Lesbian Assassins 4

by Audrey Faye

  Cool air rushed in the opening, invading my cranky spaces and calling to my restless insides. My hermit self loved brisk nights and dark skies—an occupational hazard of growing up within walking distance of the Canadian border. Either you fall in love with crisp and cool or you move to LA.

  There’s not nearly enough flannel for me to survive California.

  I grabbed part of the metal stairs and pulled myself up to standing, debating the sanity of wearing fluffy chicken slippers on a fire escape. Then again, they were probably what most people escaping fire wore.

  Me, I was only trying to escape the musical words in my head.

  Somebody drove by on the street below, going about five miles an hour and none too straight. I watched them all the way down two blocks and a wobbly turn into the hotel parking lot, and relaxed. The guy on night shift there was a good egg—he’d make sure there was no more driving until sobriety put in a belated appearance.

  Which isn’t the kind of thing you know unless you’ve been living somewhere for enough days to get to know the local cast of characters. I sighed and kept heading up the stairs before my muse decided that the hotel night clerk was good fodder for a song too.

  I made it up three more steps before my fluffy slippers tried to mate with each other and nearly turned me into Lennotsville pancake splatter. Which is how I arrived at Lelo’s rooftop garden cursing a blue streak and bearing two fuzzy, faded yellow chickens in my hands.

  My muse didn’t bother trying to find lyrics for that. She was too busy taking in the scene that I’d somehow managed to walk in on.

  I stood, frozen, one bare foot on the top stair, watching as Rosie’s eyes swung up to mine in that slow-motion way where time hasn’t really warped—just your ability to deal with life and its contents. My abjectly awkward, apologetic hermit self cringed, wanting to leave as quickly as humanly possible, even if it meant giving pancake splatter a second chance.

  Except I couldn’t look away.

  Rosie sat on one end of the rooftop swing, her boot-clad foot slowly pushing back and forth. My partner’s head rested in her lap, golden tresses nestled in the wooly blanket that wrapped around them both. The sexy gypsy’s fingers played gently in Carly’s hair, tracing tender designs on an assassin’s skull as she slept.

  Rosie looked down, her gaze following the path of her hands. But not before I saw the sadness in her eyes. And the yearning.

  My heart stuttered. The lure of the life that could be. And the bitter pain of truth—if we weren’t assassins, we were just a couple of really lost women. One washed-up songwriter and one… well, I didn’t know what Carly would be without her knives. But I’d always known it would be something that the light in her soul wouldn’t survive.

  Rosie’s eyes said she knew that too.

  I turned around, heart suddenly as cold and sad as my feet. It was getting a whole lot harder to go. But neither of us would have any idea how to stay.

  3

  I stared at the road and tried to ignore the gravel in my eyes. Early mornings were a regular part of our lives, but I had no idea why we were making ourselves face this one. Three hours of sleep in a bed I’d grown far too used to weren’t nearly enough, and there weren’t any cases pushing on us to get rolling.

  This was a trip mostly to get us out of Rosie’s and Lelo’s pockets while they got some work done, no matter what else we might be pretending it was.

  I was driving—I’d snagged the keys, all three sets of them, before I’d loaded myself back into bed. Six months of obedience to the speed limit had almost cured my PTSD, and my partner’s time was better spent figuring out where we were headed.

  Given the traffic jam we were currently in, I probably should have just let her drive.

  “We have three backsliding dirtbags on the radar, all in states north of here.” Carly was drinking her morning coffee while reading our email and mapping potential stop locations on her laptop. “We could make a little loop, have ourselves some lobster chowder while we handle slimeball cleanup.”

  I side-eyed her map. “Exactly how far north are we talking?” I hadn’t set foot back in Vermont in two years and I didn’t plan to start now.

  “Far enough for lobster chowder.”

  “This is the wrong time of year for lobster.” Not by much, but I’d take whatever excuses I could find.

  Carly’s snort smelled of coffee and cheese scones. “No such thing.”

