smoking gun.”
That fit with my impressions of how tight they were. “I bet they meet in person.” It would be good strategy on Judi’s part, a way to keep Rhonda in line and working hard. Hold out the crumbs of friendship.
“I’m running a filter.” My partner was back to typing away on her laptop. “Looking for people they’ve exchanged lots of emails with. Rhonda’s chatty, though, so that’s not narrowing it down much.”
Rhonda was lonely, but for Carly’s purposes, the distinction wasn’t relevant.
“Follow the money.” Rosie shrugged when we all looked at her. “What? It works on all the TV shows.”
My partner’s eyebrows wrinkled. “They hit everyone up for money.”
“Who’s the biggest?” The sexy gypsy intercepted the Doritos as they passed from back seat to front. “We know how much Judi tried to hit Jane up for, right? How much higher do they go?”
“Good question.” Carly was already typing. “That’s not an easy search to run, give me a minute.”
; We all sat quietly, the sounds of sweet silence interrupted only by Carly’s arrhythmic fingers and the occasional crunch as yet another Dorito died.
“Ha.” Our chief researcher pumped a fist in the air and then drilled a look Rosie’s direction. “You’re pretty smart for a girl who sells flowers.”
“It pays better than knocking biker heads together,” said Rosie serenely.
Points to the sexy gypsy.
Lelo pitched a Dorito backwards at Carly’s head and missed by a mile. “Did you find something?”
“I did. Lots of dollars. Some shithead who uses his fists after every meal and has his wife totally terrified. Digging on her now—she’s got an aliased email.”
We went back to chip-crunching silence, waiting for my partner’s savvy fingers to dig up dirt.
“Got her.” Carly sounded almost winded. “And she’s on Facebook, hang on.”
You can find out almost anything about someone on Facebook.
“Seriously?” My partner shook her head and snorted at her laptop screen. “Get this—the husband is an accountant. How evil can he be?”
She’d clearly never had to deal with filing taxes. “Plenty.”
“Okay, but when’s the last time we had to pound on one?”
She had a point—as a profession, they weren’t guys who tended to use their fists. “There has to be a first time for everything, I guess.”
“That’s why he’s the big target, though,” said Rosie grimly. “His wife’s got money.”
Carly nodded, all traces of amusement gone. “Yeah, they’re hitting her up for ten thousand.”
My brain charred slightly. “Dollars? You can order a hit for half that.” And then my words caught up with me. “Oh, shit.”
“Um.” Lelo spoke from the driver’s seat, voice slightly squeaky. “Should I turn around and go back?”
“No. Not yet.” Carly sounded sure. “They don’t have the deal totally sewn up yet, and Judi’s currently busy playing tonsil hockey with some chick whose boobs are as big as her head.”
I really, really didn’t want to know how she knew that.
My partner’s hands were flying on three separate devices. “The wife is supposed to get back to them late tonight. I’ll verify, but all contact is by email so far.”
Smart wife. “So all we’d be interrupting right now is a hypothetical chat via email.” Which would accomplish exactly nothing. Better we sat on the snake’s proverbial head, virtually at least.
“Yeah. So we go figure out where to plant petunias, and we wait.” Carly looked like she’d rather eat glass.
“I never plant petunias.” Rosie looked at my partner. “You can set up alerts in case anything moves?”
“Yeah. I can send them to you and Lelo too. That way, we for sure won’t miss anything.”
The sexy gypsy considered a moment longer, and then she nodded once and turned forward. “Okay. Then let’s go to the lake.”
I leaned back and sighed. Waiting with Carly was significantly less fun than a root canal.
At least we’d be waiting in style.
10
I took a ginger seat on a garden bench with spindly legs and prayed to the gods of neglected garden furniture. Not that this bench had ever resembled sturdy.
Rosie chuckled from her perch nearby. “I don’t think they intended for anyone to sit out here.”
I shook my head and breathed out a sigh of relief as the bench took my weight without turning into toothpicks. “I have no idea what they intended out here. You have your work cut out for you.” It wasn’t the ugliest garden I’d ever seen, but it was easily the most unfriendly.
She shrugged. “My friend bought the house for the view.”
That part was lovely. Lelo and Carly were hanging over the back gate, soaking in the crisp mountain lake smells and the sunny day. With the right garden, this could easily be paradise. “It might be easier to bomb it and start from scratch.”
“Nope.” Rosie leaned over and touched a small orange bloom. “There’s some good stuff in here, it just needs new bones.”
That sounded like a lot more work than a quick bombing and replanting, but nobody hired me to landscape anything. I sat quietly, trying to imagine what I might do if the garden were mine. “It could use a few of those little stone statues tucked away in interesting places.”
The sexy gypsy looked over at me and raised a curious eyebrow. “Like what?”
