Working Stiff tr-1

by Rachel Caine

  Bryn laughed, and it sounded a little wild, a little despairing. “I am so very far from sexy right now, Annie. And how did we get on this subject again?”

  “Because you wouldn’t discuss dinner?”

  “Well, I’ll discuss it now. I don’t have much time, though. I’m sorry, but I have to go out tonight. An appointment. I need to be there by eight thirty.”

  “Cool.” Annie squeezed her and let go. “We can go out tomorrow night. I made bruschetta and pasta primavera; I walked over to the store and stocked your fridge. You’ll love it.”

  And Bryn did. For the first time in a long time—since before that awful moment when her whole life had ended and restarted—she tasted food, really tasted it. Crisp, nutty bread, fresh chopped tomato, basil, garlic, balsamic vinegar, oil … and the pasta, perfectly cooked al dente. Annie offered wine, but Bryn refused, on the grounds of driving. They talked. They laughed. They mocked each other. They did dishes and splashed each other, half out of spite, half out of joy.

  Sisters.

  Bryn felt the darkness and horror slip away, just for a while.

  It all passed in far too short a time. By eight, they were sitting on the couch again, and Annie was flipping channels on Bryn’s TV. “What time do you think you’ll be back?” she asked. She flipped her hair back over her shoulders. She’d showered, and her hair had fallen into golden brown ringlets, perfectly shaped. When Bryn was ten and Annie was eight, Bryn had given her sister a deliberately awful haircut with a pair of safety scissors out of sheer envy—and in truth, she still hadn’t quite gotten over coveting those curls.

  “Why? You going to wait up?”

  “Are you going out on a date?”

  “I wish. No.”

  “Are you going to be draining body fluids out of some poor dead person?”

  “No, and God, you are morbid.”

  “Me? You’re the one with the job in the death business.” Annie made air quotes around it. “I’m sorry, and I don’t want to judge, but it just seems really weird to me.”

  “It’s not weird. It’s …” Bryn remembered Riley’s words, back in the prep room. “It’s something sacred, in a way. We’re the last people to touch someone in this world, and that’s important. We’re all going there, in the end. Wouldn’t you like there to be someone there to care for you?”

  Annie turned toward her, eyes wide. She didn’t speak. Finally, she settled against the cushions and refocused her attention on the TV. “So you don’t know when you’ll be back.”

  “God, Annie, are you planning on throwing a party while I’m gone? No, I don’t know. A couple of hours, probably. Stop questioning me.”

  “You always ask me these things.”

  “I’m your older sister. I’m supposed to.”

  “So who are you meeting? Your mystery man?” Annie nudged her with her shoulder. Bryn nudged back, harder.

  “None of your business.”

  “Oh, come on. If I’ve never met him, what does it matter?”

  “He’s … complicated,” Bryn said slowly. “And very … complicated.”

  “You are the worst. Okay, just answer this. Is he hot?”

  “I don’t know.” She didn‘t, honestly. He was; then he wasn‘t. She didn’t know how to view Patrick McCallister objectively at all. “I suppose so.”

  “What’s his best feature?”

  Annie probably wanted her to say his ass, or his abs, or his eyes, or something like that, but Bryn thought for a second and said, “His certainty.”

  Her sister laughed outright. “You are insane—you know that? No wonder you can’t get yourself laid properly.”

  For answer, Bryn grabbed the remote and put on a reality show she knew her sister hated, and as Annie breathlessly chased her around to grab the remote, she knew, deep down, that it was all going to be okay. Somehow, it was all going to be okay.

  It had to be.

  Eight thirty came far too soon.

  By nine thirty, sitting with Joe Fideli in his black sedan, she wasn’t so sure of a positive outcome. McCallister was in the backseat, hidden behind the tinted windows; he’d changed the white tee for a black knit shirt, but kept the jeans. She’d expected him to be … different, but from the moment she’d entered the car at the mortuary, she’d sensed that McCallister’s armor was back up, and in full force. He was polite, but cool and slick as glass.

  “I don’t like this,” Bryn said. “What if he wanted me to come alone?”

