by Audrey Faye
“Huh?” She dribbled a little more oil on her cloth and then looked up at me. “Wait—you’re taking them seriously?”
More seriously than the chick with the knives, which was pretty unusual. “You didn’t check them out at all today?”
“Nope.” More drops of oil. “Busy.”
That was like a cloud saying it was too busy to rain. I sat quietly, stumped. We weren’t usually that far apart in our gut reactions. “You think it’s okay for them to keep doing what they’re doing?”
She looked over at me, forehead wrinkled. “It’s a dumb marketing gimmick, J—that’s all. They’re probably cheap PIs who will go off and take pictures of your cheating bastard for you.”
She could easily be right, but I didn’t feel it, not in my assassin bones. “Maybe.”
She leaned into the oiling of her blade, eyes lost in some land that I suspected held cayenne-pepper-spiced guacamole, a sexy gypsy, and maybe the faint edges of a future life where she didn’t hold a knife in her hand.
I had no idea what to do with any of that. “Do me a favor?”
“Sure, anything.”
Two words that she’d mean no matter what came out of my mouth next. “Check out the pretender assassins, okay? Just a little digging—see if you smell anything.”
She looked over, eyes less hazy now. “You think there’s something there?”
My bones did. “Maybe.”
She nodded. “Consider it done.”
I smiled and reached for my secret stash of chocolate instead of the stale cheese doodles. Van hermitude—I’d missed it.
She looked over at me one more time, her hands never breaking rhythm. “Can it wait a couple of days?”
Still on different planets. I sighed inside my head, closed up my chocolate, and put it away. “Sure.” In three years, she’d never once let go of the ball—I could give her space to do it now. In the meantime, I’d just have to take matters into my own hands.
Someone needed to be on assassin duty.
6
I tucked myself into the back corner of the very ratty bar thirty minutes outside of Lennotsville that had nothing at all going for it except for a pay phone, which is about as easy to find as a thirty-year-old virgin these days. A handful of quarters, a football game on the lone big-screen TV, and a dispassionate stare at the one guy who’d bothered to look up from his seat as I’d walked by, and I’d ensured myself as much privacy and anonymity as I could figure out how to get on short notice, at least without developing actual familiarity with devices that connected to the Internet. I wanted to find the pretenders, but I didn’t want them to find me.
Old-school methods might be old, but they should get the job done. Presuming the pay phone actually worked—it looked like the last time it had been used was around 1993.
I picked up the headset, grimed by years of beer-sticky hands and other things I probably didn’t want to think about, and dug the corner of a grocery receipt out of my pocket. The lime-green ladies had been very prompt in replying to my morning email of terror and woe, and very certain they could solve my problems. All it took to get started was an initial consultation for the tiny fee of five hundred dollars, but they’d be happy to chat with me first and answer any questions I might have.
I took a quick glance around the bar to make sure I was still invisible, and dialed the number they’d given me. Someone answered on the second ring. “Hello—Lesbian Assassins at your service! How can we help you?”
I wanted to kill her already. “I’m Daphne. I sent you an email earlier, and you gave me this number to call.”
“Oh, sweetie.” The sympathy in her voice could have drowned a fleet of battleships. “You’ve had it really rough for a while, haven’t you? I’m Judi, and I’m so glad you called. It’s the best kind of day when I can help someone like you turn her life around.”
I choked back the urge to ask her what she used to sell on late-night TV, and instead dished out pat answers to the increasingly smarmy set of questions she reeled off. Bait for the sad and the lonely and the afraid.
I waited until her patter had run down a little and then dug for dirt. I needed to know what exactly they did for people and just how much they charged. “So when you say you’ll take care of him, what exactly do you mean?”
“Oh, that’s something that takes time to work out, dear.” Judi’s cheerfulness was entirely creepy. “All you need to know right now is that we’ve never failed. Would you be interested in reading the stories of some of the women we’ve helped? I’d be happy to email them to you.”
Fiction wasn’t all that hard to write, but I had my first answer. No details given on the methods, just a pitch for trust. I squirmed—it wasn’t all that different from what we did. “I’m not sure you can help—things are pretty bad.”
“Well, that is something we do have to consider, love. Cases like yours are more complicated, and we’ll need to do some special things to make sure you stay safe.”
I decided it was time to be honest. “That sounds expensive.”
A sympathetic hum. “We always manage to figure that part out—our first priority is getting you to a better place. Do you have any kids?”
Kids probably cost more. “No. I always wanted a baby, but Oscar thought they would get in the way.”
Her tone shifted. “That’s what men do, sweetheart—they stomp all over our dreams. Our job is to help you stand up and take back what you really want.”
I frowned into the phone. She’d finally stepped wrong—it was way too fast to try to get Daphne angry or to attempt to inflate her soggy sails. However, I hadn’t called to improve their marketing strategies. “That would be really good. I need to know how much it would cost, though. I don’t have much money.”
“A complicated case like yours is a bit more expensive, sweetie.” Judi made some hemming and hawing sounds. “But I never like to leave anyone stuck in such a terrible situation, so I’m going to do this for you at just enough to cover our costs. Three thousand and you’ll never have to look at Oscar and be sad again.”
