Partners

by D B Steward

  “Sorry,” Sonny said sleepily as she moved to untangle her limbs from Kelly’s. Kelly smiled flirtatiously and grabbed at Sonny’s arms playfully.

  “Aww, you don’t have to do that! I was comfortable.”

  Sonny just shook her head, but there was a small grin on her lips that she tried to hide. Kelly saw it. “Were you pretending to sleep?” Sonny’s morning voice was even sexier to Kelly than her regular sultry one. She thought she could really get used to hearing that every morning.

  “Yeah, but not for long. Maybe two or three hours, tops.”

  Sonny shook her head again and this time she did not try to hide her smile. “I wouldn’t put that past you, Miss King.” She slid her long legs over the side of the bed and stood, stretching her long slender arms above her head. Kelly looked at the T-shirt that Sonny had worn to bed rise slowly as Sonny stretched, revealing the tan-skinned abdomen. Kelly had to bite her lip so she would not moan at the sight. “So why didn’t you wake me?” Kelly’s eyes flew up to meet Sonny’s and she could tell by the assassin’s smirk that she had been caught staring.

  “I was just trying to figure out how to tell you that Homeland Security wants to talk to you.”

  Sonny’s eyes went wide. “What?! Why? Homeland Security?”

  “Wow, Sonny! I think this is the most worked up that I have ever seen you get!”

  “What does Homeland Security want with me?”

  “I don’t know, black ops and assassin stuff probably.” Kelly shrugged her shoulders matter-of-factly as she started to get out of the bed as well. Sonny ran her fingers nervously through her long dark hair, making it even messier than before.

  “Black ops?! I’m not doing that!” She started to pace and massage her forehead with her hand. Kelly raised a questioning eyebrow at the woman before slipping a leg into the sweatpants she had discarded the night before.

  “Why not? What’s the difference between that and what you do now?”

  Sonny stopped pacing abruptly and looked at Kelly like she had grown a second head.

  “What’s the difference?” Her voice was rising to a higher pitch that made Kelly fight back a chuckle. “There’s a big difference! What I do, I do because I want to! Not because someone tells me to do it! I am no one’s hired gun, Miss King! I am free to take any job or turn down any job! I belong to no one! I like my freedom!”

  “But the government has really good insurance.”

  Sonny colored at Kelly’s joke and clenched her fists at her side. “This isn’t some fucking joke! I didn’t even know I was on their radar! Now I find out they are actively looking for me?! I am so fucked right now and all you can do is make your insipid little remarks?” Kelly crossed her arms in indignation and frowned.

  “My remarks are not insipid! They are quite witty, I’ll have you know!” Sonny shook her head slowly and gazed at Kelly as if she was seeing her for the first time.

  “Nothing is ever serious with you, is it? It’s all some little juvenile joke to you.” She rounded the bed and closed the distance between the two of them rapidly. “Well, some of us take life seriously! And I seriously want to keep living my life free and not as some government puppet!” She punctuated her statement by jabbing her finger hard into Kelly’s chest. Kelly pushed it away hard.

  “Hey! You don’t know me, Miss American Ninja Warrior!” She jabbed her finger into Sonny’s chest. “I take life plenty serious! Don’t go making assumptions about me!” Sonny backed up a step.

  “Oh, I know you well enough, Miss King!” She growled lowly, baring her teeth. “You gave up on life a long time ago. You think that by playing the cool laid back tough girl, you can hide the fact that you are just a shell of a woman. A hole looking for something to fill it. If you were a real person, you would understand just how important someone’s independence really is!”

  Kelly’s eyes opened and she felt like she had just been slapped. “Oh! You have me all figured out! Well, let me tell you about yourself, Miss Moretti! I’m not some emotional shut-in like you! You’re so damned withdrawn from the fucking world that you might as well not be in it! You have no friends, no family, not even a fucking hamster to take care of! You live like some crazed Unabomber and go around shooting people like a fucking psycho! You’re too scared to let anybody close to you because you have never been around another person for more than ten minutes without killing them!”

