by Audrey Faye
Whoa. “What did you have in mind?”
“Visit her in person, feel her out.” Her smile was almost hesitant. “You did great with the bad cop. And with Judi on the phone.”
I could feel the baton she was holding out to me. The roles in our partnership were very clear. I watched, I contemplated, I analyzed—Carly did.
She’d seen that change on our last case, and she was holding out an offer to keep things different. I had no idea how I felt about that.
Lelo cleared her throat. “I think it’s a good idea. We need to know whether she’s one of the good guys or the bad guys.”
That much, I could agree with. I studied the stack of paper again, thinking about what I knew about assassin duos, and then looked back up at my partner. “What did you find out about Judi?” We’re shaped by those we associate with, sometimes deeply, and I was pretty sure Rhonda had chosen a really poor bunkmate.
“She’s a con artist." Carly’s eyes were flint and fire. “She’s totally bad news, whether Rhonda is helping or just a hapless sidekick.”
My partner was a lot more sure of this half of the duo—and a lot readier to stomp Judi into dust. Which was good, because I’d been feeling that way since I got off the pay phone with her, and it wasn’t me who wore the biggest set of boots in our van.
“Grrr.” Lelo was back into the pile of paper, reading ten pages ahead and obviously not liking what she saw.
I waited for my partner’s version—it would be faster, and I wanted to see her eyes. I needed to know how many barricades to put up against the barn door until we were ready to start the actual stomping.
Carly looked at Rosie and me. “You know the forum post Lelo found, right? The one from the woman saying Judi and Rhonda got her asshole paying child support?”
"They hardly even tried," said Lelo grimly.
My partner nodded. “They sent him a couple of vaguely threatening emails and a picture of his new sports car as proof that he could afford to pay up.”
That wouldn’t get a passing grade in assassin kindergarten. “I take it the guy didn’t cave.”
"Nope.” Carly shook her head in disgust. “I ran the plates—the sports car’s not even his. It belongs to the guys who paid him a visit when he got overdue on his gambling bill.”
Men who were probably a lot scarier than a couple of random women sending emails. We’d learned over the years that you can’t get blood from a stone or money from a guy who’s broke, no matter how much his kids might need it.
Rosie frowned. “So you think the woman in the forum is lying?”
“No.” My partner’s eyes had gotten several shades darker. “Judi and Rhonda couldn’t get the job done, so they decided to game the system. The child support payments are coming straight from one of Judi’s offshore bank accounts."
All four of us reached for chicken wings.
I ate mine fastest—I had the most experience listening to Carly break the laws of several countries simultaneously.
“So, wait.” Lelo’s eyes were crossing, either from confusion or one too many suicide wings. “If they’re trying to scam people, why are they paying this woman’s child support?”
“Loss leader.” Rosie looked ready to break something. “Same reason I give away daffodils every spring. People come into the shop, remember they like colors that aren’t gray and white and winter bleak, and then they leave with armfuls of flowers and tell everyone else to stop by.”
Carly nodded. “It’s smart business—they pick someone with a good online reputation in a place full of potential customers and make her happy. She posts her glowing testimonial and a whole bunch of people click on her link and go dig money out of their couch cushions.”
They’d asked me for a lot more money than I’d ever seen in any couch.
I reached for the last chicken wing on the plate nearest to me. I didn’t need to read any more to know what had to happen next. We had one wannabe assassin with her eyes shut or worse, and one doing evil while wearing our t-shirt.
It was time to go take a closer look.
8
Things were so freaking different with Rosie and Lelo along. I sat on one edge of a pretty picnic blanket spread out under an apple tree and contemplated my weirdly shifted life. We were on assignment, more or less, and we were currently having a picnic, complete with cheesecake, on the grass outside the shabby farmhouse Lelo had found for us to camp out in while we investigated Judi and Rhonda.
It was so utterly foreign—and so quietly seductive.