I had no clue—whimsy is a really personal thing, and I only knew what worked for me. I looked over at a willow hidden behind a prim hedge. “I’d let that weeping willow tree out of prison and tuck a hammock chair under it, maybe.”
“Hmm.” Rosie stood and walked around the hedge, touching it as she went. “This needs to go. Minor bombing. Nice view from back here, though.” She smiled at me from between willow fronds. “You’re good at this.”
I knew a thing or two about comfy seats. I didn’t know diddly about gardens. “Sorry, you’re on your own.”
She grinned. “I’m used to reluctant recruits.”
I bet she was.
Rosie turned to look at the other two members of our little tribe, who were walking back from the gate. “Something’s up.”
I looked. Two heads bent intently together, and Carly’s hands were moving in quick, sharp slices. No devices out, though. I waited, mystified, as they got closer.
“They call themselves assassins, and so do we.” Carly shot up a hand to stall Lelo’s protests. “They wave knives around and promise to fix things, and so do we.”
The kid looked over at Rosie and me, eyes full of piss and vinegar. “Tell her you’re different from the pretenders.”
My partner folded her arms in front of her ribs. “Not all that different.”
Oh, boy. The problem with two hours in a van is that it gives everyone too much time to think. “That’s like saying Rosie’s garden isn’t much different from this one.”
The sexy gypsy snorted. “This one’s an uptight old English teacher who forgot to eat her prunes.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to ask. “And what’s your garden?”
She grinned. “The sexy lady with an aura of mystery and danger who makes all the kids want to learn Shakespeare.”
Carly rolled her eyes. “Are you two done yet?”
Not hardly. In Vermont, we don’t start things, but we know how to finish them and this one needed to die a quick death. “Just because we put the same title in our job description doesn’t mean we’re anything like the pretenders.”
She leaned against a tree. “Really? Name one way we’re different.”
“They’re scam artists. We don’t take money.”
She shrugged. “We let people hope, and we can’t always deliver.”
But we tried, dammit. “Nobody could get this right all the time. But the scammers, they never really try.”
She watched me silently, her fingers beating a rhythm on the trunk of the tree that held her up. “Even if we try our damnedest, that might not matter to the women we can’t help.”
I felt that one hit. The road to hell is paved with good intentions—but so are most of the places we have available to put our feet. I looked at my partner, trying to keep my agitation tucked away. It was bad enough that one of us was stirred up. “I don’t believe that. Life is messy, but how we choose to walk still matters.”
I could see Rosie nodding beside me, but it wasn’t her I needed to understand. Carly had somehow landed the two of us in quicksand, and I wasn’t willing to leave either of us sinking there. She hated shades of gray—in her world, safety came in the blacks and the whites. But it was the shading that made us so different from two women who’d decided to piss on people while wearing our t-shirts.
She was drumming her fingers again. “We started from hate, just like they did. From revenge. Our motives aren’t pure either.”
“That’s bullshit.” Rosie didn’t mince words. “You aren’t anything like them.”
&n
bsp; I watched my partner as that landed. It wasn’t often that Carly got philosophical about what we did, but it always worried me. So much of who she was attached firmly to the end of a knife—and whatever she might dream about when she cuddled a baby, I didn’t think she was remotely ready to do the intricate surgery necessary to detach the knife.
The sexy gypsy was leaning hard on another big can of worms.
Carly started to vibrate.
“This,” said Lelo loudly beside me, “is dumb.”
The other three of us blinked and turned to stare at her.
“Grown-ups. Always thinking too much.” The kid shook her head sadly and walked over to hook her arm through Carly’s. “Come play on the dock with me. I bet I can keep my pants dry longer than you can.”
It took a moment, and then Carly laughed and pushed away from her tree. “Not a chance, skinny girl.”
I watched as the two of them raced for the back gate, tense energy gone as quickly as it had come.
And marveled. The kid had a touch.
-o0o-
“I guess that leaves us old farts here to watch the grass grow.” Rosie picked up a pair of little-kid scissors and started gathering flowers from the bits of prissy garden she could reach from her chair.
I watched for a while, fascinated by the transformation as they landed in her hand. Not prissy any longer. I suspected that any bouquet Rosie built would have a little bit of wild and a little bit of attitude, no matter where the flowers had started.
I wondered if she could do the same for a knife-wielding assassin.
Rosie tucked a sprig of tiny, bright-blue blossoms in under her thumb. “You chickened out on your answers—you know that, right?”
I blinked. “I what?”
“Carly wanted to know why the two of you are different from the idiots wearing your t-shirts.”
Of course she did. “She thinks they’re slime.” And of all the things on earth my partner wanted to be, that wasn’t one of them.
“They are slime. You aren’t.”