  The silence in the bedroom was only interrupted by the angry breaths that the two furious women took. They stared at each other in a mirror image of fury before Sonny relaxed her stance and stood up straight. A blank expressionless mask fell over her face, her eyes cold and her voice low.

  “I want you to leave.”

  Kelly shook her head as if she hadn’t heard her correctly. “What?”

  “I said that I want you to leave.” Her level and emotionless tone stood in sharp juxtaposition with her wild and unruly hair. Kelly would have laughed at it if she was not so shocked.

  “Leave? Where the hell am I supposed to go?”

  “I don’t give a damn.”

  Kelly smirked. “Gone With the Wind, but you forgot the ‘frankly’.”

  “Get out!” Kelly started at the loud scream from Sonny. The other woman was shaking with rage as she pointed her finger at the door with her arm as stiff as an iron bar. Kelly searched her eyes, in disbelief of what the assassin was doing.

  “Hey wait, what about Ivan? We still have to—”

  “I said go.”

  Kelly squared her jaw and nodded crisply. She moved quickly, gathering the clothes she had borrowed and getting dressed. After she had dressed, she looked around the sparse place and realized that she did not have anything else. Sonny refused to look at her; she had remained frozen in place, pointing at the door and staring straight ahead at nothing. Kelly stood and watched her for a moment then shook her head, turned swiftly, and marched out of the room.

  The loud bang of the front door slamming did not make Sonny flinch one centimeter. Slowly, she lowered her arm to her side as she continued to stare at the bare, beige wall.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Well, Sonja Moretti can go fuck herself! Kelly’s feet stomped hard along the concrete sidewalk as she marched away from the safehouse on her way to no place at all. With her arms ramrod straight and her hands fisted up in angry little balls, she shook her head from side to side, muttering sounds that could only be understood by herself. Before she knew it, she was blocks away with no clear idea where she was going. She had no money, none on her person or in her bank account. She could not go back to her place—it was a crime scene—and she really did not feel like trying to explain to the police what kind of shitshow her life had turned into.

  Oh, officer, it’s a funny story. See, I do these jobs for the mafia where I hunt down people for them and I was hunting down this hit girl who is trying to kill this Russian mafia guy. Then my ex-girlfriend got slaughtered in my apartment when the Russians came looking for me, but I wasn’t there because I was in this nightmare whorehouse run by those same guys. Anywho, there was a massacre there, oh you guys probably saw it. Hell on Earth with poor girls locked in cages like animals? Yeah, me and the hit girl killed all the bad guys there. You probably saw the bodies. Oh, did I mention I was working with the hit girl? Yeah, I really thought we were gonna hit it off (see what I did there?), but we got into an argument and now I got no place to go.

  She came to a bus stop and sat down on a bench next to a middle-aged guy who looked like he sold insurance, and not a lot of insurance either judging by his shabby suit and the fact he was riding the bus. He looked over to her and she could see the flash of interest in his eyes; she rolled hers in anticipation of his lame attempt to hit on her. He cleared his throat nervously and began to open his mouth when she held up her hand to stop him.

  “Whoa, cowboy, before you give me your line, I gotta tell you that I’m wanted for questioning by the cops. I’m also into chicks, probably just as much as you are, and I
just got into a fight with my future wife who kills people for a living, so she might not appreciate you coming on to me. So you can just go ahead and keep your shitty come-on lines to yourself. Unless, of course, you just want to know what time it is and that’s what you were going to ask me, because I don’t have a watch because I gambled all my money away because I’m an addict. Oh, and I did some time in prison too so….” She gave him the biggest smile she could and watched his mouth hang open as the bus pulled up to the curb. “Your ride’s here.” He rose slowly to his feet and boarded the bus while staring at her in bewilderment. “Have a nice day!” The doors closed and the man rode off to enjoy the rest of his normal life. She sighed and leaned back on the bench, covering her face with her hands and running her fingers through her messy bed hair. She chuckled, realizing that she probably looked just like the hot mess that her life had turned into.

