by Audrey Faye
She nodded, mouth grim. “Yeah. Especially if any of them get stupid.”
We tried to compensate for stupidity in our plans—it usually showed up one way or another. “Anything nudging your gut?” It was generally my job to make the plans, but Carly had a nose for the weaknesses, the little pieces of information that gave us our leverage.
“It’s gotta be those reviews. They smell fifteen kinds of rotten. Our way in has to be there somewhere.”
“What smells?” I knew she’d been studying the reviews, quietly looking for patterns in a mountain of data. Underneath the assassin bluster and the sharp knives, my partner is an analyst without peer. If there was meaning hidden in the burrito slags and the condiment insults, she’d find it.
“Nothing really obvious.” She kicked half-heartedly at a nearby fast-food bag. “I’ve been analyzing his review content, and I’m pretty sure it’s just message delivery. Drug drops, maybe, or where the cops are watching that night.”
That sounded like hard stuff to hide in a discussion about flavors of ketchup. “Are the messages obvious enough to send to the cops?” The good ones, whoever they were.
“Nah. The changes are pretty nonsensical. Some reviews get changed a lot more often than others, but he’s posting about bacon bits and how hot the soup was.” She shrugged. “I’m guessing it matters which review he changes or what time he changes it, and not what he writes.”
Which wasn’t nearly enough of a smoking gun to hand over to the authorities. My head was beginning to hurt. “Then what if we change a few ourselves?”
She stopped pacing the alleyway, hands on hips. “That’s worth considering. Stir up the communication channels a little, create a little havoc in Rick’s life.”
I was already backing away from my own idea. “That’s no safer than a threat.” I didn’t stir up hornet’s nests on principle, and it seemed like a safe bet to extend that practice to cop shops and whatever shadowy bad guys obsessed over burrito reviews.
“Okay.” Carly started heading toward the light at the end of the alley. “I’ll keep digging, you keep thinking—we’ll come up with something.”
That was our usual pattern, and one of the major victories of the last three years. She trusted our process these days. Now we just had to make it work with a couple of pesky friends looking over our shoulders. Guilt clawed up between my shoulder blades. “I shouldn’t have invited them.” It was going to make things more difficult—and at the bottom of it, I’d called them because I hadn’t trusted Carly to listen.
She turned to look at me, eyes serious. And then cracked a small grin. “You might need their help yet, J. Just because I’m being good today doesn’t mean it will stick.”
Forgiveness, assassin style.
I followed her out of the alleyway. Some days, I don’t know why she sticks with me—but I know exactly why I ride shotgun with her.
12
Nothing like walking out of an alleyway meeting into an even more dangerous one. Rosie and Lelo had given us all of fifteen seconds back in the motel room before they pounced.
I didn’t even bother to protest as both of them flopped down on the end of my bed, bodies casual and eyes fierce—I knew when battles were already lost. I inched backwards as innocuously as possible, suspecting it was futile. A few inches weren’t going to stop this steamroller.
I looked over at Carly, who had taken the lily-livered, expedient path of hiding her head under a pillow.
Shit. Clearly, our alleyway meeting hadn’t gone unnoticed. “Did Mrs. Beauchamp deliver more packages?”
“No,” said Rosie quietly.
Lelo threw a pillow at Carly’s butt. “You know we can see your chicken-hearted ass over there, right?”
Those were fighting words. My partner rolled over, eyes the color of molten lava. “The hell—”
“Don’t.” Rosie cut her off with one word. “Just don’t. This isn’t a fight, and you don’t get to start one to avoid the real issue.” She put a hand on Lelo’s shoulder. “You either.”
I was smart enough not to open my mouth.
Rosie took a deep breath and let it out, forcing a good deal of the tension in the room to go with it. “Let’s go get something to eat, okay? I’m sick of looking at burrito reviews, so I vote for burgers.”
All three of us had seen that innocent look at the poker table.