That was a lot more than five hundred. I tried to sound despairing. “I don’t have that kind of cash.”
“Oh, honey, there’s always a way to get money if you want it badly enough.” Her voice lowered conspiratorially. “He’s probably got some expensive things lying around that you can sell, don’t you think?”
The red stars flying around my head promptly had babies. I could imagine few things that would inflame an abusive guy more than coming home and discovering his woman had fenced all his valuables. “If I steal from him, he’ll just hurt me worse.”
“He won’t, sweetheart—that’s what we’re for. You just do your part and find the money, and we’ll take care of him so he’ll never bother you again.”
I wondered if it was possible to shove my hands down the phone line and wring her neck. “How can you be so sure?”
“One-hundred-percent money-back guarantee.” She sounded like she was selling encyclopedias. “And we’ve never had to return anyone’s money, not even once.”
I bet. “That sounds pretty unbelievable.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Her tone had shifted again, back to oozing empathy. “I was in your shoes once, and I didn’t believe anyone or anything in the world could save me.” I heard her quiet hitch of breath. “Just know that the first step is the hardest one. You have to have faith—you have to put your trust in the world being a good place just one more time. We’re right here waiting, but we can’t do anything until you hold out your hand and let us take it.”
They wanted my outstretched hand to be holding several thousand dollars. I was ready to puke. She had probably sold ice to penguins in her previous life—she knew all the buttons to push and just how to dance on them. “I’ll have to think about it.”
A pause. “Well, I suppose that’s understandable, honey. It’s a big, brave choice you need to consider.”
That was laying it on a bit thick—
and it was the second time she’d hit an off note. Most women on the receiving end of a pair of fists didn’t want to be brave, they just wanted out.
Bravery is a luxury mostly reserved for people who don’t need it.
I let the line go dead. She could make of that what she liked. I didn’t have a complete picture of what the pretenders were just yet, but they definitely weren’t harmless. I needed to go light a fire under a brooding assassin. Real life would just have to get parked for a while—we had a job to do.
-o0o-
I walked in the door of Lelo’s apartment to find things already buzzing.
Carly and Rosie were bent over the kid’s hunched shoulders, scrutinizing whatever she was doing on her screen. “I just found it like two minutes ago.”
Lelo was wound up tight, whatever it was. I set my containers of Chinese takeout on the counter and moved in closer.
“I was looking for all the places the pretender chicks post their crap so that we can contact their ad companies.” She looked at Carly for retroactive approval. “Some people use more than one, so I wanted to make sure I got them all.”
“These two aren’t smart.”
Lelo tensed. “Still.”
My partner caved, fast and easy. “It was good legwork.”
That got the shiny back on the kid. She angled at her computer again, reinvigorated. “So while I was digging, I found this forum.” She held up a hand as Carly growled. “They advertise there, so you can just stop with the big-bad-wolf assassin thing.”
Rosie smothered a grin.
Carly rolled her eyes. “When I’m being the big, bad wolf, you’ll know.”
Lelo nodded her chin at her laptop. “Read this and I bet you get there.”
My partner’s eyes darted back and forth across the screen—and I could tell by the third pass that Lelo had hit pay dirt.
I leaned into Rosie, since there were only so many faces that could read one laptop at the same time and Carly had taken full possession of this one. “What’d she find?”
“A story.”
Lelo tapped a few things on her phone and held it out to Rosie. I peered over the sexy gypsy’s shoulder—it seemed like the safer vantage point, given the storm clouds forming on Carly’s face.
It was a forum post—a testimonial, really. A gushing story of two women who had come to the rescue of a mom who wasn’t being paid child support, just like they’d helped her cousin two years back. Worth every penny of the thousand dollars she’d handed over—she’d already gotten three times that much from her dirtbag ex, sent straight to her bank account. The post ended with a link to the pretenders’ contact form.
Rosie winced. “That’s probably going to drum them up some business.”
“A ton.” Lelo’s foot was tapping like a marionette on crack. “Look at her post count.”
I had no idea what that meant, but it made Carly hiss.
“Shit.” Rosie didn’t sound happy either. “That’s a crapton of reputation points.”
I needed plain English. “Which means what?”
“It means the original poster’s been around a long time.” My partner was used to explaining the world of the Internet to me. “She’s got lots of posts, lots of interaction—lots of street cred, basically. Other users in the forum likely consider her a fixture, maybe a leader.”
Lelo’s foot was still tapping. “And it’s one of the biggest forums out there for single parents. Lots of them are broke and haven’t seen child support in forever.”
“It’s worse than that,” said Carly grimly. She turned the laptop back toward Lelo. “See the first reply to her post?”
Rosie scrolled down the phone screen. “It’s from the cousin, singing the praises of those idiots.”
I read the details and felt the bile rising in my throat. “She’s not talking about them.” I looked over at Carly, knowing my partner had already made the connection. “That was us.”
