Finders/Keepers

Fourteen

“What the fuck happened to you?”

“I was shot. What does it look like?”

“She shot you?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“In the diner.”

“That explains the stampede of fat asses.” Dwight chuckled. “Serves you right. I told you she was bad news. It’s just like that time in Colombia. I have a sixth sense for these things. The girl wasn’t right the first time I laid eyes on her.”

“Then you should have said something,” Reese said.

“I did. You didn’t listen.”

“You should have tried harder.”

“Whatever.” Dwight glanced over. “So, you going to bleed to death or what?”

“Hopefully not.”

“You sure?”

“Mostly.”

“Sure are bleeding a lot for someone who isn’t gonna bleed to death, though,” Dwight said, not even trying to hide that smile on his face. Apparently he found all of this very amusing.

Can’t say I blame him.

Reese sighed. He was very well aware that he was “bleeding a lot,” even when he pushed his way through the diner and out into the parking lot and saw Alice (Was that even her real name?) on the ground fighting with some fat guy. Then she was up and running, and moments later, shooting. It took him a few seconds to figure out what she was doing: she was aiming at the cab of the semi, the one hauling the girls in the back. She was trying to stop them from leaving like everyone else around them at the time.

And it worked, because the semi never moved, even though it had turned on its headlights. He assumed its engine was also on, but given the roar of noises in the parking lot at the time — police sirens, cars revving, tires squealing — it was impossible to be sure. All of that took a backseat when Dwight, in the Ford, clipped Alice in the legs, and Reese watched, his own gunshot wound momentarily forgotten, as she bounced into the air and landed back on the hard pavement like a rag doll.

Dwight hadn’t wanted to bring Alice along, but Reese didn’t wait for his partner’s permission to pick her up and throw her into the backseat. Not an easy feat, given that the only thing keeping him from bleeding out was his own hands and he had to use them to grab Alice. Thank God he had insisted on outfitting all their vehicles with first-aid kits for just such occasions, otherwise he would have bled to death by the time Dwight, somehow, managed to weave his way through the maze of moving vehicles and get them back out onto the interstate even as more state troopers poured into the truck stop behind them.

“You need a doctor or something?” Dwight was asking him. He didn’t sound amused anymore. In fact, he might have even been actually concerned, though Reese wasn’t willing to commit to that assumption just yet.

“No, I’ll be fine,” Reese said. “She just grazed me.”

“Looked a hell of a lot more than a graze, dude.”

“It looks worse than it is.”

“Really? ’Cause it looks really worse.”

“I’ll live.”

“We’ll see about that,” Dwight said.

A jolt of misery shot through Reese and he grimaced through it, letting it wash over him. Both his hands were slick with blood, and he wiped them on his pant legs, then brushed at the sweat dripping from his forehead. He checked, then double checked to make sure the bandages wrapped around his stomach under his jacket weren’t soaked with blood. It was a slightly half-assed job, but the best he could do while trying not to bleed to death in the front passenger seat of an erratically moving vehicle. Dwight was a hell of a tactical driver, but he hadn’t been shy about swinging the Ford around as if it were a toy as they fled the truck stop.

Reese hadn’t completely lied to Dwight, though; his wound wasn’t life-threatening, though it hurt a hell of a lot more than just a graze, so maybe he was lying just a little bit. Still, he counted his lucky stars. Another inch or two to the wrong side and it would have put a permanent hole in his stomach. He was bleeding, but as long as he stopped it — which he had, despite working in the semidarkness — he wasn’t in any danger of bleeding out in the foreseeable future.

Is that a professional diagnosis or unwarranted optimism, old sport?

He grimaced again and said, “I won’t lie; I could use some painkillers.”

“Why not some morphine while you’re at it?” Dwight said, focusing on the road outside the car’s spiderwebbed front windshield.

The damage to the Ford was limited to the windshield where Alice had struck it when she rolled across the hood before bouncing into the air. The sight of her flying had been something else, and Reese was surprised she was still alive when he turned the corner and saw her lying there.

“That’ll work,” Reese said.

“I’ll see what I can do. Until then, what’s our next move?”

“We’ve lost Nest. Best-case scenario, the drivers are dead. Worst case, they’re wounded and the cops have them.”

“She pumped a lot of rounds into the cab back there.”

“You didn’t see what happened to the boys?”

“Are you kidding me? Cops were coming out of the woodworks. You’re lucky I spotted your dumb ass, or I would have left you back there with your girlfriend. That would have been some sight, the two of you…”

Reese grunted. Girlfriend? Who, Alice?

“Assuming worst case,” Dwight continued, “what are the chances the drivers will talk?”

“They’re freelancers,” Reese said. “They have no reason to take it all on themselves. They’ll talk about what they know.”

“And what do they know?”

“The gigs and the people that hired them. Specifically, us.”

“That’s bad news.”

“Indeed.”

“So what about them?”

“I’ll deal with that when they call.”

“You think they will?”

“Oh, I know they’ll call.”

