Lee awoke with plastic over his face. In a moment’s panic, he jerked, his nerve endings only then registering the cold, and the fact that the plastic only covered part of his face.
He’d slept poorly on the floor.
No surprise there. His back was stiff. His bruises screamed at him. And he felt like shit, both inside and out, both physically and mentally. Soft hands touched him, and he knew instantly that it was Sin. He just didn’t know why. Unless she was searching for nerve clusters again.
“You’re awake.” Her voice was soft and sounded battered.
When he opened his eyes, he saw that she looked battered, too. Deep shadows resided under her eyes. And her eyes looked hurt. She didn’t look like Sin. This girl looked wounded, and Sin was incapable of that. He wanted to frown at the thought, but the very idea of expression made his face hurt.
“You should go sleep in the bed.” Her hands plucked at the bag, lifting it, rolling it, and placing it against his face again. Only not before he’d been able to discern that what she’d set on him was a zipper bag of frozen peas to help ease the swelling she’d caused.
Turning to look at the window, Lee figured it was only a few hours after he’d crashed there on the floor. The light at the edges of the blackout curtains didn’t come into the room, but looked bright and far too cheerful in its desperate attempts the breach the barriers Sin had so skillfully erected.
Lee didn’t answer her. Just blinked and watched as she shifted other bags of peas, and a few of corn and even mixed vegetables, against his chest. He stared at the ceiling, and lay still, in only his jeans. His torso was a mass of bruising, and every breath hurt. Sin had clearly had to raid every last corner of the freezer to tend to him.
Between the bullets and the hard hits Sin had delivered, his body matched his state of mind.
Everything was wrong.
Nothing was as it should be.
Finally, he found his voice.
“We’re done, Sin. Finished. No more.”
She pulled back a little at the words. It assured him she was the Sin that he knew‒she wouldn’t want to hear that.
But her answer made no sense.
“I know. I’ll sleep on the couch.”
This time he did frown. And it hurt like a mother-fucker. “No, both of us should sleep in the bed. You must look as bad as I do. We need rest.”
Her smile was slow and sad. “But surely you don’t want to be near me. We’re finished.”
Oh.
He wanted to shake his head at her. He wanted to sit up and shake her. He wanted a lot of things, and wondered where the iron will that had served him so well these past years had fled to. Lee searched and found just a little of it. Using his elbows, he pushed upright, forgetting the vegetables that adorned his chest until they slipped and fell haphazardly into his lap.
In the only kind gesture he knew to make then, he lifted one of the still cold bags and pushed Sin’s nightgown off her shoulder. Sure enough, large purple stains marred the pale coffee colors he was used to seeing. He settled the bag over the bruise and heard her breath hiss in at the sensation.
Doing what was necessary, Lee pushed himself to standing and held the bag against Sin’s skin while he helped her to her feet, too. He searched her knuckles, wondering if she sported bruises there, too, from turning his nose inside out. But, no, her hands were used to hard hits. No one would suspect anything from looking at them. He tugged her into the bedroom while she looked at him with big wary eyes, and he motioned for her to lie on her stomach so he could place the bag of frozen corn he carried onto the bruise she’d gotten across her shoulder blade.
His bullet wounds hurt the worst, and aside from his nose, they looked the worst‒he’d gotten a glimpse of himself when he walked past the hall bathroom. Which meant that Sin had pulled every punch she’d leveled at him. Just as he had. Even furious, they didn’t seem to be able to do each other real harm.
Her eyes drifted closed, and her breathing was too even to be anything but forced. She very carefully stayed on her side of the bed. Her bed.
“Listen, Sin. There’re two separate things here.” He sighed and remained on his feet. She only nodded slightly, but it was enough, and he continued. “First, you should have told me you were a virgin.”
“But I wasn’t.”
“You were.”
She frowned at him, and he knew that behind her eyelids she was looking at him like he was nuts.
“Sin, there’s making love, and there’s sex, and there’s screwing and fucking, and what happened to you wasn’t even on the chart. The way you talked, I thought you’d been with other men in the meantime.”
He huffed, angry at himself for his own stupidity. The leather underwear? She hadn’t let anyone in. And in hindsight, of course, it was all perfectly clear.
