What Doesn't Kill You

by Aimee Hix

  He shook his head. “You are the most infuriating person. I just have no idea what do with you. None. You’re impossible.”

  I didn’t smile. I stood quietly, barely breathing. I owed him the time it took to accept he had no other option than to let me in with dignity. Also, I wasn’t entirely sure he wouldn’t arrest me just because I’d gotten cocky and pushed him too far.

  “You do anything that I haven’t cleared and, so help me, Willa, I will drag you off to a safe house and cuff you to a pipe in the basement.”

  I smiled at him. I couldn’t help myself. “That’s kinky. You didn’t even list that in the options the other day.”

  He dropped his head and laughed before looking back up at me. “Where did this information come from?”

  I hadn’t planned to keep Ben’s involvement from him. I wasn’t happy about it, but I knew a stern lecture from Seth would actually work on Ben. I was counting on Seth blowing two gaskets when he found out.

  “Ben.”

  “Ben? You let Ben read the files? That was so irresponsible. You knew I didn’t want you involved because it was dangerous. Ben is—”

  “Whoa. Slow down. I asked Ben last night if he had access to the files and he said he didn’t. That they were only on my phone.”

  “He gave you what you needed to steal them from my laptop, didn’t he?” Seth’s pacing had turn into stomping. If the building hadn’t been cinderblock the guys below us would have had drywall dust falling on them.

  “Yes. I didn’t tell him what it was for but … it was a mistake. I told him I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “But then he read the files, so clearly you didn’t make it clear to him. Dammit, Willa.”

  “I’m mad at him, too, but he left the drive and notes for me this morning. What did you want me to do? It’s not like I could go to school to yell at him for interfering in a federal investigation. That seems hypocritical at best.”

  “I’ll to talk to him. Make it clear he’s had his first and last taste of acting like you.”

  I nodded, ignoring the sting that little insult carried. “Definitely. I totally agree. But … this doesn’t change our deal, right?” I cringed, waiting for him to start yelling at me.

  “You’re just killing me. Killing me, Willa.”

  Okay, not yelling. That was good. “So you already knew what Ben can do?” I asked.

  “We’ve talked a bit. He’s been careful to keep it all hypotheticals. I assumed there was more than what he’d alluded to. I am actually a good agent, you know? A nosy PI in my case is an anomaly.” He eyed, me. “Anomaly means it happens one time only. Got it?”

  I nodded. I didn’t want to give away too much because it wasn’t my story to tell. “These people—the ones who can do what Ben can do—they can sniff out cops. I don’t even understand one percent of it, but it’s all IP traces and satellite bounces and routing through public WiFi to a hotspot on a damn cell phone at some goat herder’s hut in Dakar. And your guys come blundering with a router named ATF42 and these hackers just scatter to another layer. Like climbing a tree and watching the little kids try to figure out where everyone went.”

  “But he’s safe, right? He’s not going to call any attention to himself?”

  “The good guys couldn’t find Ben even if he was in the same room, and the so-called bad guys are his friends. Or however much you can call a person you only know as Hackopocalypse a friend. He says he’s safe and I believe him. Mostly because he’s knows I’d kick his ass if he lied about something like that.”

  “And the actual bad guys. The ones who steal guns?”

  “Ben’s note said he’s compiled data on the most likely options for the tech guy that breached the security systems and that your team can probably figure out who they are IRL.”

  “IRL?”

  “In real life,” I said.

  “What else is on the drive?”

  “Details of how to get through the security systems that are supposed to be unbeatable. Ben says they’re designed by guys who are five years behind the curve. Stuff like this really needs to be built by these kids roaming the dark net. Only then would they be unbeatable. Until the next twelve-year-old comes up with a way to tear it all down. It’s changing at the pace of a heartbeat, Seth. And these former government wonks just can’t keep up.”

  “So what you’re saying is that the security systems are about as secure as a paper bag.”

  “A wet one.”

  He rubbed his hand over his forehead. “Tim is not going to like this.”

  “Tim?” I asked.

  “My boss. He’s not thrilled about this op anyway. Me.”

  “Aw, is there someone you can’t charm?”

  “No, he likes me just fine. It’s just me being on this case. And here.” He glanced around the office and then looked directly at me. “I’m a little closer to home than he’d like.”

  “He’d probably find out about the pipe in the basement, in case you change your mind. It’s just a thought.”

  “Will, honestly, I am so far out on a limb with this case that I can’t take another step without crashing down. You are a baby step shuffle as long as you do what I say. And, for the record, I don’t hate the things about you that made you a good cop. They just scare me. And I finally get why you quit the force.”

  “Oh?”

  “You’re too outside the box for a local police force. You had to have been chafing at all the rules and bureaucracy.”

  Lying to him was an option. I could probably have done it convincingly enough, but he was trusting me so he deserved a real answer.

  “Yeah, that wasn’t my favorite aspect, but it was more than that. After Michael died I just felt like I was in the wrong place for the wrong reason.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means … being a cop was good until it wasn’t. It wasn’t about the job. It was about me. Everything changed that day.”

