by Audrey Faye
Instead, my partner had just turned this into a nice, controlled gig, one that was low risk and mostly legal—the kind of op the kid and the gypsy could help out with and it wouldn’t disturb my sleep at all. It was a good, solid plan.
But it wasn’t assassin work—and I wanted to feel like an assassin.
15
I opened the lid of the cooler and studied the ice-swaddled contents, feeling morose. It was the end of another day of work full of technical whiz bang, and as usual on those days I’d had very little to do. I reached for a bottle—hard cider wasn’t going to cure my woes, but at least I could chase them down with something tasty.
“Want company?”
I turned and looked at my partner, leaning against the kitchen wall. She was a picture from another time—wispy sundress, bare feet, and curls escaping from whatever she’d used to pile them on her head. “You done?”
She smiled and walked my direction, hips swinging in the way that had knocked guys off barstools in fifty states. “Lelo and Rosie are doing most of the hard stuff.”
They were doing most of the legal stuff. Carly’s to-do list had been short and very stealth. She reached into the cooler and pulled out one of the microbrew beers she collected every time she had the chance.
We walked out the back way, listening to the screen door creak shut behind us. The air was summertime muggy, with a buzz I hoped wasn’t mosquitoes or anything else that fed on the blood of hermits from Vermont.
This staying in actual houses was a strange thing, even ones with comfy back porches and peeling paint. I picked a rocking chair that looked reasonably sturdy and would instantly age me twenty-five years, and took a seat.
The creak of the rocker added a base note to the sounds of the night. My muse yearned.
Carly leaned back against the porch rail and let out a long, soft exhale. In anyone else, it would have been the settling in of utter relaxation.
I knew better. I studied her more carefully, taking in the curling toes and restless fingers on the neck of the bottle in her left hand. “What’s up?”
She took a sip of her beer, eyes closed, sunset at her back. A commercial in the making, except for the hint of angst in her eyes when she opened them again. “I did some digging on the accountant.”
I stopped in mid-swig. “I thought we were figuring out how to turn Judi into maggot food.”
“That’s next.”
Carly had spent way too much time lately in a state of introspective agitation. Assassin brooding. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, it usually meant something nasty had stuck its head up out of the primeval dark. I was pretty sure my day had just gotten less boring. “What’s up?”
“His wife told Judi this story about how he used his fists on her all the time, right?”
I nodded. It was one we heard often enough.
She was fingering her bottle again. “So when I finished up my part of Lelo’s little brainstorm, I did our usual due diligence.”
I didn’t like where this was headed. Not all the stories people tell are true—we’d learned to check. Carly wasn’t out here because she’d found truth. “No trail of evidence?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. No medical reports, no missed work, not even any OTC pain meds from the drugstore on her credit cards.”
I toyed with the spout of my hard cider. Some women kept things way underground, but this definitely didn’t smell good. “What did you find?” There was no way my partner had stopped digging two shovelfuls in—especially given what those two had uncovered.
“His wife’s having an affair. Evidence all over hell. The accountant’s got a juvie record and a home address growing up that makes the hood look like suburbia.”
That explained his knife skills—and made the cider in my stomach start to curdle.
Carly took another swig of beer. “And as far as I can tell, he’s been a model citizen ever since.”
Shit. “Are you sure?” Of course she was. She’d been sure long before she’d set foot in the kitchen.
“I dug. Hard. If he’s dirty, he hides it damn well.” Her lips pushed together, a woman who struggled to believe in redemption as much as I did. “He walked away from the alley today, J. A guy who’s still got his hand in the muck, I don’t think he does that.”
Yeah. Guys walked away from a fight because they were soft or because they were decent—and this one hadn’t been soft. “What’s his name?” I suddenly needed to know.
She raised an eyebrow. “Rodney.”
A guy with a crappy start who had somehow turned out okay. We didn’t meet them much—we mostly got the ones with decent starts who decided to take a turn into the dark and stupid. But if a kid who had grown up on hard streets had managed to transform himself into an upstanding citizen, we were the last people on earth who wanted to dull his hard-won shine.
Because we wanted to believe that Talia would get there. And Benji. And a whole pile of other small, earnest faces we knew who had lived through crappy starts.
This assassin gig doesn’t come with any of the right warnings. It isn’t the asshat guys whose faces haunt us at night. It’s their kids.
“Earth to J.”
I looked up from my cider-gazing. My partner knew all too well where my mind went woolgathering, but I told her anyway. “I was thinking about the kids. Maybe some of them will turn out okay too.”
“Yeah.” She smiled. “Softie.”
Whatever. “Softie who wants to crush Judi’s brains into oyster food.”
“Don’t be mean to the oysters.”
It was a sick, strange habit to eat raw, jiggly things on a shell. “I’ll be sure to feed the kinds you don’t eat.” Whatever those were—my partner was a bit of an oyster omnivore.
Carly settled her elbows on the balcony railing and watched me, eyes steady. “You’ve gotten bloodthirsty lately. Or she just really got under your craw.”