  Spoken like a child who had grown up in the foodie capital of the North American universe. “Chowder’s better when the lobster’s in season.”

  My partner kept her nose buried in her laptop. “I heard that Johnny’s down south.”

  I was pretty damn certain she knew exactly where my ex-husband was. “Down south as in moldering in a Louisiana swamp, or down south eating hush puppies and pulled pork?” It wouldn’t matter to him so long as he had some young thing singing by his side, but it mattered to me. I wanted him miserable and bug-eaten.

  She was watching me carefully. “Do you want me to find out?”

  I kicked myself for wanting to know. Three years and the hurt still festered in the nether regions of my flannel-swaddled heart. “Do any of the northern dirtbags actually need us in person, or are we just taking a chowder detour?” Either was permissible, but I wanted to know the lay of the land before I stepped out of the van and ended up knee-deep in it.

  And truth be told, I wanted some good old-fashioned assassin legwork to do. Something to chase the echoes of Johnny in some Louisiana swamp out of my mind. And the echoes of Lelo’s slightly forlorn room. The passenger-seat energy of Carly missing Rosie wasn’t helping with the latter at all.

  The ghosts of impossible futures and discarded pasts.

  “Two can probably be handled via text.” She shrugged, and then glanced at me with the kind of glint in her eye that almost always gave birth to trouble. “The third guy could probably use a quick look at my sexy legs.”

  That was her standard trick for luring unfaithful bastards into alleyways so we could have our way with them. My heart twinged as I tried not to think about the unfaithful bastard who had once been mine. Unlike most of the women we went to bat for, I didn’t want my bastard back.

  I didn’t want him to be important enough to warrant Carly’s knives, either. I knew she’d use them for me—I’d always known that. I looked down at the speedometer and slowed down. Getting pulled over by an eighteen-year-old posing as a police officer wouldn’t improve my mood this morning, especially since they never seemed to notice Carly breaking the sound barrier on their highways. “Nothing better in another direction?” I wanted something with more urgency than a guy who couldn’t keep his dick in his pants and likely wouldn’t after we left, either.

  Guys who use their fists, those we can fix more often than not. They understand violence—and they know when they’re beat. Deadbeat dads are even easier, assuming they have any idea how to be a father in the first place. Those were the assignments where we sometimes made a difference, and making a difference reminded me that I was more than a sorry, jilted, washed-up singer.

  Carly was skimming down a list of emails. “Nothing good.”

  Then we’d have to make something out of what we had, even if it involved wild overkill on some guys who could likely be terrified via text message. I made a decisive turn north, knowing Carly would eventually get down to the finer points of navigating us to where we needed to go. “Let’s go get ourselves some lobster soup, then.”

  She smiled and pulled up Google Maps, but I could still feel her edginess under the comfortable veneer of routine. Chowder wasn’t going to fix any of the biggest problems riding in this van.

  I reached for a kale chip. It was a long way to Maine. “Want to talk about it?” It was a brave offer, and one I didn’t make lightly. Carly and I had lasted three years because we mostly knew how to stay out of each other’s business.

  “No.” Her hands got a lot busier with her map.

  No is unfortun
ately one of those shaded words that isn’t nearly as black and white as we want it to be. I pulled one of my usual land-of-gray tricks and waited, my question still hanging in the air.

  We passed three highway exits before Carly spoke again. “It’s complicated. Assassins aren’t supposed to have love lives.”

  Assassins aren’t supposed to have a lot of things. “We’re not supposed to have friends who feed us cheese scones, either, and that part’s going okay.” More than okay. Carly was slowly figuring out bits of real work she could pass over to Lelo, and the kid was doing a masterful job of coloring inside the lines—for a teenager, anyhow.

  “This is different.” My partner sounded almost wistful.

  Murky waters. Deep, cold ones. “Different in a good way?” I winced—there had been far too much gentleness in those words.

  Her breath whooshed out like I’d punched her. “Sometimes.”

