TEN

“NOW THAT WE have the money, we should really call Carl again. This time for the passports.”

“That man?” Henley didn’t bother to hide his distaste.

“I know you don’t like him—”

“I don’t feel comfortable with him.”

“He’s not here to make us feel comfortable. He’s here to get us passports.”

It was a little blunt, but it seemed to work, as Henley followed me down to the hostel lobby.

“Why don’t you do it?” Henley looked at the ground between his feet. “I’d call him, but um . . . I don’t think he likes me. He seems to like you better.”

I would have laughed if I hadn’t been so nervous about calling Carl myself. He had been nice enough to me, but he was still a criminal. I picked up the phone and began to dial.

It rang.

“Anything?” Henley asked.

“Not yet.”

The phone rang again.

“Still nothing?” Henley was putting me on edge.

“You’ll hear it if he picks up,” I said.

I was about to give up when I heard a click on the other end.

“Hi . . . uh, Carl?”

“Yes?” He sounded more intimidating on the phone than he did in real life.

“This is Rebecca and Henley,” I said.

There was no response back. I would have thought the line had dropped if it hadn’t been for the breathing I could hear.

I chose my words carefully. “We met in front of the pub?” I couldn’t exactly say, “Oh, we were the ones you helped get fake IDs for,” while we were in public.

“Where are you calling from?”

“Um, the hostel lobby?”

“The hostel you and your boy are staying at?”

“Yes?”

“God, woman. You should never use a phone connected to where you’re staying.”

“Sorry . . . ?”

“Are you at least using a pay phone?”

“No . . .” I wondered if he would hang up on me.

“Good God, are you trying to get yourself arrested?”

If only he knew I had bigger problems. Like an unknown killer after me.

There was a pause. Henley was looking pale.

“Let’s make this quick, then. What can I do for you? There is a reason you called, isn’t there?”

“Yes, yes there is.” My mind scrambled to think of a way to ask this. What was the best approach?

“Spit it out, woman.”

“We need passports,” I said.

I saw Henley look over his shoulder to make sure no one was around. He signaled for me to lower my voice.

“Two?” Carl asked. “One for you and one for that kid you like to tote around?”

“You mean Henley? Yeah.”

“And you want the real deal? I mean, it’ll still be a fake, but a damn good one. Something that’ll have the electronics inside and get you through airport security?”

“Well, yes. That’s what we were thinking,” I said.

There was a low whistle on the other end. “Oh, girl . . . you’re asking for a lot.”

I felt my stomach drop. “You can’t do it?” We were back to square one, with no way of getting out of the country.

“I didn’t say that, did I now?”

“S-so you can?”

“It’ll cost you an arm and a leg, but sure, my guy can do it.”

I bit my lip. We had some money now, but still not an enormous amount. “How much will it cost?”

“Not on here,” Carl said. “We’ll talk.”

“I need this as quickly as possible.”

“Then you want to talk now, girl? I’m in the neighborhood. If you promise to make this worth my while, I can be there in ten,” he said.

Before I could respond, the line went dead.

I steadied my hand, putting the phone receiver down.

Henley was pacing in front of me already. It was clear he had heard all that had been said.

“Let’s go outside,” I said, hoping it would stop Henley’s pacing.

Unfortunately, he continued.

“You really think he can do this?” Henley asked.

“He’s the best shot we have,” I said. “And they did a great job on the IDs.”

“This better work . . . It’ll probably cost a fortune.”

I didn’t tell him I was worried we wouldn’t have enough.

Ten minutes later, practically on the dot, Carl walked over to us. This time he was wearing a navy sweatshirt—also with a stain down the front. I was beginning to think his entire wardrobe consisted of dirty sweatshirts he never washed.

“My favorite twosome,” he said.

I was getting used to him leering at us.

He tilted his head toward the back alleyway we always had our conversations in.

Carl walked toward the alley, and we gave it a full minute before we followed.

