by Audrey Faye
I knew that, but it was awfully nice to hear it from someone who sounded rock-solid certain. “I told her that.” Mostly.
“Yeah.” Rosie shook her head and added a fat red flower to her collection. “But you didn’t tell her why.”
I was totally the slow kid on this conversational block. “Why what?”
She grinned. “Well, there are two whys, I guess.”
I groaned. “Just kill me now.”
“That’s your job.”
She was like the three Stooges all wrapped into one curly head.
Rosie handed me her scissors. “The first reason why you’re different is her and what lives in her heart.”
The one place Carly never looked. “She wouldn’t listen if I said that. I’ve tried.” She was this beacon of something important and strong and righteous in the world, and she never wanted to hear it—but maybe a sexy gypsy did. “She’s amazing. She took the crap that happened to her and somehow figured out how to turn it into gasoline.” Which sometimes she stuck in the tank of a hot red car, and sometimes she threw on a hot fire instead, but I figured Rosie knew that already.
Her smile was a little wry. “Yeah.”
I touched a shiny green leaf with prickly edges, suddenly uncomfortable. “Who the hell puts mistletoe in their garden?”
“No idea. Someone really obsessed with kissing.”
I raised an eyebrow and looked around the yard. “Really?”
She snorted. “Okay, maybe not.”
I heard shrieks from the direction of the water and smiled. Someone hadn’t kept their pants dry.
Rosie reached over and plunked her handful of flowers into my water mug. “She’s lucky she found you.”
I blinked again, fighting the tug of the appealing small-child disarray of blooms. This day was a song waiting to happen, and my muse was drilling a hole through the side of my head trying to get out. “What?”
“That’s the second why. The reason you guys aren’t slimy scammers or a couple of hard knives who think you’re the only justice in the universe.”
I looked up at her, my muse suddenly silent. Scammers we’d never be—but when I’d run into Carly, she’d been toying with the road that led to the second.
“She met you,” said Rosie quietly. “And you’re the reason she still has that amazing gasoline heart.”
Carly was her own damn success story. “I just do the laundry.”
“That too.” She set her scissors down on a side table, an incongruous bit of faded pink plastic in a garden with no whimsy whatsoever. “You’re her moral compass. You stand between her and a lot of ugly possibilities.”
It suddenly occurred to me that I wasn’t the only one who might do that for Carly some day.
That I wasn’t the only one who might want to.
11
Carly rolled from one side to the other under her tree and sighed happily. “This is the life.”
I looked up from the book I’d filched from the garden shed and had to agree. It was the closest thing we’d had to a real vacation in years. Maybe Rhonda and Judi would take their time getting up to no good, and we could stay a few days. I glanced over at Rosie. “How does your friend feel about people pitching a tent in her backyard?”
She laughed. “You can do that if you want. Or we can use the house keys and actually sleep in a bed.”
I liked people with really accommodating friends.
Lelo levered up off her napping spot on the ground. “I’ll go check out the kitchen.”
I shook my head at both her enthusiasm and her assumption. “You don’t have to cook for us all the time—you know that, right?”
“Do so.” She picked up a couple of dirty plates and grinned. “I’ve seen you guys boil water.”
We weren’t that bad in the kitchen. And something about her holding my dirty dishes suddenly rankled. “Seriously—you aren’t here to be our cook-and-cleanup crew. You’re here because you’re smart and good on a computer and you mostly follow instructions.”
She snickered. “I’m here because I keep climbing into the van and you guys are getting tired of trying to throw me out.”
That too. I sat up, suddenly needing to make a point that had been bubbling under the surface for days.
“Don’t.” She put a hand on my shoulder and pushed me back down to reclining. “I’m not here because my life sucks or because you take advantage of me or because of Carly’s sexy legs. I know you guys think of me as a kid sometimes, but I make my own decisions. I choose to be here, and I can choose to leave any time I want.”
I stared at her, wind entirely sucked out of my sails.
