Finders/Keepers

Seventeen

The Tramadol was strong enough to knock her out, but she fought through it anyway, letting it do its job of numbing her body and fighting back against the excruciating pain, but at the same time never letting go completely. She remained in the backseat of the stolen Chevy, not moving or opening her eyes, but letting herself breathe normally (or as normally as she could manage, anyway) as if she were asleep.

None of those things were very hard to pull off since she wasn’t even sure she could move more than just her head if she had wanted to. Being dragged out of the motel room to the car was like having needles shoved into every part of her body. She had been forced to move on legs that might as well be engulfed in lava, while every inch of her spine gave the impression they were about to collapse inward like some black hole.

Reese had done that. The asshole.

The painkillers, she guessed, was his way of making up for what he had put her through. He hadn’t needed to do that, and as he pushed her lips apart and slipped the pills inside her mouth one at a time, then tilted the bottle so she wouldn’t have to move her head too much to drink down the meds, she thought she saw something that was almost like…concern?…on his face.

Bullshit. He’s a killer. A criminal.

Worse than that, he’s an enabler to the people who stole girls like Faith and Sara and sentenced them to a life worse than death.

No, don’t buy his lies. Reese is human garbage. Kill him when you get the chance.

After some driving and putting miles between them and the motel, Dwight finally turned off the road and parked. She heard cars passing in the background, but there weren’t enough extra clues to tell her where they were exactly. If she had to guess (and that was really all she could do while lying in the back of the Chevy), they were probably still using one of the country roads.

She had the satisfaction of knowing that Dwight and Reese weren’t just hiding from cops this time.

Men with guns at the motel. They came there for us.

No, not us. For them. Reese and Dwight.

Looks like someone’s in trouble…

Maybe it was the pills, but her mind was a lot clearer now, and it wasn’t very hard to piece together all the evidence in front of her. You didn’t lose precious cargo like Sara and the others and not have to face consequences. That was the problem with dealing with criminals. They weren’t necessarily the most loyal group of people.

Allie lay silently in the backseat and listened to them talking up front. If they knew she was listening in, they didn’t appear to be altering their conversation to keep her in the dark.

“Our reputation’s going to take a hit,” Dwight was saying.

“That’s putting the cart well before the horse, partner,” Reese responded.

“So what’s the cart?”

“Getting out of this alive.”

“Makes sense. I’m very biased toward staying alive. Call me selfish if you want, but that’s just me.”

“First things first, we need to find out how far they’re willing to pursue this.”

There.

She had been waiting for the opening, and there it was. She knew what she had to do next, but she bided her time and listened to the rest of their back and forth. They sounded muted and calm, even Dwight. Finally, the car rocked slightly as Dwight climbed out and slammed the door shut.

“There’s a way out of this,” she said.

Reese turned around in his seat. He looked surprised to see her staring back at him. “How long have you been awake?”

“Long enough.”

“How much did you hear?”

“Enough.”

He might have smiled, but in the semidarkness of the car (where the hell had Dwight parked them, anyway?), she couldn’t be entirely sure.

“How’s the pain?” he asked.

“Like my skin is on fire.”

“Welcome to the club. You remember that you shot me, right?”

“I remember.”

“Not very nice.”

“You didn’t give me any choice.”

“Didn’t I?”

She shook her head. Or managed to move it just slightly left, then right, anyway.

“Fair enough,” Reese said.

“I know a way for both of you to get out of this alive.”

“This? You mean this situation you put us in?”

“I didn’t tell Vanguard to shoot those state troopers.”

He thought about it briefly before shrugging. “No, but you’re definitely here on false pretenses. Is Juliet dead?”

“No.”

“Incarcerated?”

“Yes.”

He narrowed his eyes slightly. “Why are you telling the truth now? Or is it even the truth? It’s getting hard to tell with you, Alice.”

“Because now I have a proposition for you and Dwight.”

“I’m listening…”

“You can stay and fight — which is essentially suicide, but I think you already know that even if you pretend not to — or you can go on the run. Far, far away from here, to someplace where your former employers can’t reach you. Overseas, I’d imagine.”

“You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know, Alice.”

“If you choose to live — and run — then you’re going to need money. A lot of it.”

“Oh?”

“I can give it to you. The money.”

“Are you saying you have money, Alice?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“Enough to make a big difference.”

“I don’t think you fully understand how much it’s going to take…”

“One million,” she said.

He stared at her in silence.

It stretched to five seconds.

Then ten…

“One million,” he repeated.

“Each,” she said.

“Each?”

“One million for you, and one for Dwight.”

Another long pause as he gazed at her, and she could practically see his mind working, processing what she was saying, maybe even crunching the numbers.

