Page 4 of Break for Me

“The —? You can control the lights in my —? What?”

What a weird fucking thing to threaten.

I needed a cabin in the middle of nowhere that had no hint of electricity.

* * *

I was headed toward Washington not long after that, running through the endless set of information we had about this job. We had a mile-long list of facts about this girl, but none of it seemed particularly helpful for what we needed to do. Trista Hart fell off the face of the Earth when she was nineteen, after only a single semester attending Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. Since then, she’d been stealing identities from people with unisex names and making her way across the country. As far as Memphis could tell, she’d been responsible for the downfall of a total of four other teams in our organization. Whatever she was doing along this journey, she hadn’t been doing it in lavish style. She was traveling mostly by bus. She was using stolen identities to get low-limit credit cards, spending very minor amounts of those limits before finding a new identity, and never seeming to stay in one city for more than a few months. She hadn’t owned a house or an apartment. She wasn’t trying to put her victims into extreme debts that couldn’t be paid off. She hadn’t even bought herself a car for this cross country run that she was on. She’d lived with her mother all her life, and eventually they added a stepfather into the mix. It didn’t look like she was a kid who got into trouble in her younger years. She actually looked like a mega-nerd on paper. It wasn’t really part of my job to know why she was being hunted. It didn’t usually matter what these people had done or to whom. The job was to retrieve her and drop her off at a specified location back in Philadelphia. Anything else that was necessary knowledge in terms of finishing the job, Memphis would find eventually and let me know.

I was convinced that the girl could hear my thoughts, no matter the distance between us or what either of us was actually doing. The very moment that she crossed my mind, her name appeared on the display screen of the car as an incoming call. I pushed the button on the steering wheel to answer her.

“Watcha got for me now, sweetheart?”

“Not a chance,” she said. “Where are you?”

“Are we really going to pretend like you’re not tracking every move this car makes? Are you trying to build up to something uncomfortable by starting with small talk?”

“I don’t waste time tracking the car. I track your phone.”

I shook my head and wondered if she could feel my smirk through the phone. “What do you need, Memphis?”

She hesitated for a long while. We’d had weird as shit conversations about how she was the biggest outcast in middle school because she’d finally worked up the nerve to ask some football jock to go to a dance with her, just for him to laugh at her in the middle of the cafeteria. She was apparently the quiet, geeky, goth girl and he believed that she shouldn’t have been allowed to even stand close enough to him to speak to him. So, she hacked his phone and plastered his “millimeter peter dick pics,” as she called them, all over the school. No one ever found out that she was the one behind it, but she ruined his chances at staying in the popular crowd for his time in high school. I knew nonsense like that about Memphis, so when she was uncomfortable telling me something, I was equally uncomfortable about hearing it.

“Tell me,” I insisted.

“We’ve been doing this for a long time, Jersey. And nobody knows what happens to the teams who are removed. If we fail here —.”

I waited for just a second to see if she’d continue with whatever thought was bothering her, but she stayed quiet much too long again.

“I won’t tell anyone that you were behind that guy’s dick pic nightmare, Memphis. Promise. All your strangeness will stay safe with me.”

I felt better when I could hear her giggle.

“Do you have a dropout plan?” She asked.

“Of course.”

She was quiet again.

“You don’t,” I said quietly, starting to understand. “How? You’d know better than anyone what it would take to erase your existence from the face of the planet.”

“But where would I go? I don’t know how to hide physically. I don’t know how to protect myself physically.”

“I think the whole point of a dropout plan is to not have anyone in your present world know where you’re planning to go, Memphis.”

“Any of these conversations could be the last time that we talk. And neither of us would really know it until after the fact,” she said.

Did her voice just fucking crack? Did my heart rate increase at the sound of it?

I imagined this was how it would feel to have to listen to your own little sister being tortured.

“We both know that you could find me if you decided you wanted to. No matter where my dropout plan takes me,” I said. I felt like a father scolding a child with the tone that I’d used. It was weird to me too to even consider a day when I wouldn’t hear her voice on the other end of my phone. And I absolutely refused to acknowledge the possibility of her in physical danger. It was true that no one really knew what happened to the teams who were removed, but I would not sit here and entertain the thought of the organization killing Memphis over a failed job.

“We won’t be failing, Memphis,” I said. “It’s not an option.”

“I would imagine all the other teams on this job thought the same thing,” she said.

“They’re not going to hurt you.”

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