  Joe shrugged. “I think it’d be more suspicious if you didn’t bring your bodyguard. If he’d meant for you to come alone he’d have said so. After all, you’re a woman, no offense to your self-defense skills, and this is a nasty part of town at a dangerous time of night. You brought backup. That’s acceptable behavior to him.”

  “You act like you know him.” She meant it as a joke, but as soon as she said it, her brain fired off into wild, improbable directions, and she took in a sudden breath.

  Joe interpreted all that flawlessly. “You think I’m the leak from Pharmadene?” He laughed outright. In the backseat, McCallister echoed it. “Way to think out of the box, Bryn, but no. No way I could pull it off, and I got no use for anybody who’d make money this way anyway. Patrick knows that.”

  “You know the system. And you could rip off the drugs; don’t tell me you couldn’t,” she said, obscurely offended. “You’d probably get a kick out of doing it, too—stick it to the evil corporation and all.”

  That sobered him quickly. “Pharmadene’s got some rot in it, no question about that, but it’s also full of smart, idealistic people. They save lives, Bryn.”

  “I saw today what they do. It’s hideous.”

  “This thing, this drug … it’s not what they do. Or did. Returné was an accident that came up while they were trying to find a way to nonsurgically remove cancers. Now it’s like a cancer of its own inside the company, eating away. And I—” He stopped himself—or, more accurately, McCallister’s hand clamping down on his shoulder stopped him. Joe swallowed the rest of it. “I just think Pharmadene’s got some good in it,” he finished, which she was sure wasn’t what he’d intended. “I think you should give it a chance, Bryn.”

  “You really think I have a choice?” Bryn muttered. “So am I doing this or not?”

  “Yes,” McCallister said from the backseat. “It’s time. All you need to do is get out, walk into the building, and leave the bag in the first open place you see, then come right back. I don’t care what you see or what you hear, you leg it back here as fast as you can. If you take more than two minutes before you’re back in our field of vision, Joe goes in after you.”

  “Guns blazing,” Joe added. “And nobody wants that. Gets real messy. On the upside, if I shoot you, it really doesn’t matter.”

  “I thought you were on my side.”

  He winked at her. “Good luck.”

  Bryn took a deep breath, nodded to both of them, and got out of the passenger side. She retrieved the black canvas bag full of cash and began walking. She’d dressed practically—dark pants, dark sweatshirt, running shoes, her hair tied back in a sloppy knot at the nape of her neck—but even so, she suddenly felt very exposed, very vulnerable. Her gun was under the sweatshirt, one zipper pull away. And as Joe had so not-kindly said, she could take a bullet if she had to and survive.

  So why was she so damned nervous?

  Because I feel like a mousetrap tester, she thought. And I’m the mouse.

  Not all of San Diego was shiny and tourist friendly; this area was inky dark, very few lights, and most of these feeble security lighting trying to protect what was surely a losing investment for some poor real estate company. Everything was graffiti covered, weed overgrown, and littered with trash and broken bottles. She felt the crunch of ground glass under her feet as she walked.

  The address from her e-mail was on the right, behind a rusty chain-link fence with a No Trespassing sign on it. The sign had been defaced, mangled, and shot three times, an
d right below it someone had chopped a gash in the links big enough to squeeze through, if you were reasonably small and didn’t care too much about tetanus. Bryn sucked it up and scraped by. The fence snapped back with a dry rattle, and a random breeze pushed trash past her feet in a postmodern snowdrift of cups, plastic bottles, and torn paper.

  The building she was facing had started life as some kind of a factory for a product probably made with great success now in Asia; signs were long gone, and the paint was faded and covered in a thicket of colorful but also fading neon tags.

  Bryn watched her corners, just the way they’d taught her in urban combat training, and kept walking toward the dark hole of the entrance. It used to have an accordion gate across the doors, but the doors were gone, and the security barrier was ripped off and dangling by one hinge.

  Bryn heard a stirring inside the building, and paused at the threshold. This wouldn’t even be a third choice for the homeless, but she still felt stiff with tension. Rats, she thought. This place was probably a playground for them.

