The Widow File (9 page)

It took several minutes for Dani’s phone to charge enough to turn on. They finally hit the county road and Dani was able to turn the car forward. Choo-Choo banged his knees several times on the dashboard as the
old car jerked but kept his eyes glued to the two phones. Dani wanted to pet him, to reassure him, but she was scared herself.

“Got it.” He straightened in his seat and showed her his phone. “Mine.”

She rolled her eyes. “Just dial.”

“I’m putting it on speaker.” He dialed and held the phone up between them. Dani wondered if he expected her to speak to the operator, if he had handed over complete control to her. With his other hand he flipped through apps on her phone.

“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”

Choo-Choo looked at her with wide eyes and Dani leaned toward the phone. “Is this really nine-one-one?” It was a stupid question, but she couldn’t stop herself.

“Excuse me? Ma’am, what is your emergency?” It definitely wasn’t the smooth-talking man from the black trucks. This voice had a twang and just enough fatigue in it to suggest prank calls were no novelty.

“There’s been a shooting. Men with guns. At Rasmund. Rasmund Historical Society.”

The operator’s tone was all business. “Are you hurt? Where exactly are you?”

“No, we’re running. Everyone’s dead. Rasmund Historical.” They could hear the clatter of computer keys in the background. Dani mentally kicked herself for missing that detail when her first call was intercepted. Dispatch centers were busy places. The operator was already contacting law enforcement.

“Tell them about the bombs,” Choo-Choo said.

“Ma’am, can you tell me your name?”

More keys clattered and Dani hesitated. Sure it sounded like 911 but she was no expert. “Look, they’re there right now planning to blow it up. They’re putting in bombs. Get the bomb squad.” Dani could see Choo-Choo scowling at the phone in his other hand.

There was a pause. “Ma’am. I’d like you to stay on the line with me. Will you do that?”

“Shit.” Choo-Choo cut off the call. He thumbed the screen on her phone that he held in his other hand.

Dani took her hand off the wheel long enough to jab his arm. “What?”

“You got a text message.”

When he said nothing else, just stared at the phone, Dani gripped the wheel so tightly her knuckles hurt. “I don’t suppose you could read it to me, huh? I’m kind of busy driving our getaway car.” He held up the phone so she could see the familiar image on the screen. “That’s me. That’s my Rasmund ID photo. From my badge. What’s the message?”

He cleared his throat and read with no intonation. “‘Hi Dani. Gee, you don’t look like the type to be disgruntled. I guess you never know who’s gonna blow. LOL.’”

Dani’s mouth went dry. “Disgruntled? What does that mean?”

Choo-Choo just shook his head, struggling for words. “I think maybe… they know that you… I think they’re going to blame you for this.”

“Me? Who’s going to blame me? Who is that?”

He said nothing and when the phone beeped again, he flinched so badly he nearly dropped the phone. “Another text.”

“Oh hooray. What’s it say?”

He swallowed hard and Dani envied him the ability to do so. Her mouth had turned to dust. “It says ‘Hop away, bunny rabbit. Hop hop hop.’ And then a smiley face.”

The phone beeped once more. “Fuck, now what? ‘LMAO’?”

“Uh-uh.” Choo-Choo held the phone up so she could see it. “It just says ‘Boom.’”

“Boom?”

“Boom.”

When the woods behind them rumbled and the fireball blazed through the sky, the impact shook the old car. Neither Dani nor Choo-Choo jumped.

CHAPTER FIVE

They drove without speaking until they reached the highway. If she turned left, she would wind up at the little Italian café where Hickman used to take them all for lunch after a job. Right took her back to D.C. She glanced at Choo-Choo, who nodded. She turned right.

Her eyes flitted over every car and rescue vehicle that screamed past them. Choo-Choo kept flipping through the phones but she could tell he too kept track of the horizon. Dani’s mind felt both empty and frantic and she struggled to put words together.

“Text them back.”

“And say what?” Choo-Choo asked.

“Ask them what they want.”

“They want us dead.”

“Tell them we’ve got information that they want.”

“But we don’t.”

“We’ll bluff.” She gripped the wheel hard as she accelerated toward the city. “Take a picture of the Rasmund pouch and send it to that number. Tell them they didn’t get everything and we’re going to the Feds. Tell them we want to make a deal.”

“A deal? Are you out of your mind? What if what they came for was Mrs. O’Donnell? I don’t want to make a deal. I want to disappear.”

“And let me take the blame for all that back there? And how are we supposed to disappear? With what, Choo-Choo? I have about fourteen dollars in my wallet and five of that I owe to Fay.” She realized what she had said but she wouldn’t let her mind go there. “We need to get some kind
of advantage or at least stop circling the drain like this. We work for Rasmund, goddamn it, not some pissant private eye. We have connections. We have people in high places. Mrs. O’Donnell has people in high places.”

He seemed heartened by this. “That’s true. You’re right.”

“I mean, I don’t actually know anyone any higher than Mrs. O’Donnell but—”

“Okay,” he said to himself and turned both phones off.

“Okay what? What are you doing?”

“We need a burner. A couple of them.”

Dani nearly missed their exit and had to talk over the blare of horns behind them. “‘Burner’? Why? Like camping stoves?”

Choo-Choo sighed. It seemed his nerves had been restored enough to reclaim his feline attitude of casual disdain. “Phones. Burner phones. We need to keep these off unless absolutely necessary.”

“They can track us with them, can’t they? Can you turn off the GPS?”

