by Audrey Faye
Danno’s face blanched. “Understood.”
I gave the man points for quick comprehension. I’d seen my partner scary, but I’d very rarely seen her like this. She goes on the rampage all the time for people who matter, but this time she loved, too.
She would fight for Lelo. And I knew that in doing so, Carly fought for the bright, shiny glow of her much younger self, before the world landed in combat boots and trampled shiny into the dust. Lelo still glowed, and my partner would use every lethal inch of every last knife she owned to keep her that way.
Which might not be enough. Life has a way of happening, even if you try to swaddle it in assassin armor.
Or brotherly love. I glanced over at Danno’s wall of portraits again. His sister had happy eyes—or at least she had, once. Happiness doesn’t swaddle worth a damn, any more than shiny does.
“She’s awesome,” said Danno quietly, following my gaze. “Funny and smart and impetuous enough that she gave my parents fits from the time she was two.”
And her big brother, too, from the sounds of it. “How’d she end up involved with Rick?” We’d heard a version of that story from Lelo, but I wanted to see Danno’s eyes as he told it.
“She’d just ended a relationship. Really good-looking jerk with lots of money who expected her to fawn all over his arm. Rick came along, and he was this understated nice guy, you know?”
I had more experience with the really good-looking jerks—or the nice guys who turned into them, anyhow.
He took a deep breath. “Are you here because you’re going to help Shelley?”
“Probably not.” Carly’s face was as blunt as her words. “We try not to be idiots, and messing with a cop isn’t very damn smart.”
“Yeah.” Dejection coated Danno’s voice, but his eyes said he understood all too well.
My partner slung herself into a chair. “Tell us about your sister. What’s she done to get away from this guy?”
“Everything. She’s left, she’s tried to make him leave, she’s even talked to the creepy guys on the force who handle internal affairs.”
Those were pretty serious efforts. “What happened?”
“She leaves, he drags her back. The last time, he threatened to hurt our mom if she ever left again. He visits her in the care facility every week just to keep Shelley obedient. Says it doesn’t look good to the boys if he can’t keep his woman in line.” Danno’s lips curled in disgust. “He even talks like that now. He used to sound like a regular guy.”
Carly leaned forward. “What happened with internal affairs?”
“Not enough evidence.” He shrugged. “They’re suspicious, but not only of him. The guy in charge thought maybe they needed to take a good look at my sister, too.”
That didn’t seem totally unreasonable. “If they did, would she pass?”
Mad fury launched straight into my face, Danno’s wrath blazing an inch from the end of my nose. “My sister is the best kind of person, and if you can’t see that, then you can go to hell via the express elevator. She’s in trouble. What the hell is wrong with this world that people can’t even tell the good guys from the bad ones anymore?”
I’d seen men light up before, but Danno was a pretty good volcano. One who had managed to piss me off. “It was just a question. Some days, I don’t know if I’m good or bad, but I sure as heck don’t want the cops taking a look.” A look at Carly, anyhow. I’m pretty much as pure as the driven snow—lack of illegal talents, mostly.
The volcano abruptly died. “Sorry. I’m sorry.” Danno closed his eyes, hope fading along with everything else.
Carly stood up, carefully not looking at him, me, or the pictures on the wall. “We’ll get back to you.”
The man standing in the middle of the room didn’t even seem like he’d heard her.
-o0o-
It had taken Carly about five percent of the drive back from Danno’s to get her mojo going. And about half that long to get Rosie and Lelo moving once we’d gotten back to our motel. Three brains going full speed at the online detective work. Lelo and Rosie were looking at the clean, bright parts of the Internet. Carly was digging for dirt.
My job, probably because they felt sorry for me, was to keep track of what we found. So far, we knew he was careful, he had too many empty afternoons on his official cop reports, and he liked baseball teams that lost an awful lot of their games.
So far, no smoking gun.
“I have something weird.” Rosie’s forehead wrinkled at her screen. “You gave us a list of user names to search for, right?”