“Not bad,” he said when he saw us. “You’re becoming more natural at this. Pretty soon you’ll be just like me.”

That was exactly what I didn’t want to hear.

“So let’s talk business, eh?” Carl looked at me instead of Henley.

“How much is it going to cost?” Henley said.

“First, let me clarify . . . we’re talking American passports, aren’t we?”

“Yes,” I said.

Carl shook his head. “Sorry, sweetheart. That’s only going to drive the cost up for you.”

“Just because they’re American?” Henley didn’t understand.

“We live in a post-nine/eleven world, kid,” Carl said, not that that meant anything to Henley.

“It’s okay,” I said quietly to Henley. “So how much are we talking?”

“In American dollars? Seven thousand five hundred and up.”

My jaw dropped.

Seeing my reaction, Carl said, “We’re talking complicated stuff. Working MRZs, authentic microchipping. Even the passport numbers work when you type them in online. We basically get stolen passports, strip them, and rebuild them—”

I had to think we were going to spend around four hundred and fifty pounds on the hostel room. And then there were plane tickets . . . What would that cost? Eight hundred and fifty pounds? “We can’t afford that,” I said.

“Not my problem.”

We were going to be stuck here, on this continent, with no way out. I could travel back to a time period where I could take a boat across the Atlantic with limited documentation, but how long was that going to take? Months at least? Months of potentially being stuck on a boat with a killer after me. If he could find our hostel and our exact room in a specific time, there was no stopping him from finding me on an enclosed boat. And what of Henley? I’d have to leave him here.

Tears pricked at my eyes.

“Whoa, whoa, girl. Don’t you go crying on me.”

I sniffed. “I can’t help it.”

“Yeah, you can!” Carl said. “Tears don’t do anything for me.”

By now, they were streaming down my face. Henley put an arm around me.

“Stop it,” Carl hissed. “Goddamn, woman, stop it.”

But I was blubbering. “I just want to go home . . .”

“Well then find some other way.”

That only made me cry harder. “There’s no other way. We tried.”

“Get someone to send you money, then. You got relatives, right?”

“I don’t have anyone.” I sobbed. “We don’t have anyone.”

“An orphan already? Hate it when relatives leave without giving money,” Carl said. “For God’s sake, stop the crying already.”

“I’m trying!”

“I’ll . . . I’ll cut the cost if you stop your crying.”

I sniffed. “To how much?”

“Well, how much can you afford?”

Henley spoke quietly. “We only have a little over four thousand pounds.” We had more, but I knew Henley had done some math too, taking the hostel room into account, and leaving us with extra money for plane tickets and whatnot.

“Whoa, whoa. That’s a big cut. You’re practically asking me to get my guy to do this for free. Are you insane? Absolutely not.”

My tears started again.

Finally, Carl spoke directly to Henley. “Can’t you get your woman to stop crying?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I honestly can’t help it. I just want to get back to the States.”

Carl sighed. “All right.”

“W-what?” I wasn’t sure if I heard correctly.

“I said all right, woman! Geez, don’t make me repeat myself . . .”

Henley hesitated. “So you’ll do it for four thousand pounds?”

Carl crossed his arms. “But you’re paying in full now. None of that half up front and half later stuff. Seven thousand five hundred dollars is four thousand eight hundred pounds, more or less. That’s the price for two and my guy gets a percentage of the profits, see . . . So I have to give up my percentage for him to keep his.”

“A-and you’d do that? For us?” My eyes were so wide the tears made a film over them.

“Whoa there, don’t get all glossy-eyed on me, girl. That’s almost worse than crying. Call it my yearly pro bono work. Can’t be doing this all the time, but gotta get the big guy in the sky to get me into heaven somehow, right?”

I didn’t know if someone who forged passports and IDs would be getting into heaven, if there even was one, but who was I to make that decision? I could have hugged Carl in that moment, sweatshirt stain and all.

Carl took out his phone and made us stand still for a photo.

“This is going to be your passport photo, okay?”

“How quickly can we get them?” I asked.