I was pretty sure the girl raised in New York City had no idea what a craw actually was. “She’s slime. She latched onto Rhonda’s pain and is bleeding her like a leech, she’s running a despicable con on women who already have boot marks on their souls, and she pointed a knife at one of the good guys.” And so had we.
Carly’s lips quirked. “She totally got to you.”
She had. There had been a point, three years ago, when I might have followed the first person to show me a little kindness, no matter what their motives. I knew what it was to be Rhonda’s kind of weak, and I easily could have found my Judi.
The universe had sent me a lesbian hothead with a love of sharp edges instead.
I didn’t know how the accountant had turned his life around—but I knew who had helped me reroute mine. Carly had bulldozed her way into my life’s journey and laid a road to a place where I knew why I got up in the morning and found some reason to smile most days.
Judi was a bulldozer too—one of those people who exerts gravitational force on the directions other people are heading. And she was using it for evil. I felt my stewing, stirred-up heart move to a hard boil—and then I felt the words of my own analogy click into place.
Gravitational force.
I looked at my partner. “If a tree screams in the forest and nobody hears it, has it made a sound?”
She gave me one of those looks people reserve for moms of two-year-old triplets. “Let’s go find you some food to go with that cider, okay?”
I laughed, swept up in the resonance of a missing link snapping into a tight, beautiful chain. “I’m not drunk.” I had a three-quarters-full bottle to prove it. “Let’s go find Lelo and Rosie—I know how we finish breaking Judi’s kneecaps.”
Carly raised an eyebrow. “Does this idea of yours involve screaming trees?”
“Not yet.” I grinned, a little drunk on the sweet rightness of that missing link. “It might after the kid and the florist are done with it, though.”
My partner groaned and set down her beer.
I left my cider where it w
as—it belonged to the long, slow night. I was headed elsewhere.
-o0o-
Late nights around the kitchen table. I’d done a lot of them in my life, but the snacks had never been this good or the audience this impatient. I picked up a mushroom thing that had sketchy ingredients and tasted like something from a French royal banquet. “I have one more thing to add to the plan. It’s mostly just an extension of what you guys are already working on.”
Lelo raised an eyebrow. “You have ideas about ads and IP addresses?”
Hell, no. “What you’re doing is taking away Judi’s audience, right?”
Rosie nodded. “Sure. Scammers need marks.”
They needed more than that. “We overlooked Judi’s biggest audience.”
Comprehension dawned in Carly’s eyes. “Rhonda.”
Exactly.
My partner nodded. “Yeah. If someone wanted to get to me, they’d be really smart to go after you.”
That wasn’t a comforting thought. “We take Rhonda out of the picture and Judi’s just a washed-up scumbag with nobody to prop her up.”
Rosie’s fingers traced an old crack on the table. “I’m not sure I’m comfortable going after Rhonda.” She looked at me and shrugged a little. “I know she’s not all victim, but still.”
The line between victims and villains isn’t nearly as clear as we want it to be. “Yeah, I get that. Fortunately, we don’t need to go after her, at least not the way you’re thinking.”
The sexy gypsy’s brows furrowed, and then a long, slow smile slid onto her face. “You’re going to save her.”
We didn’t have that kind of power, no matter what we told ourselves when we fell asleep at night. “We’ll haul her ass out of the muck. The rest will be up to her.”
Rosie’s smile deepened. “Whatever.”
We weren’t saviors, not even close. I opened my mouth to argue and then realized this was the kind of belief that words don’t shift—some learnings in life just have to seep in through your pores.
Lelo looked at me, frowning. “I’m confused.”
The sexy gypsy raided the stuffed mushrooms. “They’re going to nail Judi’s ass to the wall by taking away her sidekick.”
The kid had really communicative eyebrows. “How?”
I wasn’t entirely sure of all the details yet, but I knew our most important move. “We’re going to get a certain accountant to help us.” He deserved a chance to take a kick in this game too.
Carly snorted. “Good luck with that.” Then she looked at me a little harder. “Wait—what the heck are you planning to have Rodney do?”
Nothing. I just needed Rhonda to know he existed. “Remember that guy in Oklahoma a couple of years back? The one with the scabby-kneed kids and the ugly brown pickup truck?”
My partner winced.
It wasn’t a case we would ever forget. A woman had contacted us with a sob story of unpaid child support and starving kids. Scrawny twins with big eyes had stared at us from under the table in her painfully scrubbed apartment when we’d visited, and nearly broken our hearts.
We’d gone after the asshole, dragging our butts to the overgrown farm at the end of the road in middle-of-nowhere Oklahoma because he hadn’t paid his cell phone bill any more frequently than his child support, and Carly couldn’t find any money in any bank accounts to transfer.
We’d driven five hundred miles cursing scumbags who kept all their money under the mattress—and discovered a dad sitting under a crabapple tree with his two boys, munching on fried chicken and fresh-picked raspberries and telling a tale of dragons and knights and a mommy who’d had to go away for a while.
The scrawny twins had been borrowed, acquired for an hour along with the painfully scrubbed apartment in exchange for their mama’s next hit.
And we had to live with knowing that if the man sitting under the crabapple tree had kept his money in the bank instead of under his mattress, we’d have given his life savings to a woman who dealt heroin to ten-year-olds.