  There were so many demons under that hood—but there were also a whole bunch of seeds that had never seen enough daylight to grow. I had no idea whether to duct tape the hood shut or slide a little water underneath. I decided to stick with the obvious and let the demons and seeds fight it out for themselves. “I like Rosie.” Which shouldn’t matter at all, but probably did.

  Carly’s grin was decidedly dopey—and really uncomfortable. “Me too.”

  Phew. Enough of that. I stabbed a finger at the laptop. “We need gas. And maybe find us some onion rings too, I’m starving.”

  “Eww. We’re eating lobster chowder later.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You’d rather eat kale chips until then?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “No. How about bagels now, onion rings for lunch?”

  Relief was like a warm sponge bath—this was a groove we knew cold. “Breakfast burritos. I need protein.” And my partner liked challenges. Finding decent Mexican in this state at the crack of dawn would be a good one.

  She grinned and dusted her fingers on her shoulder.

  Challenge accepted. This one, anyhow.

  -o0o-

  The breakfast burritos had been good. Showing up at Riff Anducini’s front door felt even better. He was one of our delinquent regulars.

  The man was three months late on his child support payments. Again. Which was as far as we ever let any of our assholes get. Any worse and he’d be on the receiving end of Carly’s skills with bank hacking and monetary fraud. Which she was quite willing to put into action, but I preferred threats first. They carried way less jail time.

  Riff opened the front door, all Saturday morning swagger and brawn—and then caught a look at Carly’s face and turned pale.

  They always remembered her.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” Riff was nearly hissing.

  My turn to do the talking. “Anna Lee says you’re late on your payments again.” She was also finishing up her yoga teacher training and dating a man with three kids of his own who thought he was the best dad ever, but there was no need for Riff to know any of that. “Time to pay up.”

  “Sssh.” Riff’s hands waved frenetically. “Keep it down, will you? Bambi will hear you.”

  The name told you everything you needed to know about his new wife. “Bambi knows you have kids.” Or she should—we’d made that very clear in a short coffee-shop conversation the last time we’d been in Riff’s neck of the woods. My stored impressions of her were that she was young, gorgeous, and dumb as bricks instead of just pretending to be.

  Johnny had been very fond of her kind.

  “She doesn’t like to think about the kids.”

  He didn’t like to—nothing like being the father of three teenagers to make you sound old in a hurry. “We don’t need either of you to think about them. We just need you to keep sending your child support payments.” Teenagers ate enough to bankrupt small countries, and Anna Lee was already pulling meals out of thin air.

  “I’ll send them.” He looked left and right like the mythical child-support police might jump out of the bushes. “It’s just a little tight right now.”

  Football season tickets and a month in Hawaii tend to do that to a guy. I glanced over at Carly—normally, she’d have taken over by now. I wasn’t used to being the bad assassin in our routine.

  She shrugged and flicked an eye Riff’s way.

  My asshole to deal with. I shuffled mentally through our usual bag of tricks. None of them appealed. I considered Riff and his pathetic cookie-cutter midlife crisis and the reams of data my partner had collected on one Riff Anducini, and pondered.

  Carly filled the silence with dark, threatening glares.

  I smiled as my lazy neurons landed on an answer. We’d leaned on his bank accounts, his sense of decency, and his fear, and none of them stuck overly long. We’d never tried leaning on the thing that apparently mattered to him most. I opened my mouth, hoping he didn’t know exactly how clueless Bambi was—or how head over heels in love. “You’re three months late. You have two days to get current, or I’m going to tell your new wife about those little visits you keep secret from her.”

  My partner raised a surprised eyebrow.

  It was a guess—but not all shots in the dark are poorly aimed. A forty-five-year-old guy doesn’t go visit the doctor every couple of months because he believes in preventative healthcare. I hoped like hell he didn’t have allergies.

  Riff looked totally confused. “What visits?”

  I blessed the photographic memory that had once let me learn lyrics while taking a water break. I’d spent the last hour in the van skimming Riff’s recent credit card bills. “With Dr. Pomeroy and Associates.”