“Oh well.” Still not opening her eyes, she offered a small shrug beneath the frozen foods. “The next time I’m a virgin, I’ll be sure to tell whoever it is.”
Why? Why did he just want to hit her so much of the time?
He took a leveling breath. “I’m sorry about what I said. You were so hot for it. Or at least I thought you were, until the last minute. I’ve never had a woman grit her teeth with me before. It makes sense now.”
“Hmm.” Was all she offered.
That was all he could handle of it right now, too. “The other thing is: we’re out of the business.”
“What?” Eyes opened wide, revealing the Sin he knew. “We walked away! We’ll get better at it.”
“We didn’t walk. We ran. Out the back door. Not knowing who was coming down the stairs or going to show up at the front door in the next few minutes. We left tracks‒clear tracks‒straight to the car. I have to change the tires today and get the others out to the dump.”
Her breath sighed out of her. “We should put them on someone else’s car.”
That was a good idea, but he didn’t address it. He wasn’t in any shape to change tires, or even to flee if the Feds showed up at the door. “The Kurevs know about us. They’re waiting up at night with backup. Backup that we didn’t find when we swept the house.” That had been the really disturbing part.
Sin looked at him, but didn’t deny anything.
Lee kept talking, pacing the room with an agitation that hurt his arms, ribs, and face. Although, after the shootout last night, the pain was reassuring in a way. “The FBI is after us from the other side. The fact is that we have no idea how close they are. But it feels pretty damn close. We’re either getting our asses killed, hauled before Kolya Kurev, or thrown in jail for a long, long time.”
“I thought you didn’t care.”
His chest seemed to get smaller. “I didn’t. I do. I do now.” Lee shook his head. “I don’t mind continuing. But we can’t do it safely-”
“Yeah, not if you’re going to get scared like a little girl in the middle of it.” Her mouth quirked up on one side, even though she hadn’t moved, hadn’t disturbed the ridiculous looking veggies on her back.
“You should have.” He was near to yelling, and only wasn’t louder because his ribs protested to remind him every time his volume got too high. “Na came up with a gun aimed at you!”
“At my chest! I was wearing Kevlar!”
“What if she’d moved it just a little higher? Did you have Kevlar on your head? I think maybe you have it in your head!”
“Hey, bullet proof brains!”
“It’s not funny!” His ribs protesting weren’t enough to stop the yelling. “You could have gotten your head blown off!”
Her eyes blinked, the same comprehension he’d seen before. “And you would have cared.”
“Hell, yes, I would have! God help me, I don’t know why!” But he stopped pacing and peeled his jeans before stretching out beside her. His hand plucked at the bags of vegetables, tossing them across the room just to get rid of them. With movements that were neither rough nor gentle, he moved Sin around, until she faced him, with her nose pressed into his chest. Only then did he really begin to breathe easily.
Her voice carried up to him. “So what do we do?”
“I don’t know. I was thinking maybe we could just start over.” He let his voice follow his thoughts. “What if we show up at FBI headquarters and demand immunity? Can we go into Witness Protection?”
He didn’t like it even as it left this mouth.
Neither did Sin. “I’ve killed three men who were in WitSec. The Kurevs will still find us.”
Lee finished. “And when they do, they’ll kill us. And we’ll have no idea when it’s coming. Yeah, we don’t even really know anything worth trading. We killed all our bargaining chips.”
He felt her nose move as she nodded. “Can we just stay underground?”
“I’ll go crazy, just hanging out. What will we do?”
A small laugh escaped her and he wondered what she thought. “Kill each other? Shoot deer for food? Become really well trained so we can do nothing?”
“The Kurevs will still eventually find us. They are pissed. We’ve taken out a lot of their best people.”
“What do you want?”
That was the sixty-four thousand dollar question, wasn’t it? But suddenly he didn’t have to think about it. An answer came immediately. “A life.”
“What? A house? A wife and kids?”
He shrugged, “Maybe. I was happy as an accountant before I knew who I was working for.”
“You still miss them.”
