by Audrey Faye
“I didn’t come here for me.” Lelo didn’t sound sixteen now. “My sister needs help.”
Before the guy with mean eyes swallowed her whole. I looked at Carly—she was going to find this one hard to walk away from, at least until we scoped out Chadwick Berrington for ourselves. She knew all about the monsters who wore white-knight armor.
Her eyes already held her answer.
Which meant it was time for me to do my job and see if either of the faces sitting at the table could be persuaded to listen to reason. I pushed my chocolate further away and waded in on behalf of the devil and sanity, starting with Lelo. “So let me get this straight. This guy is rich, handsome, and everyone except you thinks he’s God’s gift to Ally.”
She watched me carefully. “More or less.”
“But you think he’s a snake in the grass under all that. Bad enough that a knife across his throat is the only way to fix this.”
A tiny shrug. “I know you don’t kill them all.”
Carly raised an eyebrow. “Keep that little nugget to yourself, okay?”
Lelo managed to look insulted and curious at the same time.
“We do what we need to do to get the job done,” I said mildly. “But it takes a lot more than a knife to do that. It takes a woman with her brain in gear.” Ironclad rule. “Your sister’s isn’t.”
“No shit.” Lelo stabbed her spoon at what was left of my chocolate mousse. “But maybe if Sir Asshole was out of the way she’d be able to think straight again.”
We’d seen way too many cases where that hadn’t worked. Our ironclad rules existed for a reason. Knives only created openings—someone had to be willing to walk through them. I eyed our visitor and her grubby exterior. Smart kid—but still a kid. “You seem to know a lot about us.” And that was worrying, but we’d dig into that later when she wasn’t staring at us with pleading eyes and a request that was going to tie us in knots half the night. My job right now was to balance the fire smoldering on Carly’s side of the table. “So you know we don’t take every case.”
Lelo nodded like this wasn’t news. “Only the hardest ones.”
“No.” I hated the hint of hero worship—we were anything but heroes. “Mostly we take the easiest ones, actually. We pick the cases where we think we can make a difference. You have a guy who hasn’t done anything all that terrible yet and a sister who thinks he poops gold.”
“My mom wasted her life because of some asshole guy.” Lelo’s voice was low and fierce and precariously close to tears. “I don’t want my sister to waste hers.”
I had no idea if Ally was worth all this effort or not—but my gut said that Lelo just might be.
I motioned for our check. “You can ride with us for a bit.” We had one more job to do before switching gears was an option, and some thinking to do—the kind that worked better when it wasn’t clouded by sake, chocolate, and the eyes of a kid we both liked just a little too much.
She frowned. “Where are we going?”
Carly shrugged. “We’ll figure that out once we’re rolling.” She smirked at Lelo. “It can’t be any worse than the bus.”
CHAPTER 4
This wasn’t going to go well.
I sat in the room of the cheesy motel we’d stopped at because we needed a place to argue, and because Lelo had passed out in the van. It didn’t even have a decent bathtub. The hotel, not the van. God, I was tired. We’d driven two hundred miles since sushi, much of it in silence.
Which hadn’t made it any easier to ignore our passenger, even when she’d fallen asleep.
Carly sat on one of the saggy beds, stretching out her back and leg muscles, keeping her assassin self nimble. I handed over one of the cups of tea I’d brewed with our little plug-in kettle. “Chamomile.” An attempted antidote for the gallons of coffee we’d consumed on the way here. Being an assassin isn’t a recipe for a long life and good health.
“Thanks.” My partner leaned over an outstretched leg, graceful as a dancer, and took the cup. “I’m not totally sold on this case, you know.”
I raised an eyebrow.
She hid a grin behind her cup. “It was worth a try.”
My bullshit detector wasn’t that tired. “You’re ready to storm into whatever the hell small town Lelo comes from and chop off Chadwick Berrington’s head.” Or other relevant body parts—whatever she could get a knife to first.
She set down the cup and contorted her upper body into a twist, still leaning over her leg. “I know his type. Nothing scares him.”
