by Rick Dakan
"Why're we doing this again?" he asked for the tenth time since they'd gotten Bee's call. She decided to ignore him this time. She pulled her stun gun from her bag and then leaned forward and tucked it into the back of her pants before pulling her shirt down over it. Paul backed the car into the space right in front of room 8, so they could make a quick escape if they needed to.
"I'll keep the motor running," he said as she opened the door.
"And your eyes open," she said, giving him a quick kiss on the cheek. "If I run into trouble, I'll call in the cavalry."
Paul held up his cell phone. "That's me, a cavalry of one. I'll have my horse saddled and ready to go," he said with a wan smile. She winked at him and went to the motel room door.
He sat in the car and tried his best to look everywhere at once, but it wasn't working for him, so he concentrated on watching Chloe in the rearview mirror. She knocked lightly on the door and waited. After a few seconds she put her hand on the doorknob and turned it herself. Paul got a glimpse of yellow light from inside but nothing else. She slipped into the room without opening the door all the way and then closed it CHAPTER 40
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behind her.
Paul sighed and scanned the quiet night around him. Across the street was a gas station and a small strip mall with a several shops and a restaurant. All the signs were in Spanish and all the businesses were closed. He tensed as a pickup truck passed by on the street, but it didn't even slow down and the driver never took his eyes off the road. He supposed Raff or the PI could be in any of the empty storefronts or in any of the adjacent motel rooms. For that matter, they could've been waiting inside with Bee and had Chloe in their clutches right now.
As the seconds ticked by without any sign from Chloe, another possibility crept unwanted into his head. What if Chloe was setting him up? Was it possible, even after everything that had happened? Was all this the most complicated con imaginable, a massive plot to steal his money? Given the fact that Winston had gotten shot earlier that seemed impossible. Raff and Chloe were definitely at odds at this point, no doubt about that, but what about Bee and Chloe? Could they be planning something? Why else would Chloe risk coming here if not for the sake of some pre-arranged agreement with Bee?
His phone buzzed in his lap, starting him out of his reverie. He looked down at the face and saw Chloe's name. Huh?
"Hello?" he said.
"Act cool. Nonchalant," said Chloe, "But calmly get out of the car and come in here right now."
"Wh..."
"Right now," she insisted.
He turned the engine off and got out of the car, the phone still in his hand. He wondered if talking on the phone made him look more or less calm and decided he'd find out what was going on soon enough and so he kept his hand and the phone at his side. The motel room door opened easily and he stepped inside.
In the middle of the dingy room stood Bee and Chloe. The single queen sized bed was covered with electronics, including a laptop with its display open and facing the doorway. It took Paul a moment to understand what he was seeing on the screen.
"Shut the door," hissed Bee.
Paul reached behind him to knock the door shut, all the while keeping his eyes locked on the screen. There he saw an image of himself from a vantage point above and behind him, looking through the motel room door.
There were cross-hairs on the back of his head. As the door slammed shut they moved and focused on the peephole.
"What the fuck," said Paul.
"It's a trap," said Chloe.
"Sorry..." said Bee, meekly.
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CHAPTER 41
"What the fuck am I looking at?" Paul asked as he stared at the image of the motel room door on the computer monitor. The red, superimposed crosshairs were almost, but not quite, dead on the peephole. All three of them in the room were careful not to stand anywhere near the door.
"It's..."Bee started to explain. "It's a live feed from a camera across the street...I'm tapping into the signal from whoever's controlling it."
"And the crosshairs?" Paul asked.
"Well, I think it's because the camera's on a gun, but there's no way to be sure," she stared back at the screen.
"It's really pretty clever if you think about it..."
"Someone's pointing a remote controlled gun at us?" Paul didn't much care if it was clever or not.
"A rifle probably," Bee said distantly, her eyes locked on the screen.
"Oh my God..." said Paul, stepping further away from the door.
Chloe gently gripped Bee by the shoulders and turned the small woman to face her. "Bee, listen to me, please.