  He looked sad. Well, of course he did. He was in the middle of a case that was beating him down and I had just reminded him that his brother was dead.

  “I’m sorry, Seth. I shouldn’t have brought it up,” I said. “This is business.”

  “No. It’s okay. Sometimes it helps to talk about him with someone who really knew him. They don’t get it. They didn’t know him like we did.”

  “Well, that’s it. Everything changed. And I didn’t. Or maybe I did and the job didn’t. I just didn’t feel like it would ever be the same again.”

  “And Santa Fe?”

  How to explain that I was afraid to see him again after that night without sounding like a coward? Even if I could admit it to myself, I wasn’t about to admit it to him.

  “Mom thought it would be good to have a change of scenery. And Leila has a new job teaching and a new husband. He’s an accountant, if you can believe that. There was this cool drama festival they put on at the college she’s teaching at. So I spent some time not being me. It was easier. For a little while anyway.”

  “I missed you.”

  My stomach flipped. I didn’t know how I felt about him missing me. Or how I felt about him telling me.

  Chapter

  15

  Outside the garage I sat behind the wheel of my car trying not to think about how confusing everything with Seth had gotten in just a few days. I’d had it all under control. I had barely thought about him for years. We’d done the family stuff and holidays, of course, our two little families converging. He hey-ed and head nodded in passing, but seeing him at Michael’s memorial service had wiped out all the time that had passed. I was fifteen again and he was the handsome football star who grinned at me in the hall and set the girls around me into a tizzy.

  I cranked the engine and backed out of the lot to head for home. The lane was quiet and dark. There weren’t any houses on this end of the ro
ad, just small businesses that needed a little property and some room to make noise like Seth’s garage. No streetlights either. Cinderblock buildings here and there. It hadn’t been built up, in a stasis from earlier decades, just like the area around Joe Reagan’s house. There were little pockets like this all over Fairfax County. The parkway and 66 coursed through and around, making it ridiculously easy to get from point A to point B and ridiculously time-consuming to get from point B to point C. Unless it was rush hour, of course. Then all bets were off.

  It wasn’t hard to see how some gun runners had made this area their home base. All they’d need is a reasonable cover for moderate comings and goings of no more than five guys. The fewer people involved, the fewer ways the cash would need to be split.

  There were no other cars either behind or in front of me and no oncoming traffic. The vast tree line deepened as the road curved and wound around itself. My headlights lit the asphalt only a few yards ahead and the trees arced over the road away from the power lines. It was a distinctly claustrophobic feel. Dark and quiet, as if I were the only person in the world. The hair on the back of my neck began to prickle and stand up. I felt as if I were being watched even though I knew it was impossible.

  I finally saw the stoplight for the parkway and my nerves settled down. While the parkway didn’t have streetlights either, it was more populated with people coming and going across the county. The sign told me it was eight miles to 66, and I’d be home long before that. The light was red when I got to it, no surprise, and as I slowed and stopped the car gave a faint shudder. I could have sworn I got a whiff of pancakes.

  I turned right onto the parkway instead of left; if something was wrong with the car I didn’t want it giving out on me in the middle of that wide intersection. I could make a turnaround up at the exit a mile or so on without losing too much time if I needed. Better to take that extra time than stall in oncoming traffic and risk a wreck. I coasted onto the wide dirt shoulder and clicked on the hazard lights.

  I pulled a heavy flashlight out of my glove box, grateful for Dad insisting on it the moment I learned to drive. Again, that nervy feeling of being watched had me reaching into the door well to pull out the collapsible baton he’d also insisted on. Dad put Boy Scouts to shame with his preparedness. His motto was always to hope for the best but prepare for the worst. Maybe that hadn’t always been his worldview but having a daughter had certainly caused him to consider all kinds of things in a different light. Once that daughter got to be a teenager and a driver, that different light had extended to making sure said daughter was protected even when he wasn’t in arm’s reach to do the protecting.

  I popped the hood and got out. I had no idea what I thought I was going to do. I knew how to perform some basic maintenance—check and change the oil, add more coolant—but troubleshooting damage or repair was beyond me. Had I been thinking clearly I would have just called Seth. He was less than five minutes away and he did know something about cars. I wasn’t thinking clearly. And, honestly, part of me still resisted that I needed him to rescue me, even for something as stupid as looking at my car.

  I shone the flashlight inside the engine compartment but couldn’t see anything obviously wrong. No smoke or obvious fluid leaks. No fire. Which I assumed was good. And I didn’t see any missing parts as I moved the beam of light around. I also didn’t see the car pull up. The crunch of tires on broken glass alerted me. What should have alerted me was headlights, but the car’s lights were off. The hair on the back on my neck prickled again. Call me paranoid but I’d already armed myself for no real reason. The prickle traveled down to the small of my back.

  You saw it on the news every day—people gone missing after running out to pick up some milk. Their cars found days later, miles from their intended destinations. No sign of them. I knew that the majority of intentional harm to people was committed by so-called loved ones, but even so, thousands of people went missing every year at the hands of someone they’d never seen before. The ones who found their way home again were called miracles for good reason.

