Four Weeks Ago
There are no lights down here, but the city’s hazy glow is plenty bright for me. In the dark, every other sense is sharper. That’s why Fitzpatrick used to make us drill blindfolded. Shoot blindfolded. Swim blindfolded.
Each sound is more meaningful. Each smell more potent. Even in so built up an area as this town outside Boston, the night reveals more mysteries than the day. From here, I can hear the ripples in the Charles River. And I can smell the alcohol on my companion. That was a bad idea of his—drinking before this confrontation.
“We had a deal.” My voice echoes off the concrete walls surrounding us. They’re covered in graffiti and river slime. Broken glass glimmers by my feet, and plastic bottles mingle with fast food wrappers. Beer and orange soda and probably piss mix with the fishy river reek and stench of refineries.
I feel like I’m in a bad movie, the kind Chase watches, in which terrible things happen to good people, and smart people act stupid so the movie can claim a plot, and stuff blows up when physics is quite clear that such an explosion would never happen in real life. They’re the kind of movies I never got to watch at the camp, and I’m okay with that. I don’t really like them.
I like feeling as if I’m in one even less. But I have to do what I have to do. I have a plan.
“The deal’s off,” my companion says.
Great. I want to get back to campus and sleep. As it is, the trains stopped an hour ago. I have a long run ahead of me.
“There’s no reward for being honest, is there?” I take my backpack off. “I should know better than that in my line of work.”
The guy snorts. He clearly shaves his head to hide his pattern baldness, and he has a slight beer gut. No gun. It wouldn’t fit under his size-too-small jacket. Thanks to Fitzpatrick’s training, I could gut him with my dorm room key. But I’m not that sort of person. Not anymore.
“Your line of work?” he repeats. “You’re fourteen.”
“Nineteen, jackass, and you’re not helping your case. Stick to the deal. You got yours.”
He pulls out a switchblade. “I’m renegotiating. Be a good girl now.”
“Yeah, I guess I will be when you put it that way.” I toss the backpack between us, making sure it lands in a dry spot. I don’t need the money inside it—money I just busted my ass to acquire—getting wet. There’s no place to dry it in my dorm room without Audrey seeing it.
A car drives by, and the headlights catch the steel blade of the guy’s knife for a second before the light vanishes. Beneath the bridge, no one can see us. That’s why I stopped here.
“Good choice.” He keeps the knife out as he goes to pick up my pack, so he’s not as dumb as he looks.
Then again, he does look pretty dumb. What kind of idiot do you have to be to double-cross someone like me? After I’ve given you a sample of what I’m capable of? Pure humans are exhausting in their illogic.
The backpack’s ten feet away. I wait for him to reach down to grab it, smiling at him, because he doesn’t take his eyes off me the whole time. Nope, he’s not a total idiot. Just too greedy for his own good.
“Greed’s not a mortal sin, in my opinion. But if you take a go at me with that knife, all bets are off.”
“What?” He bends for the strap, and his balance and attention shift.
I move. He doesn’t have time to drop the backpack. My boot meets his arm, and the knife goes flying. This guy has no training whatsoever in how to use it or he’d have gripped it better. Lucky for him he simply thought he could scare me with it. He’s down without me breaking a sweat. It takes three seconds.
That’s a relief. In one of Chase’s bad movies, the fights last absurdly long. No pure human can withstand that sort of abuse and keep fighting the way they do in Hollywood. So I dodged one cliché tonight.
I fling my backpack over my shoulder and pull the guy’s phone from his pocket. He’s clutching his knee and moaning. “You want me to call an ambulance, or can you walk out of here?”
He gapes at me, blood and sweat running down his face. “You shitting me?”
“Nope. I’m trying to be a better person these days, that’s all. I’d offer to call the cops, but you probably don’t want to tell them a fourteen-year-old girl beat you up. So what’ll it be?”
“Give me back my phone and get the hell away from me.”
I oblige, wishing there were an easier way to do what needs to be done.