Page 11 of Break for Me

“This is starting to feel a little personal, Memphis,” I laughed. “Am I supposed to wait a certain amount of time before I text her?”

“What?”

“Aren’t there rules? Can’t call the day right after a date, can’t respond to a text within a certain number of minutes. Isn’t it a whole thing?” I asked.

“This might be massively shocking for you to hear, but I’m not exactly the bachelorette of the year, Jersey. I spend every second of my time dictating your next move. There isn’t much availability for dating.”

“If you wouldn’t make me wear all this crap, you wouldn’t have to dictate my every move. I could just call you when I needed you,” I offered. “Like the old days. When this was easy. And I was mostly alone.”

I didn’t even like saying those words out loud. The old days were way easier, but the old days were also lonely, long, and exhausting.

“Like the old days,” she repeated and laughed. “You wouldn’t survive a full day without me now, champ. Would you even know how to turn on the computer in your car by yourself?”

“You leave Seph out of this,” I said quickly. “She’s never done anything to you.”

“Let me know her schedule and I’ll set your dinner reservations,” she said.

“What? I’m not actually taking her —.”

“Your fake dinner reservations. Jesus. She’s going to ask where you’re going because she’ll need to know how to dress. You’ll need to be able to tell her about this restaurant. She’s not from this city either,” Memphis said.

“You know, you’re always welcome to explain yourself without the attitude.”

“Oh, we both know that won’t be happening anytime soon.”

“Talk to you later, Memphis.”

I tossed the little plastic bag full of napkins into a trash can on my way back to where I’d parked my car. I knew where she was staying, I knew where she worked, and I had her current phone number. She was spooked by my random appearance but not enough to prevent her from ending up in my phone, so I didn’t have to keep physically following her to make sure she didn’t disappear again. I wasn’t overly fond of the idea of having to hang around this city any longer than was necessary though. I’d never gotten the deliver her alive line from the paperwork out of my head. It still wasn’t sitting well with me. I had no information at all about who else might be after her and I wasn’t interested in failing this job just because someone else might get to her first. I pulled my phone out as soon as I was sitting in my car and texted Trista.

Me: How do you feel about tonight, fancy face? 7:30?

Memphis would shit an absolute brick if she ever got wind of the Fancy Face thing.

Could she see my text messages?

She probably could.

Shit.

I went back to my own hotel that was much deeper into the city and very uncomfortably handed the keys to my car over to the valet.

“She goes in a garage,” I said to the kid. “Not outside. If you don’t have spaces inside, bring her right back here.”

He nodded at me. Memphis set me up in one of the better Seattle hotels, so this kid was probably used to assholes with expensive cars. But he probably wasn’t used to former Marines who could torture him half a million ways without ever killing him just to make sure he felt as much pain as possible over those expensive cars. I made my way back up to my room to scour my way through everything that Memphis had ever sent me about this assignment. I planned to have this girl fully in my possession within the next day or two and then I wouldn’t have much time left for any extra research. Whatever was necessary to know, I’d need to know ahead of time. I shouldn’t have smiled the way that I did at my own ability to simply turn on the laptop that was waiting for me in the room, but Memphis wasn’t wrong. I knew everything there was to know about my Challenger when it existed just the way that I’d bought it, but I knew next to nothing about the hundreds of little gadgets that she’d had added to it over the last year. Somehow, it had gone from feeling like the Demon I’d purchased to feeling like something out of Back to the Future.

Trista’s text message interrupted my research before it ever started.

Fancy Face: Gotta work tonight. What about tomorrow?

Having to sit around and wait for another full day definitely wasn’t ideal, but I couldn’t exactly make demands without her ending up suspicious. Or having it end with her telling me to fuck off entirely. She probably wouldn’t appreciate it if I just showed up at her bar again tonight, either. Before I even responded to Trista, Memphis sent me a separate text with the name and address of a restaurant.

Yep. She already knew about the Fancy Face situation. No doubt.

I sent the information to Trista and went back to reading about her personal life. More than anything, I wanted to know what I was about to be up against for the next few days of driving across the country with this person who’d managed to outsmart more than one of our teams. I wanted to know what she’d studied with that whopping one semester at Carnegie Mellon before she evaporated that had managed to prepare her to be a successful outlaw for the next half a decade. I wanted to know who and where her biological father was and I couldn’t help but wonder if he played a role in any of what was happening. The address that we’d been given to return her to didn’t provide any information. It looked like any other run down skyscraper on the outskirts of Philadelphia. It had no identifying labels, no signs, no information attached to the address online.

Unfortunately, Trista Hart had been a very successful ghost for most of her time on the run.

nine

---