Lelo took a bite from one of the very sour apples she’d plucked from the tree over our heads. “Why do you think they do it?”
Carly raised an eyebrow, her mouth full of cheesecake. “Mmmfph?”
“The two pretender chicks. Why do you think they want to be assassins? Or at least want people to think they are?”
I didn’t want to get philosophical about two women who were trying to borrow our t-shirts and our lives. “They say they’re doing it to help people. They lie.”
My partner nodded and swallowed. “They’re in it for themselves.”
Rosie toyed with her own apple. “Isn’t everybody, in the end? We all have reasons for what we do, but it generally boils down to what’s good for us.”
I wasn’t sure that was a bad thing. “Nothing’s wrong with being a little selfish.” It kept us from giving our souls to someone else.
She aimed a quick glance my way. “Exactly.”
Lelo was frowning. “You guys do this to help people.”
It hurt more than it should have to dust up the pretty picture of me she carried around in her head. “I do this to stay sane. Helping people’s a nice side benefit.”
She was already shaking her head. “Liar. I’ve seen you work, remember?”
She’d seen some. Not nearly all. “It gives me a reason to get up in the morning. Three years ago, I needed one of those.” Which was more than I admitted most days, even to myself. “And Carly’s pretty fun to hang out with, once you get past the knives and the whole being-cheery-in-the-morning thing.”
“Hey.” My partner scowled. “I can be plenty grumpy.”
“At every other hour of the day,” said Rosie dryly. “You’re predictably chirpy at the crack of dawn.”
Carly raised an eyebrow. “Them’s fighting words, missy. Nobody calls me chirpy and gets to walk away.”
“Perky. Bubbly.” Rosie grinned and dusted her knuckles on the picnic blanket. “Vivacious.”
Lelo snickered from her spot against the tree trunk. “Deceased. Lifeless. Erased.”
“Nah, not yet.” Carly ran a finger along the edge of her cheesecake fork. “I need to torture her for a while first.”
Rosie waggled an eyebrow. “Promises, promises.”
I grinned and stole a bite of the kid’s cheesecake. Only crazy people teased an assassin. Heck, only crazy people traveled with them. I was suddenly awfully glad for these two, however.
And very glad to see energy flowing between Rosie and Carly that wasn’t crackling. Maybe they’d found some stable ground to stand on. Or maybe there was just an upside to having something to do.
Someone’s device pinged. Three heads swiveled, looking for their phones. I didn’t bother—if the world had ended and someone was actually texting me, that would become clear soon enough.
Rosie and Lelo both looked up, shaking their heads. Not them.
Carly was reading her phone and turning into a class-four hurricane.
That smelled like picnic over. I started stacking plates. “What’s up?”
“It’s an alert I set up on one of Rhonda’s private message accounts. She just got a message from a woman who hired them to deal with her asshole. They made him mad instead, and now she’s hiding out under a bridge in freaking Seattle, hoping he doesn’t find her before she figures out how to get to the nearest women’s shelter.”
Shit. “Loralee’s in Seattle.” Someone we’d helped a couple of years back who had taken
to helping others when she could. More importantly, her new guy had fists the size of small planets and knew how to use them on the side of the righteous and the scared.
Carly’s thumbs were flying. “I’m already texting her, and trying to get this poor woman’s location. There are a lot of bridges in Seattle.”
Rosie, phone at the ready, laid a hand on my partner’s arm. “I know someone in Seattle too. Runs a biker bar. Let me know where to send him.”
Not after some terrified woman huddling under a bridge. I opened my mouth to protest, and then I caught the hard glint in our sexy gypsy’s eyes. Ah—that wasn’t her plan at all.
We’d send Loralee to the rescue of the lady in distress, and Rosie’s bikers on the trail of the guy trying to find her. Justice the old-fashioned way. Carly handed one phone to me and picked up another. “Talk to Loralee. I’m tracking the asshole—he’s texting all kinds of threats, which is perfect.”