It had been a case of ours about a year after Carly and I met, and a tough one. A guy who didn’t want to pay his child support and knew sixteen ways to hide his money, most of them illegal. It had taken two back-alley visits and hacking into banks in three different countries to get him to see the light.
None of which the cousin had been aware of. She only knew that two angels had come riding to her rescue—and she thought the pretenders were those same angels.
“Wait.” Lelo looked horrified and fascinated at the same time. “It was you guys who helped the cousin? And the bitch scammers are using your reputation and pretending to be you?”
Something like that.
Carly was hissing again. “They’re riding on our coattails and charging money for it.”
“It’s worse than that.” I waited until my partner looked up. “I called them. I was coming back to tell you. They suggested I fence my abusive husband’s expensive toys to pay their fee. All three grand of it.”
Two faces stared at me. The third was already on the move. Carly stood and tossed Lelo her laptop. “I’ll get mine. It’s faster.”
I watched as the kid scrambled to catch her machine and my partner stalked out the door in the direction of the van, and felt an odd kind of rightness re-exerting itself in my world.
“You look happy,” said Rosie under her breath.
I was. I’d smelled slime on Judi, but I didn’t have the tools to track her into the online world, and the person who did hadn’t been ready to take the pretenders seriously.
That had just changed. Carly would dig now—and she’d be digging mad.
7
“Meet Judi and Rhonda.” Carly handed out folders an inch thick to each of us in the booth.
I wasn’t sure we could manage three folders and two plates of suicide chicken wings without disaster, but it was better than having to peer at something on my phone. “You did a lot of work in three hours.” The rest of us had been summarily kicked to the curb while she dug.
She snorted. “This is just the good stuff.”
After three years, I should know better than to sound doubtful of my partner’s research prowess. “In that case, thank you for not drowning us in paper.”
Rosie bit the head off a chicken wing and frowned. “How’d you find them so fast?”
I fielded that one. “Have a chicken wing and pretend she’s a really smart Magic 8 Ball. We ask her questions, she spits out answers.” In other words, we weren’t going to have a casual conversation about Carly’s often-illegal methods in a public place.
“Right.” Rosie’s cheeks were slightly pink.
Damn. “It’s okay—it’s easy to forget.”
She pressed her lips together. “You don’t.”
I didn’t anymore. “Three years of practice.”
Carly grinned. “And a couple of excellent threats.”
Those too. My partner’s survival instincts were terrible when it came to keeping her physical and emotional self out of trouble, but she had stealth and privacy totally down. There was very little about either of us out there in the world that Carly hadn’t blessed.
Judging from the stacks of paper she’d just passed out, that wasn’t remotely true of Judi and her sidekick, Rhonda, who now had a name.
Lelo lifted up the top couple of sheets of paper, eager to get a peek inside. “What’d you find out?”
“Judi’s the brains, and most or all of the slime. Rhonda’s the resident slave labor and the one who’s got reason to be angry.”
That was a pretty interesting summary. “Judi’s not angry?” It was hard to imagine anyone tripping into our line of work without a fair head of steam at their heels.
Carly looked at me and shrugged. “I don’t think so. Or she’s like you and hides it really well.”
Three years ago, I’d been way too numb to be angry, or so I’d thought. “Then why does she do this?”
She tapped my folder. “Data first.”
Right. Head researcher wanting the peons to draw our own conclusions. I didn’t
bother to point out that the person who chooses what data to share can lead her sheep to whatever conclusions she wants. This wasn’t science, and I trusted Carly’s art, no matter how many inches of paper she tried to lay over good gut feel.
My partner only dares to trust her guts openly if she has a knife in her hand.
“Rhonda’s story is sad,” said Lelo quietly. “Shit husband, shittier boyfriend after that.”
That’s what really paves the road to hell—shitty stories. I paged through the stack, trying to find whatever Lelo was reading.
“I pieced it together from forum posts, mostly,” said Carly. “She used to hang out in all the usual places. Same user name these days, but now she’s trolling for customers.”
Rosie raised an eyebrow. “These forums don’t have moderators to stop that kind of thing?”
“She’s messaging people privately.”
The kid and the gypsy both reached for chicken wings and didn’t ask how she knew that. They learned fast.
I’d gotten so used to Carly accessing anything she wanted on the net that it took me a minute to remember that most people think their emails and messages are private. Very little is sacred anymore, especially if it lives online. “So Rhonda does the trolling, but you think she’s only the slave labor?”
“Maybe. She’s got a good touch—she sounds genuine when she talks to people, and she’s good at the sympathy thing.”
“She uses her history to reel people in.”
Carly grimaced. “I think maybe she’s more gullible than that.”
My mental picture of Rhonda kept fuzzing. “You think she’s a victim? That Judi’s using her?”
A slow head shake. “It’s not that black and white, or at least it isn’t from this far away. I think she’s along for the ride, at least some—how much is hard to tell for sure.”
If that was true, it was messy and far too close to home. I knew a little something about riding on coattails. “We need to find out.”
A pregnant pause. “I thought maybe that could be your job.”