How much would it take to run? How much did he have on hand? How much could he afford?

All those things took a while, until he finally said, “Bullshit.”

“Not bullshit.”

“Where would you get two million?”

“That’s none of your concern.”

“That means you don’t have it.”

“I can prove it.”

“How?”

“The same way you access the money you don’t want anyone — any government — to find out about. Call your money man and I’ll give you a bank name and an account number, along with a password, and whoever manages your money can verify the two million’s existence. He won’t be able to touch it, of course, but you’ll know I’m telling the truth.”

There was just a ghost of a smile on his lips when he said, “Who are you?”

“Make the call, Reese,” Allie said.

Reese made the call, using a burner cell phone that Dwight had grabbed from the convenience store. Dwight sat behind the steering wheel, drinking from a large can of Red Bull and scooping freshly-microwaved frozen TV dinner into his mouth while watching on with genuine curiosity.

When Reese finally made contact with his “money man,” he glanced into the backseat at her. She had sat up, both because the pain wasn’t quite as unbearable as before, and she knew that from a purely psychological standpoint, sitting was a better position to negotiate from than lying helplessly on her back.

“Two million?” Dwight said doubtfully.

“That’s what she said,” Reese nodded, holding the phone to his ear. He had been waiting for a response from the other end for the last couple of minutes.

Dwight turned in his seat and looked back at her, cheap plastic spoon filled with dripping creamy white something poking out one corner of his mouth. “So you’re not a cop.”

“No,” she said.

“Then who are you?”

“Verify the money; then we’ll talk.”

Dwight reached down and drew his Smith & Wesson.45 and tapped it against his seat’s headrest. “You better hope everything comes up roses, Alice in Wonderland, otherwise this is gonna be the last ride you’re ever going to take. I don’t care that Reese here’s smitten with you, either.”

“The money’s there,” she said.

“So you keep saying.” He turned to Reese. “Well—”

Reese held up his hand to silence Dwight, then said into the phone, “Confirm it again.” He paused to listen, then, “All right. I’ll be in touch.”

“Well?” Dwight said.

Reese turned the phone off and put it away. “She’s not lying. There is over three million in the account.”

“Three million,” Dwight said, putting the gun away. It might have been her imagination, but he looked either impressed or confused. Maybe somewhere in between. “You willing to give two of that to us?” he asked her.

“Only if you agree to my proposition,” Allie said.

“And what would that be?” Reese said, also turning to face her.

“I’m looking for a girl named Faith.”

“Never heard of her,” Dwight said.

“You wouldn’t. Two years ago, she was taken off the road in a nearby state during a cross-country road trip with her boyfriend. He didn’t survive.”

“Sister?” Reese asked.

“No,” Allie said.

“Friend?”

“I’ve never met her in my life.”

Reese gave her a quizzical look, then exchanged the same with Dwight.

“So what, her parents paid you to find her?” Dwight asked.

“Her mother asked me to,” Allie said, “but she’s not paying me.”

Dwight scratched his stubble, not even bothering to hide the confusion on his face this time. “So what are you, some chick with a Robin Hood complex who just happens to have three million bucks sitting around in a foreign bank account, accumulating interest?”

“What I am, or why I’m doing this, is my business.” She looked at Dwight, then at Reese. “The question is: You want to try outrunning your pissed-off employers with what you have on hand, or would you rather do it with an additional million each?”

The two men exchanged another look, and this time it was much longer than the first.

Reese finally turned back to her. “So that’s it. The reason you climbed into our car in the first place. This girl, Faith.”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“So what was the plan?”

“Let you take me to your employers, and from there, find out where they’re keeping Faith.”

“She’s with them?”

“If she’s not presently, then they would know where she is.”

“So you’re going to pay us to find a girl who is currently working for the same assholes we’re trying to avoid?” Dwight said. He sounded on the urge of either laughing or crying. “Which part of trying not to get dead by running don’t you get, Alice in Wonderland?”

“He’s got a point,” Reese said. “It rarely happens, I’ll grant you, but this is definitely one of those rare occurrences.”

Dwight snorted, but Reese ignored him and continued:

“Your big sell is a million dollars each to help us run from the men trying to kill us, but in order to get that payday, we have to actually go back into the viper’s nest.” Reese shook his head. “You didn’t really think this through, did you?”

“On the contrary,” Allie said, “I’ve thought it through enough to know you’ll do it.”

“Is that so?”

“Your former employers are looking to either silence you or punish you for your failures. Either way, it ends with the two of you below ground. The smart thing for you to do is run. And they know that. The last thing they expect is for you to head right back into the belly of the beast.”

“It’s the last thing they would expect because it’s the dumbest thing,” Dwight said.