It was one of Carly’s best tricks. Criminals and dickwads can’t remember their usernames and passwords any better than the rest of us, so they tend to use them over and over. An Internet footprint of sorts.
Carly was already peering over Rosie’s shoulder. “You found something?”
“Yeah. Restaurant reviews. Thousands of them.”
I hoped she’d found them somewhere nice and legal. “We’re going to hunt down a guy because he likes to eat?”
Carly reached over and typed a couple of things into Rosie’s keyboard. “He’s posted 9,343 of them.” She looked up and raised an eyebrow. “How many cops do you know who like escargots à la bourguignonne?”
I had no idea what those were. “That sounds totally suspicious.”
“Exactly.” She was reading her screen now, eyes flicking left to right in a neurotic zigzag. “And he thinks pupusas revueltas are a dessert.” She grinned. “Someone gave him shit for that one.”
Traveling with a foodie for three years has taught me a few things. Pupusas are a tortilla sandwich with fillings made in Salvadorian heaven. They also didn’t exist within a thousand miles of our current location, which was something my belly had started to protest very loudly. I told it to shush. “He’s telling lies in his reviews?”
“Lots of them.” She chomped a huge bite of granola bar, assassin hot on the trail of something that smelled. “Now why do you think a cop is posting reviews for restaurants he’s never eaten at?”
Maybe this gun was starting to smoke a little. “He’s trying to impress the ladies?” It was a weak guess, but I had no idea why people did most things online.
“If he was trying to do that, he’d eat more oysters and less escargots.”
Note to self—never date a foodie. “So he’s not very good at trying to impress the ladies?”
“You’re kind of right.” The granola bar was disappearing at a frightening rate. “He’s trying to get someone’s attention. Lots of strange, random sentences in these reviews, or here, he says that Capo Verde tostadas are better than the ones at Michele’s.”
I was back to being totally lost. “You say that kind of stuff all the time.”
“Of course I do.” Her eyes twinkled over the top of her laptop. “But I know that Huevos makes the best tostadas.”
“No way.”
Both of us looked up, startled to find Rosie still present and accounted for. We were way, way too used to working alone.
She grinned. “Everyone knows Hermano’s makes the best tostadas.”
Carly raised an eyebrow. “Where the heck is that?”
“Just north of Chicago. The guy who makes them used to work for Ocho’s in Puerta Vallarta.”
“Pfft.” My partner had regained her balance. “There are no real tostadas north of L.A.”
That was pretty funny, coming from the woman who found chiles rellenos in Wyoming. But I was smart enough to know this wasn’t even a tiny bit my fight—and judging from Lelo’s careful slide down the wall to the chair in the corner, she’d come to the same conclusion.
This wasn’t a garden-variety disagreement. Sparks were flying—and they had nothing to do with tostadas.
“Right.” Rosie tossed herself down on the end of her bed. “And I suppose you think you can’t get real bagels outside of Manhattan, either.”
Carly had leaned forward, hands curled into fists on the mattress. “Duh.”
Rosie reached out a quick hand to Carly’s shoulder, and Carly started to lean in.
And then five years of armor crashed back into place. My partner grabbed for her laptop, face oddly blank. “I’ll pull down the reviews, do some digging.”
There were so many things I could have said to the curvy florist with pain in her eyes. I could have told her that it would take a hell of a lot of time and more brush-offs than she could count, but if she stuck with it, there was gold behind those walls. I could have told her that sometimes, it isn’t the hurt that’s most difficult to lift away from an old wound—it’s the happiness we’ve laid over it.
Instead, I just made my way to the bathroom and dropped a hand on her shoulder on my way by.
Any woman who could handle Rowena would figure those things out all by herself.
11
I squinted at the inhabitants of the tiny motel room table, not at all sure why I’d answered the door at 8am. Lack of coffee is responsible for most of my life’s really bad decisions. I grunted something that most Vermonters would take as a cheery good morning and crawled back under the covers.
“What are you speaking, Klingon?” Lelo grinned and set down a big, steaming mug of something that could only be coffee on the bedside table.
