Authors: Penny McCall
All that stuff ran through his mind, but there was a bigger question mark lodged in his brain. Was his job really worth it? He’d started out with the same confidence he’d begun every assignment. Now here it was, day four with Aubrey Sullivan, and he wasn’t sure anymore if he’d survive the contractee let alone the hit men, and he was beginning to think fondly of retirement. Being around Aubrey Sullivan was downright discouraging.
The pump clicked off a dime short. Jack fed in the last bit of gas a penny at a time, one eye on the pump, the other on the door. Still no Aubrey. He blew the car’s horn. The clerk held up a finger and checked some sort of display screen behind him. Aubrey never even looked out the window.
Jack blew the horn again, his temper starting to simmer even though he knew that was what she wanted. “What took you so long?” he asked her when she was about halfway to the car.
“I was trying to convince Joe you kidnapped me.”
“Joe?”
“Joe. The guy in the store.”
“You mean the guy who watched you walk in there willingly and pay for the gas? He’d have to be an idiot . . .”
She grinned, and Jack felt like the idiot.
“Joe was studying for a history test. The Civil War.”
Jack didn’t give a crap about the Civil War, but he definitely hadn’t learned anything from recent history. Like not to bandy words with an egghead librarian. He got in the car, knowing she’d have to follow suit if she wanted to keep talking to him. If? What was he thinking, if?
“Some of the battle sites are right around here,” she said, sliding in the passenger side, never pausing to draw breath. “I suggested he visit them instead of just reading dry facts in a textbook.”
“You told him not to read?”
“I suggested he supplement his reading.”
“I thought you agreed not to have any unnecessary conversations.”
“Did you actually think your version of necessary would be the same as mine?”
Reading his expressions was a skill she’d possessed from early in the game, and the one he was wearing was nothing new. She sank down in her seat and crossed her arms. Jack thought about asking if she’d really tried to rat him out to the gas station clerk, but opted to let quiet librarians lay. He pulled out of the gas station in the opposite direction he ultimately meant to go, then circled around on side streets. He’d filled the tank, but he only drove them about five miles before he pulled the car off the road and behind a thick screen of underbrush.
“Now what are you doing?” Aubrey asked.
He sighed, missing the silence. “The cops are probably looking for this car by now.”
“I thought you picked this car because it looked like it belonged to someone who wouldn’t miss it. A senior citizen, you said, who didn’t go out that much.” She gave the old Cadillac a once-over, spending extra time on the mile of hood and the big white-leather bucket seats. Then she looked at him, making it clear that she’d formulated a different theory, one having to do with the reason he carried a .45 instead of a .40-caliber Glock.
“It’s also very recognizable.”
“Is that what all that stuff at the gas station was about? You sent me in to pay so I could be identified?”
“It’s called misdirection. Your friend Joe can tell them we filled up and washed the windshield like people who weren’t planning to ditch a car after five miles. And he was watching you out the window. He’ll tell the cops what direction we went.”
“I could have casually mentioned it,” Aubrey said, “if I ever knew your plans in advance.”
“I thought it was better not to trust your acting abilities.”
“I’m great at hiding my feelings.”
Jack didn’t laugh, but it was a chore to hold it in. “You’re lousy at hiding your feelings,” he said, climbing out of the car.
She got out, too, resting her hands on the roof of the car, her feelings written all over her face.
“Your feelings are written all over your face,” Jack said. “Not that it stops you from describing them. And don’t even get me started on body language.” It was her mind he couldn’t predict. Her mind was like her backpack, chock-full of useless flotsam and mysterious odds and ends that seemed to have no useful purpose but somehow managed to come through every crisis intact. “Being around you makes me understand why they name tornadoes after women. I should probably cut you loose and let you suck the hit men into your damage path.”
“You’re the one who likes to blow things up and shoot people.”
“That’s what makes you such a threat. You look harmless. Completely innocent men are taken in by the big brown eyes and the clueless attitude and then
wham!