  Then her mind went to the one friend she still had in the world: Reggie. She pulled out the cell phone, thankful to the patron saint of losers that she still had it as she dialed Reggie’s number.

  “This is Special Agent Reggie Burns. Leave a detailed message and I will get back to you.” She huffed as she listened to his voicemail greeting.

  “Reggie, it’s Kelly. I got no money and Sonny kicked me to the curb. She didn’t react well to Homeland’s job offer. Anyway, call me back on this cell phone I stole.” She put the phone back in her sweatpants and frowned. Maybe Reggie could help her, but maybe she had pushed him far past the limit of his nearly infinite patience with her.

  Kelly King decided that she was a virus: she worked her way into someone’s life and then burned through it before she moved on to her next host, leaving a destroyed relationship in her wake. Sonny, Reggie, and poor Lori got a real bad case of Kelly King. Her father had too. She had done the same thing to the man who had given birth to her.

  Kelly remembered there was still one person she knew that she had not managed to destroy their life yet. One person who might be able to help her out. She got up on her feet and began the long walk to the Don’s place where she hoped Tony would be willing to talk to her.

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  Reggie looked at the mangled corpse on the picture. You could see that it was human at one time and guess from the size that it was probably a man. But other than those distinctions, any other attempt to identify it would be a wild guess at best. Reggie did not need to see the autopsy results that lay on his desk because he did not need any blood samples, hair samples, or anything else to tell him the name of the dead man. It was Ziggy.

  “So, that’s Ziggy, huh?” Ken was at his usual spot, leaning on the door frame of Reggie’s office, ever-present coffee mug in hand.

  “It was Ziggy.” Reggie tossed the picture onto his desk with the other photos. The crime scene and autopsy photos were assembled in front of him as if he were the magazine editor of some publication from Hell, figuring out which grizzly picture to use on its cover.

  “That sucks, man. You’ve been putting a lot of work in on this.”

  “Well, I’m not giving up. Pierpont was onto us, that much is clear. Who knows how much misinformation he was feeding Ziggy. But we do know for a fact that he is getting his weapons soon.”

  Ken pointed to the pictures with his coffee mug. “Hey, you’ll get him, buddy.” Reggie nodded and Ken pushed off the doorframe and headed down the hallway.

  “Shit.”

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  Nancy Timmerman observed that the computer tech was wearing her black hoodie and noted to herself that therefore it must be Thursday. She chided herself for using the color descriptor for the young woman’s clothing, as if it was a surprise—every single item of clothing that Tracey ‘Trace’ Martinez owned was black. Trace was hunched over her laptop that was practically always attached to her. She sat cross-legged on the hotel bed, her fingers flying over the keyboard like a concert pianist.

  Trace was a genius when it came to computers. Timmerman rethought the word genius; it did not quite measure up to Trace’s capabilities. Like Einstein, Michelangelo, or Shakespeare, Trace was a few steps above genius. Her skill was legendary and there was no one in the world who was even near her skill level. Trace saw things in code the way a sculptor saw their finished work in blocks of marble, bending and shaping computers and programs to her will with style. She had popped up on Homeland Security’s radar three years ago when she had brought down the private network of one of the most prestigious tech companies in the world because the CEO had made a few condescending comments about gamers in an interview. She was only sixteen years old at the time and had done it on her phone during study hall. Homeland snatched her up right away and in exchange for expunging her record, they offered her a job. Trace took their offer because she would be able to work with leading-edge tech doing what she loved, making the internet her bitch.

  “She won’t go for it.” Her sarcastic voice greeted Nancy even though Trace had not looked up from her screen when Agent Timmerman had entered her room. When there was a choice to interface with a human being or a screen, Trace would choose the computer screen every time. “You know that, right?”

