Page 2 of Break for Me

“Will you focus, please?”

I couldn’t help but chuckle. “Tell me about The Retirement.”

“Sending it to your computer now,” she said. It creeped me out endlessly that she was able to remote control her way into the laptop in my car to bring up whatever she wanted me to see whenever she wanted me to see it, even while I was driving.

“You might want to pull over somewhere for this one,” she said.

I glanced at the screen while she brought up lists of information, photos, locations that were pinned all across a map of the United States.

“It’s a person,” Memphis said. “We’re looking for a woman. Someone has been looking for her for almost five years now. She’s good. I don’t think I’ll be able to find her quickly. Looks like every time she’s been found, she disappears again within the next twelve hours. Pulling her up now.”

My breath got caught in my throat at the picture that popped up on my screen.

I was looking at a damn model. She might as well have been a child for how young she looked, but she was still stunning. All of her features were dark. Deep brown hair that was long enough that I couldn’t see where it ended in this photo of her from her shoulders and up. Eyes that were dark enough to be the color of black coffee. Her face was more round than it was elongated but her cheekbones were high enough that her cheeks looked like they hollowed out naturally. Every image that Memphis pulled up showed her with the same angry-looking glare. Not a single one captured this girl with a smile.

“Do we know why they’re looking for her?” I asked, realizing Memphis was probably right. I needed to just pull over so I didn’t end up in a ditch trying to keep up with everything she was trying to show me.

“Nope,” she said. “No reason given at all. The most textbook case I think I’ve ever seen of RBF though. I can’t imagine she’ll be much fun to be around.”

“What’s RBF?”

“Jersey. Seriously. What do you even do with your free time? How old are you?”

“Memphis.”

We both knew she knew my age and the fact that I did not have free time.

“It means resting bitch face, oldster,” she said.

I tried not to laugh at how hilarious the term was, and how well it fit this girl. I looked a little closer at the notes that were included in the file while Memphis continued to shift through photos.

“Why does that specify to keep her alive?” I asked. One of the very few rules that we actually kept to like mad in this organization was not killing people. We weren’t hitmen. We did what we had to do to get jobs done. Sometimes that meant getting real close to having to kill people. We hurt them, we tortured them for information, but the end result was never death. If death was on the horizon, we were expected to find another route to achieve the goal.

The silence from my Judge was unnerving.

“Don’t you dare tell me that she’s one of those you’ll never catch me alive types,” I said. “I’m not babysitting someone who’s suicidal, Memphis.”

“The image of you babysitting is the funniest thing I’ve pictured in a while,” she said.

“Why does it say that?” I asked again, with a hint of impatience in my tone to try to get her attention.

“I don’t know, Jersey Boy. There’s almost no background given with this one. Could mean we’re not the only people looking for her. Could mean someone else wants her dead. Could mean she’s suicidal. Could mean —.”

“I get it,” I interrupted. “You don’t know. Does that really say she goes back to Philadelphia?”

“It does. And she was last seen out by the West Coast,” Memphis said with a laugh.

“I’m going to be on a cross country trip with lady grumpy pants,” I sighed and rammed my head back against the seat. “Cool.”

“That’s a very long drive to leave somebody in the trunk of a car,” Memphis said.

“It’s a big trunk.”

“Jersey.”

“We’ll have to stop for me to sleep sometime. She can get out then,” I said.

“Always a gentleman,” she said.

---