Which was exactly what worried me. “And you think a knife in a dark alley’s going to fix that?”
“Maybe. Won’t know until we try.”
I puffed out a hard, frustrated breath. This one was too close to her—the pretty, rich ones always were. “You can’t convict him sight unseen—all we have is Lelo’s story. She’s smart, but she’s freaking sixteen, and all she can really tell us is that he doesn’t suck up to everyone with equal effort.”
Carly shifted her stretch, doing something that managed to make her armpit touch her knee. “Okay, we’ll drop her off at the nearest bus stop in the morning and tell her to email us when he does something decently evil.”
I set my tea down with a pissed-off thunk. “Low blow, dammit.”
“Sorry.” And she was. “I’m tired and cranky and my belly is kind of mad I ate wasabi ice cream and chocolate mousse on the same night.”
“I bet.” I nodded at her teacup. “Drink. Chamomile’s good for bellies, too.”
She eyed me suspiciously, but she took a sip of her tea. “So, what do you think of Lelo?”
Loaded question, and one I hadn’t figured out all the answers to yet. “She’s smart. Capable.”
“A lot smarter than I was at sixteen.”
Sometimes bad things happened to smart people too—but tonight wasn’t the time to go round that Ferris wheel again.
“She tracked us down,” said Carly pensively. “That’s not all that easy to do, even with ninja-computer-geek help.”
And it might be the thing worrying us on a normal day. But this wasn’t one of those days, even by the standards of our strange little world. Under Lelo’s competence and bravado and breezy teen attitude rode the thing that had us sweating in a dingy old motel room. “She doesn’t think anything else will work.”
A husky sigh. “Yeah.”
Crap. Way, way too close to this one. “We have nothing. No data. A guy with mean eyes and a kid who has a bad feeling in her gut.”
“We rely on our guts all the time.”
I downed half my tea in one gulp. “At least half the time our guts are big, fat liars.”
That got a sliver of a smile. “That, too.”
My gut didn’t like the next idea, but I laid it out there anyhow. “You could check her out online.”
Carly’s face scrunched. “She’s a kid. And one of the good guys.”
Yeah. We broke laws, walked all over them in big military boots. But we had ethics. “You could check him out.”
“I could.” She lay back and cracked a yawn that nearly split her head in two. “Or we could just go with the whole pragmatic rationale.”
It was way too late at night for Scrabble words. “And what would that be, exactly?”
“She’s going to be kind of hard to get rid of,” said Carly dryly. “So either we work for the next six months with her haunting our backseat, or we go check out Chadwick Berrington and make up our own minds.”
I contemplated the bottom of my teacup and decided I could live with that. “I wish you’d come up with that idea two hundred miles ago.”
“Yeah.” She was already half asleep. “Me too.”
~o~0~o~
I knew it was a dream. The setting was realistic enough to fool me, but I didn’t sing in real life anymore. Even my dream self remembered that much.
My voice was grooving on something low and gritty, the kind of song where you feel the vibration in your ribs. Soul singing, Jo
hnny had called it, before he decided my soul wasn’t worth much.
I wanted to tell the dream me to shut the hell up, to stop leaning so hard into those beautiful vibrations. Depending on them had made me weak. And I wanted to tell her to never stop singing, because the day you stop is the day you maybe never get started again.
She shifted now, into something with a rockabilly beat, Johnny’s guitar following her moves as smooth as silk.
The faces in the crowd were indistinct. Moving, blurring with the beat and the resonance and that weird thing that happens when every night is a different crowd and they all begin to look the same.
The songs had been my flannel back then. Some singers reached for the audience, grappled with them, teased them, made wild, passionate stage love. Me, I used the music to push them away and give me space.
Or at least that’s the story I told myself every time I bought a new flannel shirt.
I wondered if this dream had a point or if it was just the whole phantom-limb thing, the kind that teased me into waking up some mornings and thinking I still wrote songs.