  It was a gamble—but I could tell almost instantly that it had been a good one. Riff turned mottled shades of gray and red. “There’s nothing wrong with going to see my doctor.”

  There was if you were claiming to be a middle-aged stud. “Bambi doesn’t know you’re powered by little blue pills, huh?”

  Carly’s face was still assassin grim, but her eyes were as amused as all hell. And impressed.

  It wasn’t such a reach if you’d known another forty-something guy who had been way too concerned about appearances. I glared at Riff. “Two days.”

  He mumbled something incoherent, shoulders sagging, as he stumbled into one of his bushes and then managed to slide backward through his front door. I looked over at my partner and grinned as the door slammed shut.

  Short, sweet, and hopefully effective. A nice prelude to lobster chowder.

  4

  I shifted my feet, trying to keep my discomfort to myself. I wanted my lobster chowder. If both of us took driving shifts, a big bowl of the good stuff could be mine for dinner.

  And I wanted out of the quicksand we’d just landed in.

  Carly stood, whole body in one of those awkward teenage-girl poses, staring at the roadside stand’s slightly sad bouquets of flowers. When she finally looked up at me, her face was a study in confused vulnerability. “Sorry, this was a dumb idea. Let’s go.”

  Not all dumb ideas are bad ones, and it’s a best friend’s job to know the difference, even when they’re wildly uncomfortable and just want a damn bowl of soup. “Rosie will think it’s sweet.”

  Carly’s face turned several shades of red all at once. “Shut up.”

  The guy manning the booth was watching us with interest. “You can’t go wrong with flowers.”

  My partner muttered something about sending potatoes to a farmer—I was too busy watching the guy to catch it. He had worn-down eyes and a friendly, tired smile, and he tugged at me. I reached out to touch some bluebells planted in small pots. They didn’t match the rest of the merchandise, and looked suspiciously like someone’s preschool project. “You have kids?”

  The friendly reached his eyes this time. “Yeah, four of them. I close down in an hour—my turn to cook dinner.” He reached into his pocket for a cheap flip phone and showed us the image on the screen. “This is from a few weeks back. Took them to a swimming hole on the river.”
r />   The small screen showed flower guy with his arm around a woman six inches taller than he was, surrounded by four really muddy, happy faces. He smiled. “Meggie’s the runt on the end. The bluebells are hers. She wants to buy her sister a big shiny balloon for her birthday, and I promised I’d sell the bluebells for her so she could.”

  I didn’t need to look in Carly’s eyes to know she was a total goner. I shook my head—we were at least two verses into a really sappy country song, but I wasn’t quitting now. I nodded at the beat-up scooter parked at the edge of the flower stand. If I added another line or two, I was pretty sure my partner could write the last verse on her own. “Would you be willing to make a delivery?” Rosie had a friend who manned a bar half an hour south of here, and bikers had an awesome underground railroad, especially when a sexy gypsy was the destination. The bluebells would probably lose half their petals en route, but a certain florist I knew could make anything grow.

  The guy raised a surprised eyebrow as he listened to the details. “That’s a lot of trouble you’re going to for a pot of bluebells.” He looked a little abashed. “You could probably get her something way nicer in Lennotsville—there’s a great flower shop there.”

  Carly laid enough money on the table to pay for gas, bluebells, and a fleet of shiny balloons. “None that got planted by a kid named Meggie.”

  His eyes goggled. “For that, I’ll ride them all the way there myself.”

  I caught his eyes. “Not necessary. Just tell the guy at the bar about your girl and how she planted them.” Bikers would love the provenance—and unless I drastically missed my guess, Meggie’s bluebells would sell out first thing tomorrow morning.

  I grinned at Carly as we walked off. As assassins, we made a difference for a lot of kids. It wasn’t nearly as often that we got to do it as ordinary human beings.

  She elbowed me. “You’re such a softie.”

  “Me?” I rolled my eyes. “You just paid forty bucks for a pot of bluebells and I’m the one with the squishy heart?”