by Audrey Faye
“She didn’t.” Carly had settled down a little, but her fingers were still twitchy. “Rhonda’s the one who huddled behind the bitch with the knife and looked terrified.”
I saw it—the thing I had been watching for. A flicker of sympathy. He buried it fast, but I’d seen it.
He folded his arms across his chest. “Not my problem.”
Rosie eyeballed Rodney, mostly nicely, and spoke for the first time. “You have a chance to help a woman make the right choice.”
He raised an eyebrow that came straight from the streets. “Do your own dirty work.”
“Can’t. It isn’t me she pulled a knife on.” The sexy gypsy shrugged. “She needs a hand up, okay? And you have one to give.”
“Look.” His eyes were mad now, but his hands were restless on the table. “Nobody helped me get out of hell, okay? I hear stories about do-gooders like you, but all I ever got were tired social workers and burned-out teachers and beat cops with dead eyes. I pulled myself out of there, and poor little Rhonda can solve her own self-esteem issues and grow a pair of balls without any help from me.”
The words were mean and vicious, and any smart group of women would have beat it partway through the second sentence.
I sighed. The four of us clearly weren’t very smart.
“Maybe you didn’t get help.” The teenager in black cleared her throat diffidently. “But you give it.”
Rodney’s whole body tensed in the way that a lion tenses as its breakfast on four feet comes streaking by.
I totally wanted this guy fighting my battles with the IRS. I did not, however, want him munching on the kid.
“You do all that mentoring stuff with the kids at Browning Middle School.” Lelo sounded like a squeaky seven-year-old, but she was standing firm on her facts. “I found a thing the principal wrote where she said you had the mouth of a sailor and the heart of a bad-ass angel.”
Rodney turned mottled shades of purple. “You have no business stalking me.”
I wanted to meet the principal who could use “bad-ass” in a sentence. “Publicly available information on the Internet.” At least, I hoped so. Carly was breathing heavy over Lelo’s virtual shoulder, but even that might not keep one sixteen-year-old on the straight and narrow.
“I do some stuff, all right?” Our accountant was ready to punch someone in the nose. “That doesn’t mean I have to help some pathetic bitch who followed me into an alley.”
“Watch your language,” said Rosie mildly.
Rodney neared boiling point.
“Rhonda’s high school sweetheart used his fists on her.” Carly sounded like she was placing a fast-food order. “She finally left him, got out of town, and hooked up with a really nice guy. Who used way worse than his fists.” She leaned in. “Know what a cigarette burn feels like?”
He turned pale under the mottled purple.
“Her name isn’t Rhonda.” My partner kept right on trucking. “She’s lived in five towns in the last three years and she jumps every time a strange man gets within twenty feet of her.”
I was about to be sick to my stomach. Rodney wasn’t looking much better. “Where is he now—the guy who burned her?”
My partner leaned in. “He’s mine. We’ll find him and deal with him. But you know damn well that won’t make a difference unless she gets her head out of her ass and starts thinking straight.”
His face twisted into a sneer. “And you think she’ll listen to me?”
“Yeah, I do.” Carly leaned back and folded her arms. “You’re going to sit politely at a table and put on the face you use in board meetings with dumb clients and tell her all about what a good boy you grew up to be.”
Rodney’s sneer melted into confusion and then hot embarrassment. “What? No.”
“She needs to know she went after a good guy—that she fell for a line from your wife.”
His face froze. “Ex-wife.”
So much hurt. I hated it when people still loved abusive jerks, of any gender.
Carly’s eyes held exactly zero sympathy. “Sometimes we attach ourselves to shitty people.”
Rodney’s retort halted just before he let it fly—and then he carefully studied each of us at the table. First the kid, and then a long, appraising look at the sexy gypsy. A quick perusal of me—but not a dismissive one—and then back to the woman currently making his life miserable. “You’re not doing this for Rhonda. You don’t give a shit about some weak bitch. You want the one with the hard eyes.”