I was no dummy—I folded. “I could do a burger.”
All eyes shifted to Carly, who was coiling up faster than your average rattlesnake. “Not until I know why we’re being herded.”
Sometimes honesty is the most radically uncomfortable thing in the universe.
“Because we need food.” Rosie met molten lava without a hint of fear. “And after we get some of that, you can tell us all about your secret meeting.”
Carly didn’t blink. “And what meeting would that be?”
I winced, and then watched as Rosie’s eyes softened. She had somehow heard the overprotective heart behind the dumb assassin-attitude words.
Lelo pitched another pillow at Carly. “The one we weren’t invited to, silly.”
The pillow came back at her head almost instantly. “Think maybe there’s a reason you aren’t invited everywhere, kid?”
“Yeah.” Lelo fielded the pillow and stuffed it under her own head. “But sometimes those reasons are just wrong.”
It wasn’t the words that got me—it was the tone. The same quiet one Rosie had used to launch this strike.
The one that said they were hurting, and we were the cause.
-o0o-
My eyes were bleeding by the time we pulled into the roadside diner. Not from navigating—Lelo had taken over that job the instant I’d pulled out my tattered atlas.
It was the merciless assault of forty miles of billboards that had me ready to start shooting. I didn’t want to know about every chicken special, retirement development, and X-rated video store in the great state of Colorado. I needed a burger, and not one sidling up to a scantily clad woman or an adoring cow.
Cows are dumb—but not that dumb.
Reading billboards had been preferable to the action inside the van, however. Carly had driven and stewed, Rosie had blanketed her corner of the backseat in unearthly calm, and Lelo had done whatever it is teenagers do with four devices and no reliable Internet connection.
When the van finally pulled to a stop, I swung my legs out the door with the speed of vast practice and serious motivation. The place was reputed to have good burgers, and Rick had never reviewed them—Carly had triple checked. We had plenty of business going on tonight without adding him into the mix.
In two minutes, we were seated at a table in the corner, grungy even by my standards. In ten, we had burgers that dripped grease of the unhappy kind. And thirty seconds after that, the entertainment for the evening started.
We’d somehow found ourselves at karaoke night.
I glared at Carly.
She glared back, and I remembered that she hadn’t picked the joint. This having more than one friend was confusing as all hell when it came to remembering who to blame.
Rosie winced as the first singer of the night aimed for a high note and missed by a chalkboard-fingernail-and-a-half. “Ouch. I hope they have some better talent in here soon.” She eyed Carly as my partner grinned. “Not you.”
Lelo laughed.
“What?” Carly had a really excellent pouty face. “I’m not that bad.”
“Yes, you are.” Said in unison by our two erstwhile companions.
It was damn hard not to laugh at them.
Carly winked at me, riding the random bubble of happiness. “Jane used to sing.”
“Seriously?” Lelo raised an eyebrow over her drippy burger. “Like where other people could hear you and stuff?”
I stared at the drips and imagined forty-seven ways I could render Carly dead. And then I got a look at my partner’s horrified eyes and realized she’d happily fall on any knife of my choosing.
“All that, and penguin bikinis too.” Rosie leaned back in her chair. “You have all kinds of hidden depths, J.”
I could have kissed her for every airy, casual word. “I’m pretty sure I said that anyone who ever mentioned that bikini again had to wear it.”
Lelo rolled her eyes. “Don’t encourage her.”
The fist in my belly was slowly unclenching. They were going to let it slide. “You could order one for your very own—I think they make them with giraffes, too.”
Rosie shook her head. “Penguins are way sexier.”
“Flannel is never sexy.” I’d staked a good portion of my wardrobe on that bet.
Rosie grinned. “Anything can be sexy if you flaunt it right.”
This time I did laugh. “I’ll take your word for it.”
Carly climbed to her feet. “I’m going to sing. Anyone want to do a duet?”