I shifted, trying to find a better nest in the lumpy mattress. And then shifted some more so the lumps and the scratchy faux-cotton sheets could chase the music away.
Johnny made his choice. And I’ve made mine.
CHAPTER 5
It’s never a good morning when you wake up to pounding on the door. I cracked open one eye, catching a glimpse of both the glowing red clock and my totally unconscious partner.
Carly sleeps like the dead. Which is probably a big, bad assassin fail, but not the biggest one we have to worry about. I glared at her and then back at the clock. Hours before ten a.m. should be banned.
The banging commenced again. I swung my legs out of the bed and yanked open the ugly green motel room door, wincing at the screech.
Lelo stumbled in, face almost as wrinkled as her clothes. “You have beds?” She looked grumpy. “Why the heck am I sleeping out in a cold van by myself?”
I’d spent a lot of nights sleeping in that van. “Because the service doesn’t include carrying comatose bodies into motels and tucking them in.” I could be plenty grumpy myself, particularly after late nights and bad mattresses.
She raised an eyebrow, surprised. “I fell asleep? I never do that.”
“Totally gone. Snoring.” Carly woke up far sunnier than should ever be legal. “You probably drooled on something too.”
Lelo wisely chose Carly’s bed to plop down on.
My partner raised an eyebrow. “Nobody shares my bed until they bring me coffee and something that resembles food.”
“Coffee rots your brain.” The kid didn’t budge. “There’s some kind of breakfast joint across the street, but I’m not sure you want to eat pancakes from a place that can’t spell ‘cheap eats’ right.”
We’d lived on the road for three years—our standards weren’t that high.
“Give me five minutes to have a shower.” Carly was already swinging into action. We weren’t far enough gone from our days of sleeping in the van most nights to turn down free showers, even ones in crappy motels.
I buried my head back under the sad excuse for a pillow and mumbled something about five more minutes of sleep. Which would have worked better if I couldn’t feel Lelo’s gaze burning a hole in the back of my head. I groaned—twenty years of musical gigs had turned me permanently semi-nocturnal. “Don’t teenagers sleep until noon?”
“Beats me. I’ve always been weird.”
Weren’t we all? I let the light seep through my eyelids. Carly had more than one reason for taking the first shower—it had taken her out of the immediate conversational line of fire. “You want the good news or the bad news first?”
Lelo snorted. “Who the hell wants bad news ever?”
Somebody didn’t know how to color inside the lines, a trait I had to reluctantly appreciate. “We’re going to come and check Chad out.” I opened my eyes and made damn sure she was looking my way. “But you don’t get a vote in what we decide to do, okay? You ride with us into town and then leave us alone. That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”
She watched me for a long moment, chin pillowed on her arm. “Fine. But you don’t get a vote in what I decide to do, either.”
It was said quietly—but I didn’t miss the threat and I wasn’t quite dumb enough to ignore it. “Uh, uh. No vigilante baby assassins. That’s part of the deal too.” Or it was now that she’d played some of her cards.
One corner of her mouth turned up, but it wasn’t a smile. “Then we’d better work together, huh?”
No way. We were two. Not two and a temporary sidekick, especially one who wasn’t old enough to vote. “We work alone.”
This time it was definitely a smile. “Look, I get it. You’re the deadly assassins and I’m just the girl who can’t deal with her big sister’s annoying boyfriend.” Her eyes were clear now, and way more grown up than sixteen. “But I can be useful. I know my town and I know my sister, and I know how to stay out of the way.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You’re in my motel room.” Not even close to out of the way.
She grinned. “Yeah, but I’m not on your bed.”
She was in my life, and that was bad enough. Three years ago I had run face-first into one personality that, despite all life’s best efforts, had no intentions of ever staying in the toothpaste tube. I mashed my face further into the pathetic bed sheets and wondered how the hell I’d managed to find myself another one.
“C’mon.” A pillow hit my butt to punctuate the cheery words. “Let’s go wait for slowpoke girl in the van. I’ll share my kale chips.”