He was half right. “We want them both, but helping Rhonda’s non-negotiable.”
He flicked a look at me. “Why? None of you are weak.”
I wasn’t about to navigate that. The man had at least as much experience with mercy and retribution as I did, even if he denied it.
Carly laid a piece of paper on the table.
Rodney eyed it suspiciously. “What’s that?”
I didn’t know either—and I didn’t like it at all.
My partner met his gaze casually. “The number of the off-shore bank account where your wife hid all the money she stole from your retirement funds.”
He gaped at her. “How the hell did you track that?”
“Found it on the sidewalk.”
He blinked—and then added up the street math. “You’re sure.”
I sagged in relief. Those eyes weren’t going to turn my partner over to the cops.
Carly shrugged. “This piece of sidewalk’s usually pretty reliable. A good lawyer should be able to help you get the funds back.”
He nodded in slow motion. “Yeah. I know a guy.” He looked at my partner like she’d shapeshifted into a little green alien. “Why the hell didn’t you just show me this when you sat down? I’d have told that Rhonda person whatever you wanted.”
We were horse-trading for a different kind of favor. I leaned forward to get his attention again. “This is our way of saying thank you for doing the right thing.”
He snorted.
It was, but that wasn’t a kind of currency he was going to understand. I looked pointedly around the table. “And payment.”
His face got suspicious again. “Figured. For what?”
I looked a good man directly in the eyes. “For forgetting that you ever met us.”
He blinked, and then he looked at my three companions, all too easily remembered. Eventually, he looked back at me. “I don’t need any bank-account shit for that. And I’ll help you with the weak bitch. On one condition.”
That was interesting. I tried to imitate Rosie’s best poker face. “And what would that be?”
“If anyone ever asks you, I’m a stone-cold asshole.”
I looked him square in the eyes. “No.”
He looked entirely stunned. I had no idea what had made me do it.
Lelo leaned over and whispered just loud enough for everyone to hear. “Don’t argue—she’s a total hard-case.”
Rodney’s face almost cracked a smile.
17
I felt sandpaper attacking my eyelids as I tried to open them, a clear message that they damn well intended to stay closed. But I was sure I’d heard the door click, and that either meant my partner was back, or someone was invading our idyllic little farmhouse in the middle of the night and was about to bash my head in.
Either was a good reason to get my eyeballs working. “That you, Carly?”
She chuckled quietly in the dark. “No, it’s the alien dudes from the spaceship parked in the cornfield next door.”
That wasn’t corn the neighbors were growing, but a girl from Manhattan could be excused a little crop dyslexia. “If you do experiments on my brain, can you send it back requiring less caffeine to function?” There were probably a few other adjustments I wanted, but I was too groggy to think of them. I’d stayed up until Lelo and Rosie had finished their piece of Operation Judi, and I wasn’t nearly as young as they were.
“Go back to sleep.” Carly sounded amused, which was a good sign.
&nbs
p; “Did you find Rhonda’s asshole?” She’d found his trail in a town less than an hour away.
Nothing but quiet shuffling. I scraped one eye open, more awake now.
Carly finished pulling a sleek black sweater over her head. “Yeah. Sitting in a bar with an underage girl on his lap.”
She looked like a cat burglar, all sexy lines and dangerous stealth. And she would have wanted to tear off the asshole’s limbs. “You called the cops?” That had been our deal. The guy was wanted in five different jurisdictions for crimes that would put him away for a lot of years. We tried to save our energies for when the system didn’t work, or at least I did—my partner was sometimes harder to convince.
“Did. Got the young, sexy sheriff’s deputy out of bed and waited long enough to see him show up.”
She hadn’t stayed to watch them put cuffs on Rhonda’s jerkwad. “The deputy’s going to take care of the girl?”
She sat down on the chair facing me and nodded, eyes sad. “He seemed to know her. Treated her with respect—he’s a decent guy.”