“I don’t want you to take them on. I want you to go around them. Use your knowledge of their operation and help me locate one girl. After that, you’ll both have a million dollars each to run to your heart’s content. Tell me that’s not a better plan than just disappearing tomorrow with what you have on hand.”

“What makes you think we don’t already have a million bucks socked away?” Dwight asked. “You know how long we’ve been doing this?”

“Because you wouldn’t even be considering my proposal if you did,” Allie said and smiled back at him.

Dwight grunted, but that resulted in a third exchange of glances between him and Reese in the front seats.

“Maybe,” Reese said.

“Suicide,” Dwight said.

“Not if we’re careful.”

“Too many guns. Too many meatheads. Too much everything bad.”

“There are always too many guns, always too many meatheads. At least this time we come out of it a million dollars richer. That’s a lot of operating room. We can run pretty far and pretty long with that kind of bankroll.”

She sat quietly in the backseat and didn’t interject. Despite his reluctance, she could almost sense Dwight coming around. Reese was already halfway there.

“It’s still suicide,” Dwight said.

“You already said that,” Reese said.

“That’s because it deserves to be said twice.”

“There’s a way…”

“A good way?”

Reese shrugged. “A better way.”

“Go on…”

“The houses.”

“The houses?” Dwight repeated.

“The houses,” Reese nodded.

“Maybe…”

“What houses?” Allie finally said.

Reese turned back to her. “You wanted to know where the girls were being taken. The houses. There are a handful of them spread across the countryside — four that we know of in this region alone, three that we’ve delivered to in the past — where they receive the girls and groom them.”

“And you think Faith might be in one of these places?”

“It’s possible. You said the girl was taken off the road in the state next door?”

Allie nodded. “Yes.”

“Then the closest house wouldn’t be the one we were headed to originally; it’d be the one north of us. If she’s not there — but she was, once upon a time — they would know where she was moved to, like you said. These people keep meticulous records, but they don’t trust computers. It’s all written down.”

“I got a better idea,” Dwight said. “We give you the locations of all the houses, and you send in the Feds. We’ll even only take a million between us.”

“Sounds fair,” Reese said.

“No,” Allie said without hesitation. “But you’re still going to give me the locations, except we’re still going to the one you think Faith might be at anyway. I know how law enforcement works. Even if I handed them the addresses on a silver platter, it would take weeks, maybe months to get any movement. I can’t afford to wait that long. Faith’s already waited too long.”

“The houses are well guarded,” Reese said. “We won’t just be able to walk inside and ask to see their records.”

“Guys with guns,” Dwight snorted. “A whole lotta them.”

“I know,” Allie said. “What? Did you think I was just going to hand over two million dollars for a couple of addresses? Oh no, boys, you’re going to have to earn your money.”

They exchanged a fourth glance.

“We’ll go in, and if we can’t find any information on her, we’ll move on to the next house,” Allie continued. “We’ll keep going until we find either her or her trail.”

“And what if we get killed along the way?” Dwight asked. “You think about that?”

“That’s why you’re going to give me the addresses first. If anything happens to us, my friends will have the location and they can give it to the Feds. Until then, it’ll just be the three of us. We can do what the cops can’t.”

“You sound like you have personal experience with this,” Reese said. “Run afoul of the law a time or two, have we?”

“I guess you could say that.”

“I was right,” Dwight said, and let out an almost resigned laugh. “I knew the first time I saw you that you were bad news, Alice in Wonderland.”

“Yeah, well, suck it up,” Allie said. “Now, do we have a deal or not?”

Reese exchanged a fifth glance with Dwight.

“How are you going to get the locations to your friends?” Reese asked her.

“You’re going to let me borrow your phone,” Allie said.

“Not going to happen,” Dwight said.

She gave him an amused look. “Are you afraid I’m going to turn you in, Dwight? After all the fun we’ve been through?”

He grunted. “You’re damn straight.”

“The phone’s a no-go,” Reese said.

Allie sighed. “Then write it down on a piece of paper, and I’ll mail it to my friend.”

“Snail mail?”

“Unless you’re going to hand deliver it for me, then yeah.”

Reese chuckled and looked over at Dwight. “I guess you’re going to need to pick up some stamps when you go look for the sewing needle and thread.”

Dwight made a face. “Goddammit, you’re going to make me suture your wound, aren’t you?”

“I would do it for you, partner — and in fact, I believe I have.”

Dwight groaned. “Fuck this partnership.”

“That’s the spirit,” Reese smiled.

“Do we have a deal?” Allie asked.

They looked back at her simultaneously.

“You got some balls on you, Alice in Wonderland, I’ll give you that,” Dwight said.

“Do we have a deal or not?”

“Well, you’re still alive,” Dwight said. “What does that tell you?”