Talk about things that should be illegal before ten a.m. “You’re right. You’re entirely weird.”
Lelo’s laughter followed her all the way out the door. And for reasons I prefer to ignore, I got up off my bed, pulled on my most disreputable hoodie, and followed her.
~o~0~o~
I considered the objects in the take-away bag with suspicion. New York bagels these were not. But the great and mighty Google had informed us that this was our best shot at edible breakfast for the next hundred miles, and Lelo, being a teenager, had voted for immediate gratification.
I was totally incapable of using the Google for such things, so I hadn’t argued. Hopefully the melted cheese on top would render them edible. I’ve learned to eat whatever is being served for most meals of the day, but somehow, when it comes to breakfast, I’m still a snob. Maybe my stomach’s more delicate at the crack of dawn.
Lelo snatched the bag before I’d made it all the way into my seat. “Thanks. Starving.”
“Got you two.” I eyed her, making sure we understood each other. “The other two are for Carly and me.”
She grinned. “I share. Usually.”
I was unconvinced. And reluctantly enjoying her, but she didn’t need to know that. “Figured out where we are, fearless navigator?”
She licked cheese off her finger before she swiped at her tablet. “Yeah. We’ll be there in four or five hours, faster if Carly actually obeys the posted speed limit.”
“Hush.” I swatted in the general direction of her head. “Be very careful what you wish for, youngling.”
Carly snickered from the driver’s seat and grabbed a bagel. “I’m going to win that bet.”
I just glared. How was I supposed to know that the possibility of me dancing naked in Times Square was enough to entice my partner onto the driving straight and narrow? “You have to last six months. It’s only been three and a half.”
“Three and three-quarters.” She flashed me an unrepentant, cheesy grin. “You should probably start rehearsing.”
Lelo chugged enough root beer to make an elephant burp. “What are you rehearsing?”
Acts that had to be illegal for sixteen-year-old smart-asses. “Just navigate, would you?” I pointedly ignored the fact that we were on a highway now, with no other road anywhere in sight. “If we get lost today, I’m going t
o sing ABBA songs. All of them.”
“Well, didn’t you wake up in a sunny mood.” Carly eyed me and then carefully checked the speedometer again to make sure she hadn’t sped up forty miles an hour by accident. It wouldn’t have taken much. Some people have lead feet. Carly has a whole robotic limb’s worth.
Or she had, right up until three and three-quarter months ago.
“So.” Lelo paused a moment and chased down the last of her first bagel with more root beer. “I know how Carly looks before a shower, and about Jane’s weird allergy to Google. Now tell me the good stuff. How’d you guys get into this assassins gig?”
I eyed the straight road stretching off far into the horizon. The kid had wormed more answers out of us in a couple of hours than most people did in two years. I glanced over at my partner. Somebody needed to give Lelo some kind of response so she didn’t bug us for the rest of eternity or the rest of the morning’s drive, whichever came first. And the hot chick in the driver’s seat was better at telling the sanitized versions of our story.
“I was studying to be a chef.” Carly started her tale, neatly skipping over the true beginnings. “Walked out of class one day and found some drunk idiot in the alley with a woman. He wasn’t taking no for an answer. I had all my culinary knives in a bag.”
Lelo’s eyes had gotten big. “So you sliced his throat?”
A pause that probably only I heard. “Nah. He peed himself as soon as he saw the knife. Took off running with his pants around his knees.”
And the abject fear in his eyes had convinced my partner of the power of the weapon in her hand.
Carly slowed down five more miles per hour. Just in case. “So I got some training, learned how to use a knife for more than dicing onions, and started walking into alleyways on purpose.”
That was as much of the story as I’d ever heard her tell anyone.
“What about you?” Lelo handed her root beer forward between the front seats in companionable offering and eyed me curiously.
I blinked. Nobody ever asked about me. “I just keep her company.”
“Yeah, right.” Lelo returned to her slouch against the ratty backseat. “I’m not a total moron, you know.”