If I knew my partner at all, she’d be tracking things at the sheriff’s office for the next week, making sure he stayed that way. I sighed and tried not to worry about the things we couldn’t change. “Sounds like a good night’s work.”
She shrugged. “I hope she’s worth it.”
My partner didn’t like Rhonda much. Carly knew what it was to be angry, but she had no idea what it was to be weak—to take the easy road because it was the only one you could muster up enough energy for. “Even if she isn’t, you got one girl out of that guy’s clutches tonight, and all the ones who might have ended up there in the next decade or two.” Rhonda’s ex had been pretty easy to find online, and he had a nasty pattern of trolling for teenage girls.
“Yeah.” Carly slumped back against the squishy chair. “Sometimes this job is really depressing.”
I smiled into the dark, muggy night. “And sometimes you sit at the table with an accountant and watch him squirm because he can’t get out of being one of the good guys.”
“Huh.” She grinned in the shadows. “I forgot about that part.”
Remembering was part of my job. I was our memory bank—the hoarder of the good moments, ready to drag them out of storage when the dark got too suffocating. Kind of like being a songwriter, only without the music. “He hated that we saw right through his tough-guy act.”
“It’s not an act.” Carly sounded pensive. “It’s just not all of who he is.”
I raised an eyebrow that she couldn’t see, pretty sure she wasn’t talking about Rodney anymore. “Sounds like you did a lot of thinking tonight.”
“Some.”
We weren’t sitting here chatting in the middle of the night because she’d had a couple of passing thoughts. “Land anywhere good?”
“I figure we’re complicated. Lots of parts and not all of them make sense together.”
That was a pretty radical point of view from someone who liked all her French fries to be the same length.
“Like you—you’re mostly this quiet person who puts on your flannel and does a good job and doesn’t want anyone to notice.” A small laugh floated into the still, humid air. “But you also want to punch Judi in the nose.”
I had no idea how this was suddenly about me, but it made the couch feel a hundred times lumpier. “She deserves to be punched in the nose.”
“So does Rhonda.” Carly shrugged and slung her legs over the padded arm of her chair. “But you want to help her because you see more of yourself in her than you should.”
Next time I was keeping my eyes shut. “I want to help her because it’s the best way to punch Judi in the nose.”
She smiled. “Yeah, that too.”
This conversation was starting to annoy me. “Did you figure out anything about yourself, smartypants?” It hadn’t been me angsting all week about my purpose in life and what the hell to do about a certain persistent gypsy.
“Maybe.” Her voice was a little mysterious and a lot far away. “I’m still thinking.”
That sounded alarming. I shut both eyes and snuggled more deeply into my pillow. I’d contemplate alarming in the morning. After coffee.
18
It was Monday morning, and this assignment was about to hit its high point. Usually that leaves me a little at lost ends. Instead, I was wedged into a corner of a farmhouse kitchen pouring batter into a waffle iron Lelo had procured from who knows where.
Pouring carefully. My first attempt had come out with five sides and a missing corner, and the kid had tied herself into a minor Chinese knot. I moved the ladle around in a square, as instructed, and ignored Rosie’s quiet chuckle at the cutting board beside me.
Carly had gotten herself out of kitchen duty by being the last person up, and by running around the Internet checking in on Judi fallout. Rosie and Lelo had been very busy elves late into the night. My partner looked up briefly. “Nice work—her ads are all down now.”
“Too bad,” said the kid cheerfully. “Then fewer people will see what you did to her site.”
That had been Rosie’s idea. If Judi went to her website, she would see her old version. If anyone else did, they would see a bunch of cute kittens holding up a This woman is a scam artist. RUN! sign. I was unconvinced on the kittens, but all the other architects of this plan had assured me that everything on the Internet sells better if it’s said by cute felines.
Rosie looked up from her meticulously sliced strawberries. “How are the forum posts doing?”
My partner scowled, mostly for form. “I’m going to put parental controls on both your computers.”