“I’ll miss Sam and Bethy every day for the rest of my life. And I don’t know how I’ll ever not blame myself for the fact that I wasn’t watching out, wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing. I got them killed. But I’m still here. And I’m not really willing to do myself in. I want . . . something. Don’t you? Do you miss your job here? Your friends?”
Her head shook against him, he could feel it. “I didn’t have friends.”
“Do you want any?”
“I don’t know how to have friends.”
“But do you want any?” Lee waited.
Sin didn’t answer.
Somewhere in the spaces, in the middle of the pain, the open ends, and the questions that neither of them could answer, Lee curled closer to the only living thing he knew and fell asleep.
Owen was looking at the resume Annika had edited for him when Nguyen came into his office. Quickly shuffling the papers so his friend wouldn’t see what he was holding, Owen looked up, “Got anything?”
“Got all kinds of things.” Nguyen pasted on a wide smile. “And just like before, none of them add up to crap!”
“Well, then, have a seat and share it with me.” Owen motioned to the open chairs, noticing Nguyen looked as rumpled as always. You’d think the scientist would have invented a way to press his suits by now. The man could jury rig Rube Goldberg contraptions in his sleep, and back figure murder scenes like no one Owen had ever worked with before. But somehow he couldn’t keep the wrinkles out of his suits.
“Well,” Nguyen took a seat and folded his hands formally on his lap. That did not bode well. “We have blood.”
Owen felt his heart kick up.
“From three sources.”
Of course. His heart slowed again.
“Ling Mai Na, who is O positive. Vladimir Miskevet, already ID’d, AB positive. And unknown male, early thirties, A negative. It was very kind of them to all have different blood types. There doesn’t seem to be a drop from either our gunner or our ninja.”
“But, of course.” Owen folded his own hands.
“We have the footprints leading out the back door. First, the prints themselves: given the treads and the size and weight, it remains our best guess that the gunner is male.”
Owen nodded. “That’s the one thing the profilers thought. Males are more likely to take up firearms. For mental reasons as well as biological ones.”
“Testosterone?” Nguyen’s brows rose.
“Larger arm and back muscles. Able to support the weight of the gun and handle the kick easier.”
“Hmm. Makes sense. Especially for our two-handed shooter. Which is pretty cool, I have to say.” A real smile emerged on his face. “I’ve been shooting things myself, trying to figure that one out.”
“And?”
“Aside from the fact that I always forget just how much I love shooting things? Two handed is a bitch. Especially getting the clip out and reloading left handed. Some of the old scenes that are just his‒assuming it really is a ‘him’ and not a two-hundred-plus pound bruiser of a chick-”
Owen grimaced at the thought.
“Given that the bullets are 9mm, I’m guessing he’s either using Sig Sauers retrofitted for lefties, or Heckler and Koch. They make an ambidextrous gun.”
“Interesting.” Owen wasn’t sure what importance that was, but every little thing helped.
“Well, it builds a case when we find the guy. I doubt he’s got Glocks or Colts or anything of that sort.” Nguyen continued, and Owen jotted notes, just to help keep it all in his brain. “Okay, both sets of footprints go right out the door, into the trees and right up to some tire tracks. They’re Goodyears-”
Owen just raised his eyebrows. Everybody and their brother used Goodyears.
“It narrows down the car a little.” Nguyen protested, and he was right. Although Owen thought he already had a pretty good grip on the car. If they were operating on the outskirts of Dallas, it would be brown, and a little battered looking, but run like the wind.
“Fine then,” Nguyen started on a different tack. “Both the .357 Magnums had been fired. Multiple times. Although the clips weren’t emptied.”
Owen sat back for that. “So that means what? These guys died before they could fire all their shots?”
“That’s my guess.”
“What about Na’s gun?”
Nguyen shook his head. “Fired once.”
“Hmmm.” That he hadn’t expected. “So she took the knife to her throat and the bullet to the brain and she only got off one shot?”
“There was a 9mm in the ceiling. I’m thinking she didn’t get a shot off before she took it from both sides. Her finger jerks as she dies and she kills the plaster work overhead. Our gunner doesn’t hurt harmless ceilings. And the thugs are firing .357s. Very well I might add‒there were no stray .357 slugs.”