“Making demands already, I see?” Carl said. “We’ll get them to you as quickly as possible, but you know, it’ll take two weeks, maybe?”

Two weeks. That was a long while for staying in one place. But what could we do?

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you so much.”

Carl blushed, and he rubbed his cheeks as if to rub the embarrassment away. “Don’t go telling your friends that Carl here went soft for a crying woman. Can’t stand the waterworks . . .”

I smiled. Tough guy Carl had a heart.

“We really need these passports as soon as possible.”

Carl sighed. “What room are you staying in?” He tilted his head in the direction of the hostel.

“It’s the Blue Flax room,” I said.

I saw Henley stiffen up next to me. I knew he wouldn’t like Carl knowing where we stayed, but if it somehow helped, I was willing to do anything.

I wondered if Carl would deliver the passports directly to us, even though he was usually cautious about conducting his business in public.

“If it’s just a drop-off, I can do that at the room,” he said, answering my question. He gave me a nod. “Now, scat and get my money. I gotta get on with my work, and also tell my guy he’ll be working overtime this week.”

Henley and I grabbed the green backpack from our room and gave Carl his share.

He counted the cash and only nodded before leaving.

We turned the corner, planning on going straight back to the hostel, but Henley got sidetracked when he saw a pharmacy across the street advertising that they developed photos.

He dragged me into the store without even asking.

“These stores have everything,” he said, half to himself.

“We don’t have room in our budget to go around getting photos developed. Not today, anyway.”

“Just once,” he said, already walking up to the photo counter. “It can’t be that much. Besides, we don’t have any photographs of us together.”

It wouldn’t be of us together, I wanted to say. It would be of me with Richard.

Part of me agreed with Henley. I wanted something tangible of us together, but I also didn’t want to see Richard in that photo instead of Henley.

Henley had already paid and handed the attendant the camera. We could hear the faint thrum of the machines in the back processing the film.

Twenty minutes later, we were handed an envelope.

Henley couldn’t wait and dumped out all the contents on the counter.

There were many of me looking off into a different direction—Henley must have taken photos without me realizing. There were also the ones of us hip to hip, grinning into the camera.

I watched him finger each photo. I couldn’t tell if he was looking at my face in the photos, or if he was looking at his—or rather, Richard’s.

“Rebecca . . .”

There was one photo—it was probably my favorite—in which I was staring up at Henley while he smiled at the camera. I appeared so at peace, looking into his face. It was a photo that described how I felt when I was with Henley.

“Rebecca, look.” Henley pointed to the same photo I was looking at.

“What about that photo?” I squinted at it.

Henley pointed directly to a black blur on the left-hand side of the photo.

“That’s just someone’s shoulder,” I said. “It looks like they were trying to get out of the way of the photo.”

Henley pointed to the left side of another photo. It was the same left shoulder.

“I don’t . . .”

Henley pointed to yet another one of our photos. The shoulder.

Henley spread out the photos along the counter. The same shoulder wearing black was in every single shot.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “We took these photos at different places.”

“Exactly . . . Were we being followed?”

There wasn’t much to go on. The shoulder was blurry in many of the photos. Even in the ones where it was clearer, it was hard to tell if it was male or female. All we knew was that the person was wearing black and he or she stood to our left—which was incidentally the same side I was usually on in these photos. But that had to be a coincidence . . . right?

“It’s as if whoever this is ducked out of the frame at the last second,” Henley said.

I looked behind us now. I thought I saw something dark slip into one of the drugstore aisles.

I felt paranoid, but I walked along the aisles. Peering down each of them, I couldn’t see a single person.

“Let’s go,” Henley said.

As we walked out the door, Henley threw the photos in the trash can. I had thought that maybe Henley would want to keep them for evidence of some sort, but I supposed he didn’t want to hang on to something so ominous. Any sentimental feelings he’d had toward our first photos together were probably gone thanks to this mysterious stranger.

“Yeah, let’s get out of here.”