Rosie and Lelo looked at each other, perplexed—but I knew why she was doing it. Two verses of Carly, and nobody would remember my penguins, my ancient singing career, or anything else.
Penance. One assassin, trying to make things right.
And apparently, she was going to have help. “Sure.” Lelo stood up and made a big show of clearing her throat and singing a couple of croaky notes.
“Earplugs.” Rosie looked at me with exaggerated puppy-dog eyes. “Please, I’m begging you.”
We watched the two of them bounce up to the stage, an unlikely duo with an obvious bond. I side-eyed Rosie, suddenly bone-deep tired. “Are we going to get to your agenda for the evening anytime soon?” This friend stuff was hard.
“We already are.” She shrugged. “You called us here, and now you need to let us be part of things. We’re smart, we know how to stay out of the way, and we’re good at coming up with ideas. Quit shutting us out.”
It was so tempting to believe she was right. I sighed. I was being yanked back and forth like a damn elastic band. “We’re not that kind of assassins—it’s not a teamwork gig.”
Rosie raised an eyebrow. “Who says there’s only one kind?”
The phenomenon that is Carly. I looked over at the woman who had just started pouring her terribly off-key soul into the microphone, skinny sidekick in black singing questionable backup, and willed a biker florist to understand. You don’t ask a tornado to turn into a gentle spring rain. And you especially don’t do it when you’re chasing down a bad cop. This wasn’t the kind of guy you took down with the garden club as your bench team.
“So maybe she doesn’t change,” said Rosie quietly at my ear. “Maybe you do.”
I could change into a woman who wore fornicating penguin bikinis, and that still wasn’t going to help Danno’s sister. “This is a bad case to be trying on training wheels.” Rick would chew my partner into tiny, unrecognizable pieces if we fucked up.
“There’s never a good time to change.” Rosie shrugged and winced, amused, as Carly and Lelo reached their second turn through the chorus. “You singing next?”
Right after I put on the fornicating penguins. “Nope.”
Sharp eyes looked my way, and then quieted. A gypsy picking her battles.
A skinny guy in a cowboy hat took the microphone from my partner and gave her the once-over while he did it. She grinned, kissed his cheek, and said something that turned him various shades of ketchup. And then tossed an arm around Lelo’s shoulder and walked the two of them out of trouble.
Rosie snorted and watched the parade that was Carly make her way back to the table. “She does a good job of looking like a straight chick.”
I heard nothing more than quiet amusement. “She does a good job of looking like a lot of things.” It was the closest I could come to encouragement.
Lelo was still bouncing when they made it to our corner.
“I’m totally writing this place up.” Carly stood at the edge of the table, one arm still around Lelo’s shoulders, and eyed the remains of her burger in disgust. “The singing is okay, but the reviews were lies. Food this bad doesn’t deserve to live.”
I couldn’t disagree with her—but I had something far more important going on. A wormhole had just opened in my brain as I watched our odd duo, one of those crazy dimensional shifts in which the mysteries of the universe suddenly sort themselves out and spit out answers. That magical weirdness where the dots connect and once upon a time, songs had started flowing.
On this night, what flowed was the knowledge of how to take down a bad cop without any of us doing anything remotely stupid.
We weren’t going to stir up the hornet’s nest—we were going to shake it up in a paint mixer. If we did it right, it wouldn’t even involve leaving our hotel room—and it would keep the three people in this hellhole of a diner with me safe.
I pushed away the rest of my burger. My idea wouldn’t get anywhere if we gave ourselves food poisoning first.
13
Lelo and Rosie were hunkered down on one of the motel beds when Carly and I walked in from our quick jaunt around the parking lot. I’d insisted on ten non-sneaky minutes alone with my partner so she could hear the plan first. I don’t commit anyone to action sight unseen, especially when she’d be the one in the line of fire.
It was, however, no surprise that she wanted to star in this particular script.