“Well, it did look like they were all at real close range.” Owen pictured the way the bodies had fallen. “It actually looked like Na and her two goons were all shooting at each other. But that wouldn’t make any sense. So I’m guessing there was a gunner and a ninja somewhere in there, who somehow got up and walked away.”
“Oh yeah, and get this:” Nguyen’s eyes actually sparkled. Owen thought of the resume buried under the papers on his desk. He loved his friend, but it was time to get the hell out. Nguyen’s voice ratcheted up in speed with his excitement. “They walked away with seven bullets! We can’t find any of the shots fired by the thugs. I mean we could have done ballistics. But they were using .357s, so we don’t have to. There isn’t a single round in the house from either of their guns.”
Nguyen’s hands fidgeted and he kept talking up a storm. “There were missing bullets from the clips. I suppose they could have been fired earlier, but . . . Na was dressed, and so were they. That most likely means they were waiting up. Somehow they even got behind or around our guys, and our guys are good. You wouldn’t go into that without a full clip, not unless you were flat out retarded. So it doesn’t make any sense that the rounds were fired earlier. Plus there was recent powder on the muzzles of the guns: they were each fired recently. That all makes perfect sense. Until you get to the part where the Christmas Killers walked away without leaving any blood behind, but taking seven bullets with them.”
Owen sighed. Yeah, that kind of mystery was par for the course these days. He was wondering if he could set up a meeting between them, offer the Christmas Killers immunity, just to ask them how the hell they did it.
Nguyen stood. He stretched. “That’s about it for now. Oh‒except the fact that there was no hair, fingerprints, or fibers that are likely theirs.”
“But, of course.”
Owen suffered out the rest of the day. He watched his map as though it might move, dance, or fold itself up and tell him to just give up and pack it in. His brain hurt by noon, but at least the woodpecker hadn’t come back.
That afternoon he picked up Charlotte, reveling in the expression on her face when she saw him at the edge of the schoolyard. Annika had a similar smile on when he showed up at home then took Charlotte to gymnastics that night. Of course, he’d left Anni buried under a load of FBI files to read while he watched his daughter do handsprings and flinched as she fell off the bars several times before finally spinning all the way around the high bar and letting go in a feat of inhuman flight to get to the low bar and then swing effortlessly back up. The damn bars were further apart than she was tall. It must be the Russian genes, Charlotte sure as hell hadn’t gotten any of that from him.
He’d read her another chapter in her book before tucking her into bed that night, and then faced down Anni on the couch. With no preamble, he asked, “Where are they going next?”
His wife shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m still hung up on how they got out of Na’s house without leaving blood.”
“Me, too.”
“I mean, they fled out the back door. They must have been in a bad hurry.”
He hadn’t thought of that. This time they might as well have left an arrow pointing which direction they’d gone.
Annika opened her mouth and closed it again before she was able to form words. “They must have been injured. Or heard someone coming.”
“But who? If it was mafia‒Kurevs or any other family‒they would have cleaned the scene long before we got there. If it was the neighbors come to check out the noise, they would have left evidence.”
“So they were injured. You said they took bullets with them.”
“So how come they didn’t drip? Any bullet they took would have been fired at such close range, it should have gone through and left a nasty exit wound to boot. Like Na’s face. But . . . nothing.” How come he wasn’t bald yet? Either from pulling on his hair, or just from stress. How come he hadn’t stroked out?
Owen had driven by the post office with Charlotte that afternoon. She’d enjoyed putting the letters in the drive-up mailbox. His resume had gone to five different universities.
He just had to hold on until September.
Lee had sat in the driver’s seat of the kitty on the long drive back to Tennessee. Alone.
For nearly two months, he and Sin had laid low in her house in Texas. They had healed, waiting until the bruises didn’t hinder movement. For two weeks they didn’t emerge at all, just ate the food they had stocked, watched the TV, and spent far too much time wearing cold zipper-bags of vegetables.
They had made plans. And cleaned out the house. They destroyed evidence. Patched holes in the wall of the practice room. Cut down the barb wire perimeter and tossed the trash into the landfill themselves. They reset the sprinkler heads to aim water only into the yard. Removed all the weapons from their spots in and on the walls, and peeled and cleaned away the Velcro that had held them there. They cleared the attic, driving hours on end to dump things in different landfills, hopefully never to be seen again. They cashed out Sin’s accounts and put it in lock boxes in different banks in three different states under three different names.