  I heard the car door open and shut furtively. I shot my wrist out and the baton snicked open. There would have been no way he’d have missed the sound, but I doubted he’d know what it was. I stepped to the side of the car closest to the road, keeping the baton flush to my leg. I couldn’t discount that it might be a friendly person who truly wanted to help. I also couldn’t shake the feeling that I was in trouble. Lizard brain was beating logic all to hell.

  I took another step, keeping my body slightly turned toward the road. I was now fully visible to whoever had pulled in behind my car.

  “Hello, little lady. Car trouble?”

  Ick. Little lady is not a phrase that should come out of anyone’s mouth unless they’re channeling the spirit of John Wayne at a séance. I’m serious. That’s just gross. And I’m not that little. I’m taller than the average American woman by five inches. I’m pretty solid too. Running has kept me limber and loose. Self-defense classes and police academy training have taught me how to defend myself against a much larger opponent. And I knew that my best defense, was not, in fact, a good offense but rather my opponent underestimating me.

  “Yeah. I’m not sure what happened. I’m not really good with cars.”

  I made sure my voice was a little higher than normal, like the average woman uncertain in what could possibly be a dangerous situation. Like I needed permission to have car trouble or be bad with engines. Like I didn’t know this strange man but I wanted to think he had good intentions because that was the kind of shit women dealt with every day. But I wasn’t an average woman and I wasn’t capable of ignoring the menace radiating off him in waves. The prickle was now a full-blown DEFCON 1. I was vibrating with fight-or-flight. Except there was no flight available. There was road and there was woods, and I wasn’t choosing either. Fight it was.

  He took a step toward me more aggressively than a person with help on their mind. I pressed the button on the flashlight and swung the beam up into his face. He let out a noise like a bark and rushed at me. The light glinted off something metallic that I realized was a knife. I arced the baton at him, aiming for just above his elbow. The metal connected with a dull thud that I felt rather than heard and he howled. I knew how painful a blow the baton could deliver. Even in training a reminder prod caused pain to radiate down your limb. I hadn’t given him a love tap either.

  “Bitch.”

  The slur was a breathy moan. It flashed through my mind to hit him again. I liked bitch even less than I liked little lady.

  “I don’t need your kind of help, so mosey along and grab some ice for your ouchie.”

  I hoped today wasn’t the day that my smart mouth got me in deep trouble. With a shaky hand, I leveled the flashlight beam at the ground and stepped away to the relative safety of the woods on the other side of the car. If he was feeling vengeful or just clumsy with his throbbing arm, I didn’t want him to run me down. I heard the car door slam. He rocketed off the shoulder and bumped back up onto the road. His dark-ish car was unremarkable, with no license plate to identify it. So clearly I wasn’t going to be able to look him up for a later meeting and perhaps introduce him to some uniformed friends so we could all have a chat about the proper way to introduce oneself to a stranger. Like, don’t bring a knife.

  When I was sure he was gone, I got back in the car, locked all the doors, and called Seth. He was not happy and I didn’t give him all the details. Just a quick call to let him know where I was, why I was there, and that I’d made a new friend.

  The few minutes I had to myself were spent trying to ramp down my adrenaline and remember any small details I could about the encounter. Both Seth and Boyd would want as much as I could give them. Not that there was much.

  Soon the single headlamp of Seth’s motorcycle shone through the back window of the car. He arrived in considerably less time than it should have taken, so he clearly hadn�
�t obeyed any traffic laws. I stayed in the car with the doors locked until I saw his annoyed face looming just outside the driver’s window.

  He knocked harder than necessary. I hadn’t thought he’d be in too jocular a mood since he’d huffed a great sigh when he heard it was me on the phone and then made a grunt of displeasure upon the news of my predicament. I assumed the word of my knife-wielding admirer would have gotten more of a reaction, but there was just the grunt. I assumed it was displeasure. He could have had gas. And, frankly, as a victim, I had been hoping for more ginger treatment. Minus, of course, any lectures about women on dark roads at night. Or, god forbid, the assumption that it had something to do with the cases and starting on yet another hissy fit. At minimum, I deserved a brief inquiry about my physical or emotional well-being. Or a side hug.

  I got out of the car, shutting the door a bit harder than necessary. Okay, I slammed it. He held his hand out and when I shrugged, he grabbed the flashlight from me.

  “Manners much?”

  “Willa, I was busy, okay? Remember the ongoing federal investigation you stomped your way into? I didn’t need to come out here to help you fix your car when someone else was willing to do it.”

  Of course. The one time he doesn’t pay attention is when I’m telling him someone tried to kill me. “What exactly did you hear me say, Seth? I said a guy stopped and pretended to help. Pretended. He attacked me with a knife instead. I fought him off.”

  He finally looked up from the engine compartment. In the dark I couldn’t see his face but I was sure he wore an expression of disbelief. “You were attacked?”

  “Yes, Seth. A guy rolled up behind me with no headlights, interior light of his car off, and trying his damndest to be unheard. Then he pulled a knife on me. Are you up to speed now?”