And she’d only balked a little at the careful editing of the version we were going to tell our two roommates. We’d tell some of the truth, but not all of it. I understood the code of friends better than Rosie and Lelo thought—but I also knew that the code of assassin sisterhood trumped its ass four ways to Friday.
Lelo rolled her eyes as we joined them on the bed. “Done with your super-secret handshake stuff?”
Probably not, but I could let jibes from a sixteen-year-old pass if they might help keep her safe. “Do you want to hear the plan or not?”
“Yes.” Rosie’s eyes were less accusatory. I was pretty sure she had a clearer view than Lelo of why a couple of assassins might want to keep the occasional bit of information under wraps.
“Jane had a brainwave.” Carly had dug out the stash of cheese scone leftovers. “We’re going to take down the evil cop without ever leaving this room.”
Lelo raised an amused eyebrow. “I’ll need to make more scones.”
“Yup.” Carly grinned. “Lots. I’ll go buy butter and whatever else you need so we can hunker down in here.” She glanced my way. “A couple of days should do it.”
“Five hundred scones, coming right up.”
Rosie chuckled. “I’ll ask Mrs. Beauchamp to fetch my emergency cheesecake stash.”
Their minds were headed the right direction. Good food was exactly what we needed to fuel this takedown.
The food plans settled, three heads turned my way, eyebrows raised. I was in too good a mood to make them wait. “We’re going to use his own reviews to wring his neck.”
Consequences. I’d had them on my brain for days. Too many of the people we tried to help were paying the consequences of some irresponsible asshat’s actions. Carly and I had spent three years helping to balance the scales, and this time, we were going to do it with Rick’s own damn words. “It was Carly and Rosie who found the important stuff.”
My partner shook her head. “No way—I’m not taking the fall for this one. Rosie either. You want to make everyone’s fingers bleed, this gets to be your idea.”
Lelo rolled her eyes again. “Jane’s a genius, we get it. Now somebody spill before I duct tape you both to a chair and make you eat kale chips.”
Carly shrugged. “They’re kind of growing on me, actually.”
Rosie snorted and patted Lelo’s hand. “Watch and learn, kid
.” She shifted back and eyed the two of us across the motel room mattress. “Talk. I have cheesecake bribes, and my monkshead is blooming.”
I didn’t cross gypsies with gardens full of poisonous flowers. “Well, Carly figured out how this guy communicates with his minions.” Or his bosses, but we weren’t going for scaredy points today. “He’s using all those restaurant reviews to pass them information.”
Given the satisfied look in Rosie’s eyes, she’d figured that part out without any help from me. Which made the line I was about to walk a whole lot trickier.
Lelo’s eyes gleamed. “We get to crack his code?”
Over my dead body. “Nope. We don’t want to know, right? Accomplices after the fact and all that.” Hopefully, the kid hadn’t watched as many Law & Order episodes as I had. “The important part is that we know he updates the reviews, and we figure he’s doing that to communicate with his network.”
“Sure.” Rosie nodded thoughtfully. “If the burritos are good, the drugs are in the car trunk on 7th. If the fish tacos suck, no drugs until tomorrow.”
Carly raised an eyebrow. “Planning your next career as a criminal mastermind?”
“Nah.” The gypsy winked at my partner. “I just really like tacos.”
Sometimes the energy in a room has nothing to do with the words being said. Rosie and Carly had gone to some place that had nothing to do with fish tacos.
And then my partner’s eyes dodged, and I saw fear land.
I wished for one very hard, bright moment that seven frat guys had never been born.
Rosie’s poker face was already sliding into place, but not before I saw sadness flicker in the depths. She looked at me and winked again, eyes over-bright. “So we’re rewriting reviews and screwing up our deadbeat cop’s life?”
Nothing slow about our gypsy. “Not quite that complicated.” I needed to tread carefully explaining the next part—Rosie was already way too many steps into understanding all of this. “Carly figured out which reviews are important, and we’re going to change those. The content doesn’t matter—just that we post something new.”