After five weeks, when his face finally looked normal again, and the house was scrubbed from attic to flooring, Cynthia Cooper Macey called a real estate agent and put her house on the market. Lee stayed out of the way for the walk-throughs, although Cynthia chattered with prospective buyers about how she had taken work in Oregon and had to leave for her new job soon.
It was as good an explanation as any for why the house had been priced low enough to move it quickly. And why she wanted only two weeks in escrow.
Just that fast, the house was gone. A family with five kids was moving in. Five boys, who would occupy the large extended back room that Sin had practiced in. To Lee it seemed a sign. The house had sold with little fuss and few visitors. Sin had dropped the keys off with the realtor on her way out of town. They had effectively dissolved her connection to Dallas, and ultimately to Cynthia Cooper Macey, easily.
But he was uneasy on the trip.
Lee had taken interstate 20 out of town going through Shreveport and then cutting north to arrive in Knoxville. Sin had started north on thirty-five and would connect into forty, taking her through Memphis and Nashville. She should arrive at the cabin later than he did.
They each carried their own clothes and weapons. Sin’s were stuffed in their teddy bears, far more camouflaged than his Hecklers stashed under the seat and at the bottom of his duffel bags in the trunk.
Eating nothing but Coke and Doritos, Lee stopped only long enough to pee and get more chips and soda each time. His stomach couldn’t take anything else.
There was no music, as Sin had her CD player with her in the green Toyota, and Lee was surprised to find that he missed it. He hadn’t thought he’d ever miss anything other than Samantha and Bethany. He had thought that if they started to fade from his memory he would go insane. And yet they were fading. So many times recently he’d thought of one or the other of them with only fondness at the pictures it brought to mind. There was none of the hatred for the Kurevs that blinded him to enjoying memories of his family. None of the bitterness at the unfairness, or anger at himself for bringing it on.
He arrived and parked the kitty under the weeds and kudzu that had overgrown the ‘garage’ since he’d left. In the deep dark that came in the mountains at night, he’d almost missed the spot. With grim features, he slung his bags over his shoulders to hike the almost-mile back to the cabin. It was cold, but not icy, and the land had sprung up green in his absence. Almost a year since he had first brought Sin here.
He waited outside the small house thinking to scope the place out, but lacking his usual patience, he was inside within an hour. He started the generator and prepared what food he could, planning to finally eat something while he waited for the place to warm up‒for Sin to show.
They had no cell phones, not having real identities, or even anywhere to send the bill. She wasn’t following him, like she had on the way out to Texas. He only hoped she was okay. He’d gotten far too tied to Sin. But the thought that he shouldn’t care didn’t mean that he didn’t, and it didn’t make the food go down.
Five hours later he was still sitting on the couch, staring at the glowing coils of the space heater in front of him. In spite of the huge drain the heater placed on the generator, he’d fired up another one in his bedroom. The food sat, waiting, untouched and drying on the counter.
The old heater had only ‘on’ and ‘off’, so it cycled itself through phases of ‘heat’ and ‘let cool’ to regulate temperature. It had just clicked off, leaving Lee in utter darkness, when the door pushed open and Sin let in a blast of cold air along with the warmth of her smile.
“That was long.” Even through the grin she looked tired. It was more than a full day’s ride but, going separate ways for security’s sake, they’d decided not to stay over. She peeled her jacket in the heat of the room, going about unloading her bags in an animated fashion, but quickly began to fade. Sin opened one duffel bag, identical to his, and pulled out a nightgown he hadn’t seen before, in a vivid pink. She brushed her teeth and her hair and had crawled into bed, asleep before he even realized that was what she intended.
Nothing could have convinced him more that they needed to get out of the business. They had both become lax. Feeling safe with each other, they weren’t taking the proper precautions, not maintaining any decent level of awareness. He had sat on the couch while Sin came right in the door. Of course, there was every possibility his sub-conscious recognized that it was her. But his forward brain sure hadn’t. He’d have been on his feet, thrown the door open wide to greet her, had he been aware. Even now, her teddy bears were scattered across the couch, still stitched tight. What was in the room with her to have at hand? Nothing. She was counting on him to keep her safe while she slept. A deeper, more satisfying sleep than she slept without him‒where she was less likely to rouse in the face of real danger. They’d both admitted that one to each other a while ago.