I must have looked surprised. She smiled, one of her evil, someone-is-about-to-die grins. “He’s making himself damn easy to find.”
I put the phone to my ear. We’d get the woman safe and the texting asshole very worried.
And then we’d deal with the duo who’d created this mess.
-o0o-
“I need a target. Stand there.”
I stepped onto the farmhouse lawn and stood where Carly told me to. I’d been the beat-up doll in her workouts before. It was one of those perceived high-risk activities—all bark, no bite. She’d never laid so much as a fingernail on me. It was all about control. Something the pretenders knew absolutely nothing about.
We’d had a busy night, thanks to their screw-up. It had ended fine—Loralee had the woman under the bridge tucked into bed, and the asshole who’d been trying to find her was currently halfway to Idaho with a gaggle of Hell’s Angels on his heels. Which was good, because Seattle was a two-day drive away from the farmhouse and we were in no position to have taken care of anything personally.
We didn’t usually ask for help, but it was damn gratifying to have it land when we needed it.
And now we needed to simmer down. A lot. We’d start dealing with Judi and Rhonda in the morning. Between now and then, we needed to get some actual sleep so we could put together some plans that didn’t involve decapitating the idiot duo and feeding their innards to crocodiles.
And that was one of the gentler options currently on the table.
Carly finished her opening meditation and stepped into a low forward lunge. “I’ve been thinking about what Rosie said.”
The sexy gypsy had covered a lot of ground with her words today. “Care to narrow that down for me?”
She slid into a sweeping side kick that would have broken me in three places had it landed. “About how we do things for selfish reasons. The pretender chicks, and us too.”
Of all the things that had happened today, my partner had decided to trip over the philosophical bits. I held still—she had excellent aim, but it was seriously dark out here. “Some kinds of selfish are better than others.” That sounded eternally dumb, but it was the best I could come up with on short notice.
“She doesn’t think we do this to help people. She thinks we do it for ourselves.”
Rosie was right—and totally wrong. And that was the kind of deep thinking that got assassins in trouble. “We help lots of folks.”
Carly’s foot swooshed past, narrowly missing my nose. “I know. But like you said, that’s a side benefit. You and I both have reasons for doing this that have nothing to do with helping anyone else.”
I knew that, but it scared me that my partner was looking under the hood of what made us tick. Judi and Rhonda were enough of a problem without letting them poke at how we saw ourselves.
The thing is, I know I’m weak. I know I’ve locked up the best parts of me and that I’m scared and running half a step ahead of quivering fear most days, and I do what most of us do when we’re locked up and weak and scared—I wear a mask. Assassin is a damn good one.
I had no idea if Carly knew that her knives were a mask. My heart didn’t think so.
She didn’t want to know that she was still scared. Just like I didn’t want to know that I was still angry.
Another swooshing kick, both feet this time, as if my partner was daring the thoughts in my head to come out into the moonlit night and fight. I kept very still and very quiet. It’s never been my job to undress Carly’s fear and make her see it—it’s been to walk beside her until it finally goes away. Rosie had opened a big can of worms with her picnic-blanket musing.
Carly tapped a punch up under my chin. “I do it for revenge.”
That was one of the answers under the hood—but not one of the hard ones. “Partly.”
“Really.” Another punch, this one even closer to landing. “Why do you think I do it, smartypants?”
No way was I answering that one, or my pants, either. “I’m still trying to figure out why I do this. You get to work out your own damn answers.”
“You do it so you can pretend I’m the brave one and you’re the chick who holds my jacket while I kick ass.”
That last part seemed like a pretty good description of my job. “I do hold your jacket.”
She grinned and aimed a heel at my butt. “And I do kick ass.”
Generally that wasn’t the body part she was aiming at, but whatever.
She flicked a fist at my nose. “See? Brave—you don’t even flinch.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’ve never hit me.”
“I might.”
Right after Santa started sending out repo elves. “I’m not brave. I just know something about putting one foot in front of the other.” Sometimes people got those two things plenty confused.