  Now that she’d stepped into the mouth of the beast, there was no particular reason to stay stealthy; she switched on the penlight she’d brought with her. The narrow, stark white beam didn’t make her feel any better; if anything, it only increased her anxiety about what was in the ink-black edges of her vision. In and out, she thought, like a mantra. Get in; get out.

  The clock was running.

  The main entry room was large and had four doorways leading out. There was a metal desk left abandoned in the approximate middle of the room, bolted in place. It listed to one side like a sinking ship and was covered with rat droppings, trash, empty bottles, broken syringes … the typical treasure trove of an abandoned building. Everything stank like a molding sewer.

  Bryn put the bag on the desk and turned to go.

  “Hey,” said a soft voice from the shadows.

  She spun, pointing the flashlight, but the voice echoed weirdly in the empty room, and she couldn’t pinpoint where it had come from.

  “Hey,” the whisper came again, closer.

  Screw it. Bryn unzipped her sweatshirt and pulled her gun. The weight of it made her feel less off balance, less vulnerable, even though she knew that was an illusion; she’d seen comrades chewed up by small-arms fire even through ballistic nylon vests. Human beings were always vulnerable.

  Not that she was legally considered human anymore.

  The voice seemed to come from behind her this time, startlingly close. “Hey, sugar, where you goin’?”

  Bryn spun, gun in a firing stance, just as something lunged at her from the darkness on her left. The man skidded to a stumbling halt, the muzzle pressed to his face.

  “I’m leaving, sugar,” she said. “Sit your ass down on the floor, cross-legged, hands behind your head. Now.”

  He sank down and complied without another word. Homeless, she guessed, and definitely high, from the way his pupils failed to contract in her flashlight beam. He was wearing faded surplus military khakis under layers of coats and dirt-stiff scarves. ‘“Sup?” he mumbled. “Just tryin’ to be friendly.”

  “Yeah, I can see how friendly you want to be by the bulge in your pants. Just your way of saying hi? Stay down.” Bryn took three giant steps back, and then paused. She was leaving a hundred thousand in cash sitting there with a homeless would-be rapist. If she turned her back, he and it would surely be gone. “Okay, I’m going to need you to get up. We’re going to take a walk.”

  “A walk?” He went from menacing to pathetic in the blink of an eye, and raised his hands over his head. “Please don’t kill me; I didn’t mean nothin’!”

  “I’m not going to kill you. Stand up. I can’t leave you here.”

  “It’s my place. I got stuff. I leave it, it gets took.”

  “Get up, now, or I promise you won’t need stuff ever again.”

  He scrambled up, awkward with fear, and she knew this wasn’t the first time he’d had a gun pointed at him. His head was tucked down, his hands trembling, and his posture was totally submissive.

  “Walk,” she said, and circled around so that his path was clear and not within grabbing distance of her.

  Her captive shambled out, hands raised, and she followed, careful not to close the distance as he slowed down. “Move. Head for the fence.” He glanced back, and she noticed something strange about him.

  His eyes. They didn’t look right. Still dilated, but …

  Contacts. He was wearing some kind of costume contacts.

  This was him. The one collecting the money. Maybe even the mystery caller himself. It was a great disguise, and she’d almost completely fallen for it.

  “Wait,” she said, but that tipped him off that the game was up, and he dodged, blindingly fast, out of the beam of her flashlight.

  She lost him.

  Bryn switched the light off—had to, to use the starlight effectively—but it took time for her eyes to adjust to the change, and in the second or two required, he just … vanished.

  Bryn backed up toward the building, then plunged inside and turned the penlight on to illuminate the desk.

  The bag was gone.

  The whisper came again, raw and amused. “I think I like you, sugar. You can handle yourself.”

  “Show yourself!” she yelled. “I don’t do business with jackasses in clown makeup!”

  She got nothing in reply but echoes, but she heard a scrape from a side passage. Her blood was pounding in her head, and she knew the smart thing to do was withdraw, regroup, wait for backup … but he was going to get away clean if she did. I had him, she thought. I had my gun in his face.

  She also knew that she’d never be able to identify him. She’d seen what he wanted her to see—the filth, the straggly hair, the clothes, the contacts hiding his real eye color. First rule of disguise was to distract, and he’d done it brilliantly, right down to the submissive body language.

