Page 7 of Taken By the Bounty Hunter

“Get ready, Sonja.” I make a U-turn at a reasonable speed and then pop the clutch and fucking fly.

Someone called someone else to warn them about me.

Come quick. He’s back again. That man in the leather jacket in the loud car. He’s cut his hair, but I know it’s him.

I evade the truck by using a couple of winding dirt roads through the foothills, risking bottoming out on a couple of rutted paths. My baby girl scrapes by, mostly unharmed, as the engine screams through backroads headed into town. Thank you, modern custom fenders.

Home sweet home is a crappy multi-use office with dirt cheap rent that I split with my best friend, Joaquin.

I park my dirt-caked Sonja in the alley’s carport, where I work on her on my days off. I bound up the steps through the back door, pass through the sad excuse for a kitchen, and head into the front office area.

From the outside, the place is a boring-1970s-era two-bed one-bath that narrowly escaped getting flipped into something with more curb appeal.

Inside, the front room houses two salvaged metal desks, two long rows of green file cabinets from Army Navy Surplus, two bottom-dollar Ikea office chairs that have seen better days, and a rust-colored sofa shoved under the picture window that we call our “magic sofa.”

Despite Joaquin’s preference to work in the dark, I flick the light switch on my way in. The room is bathed in a half-hearted glow from the ugly amber pendant light fixture that someone’s grandmother no doubt thought coordinated perfectly with the popcorn ceiling and the avocado-green walls. Apart from the fingerprint-ID-locked gun safe in the corner, the only thing about this office that’s not wildly outdated are the simple butcomfortable wingback chairs facing each of our two desks, and the desks’ computers. Joaquin and I were unanimous in that we’d rather splurge on technology than on making the place look pretty.

A giant head atop two broad shoulders pops out from behind one of the computer monitors. “Jefferson! Where you been?” Joaquin asks in an overly friendly way, telling me he knows exactly where I’ve been.

I grunt a monosyllabic answer and toss the keys to my Charger on my desk. “Out.”

“Looking for skips? Real juicy ones that pay the rent?”

And here comes the sarcasm. He’s calling me out without directly calling me out.

“Yep,” I say, not making eye contact though I can see his caveman eyebrows arch in mock surprise.

“Neat. Tell me about ‘em.”

I sit down in the cheap wooden desk chair and scrub my face. “Not much to tell,” I say.

“Dammit, Hope,” he replies. “You were out looking for that girl again.”

I ignore him, though he’s triggering my blood pressure. My hand goes to my mouse to wake up my computer monitor.

“We’ve got back rent due, you know,” Joaquin says, chucking a sheet of yellow paper over to my desk. It floats over to me and falls onto my keyboard. A late notice. I know how to fix this. I’ll get a few minor skips, Joaquin will take on one of his sketchier jobs that he doesn’t talk about, and we’ll squeak by.

“Well, lucky for you, we’ve got another income stream. A friend of a friend called, needing to sublet the second bedroom for someone.”

I’m barely listening.

“A woman. You good with that?”

I grunt as I scroll through search results on my monitor.

Joaquin clears his throat. “Which means you can’t walk around naked after your showers, buddy.”

“Okay.”

He goes on, “And you’ll have to move into the bonus room because this renter is going to pay over a thousand a month just for a bedroom.”

“Cool.”

“It’s real hush-hush. Like, I don’t know when she’ll be here, but we gotta just keep the room ready for her so she can crash here whenever she needs it. Could be a government contractor. Could be an assassin. Maybe it’ll be real exciting.”

No response from me.

“Maybe she’s cute.”

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