Was that what had gone wrong at Na’s? Had they been lax and under-prepared?
No. They had swept the house, searched every room but Ling’s looking for anything out of the ordinary. His eyes had been sharp, he’d been expecting something. But they just hadn’t found it. They’d had Kevlar vests, for which he was supremely grateful. And they’d come within millimeters, milli-seconds, of getting themselves killed. In his brain he could replay the scene and almost see bullets flying from chambers, rounds slamming into him. So many, with such force, that they toppled him backward, leaving him to pray for Sin’s safety but, in the half second he was down, not able to actually do anything about it. It had all gone down so quickly that, even as fast as he’d been able to get back up, it had been over by the time he regained his footing.
Finding the very last of his energy, as it seemed he’d used up almost all of it on tension waiting for Sin to arrive, Lee got up and pulled out his Hecklers. He loaded three of them, slipping one under the mattress at the end of the bed and the other two under the pillows. Sin didn’t rouse as he tucked the loaded weapon beneath her head.
No, they couldn’t work like they had been. Not anymore.
They had each lost that drive‒inertia, instinct, fear, whatever it was‒that had kept them alive. If they wished to stay that way, they had to stop.
He didn’t remember curling up beside her and falling asleep, but he remembered waking with her plastered to him. Light streamed in through the thin curtains, making him blink even as he grit his teeth and pushed her away from the morning wood he was fighting, even though by the light it was clearly afternoon. Already awake, she tensed, and he wished she hadn’t felt his response to her. Until her mouth found his neck and placed the smallest of kisses there.
Only human, and wondering when humanity had been bestowed upon him once more, Lee pushed her further away. “Sin, I told you back in that alley that you can’t do that to a man and not expect him to want something.”
Sin pushed back. Her mouth again on his skin, “I know.”
“Jesus.”
He let himself react and let her feel that reaction, figuring he’d scare some sense into her.
It didn’t work.
Cyn erased the whiteboard where she’d sketched the plan. “No. Not good enough.”
Somehow their roles had reversed. Where Lee had browbeaten her into wearing the Kevlar to Na’s, she was the one who this time had trashed option after option as not secure enough.
Her sense of purpose had been renewed. At a level she’d not experienced before. She had a plan. A long-range one. And she had a job to do as part of that plan. Deep inside her, the drive she had felt when practicing writing left-handed, or working forms, falling and getting bruised, or throwing knife after knife, had returned. Her goal now was less the taking of someone else’s life and more the securing of her own.
Lee shook his head. “We won’t know how to take them out until we see the place. Until we get inside. Right now this is the best we can do.”
She was keyed up. She had smiled at Na as the woman had raised the gun to her, because she had believed herself invulnerable. The expression on Lee’s face when she had fearlessly faced the barrel of a loaded gun had changed all that. “Then let’s go.”
He blinked. Looked like he hadn’t expected to just pick up and leave. “Two more weeks. There are more things we need. And we should just practice more.”
She didn’t like it. Cyn wanted to go now. To get in and get the job done. But she capitulated. Lee had kept himself alive through some seriously dangerous situations. Even more, at Na’s he had come up, guns in hand, because he didn’t know what had happened to her. He also didn’t know what he was facing, but he’d stood up anyway, when it would have been smarter to stay down and act wounded. She trusted him.
So she shot at the bottles as though they were Kolya Kurev with guns pointed at her. She had Lee throw things into her line of sight, and she shot them down. She made him work with the throwing stars and the knives. Moved his arms and corrected his form and ignored the feel of his skin beneath her fingertips.
They drove great distances, and she shopped with the same focus, knowing what they needed and making sure all of it worked. They had mock knife fights with sheathed weapons and practiced holds and slices, feints and jabs, and readied themselves for as much as they could. At night, she locked the doors and stashed her weapons within reach, making her fortress as secure as possible, before she gave herself to him with the same blind drive.