Is this Raff's gun camera? Is Raff controlling it?"
"I think maybe so," said Bee. "It's definitely my equipment he's using anyway. Stolen from the house when they cleared everything out earlier. So if it's not you guys then it's got to be Raff. Or maybe someone else."
Her voice was distracted, distant. Paul thought she sounded like she was in shock, which didn't surprise him since he felt the same way himself.
"Why didn't he shoot us then?" Paul asked, panic working its way from his brain and into his voice. "If I was in his sights, why didn't he fucking shoot me?"
"Because he doesn't know if we've got the money with us," Chloe said. Amazingly, her voice was still calm.
"But now he's got us trapped in here, right?" Paul said as he looked around the tiny room. Bed, dresser, TV, bathroom. No rear exits. No other windows besides the one facing the front. No escape.
"Yeah, but he's right about one thing," Chloe said, "We don't have the money with us. If he wants that he's going to have to deal. We've got some leverage here. All we have to do is wait for him to contact us and then we'll talk our way out of this."
"Simple as that, huh?" Paul said.
"Simple as that," she assured him. "He'll call. Trust me, he won't want to come busting down that door until he knows more about what we've got in here." Chloe turned back to Bee and scanned the piles of electronics and black plastic cases that covered the bed and spilled out onto the floor. "What do we have here anyway, Bee?"
The engineer sat down on the bed amidst her equipment, like a child surrounded by her stuffed animals. "It's just everything that I could salvage when the word came down from Kurt to bug out of the house this afternoon."
"This afternoon?" said Chloe in surprise. "Not this evening?"
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"No, this afternoon. After Raff and Kurt went to meet with you guys at the Great Mall, he called in and gave us the signal to bug out. We'd already half packed up everything anyway, once we saw Paul on TV. It was a madhouse getting everything together and once it turned dark we moved out all the important stuff. I took everything I could fit into my car."
"Is there a fallback point?" Chloe asked
"We're supposed to call in to a number. Kurt and Raff said they'd set it up," Bee said. "But I don't think that's going to happen, do you? I don't think they're going to set up a fallback at all..." Bee's voice trailed off and she looked around lovingly at her equipment. "They're all gone..."
Paul looked at Chloe and asked, "What is she talking about?"
"The crew has bugged out from the house," Chloe said. "It's like an emergency procedure when everything just goes to shit. Everybody packs up anything that might be valuable or incriminating or even vaguely interesting to the police. Then they split up and go their separate ways. Everyone goes somewhere else and no one knows where anyone else is hiding. All they have is a number or a Web site address or something where they can check in for further instructions about how we're supposed to get back together."
"And Raff gave this order?"
"Sounds like it. And he had Kurt backing him up. Except of course Kurt and Raff and Filo didn't bug out.
They came after us instead, with their friend and his gun."
Bee's attention snapped to Chloe when she heard this. "What?" she asked.
"Raff tried to kill me and Paul earlier. He's working with that Private Eye who attacked Paul on the highway.
He's the one who set up the whole thing from the beginning - the one who invited Paul's old coworker to the fundraiser. It was all a set up."
Bee looked heart-stricken. "Why?" she asked. "Why would he turn on you like that? Was it because of Paul?"
"He didn't turn on just me and Paul," Chloe insisted. "He betrayed all of us. Look what he's done, Bee! He brought in the police and went to an outsider for help in fucking the rest of us over."
Bee thought about this for a long time, while Chloe and Paul looked on in awkward silence. She looked down at her hands, fidgeting with a paper clip. When Chloe decided she wasn't going to say anything else, she said,
"Bee, is there anything here that can help us? Maybe a way to jam the signal that's controlling the gun or something like that..."
But Bee didn't seem to have heard her. Instead of answering Chloe's question she said, "To be fair, Chloe, you brought in an outsider first, right?"
"Huh?" said Chloe. "You mean Paul?"