“Yeah, I did but that’s not…” He tapped the phones together, chewing his lip as he did when he was working on an especially difficult gig. Dani could feel her shoulders relaxing, knowing her friend was getting his act together. Choo-Choo liked to play the spoiled pretty boy but he hadn’t gotten the job at Rasmund because of his looks.

“It’s not what?”

Choo-Choo pointed his phone at her. “They may not know we’re both alive.”

“Well they know I’m alive. I called them to let them know.” She resisted the urge to punch herself for that. She followed the thought through to the next logical conclusion and her throat tightened in fear. “Are you going to go? Do you want to go? They don’t know you’re alive. You could just… I mean, you don’t have to…”

“What? No.” Choo-Choo managed to look simultaneously heartbroken, horrified, and offended. He grabbed for her hand and pried it off the steering wheel. “I’m not leaving you, Dani. That may be the advantage we’ve been looking for. They don’t know I’m alive.”

“You could go to the cops. You could tell them the truth, tell them I didn’t do it.”

“I wish I could, Dani, but these people, whoever they are, just broke into a secure facility and wiped everyone out. They knew who you were and had your picture and phone number. Something tells me they’ve got more than one contingency plan.” He tossed the phones into the cup holders between the seats. “No, we have to work our advantage right now.”

“Our advantage?” Dani said. “Everyone’s dead, we just jumped off a roof, and we’re running for our lives and can’t tell anyone because they’ve kidnapped our boss and are going to pin it all on me.”

“We have several advantages actually.” Choo-Choo ticked them off on his elegant fingers. “They don’t know I’m alive or that you have anyone to work with. They can’t track us if we stay hidden. And despite all their stealth and finesse, they have terrible timing.”

“How do you figure that?”

He smiled. “Because they broke in before I had a chance to cut the Stringers.”

“That’s good, right?”

“It’s outstanding. The Stringers are very dangerous people and it’s good to have them on our side. I can’t imagine they’re going to be happy when they hear about this.”

“How do we know that they haven’t been, you know, gotten to yet?”

Choo-Choo snapped a look at her that made her jump. His tone sounded offended. “The Stringers? Nobody gets to the Stringers.”

“Oh, I don’t really know them. To tell you the truth, the idea of them kind of scares the hell out of me. What is it they do, anyway? I mean, are they like hit men? Does Rasmund use hit men?” Choo-Choo only shrugged. “How do we reach them?”

A flash of tooth appeared as he began to gnaw on his lip once more. “I’m not exactly sure.” He shouted down her sound of disbelief. “I mean, I can reach them. I’m the one that sends the signals. But I don’t exactly know how to meet up with them. They only go face-to-face with the Faces, and even then only in an emergency.”

“So you wouldn’t know one of them if, say, they were pointing a gun at you?”

“Why would they point a gun at me?”

Dani shrugged. “Seems the thing to do today.” She made the turn, heading for Key Bridge back into the district. “Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but why did we have Stringers on this job?”

“Standard.”

“For investigating a group like Swan? Swan seems so, I don’t know, groovy? Peaceful? I mean, they make recycling bins and solar panels.”

“They also make body armor and portable military structures. They’re paranoid as hell and they hired us because they were afraid someone was going after their new research. If it’s high enough risk to hire us, it’s high enough risk to need Stringers. Jobs like this sometimes require a little more than Face charm. Just ask Dr. Marcher.”

“Marcher?” Dani almost rear-ended a car stopped in front of her. Her eyes were wide as she tried to put together a sentence. “You don’t think… it wasn’t… how Marcher died… we didn’t, I mean, Stringers didn’t… that’s not what… right?”

“Do I think the Stringers took out our own client? No.” When Dani relaxed, he went on. “But I don’t think it’s outside of their job description, if you know what I mean. It’s not like we keep files on that sort of thing. The Stringers are an entity unto themselves. An entity with guns. It wouldn’t suck to have them on our side.” Choo-Choo pointed to a shopping plaza off the highway. “Pull off here. I’m going to get us some phones.”

Dani watched Choo-Choo jog across the parking lot. He was the only man she had ever met who could make faded jeans and a blue flannel shirt look like fashion. When he disappeared inside the Rite Aid, anxiety shot through her. She was alone. He was only a couple of yards away but now, with the silence of the car and time alone, her panic roared up at her. Everyone was dead. Really dead. Not dead like on a videotape or dead like on a news story.

She turned the rearview mirror to stare at herself. Those eyes. Those were the same shocky eyes she’d seen on surveillance videos and news reports, recorded during witness statements and interviews. She was now one of those people. She was a survivor of violence.

So far.

She spotted Choo-Choo coming out of the drugstore with a bag swinging from his arm but instead of heading for the car, he hurried a few doors down to RadioShack.

“Surely to God,” she said to nobody, “you’re not bargain hunting.”

Dani was considering beeping the horn to hurry him up when he came back out and headed to yet another store down the plaza, but couldn’t bring herself to risk the attention. Choo-Choo had a plan and she trusted him. If he thought this was the time for a spree, who was she to stop him? Getting to the car without being shot had been the extent of her strategy. It was all improv from this point on.

They needed money. She had money. She had cash and her passport stashed in the cubby beneath her bed. As her father had taught her, she kept little caches all through her apartment and even one in her car that she had completely forgotten about. Popping the trunk, Dani hurried around to the back of the car. Pulling back the fabric floor mat, she pulled up a little nylon bag tucked inside the spare tire. When they had started dating, Ben had teased her about her tendency to squirrel things away. He had no idea how pervasive that tendency was.