“Idiot.” She plunked my book on top of my chest. “I’m not Rhonda, and neither are you. I do dishes and bake because I like it and because you guys really appreciate it. So go back to reading and stop thinking so much.”
I had to grin, even though she’d just pinned my wings to a board. “Bossypants.”
“Yeah.” She grinned back. “That’s Chef Bossypants to you.”
I was on something resembling a vacation, with something resembling a personal chef. Life had definitely changed.
A sound something like a dentist’s drill interrupted our little tableau. Carly groaned, reached under her butt, and came up with a phone. “Someone’s pinging one of our dummy numbers.”
It was one of the ways we let people find us, but not too easily. They called the numbers we let travel the underground airwaves, and we got to check them out before we called them back.
She leaned off the edge of the blanket she was lying on, aiming toward darker shadows, and squinted at her phone in the dappled light.
And then she sat bolt upright, all traces of afternoon somnolence gone. “It’s a video message. From Judi.”
Lelo was already on the move. “I’ll get my laptop so we can all see it.”
Ninety seconds later, we all stood elbow to elbow in the darkest corner of the backyard, peering at Judi’s face onscreen. “Ready?” asked Carly grimly. She pushed the play button.
The face on the laptop took a moment to start moving. “Hello, assassins. I assume you’ll get this message, even though my associate tells me you’re harder than usual to find.” Judi’s mouth contorted into an ugly smirk. “He does good work.”
Carly’s eyes were blue bullets. “Not that good.”
The voice on video kept going as if she hadn’t been interrupted. “I hear you’ve been doing a little investigating. Talking to my ad companies, digging around the forums, worrying my assistant.” Her eyes got glittery and hard. “Telling lies isn’t very nice, Daphne.”
I gaped.
Judi laughed onscreen. “Thought I wouldn’t figure that out? You’re the first client ever to insist on a face-to-face meeting and you want to meet my underling? I don’t think so. And your acting skills are pathetic.” She smirked. “Mine aren’t. I was sitting in that hole of a coffee shop not fifteen feet from you, and you never saw a thing.”
Comprehension and chagrin landed like twin elephants.
“You’re in over your head, ladies. This is my turf now, and I don’t give a damn what you think about how I do business.” She focused deep into the camera, eyes hard. “Stay the hell out of my way.”
The video faded to black.
I felt like I’d just been sent to the principal’s office. In Afghanistan. “I totally screwed up in the coffee shop.” No wonder Rhonda had put so much effort into her acting—her coach had been sitting there watching. And I’d been dumb enough to eat it up.
“You couldn’t have known.” Rosie’s words were clipped and short, but it wasn’t me she was mad at.
Lelo’s hands, still holding her laptop, were shaking with fury.
Neither of them were my worry right now.
“She’s mine.” Carly was in showdown mode, hands at her sides, weight on the balls of her feet, barely leashed ferocity in her eyes.
I knew how often she practiced that look in the mirror—it did m
ore work for us than all the other weapons she carried combined.
“She can’t be.” Rosie stepped toe-to-toe with Carly, using every inch of her extra size and height. “Con artists remember details, and anyone who remembers enough details about you could have half the police in the country watching for you inside of a week.”
That kind of argument, even if every inch of it was true, wouldn’t slow down Carly’s gasoline flames at all. Someone had just tried to take away her power. She wouldn’t back down from that, not ever again.
My partner tapped the knife sheath on her hip, eyes cold fire. “She needs to be stopped.”
I stood frozen, watching the sexy gypsy’s eyes and remembering her words. You stand between Carly and a lot of ugly possibilities.
This time, it wasn’t me who had decided to stand there.
Rosie touched her fingers to the leather sheath, her eyes never leaving Carly’s. “There can be power without this.”
My partner stood ramrod straight, a pillar of fire ready to eat the world. Not words she was ready to hear.
Rosie didn’t back down an inch. “You’re not the only one who knows how to fight and how to win.” Her voice was quiet—and diamond hard.
A heartbeat, one where the beachfront air started to melt into the gypsy-assassin inferno. Lelo wasn’t breathing, and neither was I. It didn’t matter—we didn’t exist in the world where Rosie and Carly had landed.