Vermonters and Klingons have a fair amount in common. I glared her general direction as she took a seat on the edge of Carly’s bed. “You’re way too happy for the crack of dawn.”
“Bedhead looks good on you, J.” Rosie sat down beside Lelo, holding a plate with the world’s biggest slice of cheesecake and three forks.
Even in my befuddled, mostly asleep state, I was pretty sure that was enough forks for me to have one. It was a far cry from my usual road breakfast of stale Danishes and coffee that bore only passing resemblance to anything made from a bean. “Go away. I’m not required to be human for at least four hours yet.”
“Okay.” Lelo held up a mailer envelope and a long tube. “We’ll just open your packages while you sleep.”
My brain definitely needed a caffeine makeover. “Why are we getting mail here?”
“You didn’t.” Lelo forked herself a bite of cheesecake. “Mrs. Beauchamp delivered it this morning—she’s on her way to visit her grandson. She also brought fresh salsa, but don’t eat it. People are still crying from last year’s batch.”
We were assassins with little-old-lady helpers now—that had to be stopped. I eyed the long, thin package and tried to scramble my somnolent brain cells to the invasion front. “That one must be Carly’s knife. She’s in the shower.” Or someone was, and they didn’t sing Bob Marley any better than my partner.
“Okay, we’ll open that one second.” Lelo set down the tube and handed Rosie the other package. “You wanna do the honors?”
The sexy gypsy chuckled into her coffee. “I’m pretty sure a shop called Bikini Babes doesn’t make anything in my size.”
Oh, shit. Oh, goddamn hell. I levered the top half of my body out of bed in a headlong grab for a package that was swiftly taking up residence under Lelo’s butt. “Don’t open that.”
Lelo bounced and swayed on top of my envelope like some crack-addled kid on Christmas morning. “Oooooh. What’d you order?”
“Nothing.” I grabbed desperately for a true fact to throw them off the scent. “I never shop online. It must be for one of your neighbors.”
They were both laughing now, and eyeing the package with the kind of rabid curiosity that made it clear we were totally doomed. Or I was, at least—Carly might actually wear whatever the hell she’d ordered.
“Morning, J.” Carly sailed out of the bathroom, dropping dirty clothes in her bag and snagging a hoodie as she walked. “How come we’re talking to people before the sun’s up?”
I tossed my Hail Mary pass high in the air. “They got your knife. Want to see it?”
“Duh.” My partner hopped onto the bed beside me. “Hey, Lelo. Hey, Rosie.”
Something about the tone of the last couple of words caught my attention.
Amused gypsy eyes flashed a greeting and pointed at the package under Lelo’s butt. “Morning, sunshine. What’d you order from the bikini shop?”
Carly’s eyes got wide—and then she started to laugh. “Oh, man. Totally open that one first.”
Doomed. I was so absolutely doomed. I crab-walked sideways on the bed, headed for the van, the open road, and a dark cave, not necessarily in that order.
And got stopped by a hand touching my shoulder, light as a feather.
Carly didn’t say a word. She just looked at me with eyes that so often held ferocity and fear and heroism and need—and asked me to be a part of the joke that was about to happen. To see through the metric crapton of embarrassment that was about to land on my head and find a reason to stay.
I swallowed, my throat yearning for coffee and escape, and turned toward the two sets of bright eyes who wanted to be a part of a moment they didn’t understand yet. I breathed in deep, cleared off a little space on one of the dusty old ropes that serve as my heartstrings, and nodded at the package that was now in Rosie’s hands. “Okay. But if I ever hear about this again, I’m making the person who brings it up wear what’s in that envelope.”
It didn’t take Rosie long—the woman has mad package-opening skills. She lifted the first item out, swinging it by a spindly strap.
Lelo grabbed at it. “Unicorn ninjas? Seriously?”
“Mine.” Carly eyed the kid, assassin eyebrows hard at work.