Dwight didn’t say anything for a moment, and Reese watched his partner staring out the cracked windshield, lost in thought. Alice was right about one thing — he was, in many ways, the “brains” of the operation, but that didn’t mean Dwight was an idiot. If anything, Reese thought Dwight deferred to him simply because it was less work.

“They were there awfully fast,” Dwight finally said.

“The cops?”

“Yeah. Couldn’t have been more than a few minutes after she shot you in the diner before they showed up. I barely heard the gunshot outside, mostly saw the herd running out of the joint. And there were way too many cops responding. There shouldn’t have been that many in the area.”

“What are you saying?” Reese asked.

“I think they were already on their way,” Dwight said. “They knew about us, just like they knew to stop and search the semis at the roadblocks. Question is: How did they know?”

I have a pretty good idea, Reese thought, remembering the woman telling Cheyenne, the waitress in the diner, about a stranger who had asked to borrow her phone when she came out of the bathroom. Then later, Alice spending an awful lot of time inside the ladies’ room.

Two and two gets you four, old chum.

“Well?” Dwight said.

“I don’t know,” Reese lied.

He turned in his seat and looked into the back. She was still alive, because he could see the rise and fall of her chest (slightly labored, but nevertheless clearly rising and falling). She had landed with one leg dangling carelessly off the seat, and her head was lolled to one side — facing him, which offered a nice view of her serene expression.

Reese couldn’t deny that Alice was pretty. Then again, so was Juliet, and he’d never had any interest in her. But there was something different about Alice. Maybe it was the confidence. He liked that in a woman. Even when he put her through the test back at the roadside diner, she hadn’t been flustered. Even when Vanguard wasted the troopers, she had sat there and kept quiet and didn’t panic once. Compared to Dwight, she was a model of calm. Hell, she had given him a run for his money in the stoic department all day.

“Jesus, dude, are you into her or something?” Dwight was saying.

Reese glanced over. “What?”

“Don’t ‘what’ me. You’re into her, aren’t you?”

“Am I suddenly back in primary school?”

“Answer the question.”

“No. Of course not.”

“Whenever someone says ‘of course not,’ that means yes. Cause if you are, just go back there and fuck her and get it over with. She’s not going to stop you.”

“I’m not even going to dignify that with a proper response, Dwight.”

His partner laughed. “Hey, it’s just you and me and her in the car. She won’t know, and I won’t blab about it later. Go ahead. Climb back there. Just be careful; don’t wanna open that graze back up. And, oh, try not to let her shoot you again.”

“Shut up and drive,” Reese grunted.

Dwight laughed again but mercifully let it go. At least, for the moment.

His blood was pooling under him, and it should have made sitting uncomfortable, but Reese was far too relieved that they were still in the wind after everything — the sight of all those squad cars flooding the parking lot had made him overly pessimistic for a second — to let it get him down. He glanced down at his bandages again. Still no visible signs of fresh blood.

It was a good thing he had seen the glint of her gun coming out from behind her back a split second before she shot him. That early split-second warning had allowed him to twist just enough that the bullet went into his side instead of his gut. At the time he thought he could make himself small enough to force her to miss completely, but that was stupid, especially given the distance between them.

But she had shot him, and he hadn’t seen it coming. That was the thing that bothered Reese the most. He hadn’t seen it coming.

How the hell had that happened?

Dwight’s voice woke him up from his slumber: “Hey, Sleeping Beauty, it’s them. Answer the phone.”

Reese opened his eyes to a slight buzzing in his jacket pocket. The interior of the car was dead quiet and they were still moving down the interstate, which looked impossibly abandoned at the moment, except for the occasional vehicle on the faster left lane or coming from the opposite direction.

His body ached, but he ignored it and fished out the phone. The blood clinging to his fingers had dried, so he had napped for quite a stretch. He didn’t bother looking at the caller ID.

“Yes,” he said into the phone.

“We’re looking at the news right now,” a male voice said on the other end of the line. “The truck stop. Andy something.”

“Andy’s Gas N Eats.”

“Yes, that’s it. What’s your situation?”

Reese folded his palm over the phone, said to Dwight, “Where are we?”

“Next state over,” Dwight said.

“Roadblocks?”

“Haven’t seen one yet.”

He turned back to the phone: “We’re beyond the perimeter.”

“I don’t have to tell you what’s happened to the cargo,” the caller said. It wasn’t a question.

“No,” Reese said.

“Good. Because I hate wasting my breath on things people should already know.”

Reese rubbed at his eyes to help himself wake up, but the monotony of the view outside the car windows wasn’t a very big help. There seemed to be an endless series of empty black road in front of him and on the dark shoulder to his right.

“What are you going to do about it?” the man on the other end of the phone asked.

“I’m not sure what I can do,” Reese said. “If you’re worried about the cargo identifying you or even being aware of your existence, don’t be.”

“Don’t tell me what I should and shouldn’t be worried about, Reese. The drivers, on the other hand. They’re yours, aren’t they?”

“We’ve worked with them in the past, yes.”