And then the kid snorted into the silence. “You guys are ridiculous, you know that, right? They’re two pretty sad excuses for women, and you’re letting them origami your underwear.”
The dying inferno turned to stare at her, and I knew that whatever else Lelo was up to, she had just pulled the bathtub drain on whatever furnace had been billowing to life.
That was twice I owed her in a single afternoon. Even if she was wrong this time. Rosie and Carly were twisting up their own underwear just fine.
12
Powder-keg management, Jane-and-Lelo style. Something like that, anyhow. I looked around the poker hangout, happy enough with what we’d managed. Unsubtle distraction, lots of food, and the comfort of the familiar.
Or as familiar as we could get in a hurry, anyhow. We were back at the farmhouse. I’d insisted—that garden had been shaking up way too many things. There were other ways to keep Carly out of trouble.
The virtual stakeout hadn’t ended. We had fifteen devices tucked into the corner of the living room—if Judi or Rhonda so much as breathed online, we would know. In the meantime, we were keeping a nervy assassin and a wired gypsy ruthlessly occupied.
And somehow, it was managing to feel reasonably normal.
I looked over at Carly and rolled my eyes. “When do we get old enough that we can stop spending nights naked and unhappy?”
Rowena, who had shown up just as we were pulling into the farmhouse driveway, snickered. “Who says you’ll be unhappy?”
Rosie shook her head and pushed more of her chips into the middle of the table. “Quit hitting on the straight woman, Ro.”
“Hey.” Lelo eyed the chip piles in the pot and toyed with her own. “I might be straight.”
Rowena smiled at the teenager in black. “In my day, sixteen-year-olds didn’t say things like that—we all thought we were looking for handsome young men. It’s nice to see some things have changed.”
Some things hadn’t changed nearly enough, including my poker skills. I peeked at my hand and sighed—the cards hadn’t miraculously gotten better. Time to fold.
“Don’t worry, my dear.” Rowena patted my knee and folded companionably. “We’ll get you taking some risks yet. The night is young.”
The night had already lost me two of my flannel shirts and a sock. Which meant I was way closer to naked than anyone except for Carly, and she’d clearly decided it was a night for reckless abandon. She’d come dressed in lacy stockings, a really short black dress, and not much else. Powder keg, refusing to be managed.
I’d muttered something about corrupting minors, and she’d just laughed. Reasonably so—anyone traveling with Carly saw her naked at least three times a day, and Lelo had spent an unreasonable amount of time on the road with us already. My partner’s boobs were the least of what we worried about her seeing.
“Gah.” Rosie tossed in her cards and waved her hand at Lelo. “All yours, unless hot-and-sexy over there wants to keep bluffing.”
Carly smirked. “I never bluff.”
She bluffed every damn day and everyone in this room knew it.
Lelo studied her opponent, reading every line in the furrowed assassin brow and the taps of the lace-stocking-clad toes under the table. “You’ve won the last two hands—your luck can’t keep rolling like that.”
The poker gods love to laugh at people who think the world should be fair.
Carly started humming something under her breath. I tried to keep my face still. The Gambler only came out when she really wanted to poke at someone. She had nothing. I started running through a list of state capitals in my head. My partner had enough tells—she didn’t need me being one of them.
Rosie rolled her eyes at me and reached for the pitcher of icy pink slush at her elbow. “This stuff melts, people, so you need to drink faster.”
More strawberry margarita was not going to help my poker game, even the virgin kind. “You must have a blender as big as a cement truck.”
“Nope.” The sexy gypsy grinned. “Rowena does, but she yells at me if I use it to make anything tasty.”
The woman who could sell flowers to the devil snorted and held out her margarita glass to be topped up. “The last time you used my blender, my smoothies tasted like chocolate body scrub for a week.”
Rosie wrinkled her nose. “That probably improved them.”
My brain struggled to imagine what a person might do with a cement truck’s worth of chocolate body scrub.