At the end of the two weeks, when they had everything on their list, they drove through Oklahoma and removed large quantities of cash from one of the safety deposit boxes where they’d stashed part of her inheritance. They continued to Nevada, and gave all of it to a hacker who placed new names for them into the Social Security system. Then they headed to Chicago.
It was two weeks to the day from when they left the cabin that they arrived. Cyn felt she had been in the car the entire time. But still, they first drove around the edges of the city and found a handful of cheap places to stay before settling on one. They located spots in and out of town where they could easily change clothing so they didn’t look out of place either scoping out high end spots in the city or slumming it in motels on the outskirts.
She felt out of her depth casing a place in the heart of a big city. In the past she had waited until her mark showed up somewhere with the right requirements for an easy break-in. That wouldn’t be possible here. They had to hit this building, and the only reason they thought they could pull it off was that it was in Highland Park, and being a wealthier area, there just weren’t as many people around the building at night. Well, late at night. As Lee had suspected, it was well after midnight before the lights went out signaling the end of each workday.
On the seventh day, they waited just beyond the parking structure in their rented car, and followed the last man home. But they did nothing other than look.
Two days later he was mugged in the most embarrassing way. The small girl had approached him, asked for cash, then hit him when he said ‘no’. He woke up in the nearby alley when she kicked him awake, flashing the three hundred in cash she’d pulled from his wallet and taunted him. “Shoulda given me a buck or two.”
Shaking her ass as she walked off, she tucked the cash into her bra, but somehow managed to take him down again when he tried to tackle her.
He didn’t file a report with the cops. He thought he’d only lost money and some pride. Robert Graff had no idea that his wallet and pockets had been very carefully searched while he’d been unconscious, and photos and impressions had been taken. He never saw the man she worked with.
Job done, they’d returned to Tennessee.
Three weeks later, Lee and Cyn were in Chicago again. They wore sweats and ball caps and checked into one of the motels they’d seen earlier. They mugged three other people in much the same fashion as they had Robert Graff, Cyn stealing and flaunting cash each time. Only one of the three filed a police report. The person he reported as attacking him and taking his money was larger and beefier than Cyn. And male.
Lee had laughed about that one.
It took six days, although they had been ready each evening, before there was a night when everyone went home early. Then they walked into the building as if they owned the place, flashing the forged badges they’d had made. The security guard smiled at them. “Do I know you?”
“Are you new?” Lee spoke through his teeth, as Cyn flashed a sideways glance at him. In his sharp gray suit and power tie, he looked irritated at being checked, which was just how they planned on playing it. “We just got in from New York.”
“How long will you guys be working tonight?” The guard checked the IDs and, finding no flaws, handed them back. Cyn tucked hers carefully into the expensive leather wallet in the expensive leather purse she carried.
Lee held his hands out, sharp briefcase dangling from one, “I don’t know.”
And truly they didn’t.
With a sigh that didn’t reveal her voice, and her position carefully monitored to obscure both her and Lee’s faces from the lobby cameras, Cyn gave the guard her best irritated and haughty look, and started heading toward the elevators.
They were certain there weren’t cameras elsewhere in the building. Partly because there had never been any, and partly because recording the goings on here would have been stupid. Not wanting to break character, she didn’t reach out and enfold her hand in Lee’s, even though they were the only two in the closed elevator.
Instead she looked at the odd reflection staring back at her. The woman had midnight black hair, which Cyn decided went well with her new skin tone, the result of a dark shade of makeup. It was made more striking by the long cream coat and gloves she wore against the chill of the night. The khaki-colored pantsuit underneath was expensive and shot through with Lycra, one of the few she had found that wouldn’t rip if she had to kick something. She’d had it tailored so the hem of the pants would break low, nearly obscuring her shoes. And the shoes looked good. The toes that peaked out from under the edge of the pants were fashionable enough that no one would suspect the squat, sturdy heels that had easily removed the last bit of life from her practice dummy.
The eyes that looked back at her were grey, although a darker shade than the other pair that glanced her way for just a second in the reflection of the highly polished elevator door. Lee’s were a paler shade than her own, although his were green, his hair auburn from temporary color and wavy from her hand and a curling iron. His rough beard grew around his chin and connected into a new mustache above his lip.