Something happens. The hit men were around you for ten minutes and one of them got shot, you totaled an F-250, and I don’t have to remind you about the injuries I’ve suffered.”
Aubrey opened her mouth but nothing came out so she snapped it closed and glared at him, her fists opening and closing.
“Go ahead, you know you want to do it.”
She fought it for a few more seconds before she gave in, both middle fingers flipping up, aimed in his direction.
“Feel better?”
“Yes.” She shouldered her backpack and set off walking, never once looking over her shoulder, apparently expecting him to trot along after her like Bessie. And of course, what other choice did he have?
“Where are we going and how long will it take us to get there?” she asked once they’d fought clear of the underbrush and hit the edge of the road.
Jack took her by the shoulders and turned her right. “I guess there’s no chance you’ll trust me at some point.”
“I just want to know how long we have to walk this time. I’m sick of walking. I’m so far past hungry my stomach wouldn’t know what to do with food if it actually encountered any, and it feels like my joints have been injected with school paste. My hair is filthy, my clothes are still full of dried mud from the river, and they chafe. I’m a mess.”
Not from his vantage point, Jack thought. He had to be sex deprived when the sway of those narrow hips could get a rise out of him.
“And something smells,” she said in a voice that recaptured his attention and killed his libido all at once.
“Is this you hiding your feelings?”
She looked over her shoulder at him.
Jack sniffed his armpits. “It’s not me. I’m downwind.”
Her eyes slid up and he could see the exact minute when she realized the light breeze was blowing her hair back in his direction.
Her face went red and she whipped around, flipping her backpack off her shoulder at the same time. “It’s not like I’ve been able to change my clothes or take a shower in the last four days,” she muttered, digging around and coming out with a small bottle.
The overspray peppered Jack in the face. “Is that bug repellent?”
“Why? Do you have an irresistible urge to get as far away from me as possible?”
“Yes, but I wouldn’t call it irresistible since I’ve been ignoring it for four days now.”
She heaved a sigh so big he wondered how she got all that air in her skinny little body. “Is there any chance we’ll end up somewhere with a shower or bathtub or even a kitchen sink? Any place with running water will do.”
“How about right here?”
The sky opened up with a crack of thunder loud enough to make Aubrey jump, dumping rain like somebody somewhere had flipped a switch.
Aubrey let her shoulders slump, just for a second, before she straightened her spine with a determination Jack couldn’t help but respect. She irritated the hell out of him most of the time, but he had to admit that some of the qualities that drove him crazy were going to help her get through this ordeal. Optimism, for starters.
“Okay,” she said, hunching her shoulders against the rain running off her hair and down the back of her jacket, “so I wanted to take a shower and wash my clothes. I got my wish. Any chance I’ll get to be dry soon?”
“I know some people,” he said.
“Do these people have a phone? Could they possibly come and pick us up?”
Would she ever learn when to shut up? “Your last twenty-four hours consisted of sleeping while I drove all night. And before that you got to lounge in the warm police station and the cab of a truck—”
“I had to sit next to Junior.”
“You
paid
to sit next to Junior,” he reminded her.
She stopped, started to turn around before her shoulders slumped again. “I’m sorry, Jack, I know I’m whining, but I haven’t slept—really slept—in three days.”
Jack could hear the exhaustion in her voice, with a fine edge of hysteria thrown in. She sounded pitiful, and she looked it, too. Hard as he tried not to let her get to him, he felt sorry for her. She’d been through a lot. For a skinny bookworm who’d never been closer to real danger than a television screen, she was holding up pretty well. Better than pretty well, he allowed. It took nerves of steel to keep your head when someone was shooting at you—or a level of belief in your own invulnerability that verged on stupidity.
“Just concentrate on your feet instead of your mouth and we’ll be there in no time,” he said, which had the double advantage of putting her in her place and shutting her up. Or maybe she was too busy worrying about the neighborhood to come up with a snappy retort.