"Yes. He was supposed to be another mark right? When you called me from that Mexican restaurant and asked me to check his picture and name. You said you had a live one. A live mark." Bee never looked up from her hands as she said this. "That's what you said. You said I should look up everything I could find on him as quick as possible and text you if he was a good mark. And when I found out he was really the founder of that game company, I did that. I told you he was a good mark."
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It took Paul a minute to really understand what Bee was saying. She was talking about the day he'd met Chloe at the Senor Goldstein's. The day he'd been fired. He remembered Chloe talking on the phone. At the time he'd thought she was calling into her bosses at the market research firm she worked for, which seemed perfectly plausible under the circumstances. He hadn't thought about it since, but in retrospect he realized that of course she was calling someone in the Crew. And apparently that someone was Bee.
"Bee, come on, that's different," Chloe protested. "We need to focus on our big fucking problem of the moment." She pointed to the screen on the laptop. "That gun that's pointed right at us."
"All Raff wants is the money, right?" said Bee, her voice level and empty of emotion. "The money we were supposed to steal from Paul in the first place. Why not just give it to him? Just give him the money and we'll call everyone back together and move back into the house and..."
"Bee, No!" Chloe shouted. "No. We're past that now. Raff has cut the Crew loose because that was always his plan. He doesn't want to split the money with the rest of you; he wants it for himself, plain and simple. He tried to kill me. Do you fucking understand that? They shot at me and tried to kill me!"
"If we just gave him the money..." Bee tried to continue.
"No!" Chloe stood up. "You've got to trust me now, girl. Trust me. Raff is not your friend anymore. We have to concentrate on the problem at hand."
Paul could see how angry and frustrated Chloe was becoming, while Bee seemed more and more distant. Paul was getting pretty angry himself, although he was surprised how unsurprised he was that Chloe and everyone else had apparently been planning to steal from him since the beginning. Somewhere deep down he'd always assumed that was the case, which was why he'd hidden the money in the first place. Having it all out in the open was actually a relief.
He decided to jump in and see if maybe he could calm the situation down a bit. "Bee, I understand how you might blame me for screwing things up. My plan with the park and the fundraiser and all was pretty crazy, but you have to know that Raff did double-cross us. If you want a share of the money, I can cut you in when we get it. A full, equal share..."
Bee finally looked up from fiddling with her paper clip and looked at Paul. "No, no," she said. "It's not your fault at all. It's my fault really. If you think about it, it really was all my mistake that caused this."
"What mistake are you talking about?" Paul asked. "It was Raff who..."
"It was my tracking device that failed," she said. Paul just looked at her in confusion.
"Oh Christ, not this again!" Chloe said, throwing her arms up in the air in disgust. "Are we really not past this yet?"
Bee ignored Chloe's outburst and focused her gaze even tighter on Paul. "We put a tracking device on your car while you and Chloe were in the meeting with your old friends. It was working fine, but then something happened later. When you were at the bank. So when you left Chloe to go hide your money we had no way of tracking you. There was a car following you guys, too, but they got cut off in traffic." For the first time she smiled at him, a wan grin of resignation in the face of fate's cruel tricks. "You're really pretty lucky, you know."
"Yeah, I'm feeling lucky," Paul said, distractedly. So they had been tracking him after all. It only made sense.
And it even made sense that Chloe had lied about it earlier when she'd said they didn't have a working CHAPTER 41
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tracking device. In a way that was actually true. He looked over at Chloe, wanting to let her know that it was ok, that he understood, but she avoided his gaze. Instead she decided to open up on Bee with both barrels.
"We fucking get it, ok?!?!" screamed Chloe. Bee flinched at the yelling and withdrew into herself. "We fucking very well get it! But as I keep trying to get through to you, we're past that! Well and truly fucking past that! Raff and his friend are out there and they've got guns pointed at us. And, boy oh fucking boy, is that bad news. Now, what the hell are we going to do about it?"