Carly waggled her eyebrows at the table in general. “Mmm. Strawberries and chocolate.”
If that distracted Lelo, she was a lot dumber than she looked. I risked a quick glance at the kid’s face and hid a grin. She knew, all right—and she was enjoying the heck out of making a certain assassin sweat.
Rosie poured strawberry goop into my glass. “So, J—wearing something red and sexy under all that flannel?”
Lelo nearly inhaled margarita up her nose.
I snorted. “Stop hitting on the straight woman.”
Rosie grinned. “If I’m hitting on you, you’ll know about it.”
She was a pretty fearsome weapon, but one totally aimed elsewhere. “Not much point in dressing up for a table full of lesbians.”
“Don’t be silly.” Rowena played with the arrangement of blooms floating in a pretty glass bowl in the middle of the table. Poker ambience. “We appreciate red and sexy more than anyone.”
That was probably true. “I can’t remember what underwear I put on this morning, but I’m pretty sure it’s white, cotton, and boring.”
Lelo shook her head in only partly feigned disgust.
I pitched a chip at her ear. “Not all of us managed to sneak in the door wearing fifteen black t-shirts.”
She grinned. “A girl’s gotta cheat to survive around here. And I’m only wearing three.”
Not anymore—she’d lost a couple of layers to the night too.
Carly pushed her entire pile of chips into the middle of the table. “I’m all in.”
Lelo gaped. “For real?”
My partner smirked. “You have to call to find out, skinny girl.”
“Fine.” A matching pile of chips joined Carly’s in silent standoff.
For a solid ten seconds, everyone at the table thought the kid had won the night. And then my partner laid down her hand and four jaws dropped. Four jacks.
Lelo put her cards down, shaking her head slowly. “I have a full house, aces high.”
They were both better hands than I’d seen in three years.
Rowena raised an eyebrow. “That’s
a fantastic hand—I figured you had her.”
“Me too.” Rosie looked thoughtful.
Carly only grinned and pointed at the kid. “Strip. Them’s the rules.”
“Okay.” Lelo pulled off her last t-shirt, lightning quick, and then sat there grinning, waiting for reaction.
She got it. Rosie leaned sideways into Rowena, laughing like a madwoman, tears running down her cheeks. Carly spluttered curses in fifteen languages and then finally reached out and gave a sharp snap to the strap holding up a black bikini top—one covered in ninja unicorns. “That’s mine, thief.”
The kid pointed her straw at Carly like a light saber. “Back off, assassin girl. I wore it in here, so it’s mine for tonight. You need to win it off me fair and square. Deal.”
I was pretty sure my partner only had to wait a minute or two until the sock stuffing holding the whole thing in place failed.
Rowena chuckled and leaned over Lelo’s way as she dealt. “If you need a sprig or two of flowers to cover things up, I’ve got some you can borrow.”
The teenager grinned. “Nah, these unicorns aren’t going anywhere. I’m totally taking all of you down.”
I picked up my cards, looked at the pile of silent electronics in the corner, and sighed in disgust. If Judi and Rhonda didn’t hurry up and get this show on the road, she just might.
-o0o-
I sprawled out on the monster couch in the living room of our farmhouse rental. It had somehow ended up mine—the kid had taken the bedroom up under the rafters, and Rosie and Carly had claimed bedrooms on opposite ends of the second floor.
Which sounded like a cover story, but given how badly the floor up there creaked, I was pretty sure there weren’t a whole lot of midnight assignations happening. And if there were, they had my blessing and my fervent wish to know nothing.
I also fervently wished not to be awake at whatever awful predawn hour it was now. Poker had gone far into the night, but that hadn’t sent me off into immediate dreamland like I’d hoped. I was generally fairly rabid about sleeping through these hours because it was at times like this that my memories sometimes wandered to Johnny. Not the terrible, soul-sucking last couple of years as I watched him chase anything half my age, but the years before that. The good ones. The ones where we finished each other’s sentences and his guitar riffs and my voice melded in a way that I thought would never end.