As they wound their way into Charlotte, the clean suburban neighborhoods with their tidy landscaping gave way to older streets lined with mismatched buildings from different eras, then even older buildings with alleys between them. And then the alleys got scary, deep, and gloomy under the overcast sky. The rain gathered in oily puddles and resurrected noxious smells from the Dumpsters. At least Jack hoped it was the Dumpsters. The alley was lined with mysterious piles that could have been garbage bags or sleeping homeless people. Or dead bodies.
Aubrey stayed close, shooting looks over her shoulder and jumping at every little sound. Jack felt right at home.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” she asked, her hand clutching the back of his shirt as he cut down an alley that seemed a little worse than all the rest.
Jack answered by banging a fist on what seemed to be a brick wall at the end of the alley, but sounded hollow and woody, then banging again when the first got no response.
A gruff, annoyed voice piped up from the other side of the wall, “Keep your pants on.”
“Sure thing,” Jack called out. “Wouldn’t want to make you jealous, Tiny.”
“Jack?” The gate crashed open and a bear of a man, as tall as Jack and twice as wide, came lumbering out. “Jack Mitchell, you obnoxious son of a bitch.”
“That’s what I think of him, too,” Aubrey said, watching the two men go into a male back-pounding hug that would have put lesser men on the ground.
“You look like hell,” Tiny said, putting Jack at arm’s length and taking in the puffy red-rimmed eyes, the Bessie-mutilated pants, and everything in between. “How many attacked you and how big were they?”
One, and a scrawny one at that, Jack thought, not glancing at Aubrey.
For once she held her tongue, and Tiny was a man who knew how to respect a silence. “Who’s this little thing?”
“Aubrey,” Jack said. “She’s with me.”
“You usually like your women with a bit more meat on them, Jack. This one’s kind of spindly.”
“Trust me, she has the mouth of someone twice her size.”
The big guy gave her a leisurely up and down that came along with a slow, suggestive smile.
“He means I talk too much,” Aubrey clarified.
Tiny stared at her for a second, then let out a booming laugh, clapping Jack on the shoulder. “Woman’s doing all that talking, you aren’t keeping her busy enough.”
“It’s not a personal thing, Tiny, it’s a professional one.”
“If all she does is talk, I hope you’re not paying her by the hour.”
“I’m not paying her at all.” Jack looked at her for the first time since Tiny had opened the gate. “It’s the job, Tiny. Mine, not hers.”
Tiny looked at her again, eyes and mouth going hard. Quick thinking might not be his strong suit, but apparently loyalty was.
“She’s not a criminal,” Jack said before Aubrey could do more than take a step back. “I can’t tell you anything more, except we’ve been on the road for four days now.”
Tiny held Jack’s gaze for a beat. Jack hadn’t exactly asked for hospitality, and Tiny didn’t appear eager to offer any. Aubrey was weighing the merits of slogging through the rain for who knew how long before she could get warm and dry against begging for help from a man who looked like an older, meaner version of Jack.
“Girl looks all tuckered out,” Tiny finally said before she could make up her mind. And he opened the gate and ushered her through. With a hand on her ass.
She looked over her shoulder, Jack’s grin telling her he’d seen Tiny cop a feel and didn’t have the slightest urge to intervene. She wasn’t sure whether to be angry or relieved, and then she reached back to pull Tiny’s hand up to her waist, discovered that her fingers didn’t fit all the way around his wrist, and decided to be flattered instead.
They walked into a wide, sky-ceilinged courtyard that was neat as a pin. Even the cracked, potholed concrete, despite an occasional oil stain, had been swept clean. Motorcycles lined the walls on three sides, some of them with the long front forks—choppers, she’d read somewhere. Others were shorter in the front, carrying dual saddlebags along the back of the seat—Harley-Davidsons, the cycle of choice for biker gangs all the way back to
Easy Rider
. And then she noticed a different brand here and there, mostly at the far end of the space. Some of them were in pieces, others still intact but with tags hanging from the front handlebar.