It would be gone tomorrow.
The ding of their floor startled her from her reverie, but Lee didn’t do anything other than grip the briefcase and head for the opening doors. What he saw when they parted, she didn’t know, but something subtle settled into his bones at being here again.
They scoped the building, finding the emergency exits had all been locked in the non-alarm position. Cyn imagined they could simply be keyed to the ‘on’ position before inspections, allowing the owners to look like model citizens, yet be able to leave their building by the back way any time they wished.
Together, she and Lee used the keys they’d made from the impressions they’d gotten during the muggings to open a handful of the doors. With gloves on, they settled at desks and let themselves into the computer system. Cyn watched as Windows opened, and pulled as many files as she could. They hadn’t gone after anyone randomly, and she knew what she expected to find. Lee’s description of the programs was very accurate, and she had to assume that in four years the system hadn’t changed all that much. She wrote files to disks, then electronically scrubbed her trail as best she could before she stood up and went into the second office.
When she finished with three offices, Lee was still working on his first. Robert Graff, the first employee they’d mugged, was an accountant. His computer held the files Lee was most familiar with. He was also the highest up in the Black and Associates hierarchy.
For long minutes, Lee didn’t acknowledge she was there, standing just inside the doorway, looking every inch the business woman, even if she wasn’t. At last, when his fingers quit flying, he looked up, sharp green eyes meeting her own. The contacts gave her a moment’s start, which she didn’t betray with physical movement, even though her heart jogged each time she didn’t quite recognize him.
Fifteen long, quiet minutes later, he stood and stretched before handing her a shiny disk. Scrubbing the computer memory the same way Cyn had on the other computers took a few more minutes and was far from perfect, as neither of them were seasoned hackers. But all it needed to do was get them out of the building without the company knowing they’d been breached. And they had to go. They’d been here long enough, if they stayed much later, someone might get suspicious.
The two of them re-checked all the doors, turning locks with the illegally gotten keys, leaving each office as they had found it. Then they rode the elevators down to the lobby and exited the front doors, both of them making motions as though they were just now pulling on their gloves. Looking straight ahead, and carrying on a pre-planned conversation about sushi, they responded to the security guard with a wave and a ‘goodnight’ only after he’d spoken first and as though even that was an imposition far beneath them.
Cyn’s heart thudded within her chest, the evening far from over.
They climbed into the expensive rental that waited all alone in the parking lot. They didn’t even glance at the attendant as they pulled out, all the better if he never got a good look at their faces. He wasn’t the same one that had checked them in.
At one of their locations where they couldn’t be seen, they pulled out hats, wigs and shirts and changed their clothing as well as the plates on the car, quickly putting the rental plates back on. Next, she dropped Lee and their stuff at the green Toyota and returned the car to the airport lot, leaving the keys, and knowing that if the car were traced, Cynthia Ellen Winslow would likely be identified as the culprit. But as Ms. Winslow was blonde and very blue-eyed with a complexion much more toward peaches and cream, there was every possibility that the connection would be lost. Also, no one would be able to get a hold of her at any of the numbers connected to the credit card that would never be used again.
The shuttle bus drove her out to long-term parking, where she got off at the first stop and walked out to the road beyond to hitch a ride with the pale green sedan that pulled up just then. They drove to another spot they had picked out previously for privacy and assembled what they had.
Entertaining thoughts of sleep, they let themselves back into their motel room but were too keyed up to rest. Neither of them had ever pulled a job like this one before. At least it seemed it had gone well. It was two a.m. and they talked themselves into following the original plan, which was to stay through the remainder of the night and leave in the morning.
Cyn showered and brushed her teeth while Lee washed the color out of his hair. He shaved the goatee completely off, finally looking like the Lee she knew again. He crawled into bed after her and stared at the ceiling for five full minutes before groaning and pulling her into his arms. Hands tugged at flannel pants and nightgowns, desperate for contact. Residual fear was channeled into lust and they came together clinging to the belief that they had made it out the other side.
They lay, entwined and breathing heavily for a while, still neither of them able to find the peace of sleep, when Lee finally said, “Fuck it. Let’s just go.”