  Nancy folded her arms and tilted her head to the side, silently analyzing the young woman. Trace was blunt; she dealt with humans the same way that she dealt with technology: detached and uninterested in anything that was superfluous. “She’ll take the deal,” Nancy replied.

  Trace simply grunted her disagreement. “The King woman made a call to that Reggie guy in Washington state. I got her.” Nancy moved to the bed and sat down next to Trace. She peered at the screen and saw so many windows opening and closing and code popping up and being written and changed that she gave up on even trying to guess what she was looking at. “She’s walking, and from what she said on the call, she’s alone. Seems the two had a fight and Moretti kicked her out.”

  Nancy frowned. Kelly King was their only way to get to Sonny. If the two had fallen out permanently, then Sonny would most likely disappear again and all of their efforts thus far would be for naught. “Where is she going?”

  “North.” Nancy twisted her mouth at the young woman’s snarky attitude. “Other than that, I have no idea.” Agent Timmerman took a deep breath and weighed her options silently. She rose to her feet and adjusted her blazer.

  “Gather your things, we’re going to pick her up.”

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  “I’m too old for this shit.” Her words came out in a hoarse whisper. “That’s it. I’m going to start jogging. Starting tomorrow.” Kelly wiped her sweaty brow with the bottom of her T-shirt and wished for a bottle of water, or maybe vodka. There was some elation at seeing the entry gate to the Don’s estate. After her forced march, she found that she was even slightly happy to see the same jerk of a guard standing at his post. She frowned when she realized that her twenty-four-hour deodorant had run out of time. Oh well, I’m not looking to impress that ass anyway.

  Roaring car engines behind her diverted her attention from her musty smell as two black SUVs rocketed past her. Still about fifty yards away from the gate, Kelly froze as the vehicles screeched to a halt and gunmen came spilling out. Before the guard had a chance to do anything, he was mowed down in a hail of gunfire. Kelly flattened herself onto the ground and watched one of the men open the gate. In a moment, the men were inside the SUVs again and speeding up the access road.

  She scrambled to her feet and raced over to the guard. He was definitely dead, the guard having more wounds than she was able to count on her hands. Kelly removed the dead man’s gun from his holster and jogged up the long driveway. “Too much exercise,” she panted as her feet beat a rhythm onto the ground. She heard the clatter of gunfire in the distance
and felt a knot in her gut that had not come from her excessive running. Keeping close to the trees lining the perimeter of the estate, Kelly carefully jogged up the access road to the Don’s home. What she saw was a scene right out of The Expendables: men with automatic weapons of all sorts shooting at each other.

  “Well, this is quite the clusterfuck.” Kelly spoke softly to herself even though the noise from the gunfight would drown out a sold-out rock concert. She figured that the Russians had finally lost their minds and decided to wipe out the Don and his family. What she could not decide was if it was the father or the son who had given the order. Then suddenly her question was answered when she saw Ivan firing a gun while crouched behind one of the SUVs.

  The trees around the estate were providing her pretty good coverage and she was confident that everyone’s attention was occupied with not getting shot. Kelly moved quickly through the trees around the estate toward the back. The clatter from the rapid exchange of gunfire was starting to slow. Kelly assumed that meant the shootout must be winding down and she had a bad feeling that The Don’s people were the ones on the losing side.

  In sight was the entrance that she had gone through with Tony just the other night, although with everything that had gone on since then, that night felt like it happened weeks ago. She made sure the coast was clear and then sprinted across the driveway to the door. As she placed her hand on the door handle, Kelly took a deep breath and pressed her ear to the door. Hearing nothing, she opened the door slowly, keeping her acquired pistol in front of her and ready. Just as it had been that night, the kitchen was empty, but unlike her previous visit, the silence was now replaced by gunshots and shouts.