Carly stopped moving and stood, hands at her sides, right in front of me. “You followed me out of a bar into an alleyway, stepped in front of my knife, and told me not to be an idiot.”
The night we met. I smiled, remembering the cosmic stupidity that had sent me out into that alley after the girl with the angry, tragic eyes. She’d reminded me of a song. “There’s a big difference between brave and too numb to care.”
And I’d known, even then, that I was in no danger from her knife.
She lunged to the left and started moving again, low, swirling kicks aimed at the back of my knees. “You’ll stop caring about the time the coffin worms make their way through your left kidney.”
“Eww.” Me and my left kidney were both revolted by that thought. “I care now, okay? Because I can. Three years ago, I was still in the state of frozen I’d been in since Johnny left.”
A two-handed chop to my jugular. “You still care way too much about that jerk.”
I did not. I cared too much about the two decades of my life he’d stolen. “He’s part of why I do this—I get that.” And I was suddenly sick of staring at my navel. “Are we done with the dime-store psychology yet?”
Carly aimed an elbow punch at my gut. “I’m worth at least twenty bucks as a shrink.”
I snorted and almost ran my nose into her outstretched palm. “Don’t quit your day job.”
She tapped the other palm on my cheek, mostly affectionately. “I won’t.”
I kept my face as still as I could, but inside, I sighed. I hadn’t intended to ask for a promise—not that one, anyhow.
I didn’t want one she might not be able to keep.
9
I waited outside the rundown coffee shop where Rhonda had suggested that we meet, soaking in impressions. It was a down-and-out kind of place, one where most of the people walking morosely through the front door had nowhere to go and barely enough change for a cup of tepid crap and a decent tip.
Not the place to drum up business.
It was probably Rhonda’s local coffee joint, and a place where she felt safe enough to meet an insistent stranger.
I tugged on the uncomfortable shirt and too-tight jeans that were part of my Daphne get-up. I wasn’t feeling the tinies
t bit guilty about how hard I’d pushed for this meeting. We didn’t have a Loralee in every town, and Judi and Rhonda could wreak email-and-text havoc all over the country without ever leaving the comfort of their own homes.
That needed to stop.
I walked in and found myself a seat on a cracked vinyl chair that looked older than I was. I was antsy, ready to rumble and about to meet up with a woman I would probably pity instead of the one I wanted to decapitate. Rhonda wasn’t the honey-tongued scammer of the pair, or the woman we figured was the brains. She was the one we knew would be easiest to crack, and right now, cracking was our mission.
I was here because I was the one most likely to crack Rhonda while still leaving her with teeth and a brain. Lelo, all ninety-three pounds of her, was yanking on her leash, ready to drive over both pretenders with a cement truck, and whatever she left behind would never make it past the florist in biker boots, although Rosie’s threats had been less specific and a lot darker.
It was getting much harder to remember we were two assassins and not four. Except for the part where we broke laws and faced down bad guys. This wasn’t a job for amateurs, even ones with bloody minds and good hearts.
Judi and Rhonda didn’t even pass that level. Their motivations were messy at best, their methods dangerous as all hell, and from what we could tell, they were just getting started.
Nobody stirred when the coffee shop door opened again a few minutes later and a nondescript woman slid in, casting furtive glances around the small, dingy space. Same hair and eyes as the woman in the online ads, but none of the attitude.
And then I watched her transform. Shoulders up, face confident, eyes focused. It was an awkward, clunky shift, full of self-conscious adjustments, like a teenager practicing her first kiss in front of a mirror.
Or like a woman who’d been coached.
My dislike of Judi ratcheted to new levels. I waited for Rhonda’s eyes to find me—Daphne wouldn’t be waving madly at anyone in a coffee shop, and I didn’t much do that in real life, either.
She locked on to me fast. Everyone else in here was likely a regular, especially at this time of the morning. I offered a timid smile as she walked over.