Bee sat there for a moment, silent. Then she exploded like a delayed bomb blast. She jumped up from the bed and shoved Chloe away from her. "Don't you talk to me like that! Don't you treat me like that!" She tried to shove Chloe again, but now that Chloe saw it coming, she easily fended off the smaller woman's attack. "This is your fault! You! You! You! I hate you!"
She shoved ineffectually at Chloe one last time and then turned around, snatched the laptop from the bed and retreated to the far corner of the room and crouched down, cradling the computer protectively.
Chloe stayed where she was but didn't stop yelling, "Then why the hell did you call us here? If it's all my fault, why call me crying and say you're in trouble? Huh?"
Bee wasn't crying now. Her eyes were dry and focused and very, very angry. "I wanted to see if we could work this out. See if we could come to an accord. I wanted to make everything like it was before he came into the house," she pointed at Paul.
"Fuck it, Bee! We're past that! I keep saying..." Chloe stopped in mid-sentence and then her voice was calm again. "You know what? Forget it. I'd rather let Raff shoot me than deal with anymore of this guilt bullshit."
She reached out to Paul, pulled him to her and kissed him hard on the lips and then looked back at Bee. "No, the con on Paul didn't work out and yes, as I told you weeks ago, I fell for him. I fell hard. And aren't I entitled? Why can't I fall in love with who I want?"
"But..." Bee started to protest, but Chloe wouldn't let her interrupt.
"And everything could've been great! You said yourself he was a promising Crew member. You liked the comic con and you liked the park prank. You voted for all of those, didn't you?"
"Yeah," Bee admitted, "But..."
"Weren't we all happy? Wasn't everything just the way you wanted it? And then what happened? Everything was going great until that miserable fuck Frank showed up at the fundraiser, right?"
"I guess..." Bee whispered.
"Well, you remember those lists I had you e-mail me? Somebody had put Frank's name on those lists.
Someone invited him to the party just so he'd recognize Paul. For the express purpose of blowing that con wide open, right?" Bee could only nod. "And that someone? That was Raff. It was fucking Raff, Bee. I can prove it."
> "Why would he..." Bee stammered. "Why would he do that?"
"Why do we do anything, Bee?" Chloe sighed. "For the money."
"I don't...no..." Bee looked confused, hurt.
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Paul thought back to his conversation with Raff and to what he'd said about people like Bee and him loving the crew not for the money, but for the lifestyle. He realized what a mistake he'd made with trying to buy her help. For her, it wasn't about the money.
"Bee, listen to me," Paul said. "I know you're upset at what happened and I know you blame me and Chloe and I understand that. I understand that more than you know."
Chloe glanced at him skeptically, but he had Bee's attention. "What do you mean?" she asked.
"I was the only person who knew where my money was. I could've left at any time and gone and gotten my cash and just vanished. I could've gone back to Florida and drawn comic books and lived the good life for the next twenty years without worrying about anything. But I didn't. I stayed around. Why?"
"Because of Chloe?" Bee ventured.
"Sure, that was a part of it. But it's not like Chloe and I were really together all that much or even sleeping together for that matter. Yes, I love her, but I also loved all you guys, too. I loved living in that house, living in the world you all created for yourselves. We had everything we needed and anything we wanted and no one to tell us we couldn't have a good time or do drugs or have fun with our friends. It was, really, the first place that felt like home for me since I left my parents to go to college."
"I know what you mean," Bee said. He could see her eyes starting to tear up. "It was the only place that ever felt like home. The only family I ever had. The only one I liked, anyway." She started to sniffle. "And now it's all gone..."
"It doesn't have to be," Paul reassured her. "We can build that again. You, me, and Chloe. And whoever else we can find. We can build it again. We will, I swear we will. Because that's what we all want. Because that's why I stuck around."
Chloe stepped in at this point, picking up on Paul's momentum. "He's right, Bee. Why do you think I came here when you called, even though I knew it might be a trap? Because I love you, Bee. Because we're family.