“You’re no fun.” Lelo held the bikini top up to her scrawny chest. “If I stuff it with some socks, it might even fit.”
Rosie and I shared the amused look of kindred souls who had never had to stuff anything with socks.
“I’ve smelled your socks.” Carly wasn’t done with Lelo yet. “If any of yours touch my ninja unicorns, I’ll know, and I’ll crazy glue spangly red hearts to all your black t-shirts.”
“Blah, blah, blah.” The kid looked more amused than chastened, but she handed over the ninjas.
Rosie headed back into the envelope, and this time her fingers emerged holding my doom. She stared at what was in her hand, eyes not quite comprehending.
“Those… are…” Lelo doubled over and slid to the ground, hiccuping laughter floating up from somewhere between the beds.
Carly looked inordinately proud of herself. “It’s a flannel bikini. It’s totally perfect.”
“It’s—” Rosie’s face was turning the color of the strawberry sauce on her cheesecake as she tried to get her laughter under control. “It’s a bikini covered in fornicating penguins.”
If this was what friendship felt like, they could just flay me and get it over with. “Carly picked it out.”
Another snicker leaked out of Rosie. “It totally suits you, J.”
The sad truth was, it totally did. There in the evil gypsy’s lap sat scraps of fabric that might be the world’s most awful swimsuit—and written all over them was just how well my partner understood me.
I’d learned on bar stools and tiny stages all over the country—sometimes the audience took you places you never would have ventured on your own. And sometimes, it paid to join them. I grinned at Rosie and gave in to the moment that seemed prepared to happen with or without me. “Hand it over.”
She waggled her eyebrows. “Only if I get to see you wearing it.”
My penguins would join the nunnery first. “Absolutely.”
She started laughing again. “Pants on fire.”
Totally—and I was somehow in a moldy motel room with three people who knew it.
-o0o-
It wasn’t the first conversation Carly and I’d had in a dark alleyway, but this one had licks of desperation attached. We’d managed our bikini moment in the light, but now we were assassins fleeing, running away from friends with scones and opinions and wise eyes who didn’t hang out in these shadows. Just the occasional rat,
and it made me a little bit sad to know I was more comfortable with the rodents.
I didn’t want Lelo and Rosie in this. They could be the light in my life, but damned if I was going to be the grungy shadow in theirs.
And maybe that was just an excuse to keep my hermit self tucked away from people who saw way too much.
Carly threw a rubber bouncy ball at a dingy brick wall. She’d been doing it long enough that the eyeball printed on the ball had turned into zombie grunge, and I was nearing the point of crazy. I have no idea why people bounce things when they’re twisted up—adding more noise to the universe rarely fixes anything.
She singlehanded the ball and shoved it in her pocket. “Sorry.”
After three years, we had some silent shorthand that kept our partnership sane. I shoved my hands in my own pockets. “You okay?” A simple question, and one really meant for both of us.
Outsiders, shaking us up.
“Yeah.”
No opening, but not a lot of sharp edges, either. I took it as invitation. “The two of them can be kind of overwhelming sometimes.”
Carly shot me a quick glance. “I thought we were here to talk about the case.”
We could start there. Anything to make the weird wriggling in my belly calm down. “Any ideas on how we take him down yet?” Our usual methods were threats and persistence, but I didn’t see either of those being workable on a cop.
“Nothing obvious.”
“Can we just get Shelley out?” We liked screwing with dirtbags, but our primary goal was always the person who needed help, no matter what our t-shirts might say.
My partner shook her head. “Danno’s already tried that. She can’t go—she takes care of their mom, and the asshole’s made threats that direction too. And even if she could go, where the heck do you hide from a cop?”
It would be in abject fear, wherever it was.
Her left hand jiggled the ball in her pocket. “Maybe a good, creative threat.”
This time, it was me shaking my head before she finished. “No way. Threaten him and we wake up a big machine full of cops or bad guys or both. We might keep that off us, but not off Shelley and Danno.” And Danno was potentially connectable to Lelo, no matter how hard Carly had scrubbed.