  There was another scrape, behind her, and she whirled with her gun ready and braced. She wasn’t going to take another chance, not this time….

  And she barely stopped herself from putting a bullet center mass in Joe Fideli’s chest.

  He held his hands out to the sides, his gun pointed up, until she came off the shooting stance. She started to speak, but he shook his head, and she fell back into military hand signals to show him where their suspect had gone. He pointed at the penlight, and she clicked it off, and for a moment she felt claustrophobic, swarmed by the dark, until her eyes adjusted enough to make out shadows and shapes.

  Then Fideli went in the direction she’d indicated. He moved like the very best combat soldiers she’d worked with, or watched—smooth, calm, no wasted motions. He had some kind of extremely advanced training, whether it was Army Rangers or Navy SEALs or Marine Recon…. Bryn felt unavoidably clumsy next to him, but she kept up as he glided through the hallway, stepping over and around obstacles and trash as best she could. There was a faint clink from somewhere up ahead, off to the right—a bottle rolling? Fideli held up a clenched fist, and she stopped, nerves crawling. After a few seconds, he indicated for her to wait, and he glided a few more steps ahead, checking the exposed point where the hallway emptied into the next room.

  Gunfire shattered the glassy silence. Fideli hit the floor, return-firing from a prone position, and Bryn decked it, too, to avoid any ricochets. It was over in a couple of seconds. Her ears were still ringing from the hammer blows of the shots, but she heard running feet somewhere beyond.

  Fideli stayed in firing position, but he keyed a throat mike and said, “He’s on the move, heading for the north fence—” He coughed, and rolled over on his back. “And I took one,” he added. “Call nine-one-one, Bryn.”

  She saw the dark stain of blood on the filthy floor, and for a second she couldn’t react at all—and then it all snapped together, and she flung herself across to him and pulled his jacket back, then ripped open his shirt.

  “Be gentle,” he said. “Got to”—a pause for
an ominously wet cough—“explain to Kylie later—”

  “Shut up.” Bryn fumbled for her phone and hit the programmed button for McCallister. He answered on the first ring. “Fideli’s down; he took a round in the shoulder but I think it bounced; he’s got a lung wound.” Time was of the essence; she knew that. Depending on the size and location of the puncture to the lung, it could collapse quickly or slowly, but it was bound to happen. “Get in here.”

  “I can’t,” McCallister said. He sounded way too calm. “Calling nine-one-one now.”

  “But—”

  “Handle it, Bryn. Keep him alive until they get there.”

  “Wait!” But McCallister had hung up on her, damn him. She dropped the phone and began ripping up the clean portion of Fideli’s shirt to make a pressure pad for his shoulder; it was freely bleeding but not pumping, so it was unlikely the bullet had hit an artery. Internally was another matter; the bullet could have done terrible things on the bounce. No way to tell.

  His color was fading, but that was a normal shock reaction. She pressed the wadding of cloth into place, and he winced, turned his head, and spit blood. Not much, though. Not as much as she’d feared.

  “Pat call nine-one-one?” he asked. His breathing sounded labored and damp, but not yet critical.

  “Yes. I thought he was your friend.”

  “He is. But he’s got a job to do.” Another hitch in his breath, but it might have just been a pain reaction; she felt him stiffen, then relax a little. “Should have worn a vest.”

  “Yes. We both should have.”

  “Next time, eh?” He coughed and reached up to pat her hand where it pressed against the wound. “Good job, Bryn.”

  “What, getting you shot?” Her heart was hammering now, and fear was creeping in. “Don’t die on me, Joe. I don’t want to face your kids.”

  “Ought to be more afraid of Kylie,” he said, and coughed. This time, there was a lot of blood—oh, Jesus—and she heard distressed breath sounds in his right lung when she pressed her ear to his chest. “Going to be one of those damn tension pneumo things. Check jacket pocket.”

  She did, fumbling quickly, and pulled out … a silver tube with a seal. Her drug, which he kept with him in case of her distress. “Joe? Do you want me to give this to you? Will it help?”