“How much do they know? About the operation? About us?”

“They know what I’ve told them, which isn’t very much. They’re freelancers; they know better than to ask questions.”

“That isn’t an answer, Reese.”

“Nothing. They don’t know anything about you.” When his caller didn’t reply right away, Reese said, “We’re not even sure if they’ve been captured alive. There was a lot of gunplay.”

“I think it’s best to assume they’ve been captured alive, don’t you? Just in case.”

“Agreed,” Reese said.

“I have to say, we’re a little disappointed.”

“I can assure you, so are we.”

“You’ve always come through for us, Reese. What went wrong this time?”

Alice. That’s what went wrong, he thought, but said instead into the phone, Her “We’re looking into it. If we find anything, we’ll let you know.”

“Do that. In the meantime, what’s your current location?”

“We’re about three hours out from the midway point,” Reese said, and saw Dwight glance over at him out of the corner of his eye.

“Good,” the caller said. “We’ll talk again when you get there.”

“Again, our apologies,” Reese said. “We will, of course, not accept any forms of payment for this screwup. Hopefully you’ll let us make up for it.”

“We’ll see,” the caller said, and hung up.

Reese grimaced at a sudden spurt of pain as he put the phone back into his jacket pocket.

“We’re almost at the midway point,” Dwight said. “Ten minutes, tops. Why did you lie?”

“Because we’re not going there. Slow down.”

Dwight did. “What’s going on?”

“Before Alice did what she did, they called me, told me to cut our losses.”

“Fuck. That’s some hardcore shit.”

Reese nodded. “Yeah. Writing the girls off as a loss is a financial decision, but losing them to the cops, along with, potentially, the drivers, goes beyond that.”

“So I take it we’re not going to the midway point.”

“They were already looking to do damage control, and now we’ve just become another loose end that needs to be cauterized.”

“Ouch,” Dwight said. “I think there’s a word for this, if I’m not mistaken.”

“It’s not super fantastic, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Reese said, and leaned back against his seat and closed his eyes. The throbbing had returned, and no matter what he did, it was getting more and more difficult to ignore them.

“You all right?” Dwight asked.

“I really could use some of those painkillers, partner.”

“Hurts, huh?”

“What do you think?”

“Must hurt a lot. You look like you’re about to poop in your pants.”

Reese sighed. “I need something.”

“Hold your horses.”

“Trying…”

It took thirty minutes, with Dwight driving around the scheduled meeting place, before they eventually pulled into a gas station. Dwight found a spot at the side of the main store, away from the bright lights in the lot. The semidarkness kept them, Alice, and the damaged windshield mostly hidden, just as long as someone walking by didn’t look too closely.

Dwight put the car in park. “What about your girlfriend?”

“We keep her alive for now,” Reese said.

“Give me one good reason.”

“Aren’t you curious who she is?”

“It’s pretty obvious who she is. Juliet’s in custody somewhere, and she sold us out. That girl back there’s a goddamn cop. She must have gotten her hands on a phone when you let her go into the diner by herself. Case closed.”

“I didn’t let her go by herself. I followed her.”

“Not quickly enough. That place probably had a pay phone…”

“She didn’t go for it.”

“You saw her?”

“I did. She didn’t use it.”

Dwight shrugged, but he was not convinced. “Then she got her hands on a phone some other way. I don’t care how; I just know that she’s a cop and you should have left her back there. Better yet, you should have put one in her head as a good-bye gift. She did shoot you, remember?”

Reese shook his head. “I don’t think she’s a cop.”

“She has to be. It’s the only answer that makes any sense.”

“I don’t think so, but I’d like to find out for sure.”

Dwight squinted at him. It wasn’t nearly dark enough for Reese not to see the smirk on his partner’s face.

“What’s on your mind?” Reese asked.

“I think you don’t want to believe she’s a cop because you just want to keep her around.”

“I just want answers, Dwight. How long have we been partners? You know I don’t do well with blissful ignorance.” He sighed and tried to blink away a stab of pain. “Now can you please go into that store and get me something before I pass out again?”

“It’s a gas station, dude; don’t get your hopes up for a bottle of Vicodin.”

The ceiling light flickered on temporarily as Dwight opened his door and climbed out. Reese checked his bandages for the second time since waking up, and finding it stark white against the blackness of the car’s interior, leaned back and attempted to slow down his breathing.

He glanced up at the rearview mirror and looked back at Alice, still unconscious in the backseat. Or, at least, she looked the part. For all he knew, she could have been faking it. The woman was apparently very good at that. Which was just one more reason why Reese wanted to get to the bottom of who she really was.

After that, well, Dwight wasn’t completely wrong. She was much too dangerous to keep around forever. Sooner or later, whether he got his answers or not, they were going to have to say good-bye to her because they had more pressing business on their plates. That was something Reese had no doubts about, just like he knew there was nothing waiting for them at the scheduled midway point where they were supposed to meet their employers’ representatives but bullets with their names on them.

Live by the gun, die by the gun, isn’t that the old saying?