I pulled my head back to the kitchen table. “We almost screwed with a good guy. Remember how we felt after that?”
She nodded slowly. “Like pond scum.”
A whole lot worse than that. It had taken us months to trust our guts again—and we’d added layers upon layers of precautions to everything we did ever since. “I want Rhonda to feel like we felt.” To know she’d almost stabbed a knife into a good man’s throat.
To know she’d wanted to.
“That won’t be an easy sell.” Carly’s lips pursed. “She’ll need to meet him.”
“She won’t be the hardest sell.”
My partner started to laugh. “I’ll make sure Rhonda shows up. This is your idea—you get to deal with our friendly accountant.”
“We all do,” said Lelo firmly.
I shook my head, damn sure the answer was no, and then reconsidered. Rodney might have a mean knife hand, but he was a good guy—two experienced assassins felt it in their bones. And Lelo and Rosie were too full of juice to stay behind the tape barricades forever. I eyed Carly, knowing this was one of those choices either of us could veto. “They could be useful with Rodney.” And dammit, they deserved a seat at the table on this one, just like he did.
Three sets of astonished eyes stared at me.
“What?” I wished belatedly for my bottle of cider. “We’ll be having dinner. With an accountant. What could possibly go wrong?”
Carly let out something that sounded like a strangled snarl. “You want a numbered list?”
Not particularly. “He’s a good guy, C.”
The second snarl sounded less strangled.
Lelo grinned and bounced on her chair. “Consider it a reward for good behavior.”
“Or a bribe.” Rosie managed to keep a fairly straight face.
Bribery was a really uncertain sport—and the good behavior I wanted was twenty-four hours in the future. “You can help recruit Rodney. When we go visit Rhonda, the two of you are going to be having a highly visible meal at a grown-up restaurant that issues credit card receipts and has waiters with really good memories.”
An alibi. Just in case.
The snarling lights in Carly’s eyes dimmed. She approved.
Good. So did the stirred-up demons in my gut. We were going to take down Judi with the best weapons for the job at hand.
A sixteen-year-old’s web savvy and a man who added numbers for a living.
16
I eyed my three companions as we were escorted to a booth in the back of a restaurant that looked like it had fallen out of a spy movie. They were having way too much fun with this. Rosie was dressed on the soft edge of mean biker, and I was pretty sure her hair was an entirely new shade of purple. Lelo had gone for the teched-out teenager look, which she probably thought blended in.
It might, if you didn’t look at her excited, ambitious eyes.
Carly was dressed head to toe in black, and then had ruined the hard-case assassin vibe with bright-red lip stuff and one of those upswept hairdos that screamed classy, unavailable sex.
I didn’t know which one of them was going to freak Rodney out, but it seemed a pretty sure bet someone would.
We’d barely tucked into our shadowy booth when the hostess escorted in a deeply suspicious, thoroughly pissed-off accountant. He ran his gaze over each one of us in turn, and then for reasons that were totally obscure, focused on me. “What the fuck are you up to?”
The script hadn’t involved me doing the talking, but Carly didn’t seem inclined to step in. If anything, she was watching Rodney with new respect in her eyes. I laid my hands on the table. “We’re trying to fix a screw-up. Have a seat.”
“I’ll stand.”
Now he was pissing me off. I nodded a shoulder at Lelo and hoped she wouldn’t kill me later. “You think I brought her along to watch us slice you up and dump you in the garbage cans out back?”
“I’d seen worse at her age.”
I wondered if he had any i
dea how sad his eyes had just gotten. “So I’ve heard.”
His shift into fighting stance was lightning fast.
“Cut the crap,” said Carly quietly. “And sit down. If we’d planned on being stupid, we’d have done it by now.”
“You were digging on me.” His voice was jagged ice.
“And you were digging on us.” My partner did ice just fine. “I’m just better at it than you are.”
I wanted to kick them both in the shins. I glared at Rodney. “Sit.”
His eyes were back on me—and he sat.
It was time to lay most of our cards on the table. “You had a rough start, you got yourself out and made a decent life, and then a couple of idiot women not at this table mistook you for a scumbag and a wimp and tried to take care of you in a dark alley. Is that a decent summary?”
“Yeah.”
He was a smart guy who’d beaten the odds. I did the math. “You’ve been digging on them, too.”
“Maybe.”
Carly’s eyes flashed surprise. “They’re ours.”
His hands fisted on the table. “The hell they are.”
There were no more pissing matches happening on my watch. “Cut it out, both of you. We’re going to take care of both of them and we’re going to work together to do it.”
He snorted. “We only need one knife to deal with those two.”
I leaned forward, needing to make myself very clear. “There aren’t going to be any knives.”
He looked at me like I’d suggested he eat dog food for breakfast.
He was going to totally hate this plan. “Judi’s the ringleader and she’s already on her way down. We just need one more thing to finish her off.”
Suspicion flared. “Sure you do.”
A man who had grown up where everything had a price. “One of those two women isn’t scum—she’s just lost her way. We’re going to help her find it again, and we could use your help.”
He laughed, incredulous. “You want me to help some bitch who held a knife to my throat?”