While Carly had been tracking Rhonda’s ex and I’d been snoring on the couch, Lelo and Rosie had taken to the online airwaves and followed Judi all over the Internet, replying to forum threads and generally seeding things with enough innuendo and doubt to make anyone think twice about checking out her services.
Carly was reading her screen and muttering. “There’s a whole discussion here where they think she has a secret identity as a pole dancer. Or possibly a post office worker.”
Lelo grinned. “That part was my idea.”
Online communities were quick to grow rumors—and even quicker to protect an attack on their own. Kind of like small towns, but without the checks and balances of having to look someone in the eye at the grocery store. “Any alien abduction theories?”
“Oooh.” Rosie handed me a fat, juicy strawberry. “We totally forgot about that one.”
It wouldn’t matter. Effective as of this morning, Judi had no ads, no audience, and a Google search for “lesbian assassins” was about to pull up enough lurid material to fuel a tabloid for a decade.
And now we were going to take away her Rhonda.
I looked over at my partner, glad to see her eyes clear. She’d found more than Rhonda’s ex in the dark of night. “Is all this stuff going to make it a problem for people to find us?”
“Never has.” Carly didn’t seem worried.
“We didn’t want to make a big deal about you guys existing.” Lelo looked concerned.
That part had been my one contribution. Much as I wanted the world to know that we were not the pretenders, clearing that up meant turning a mirror on us, and that couldn’t be allowed to happen, even for the soothing of our egos. Most especially for the soothing of our egos. “We’ll just have to live with people confusing us for a while.”
Rosie set her cutting board and its mountain of sliced strawberries down at the table. “You’re not chickenshits and you pick actual assholes to take into alleyways. People will figure it out.”
Lelo was nodding furiously. “And you have ethics. And you know how to use a knife.”
One of us did. I looked at our two cheerleaders, embarrassed and oddly pleased.
“Nah, that’s not it.” Carly caught a strawberry in mid-flight and munched it. “The difference isn’t knife skills or ethics or marketing or any of that stuff.”
I eyed her, surprised and glad—the last go-round of this particular conversation had twisted my insides up in knots.
Lelo waited until my partner had finished chewing and then waved an impatient hand.
“It’s about the people.” Carly ducked her head and spoke softly at her computer screen. “We’re different because I found Jane and then we found the two of you.”
She didn’t see Lelo’s cheeks go pink with pleasure, or Rosie’s charmed, considering look. But I did.
Carly had it right, but she didn’t have the whole story. Friends weren’t just making us better assassins—the whole windswept dirt lot of our future was getting pretty damn interesting. Even my hermit-crab heart was the tiniest bit curious.
I reached over and fed it a strawberry. “Let’s get these waffles on the road. We have a job to finish.”
-o0o-
We arrived at Rhonda’s apartment door, a sad gray metal slab in a gloomy hallway. I shuddered—even a belly full of waffles and strawberries couldn’t hold off the creeping dreariness of this place. It was probably a good place to hide if you were scared of life.
I’d somehow been saved from such a fate.
Carly rapped her knuckles on the dented gray. “I’d kill myself if I lived here for longer than a week.”
I grinned, feeling the dreariness flee. “Just one of the many reasons I love you.”
Rhonda choose that moment to open her door—and came face-to-face with two chuckling assassins. She turned pasty white and collapsed back against a wall, quivering like jelly. And then she stopped and just stared at the floor, a woman ready to submit quietly to whatever horror came next.
I wanted to shake her silly.
Carly stuck her arm through Rhonda’s and dragged her bodily out the door. “There’s a greasy diner around the corner. Let’s go have some breakfast—we need to talk to you.”
If my partner didn’t dial it back some, Rhonda wasn’t going to be able to get any words out around her chattering teeth.
It was a short, painful walk, punctuated by my stomach’s noise as it contemplated bacon and the occasional moan from the woman we’d kidnapped. I tried not to kick at things in frustration as we walked—I wanted her to put up a fight. We were going to help her, but dammit, I wanted to be pissed off at her for a while longer first.
