Butterfly Stomp Waltz

Chapter 36

36

Everything seems to lurch to a halt.

The elderly colonial hotel room feels hotter and more claustrophobic. Walls thick with old beige paint press in on me. The smell of cooking seafood and vegetables and peppers from the crowded noisy street below turns rancid in my gut. Sitting on the bed, Rob suddenly looks like a pod person, a shabby alien duplicate in denim shorts and blue T-shirt instead of the real Rob’s impeccable suit. Bradley watches me, deliberately relaxed but ready to throw her stocky frame at me if I lose it.

Which I just might.

Don’t kill them. I work my jaw a moment as if trying to swallow the idea. “You want me. To wait outside. While you two go in to extract Noah?”

“That is correct,” Rob says. He’s sitting straight, like a commanding officer who doesn’t even conceive the crew might mutiny. I’ve seen him worried, tense, even scared, but his dark face shows nothing but confidence.

I look over at Bradley.

She nods, once.

“Why?” I snap, lunging to my feet. I try not to shout, but my voice rises with my racing heart. “Deke is in there! Do you think I’m just going to sit by and let you two ignore that? Deke sold us out. Deke got people killed.”

“You won’t be sitting by. We need a sniper, a spotter,” Rob says. My outburst doesn’t unsettle him at all.

“While you go after Noah,” I snarl. “Not Deke.”

“Noah is killing our peers,” Rob says. “Our friends.”

“And Deke is feeding Noah all his information.”

“Our first priority must be stopping the deaths,” Rob says. “That means taking Noah.”

Bradley’s fidgeting on her undersized chair. Words want to burst out of her, but she keeps glancing between Rob and me. They talked about this, too, I realize. They agreed beforehand that Rob should do the talking, Rob should sweet-talk me into giving up on Deke.

“We stop the flow of information,” I start—

—but Rob interrupts. “Noah is directing his own performance now. He is paying people to commit murder. We simply must call off those assassination squads before more people die.”

“So we go in together,” I shout. “The three of us. We can detour on the way to grab Deke.”

“Three people extracting two?” Rob says. “Two unwilling people?”

“We, we steal a car,” I say, but my voice falters at the end. It sounds weak, even to me.

“Without cover?” Rob asks. He sounds gentle again, like he thinks he’s convinced me. “Through the jungle? Pursued by Noah’s men?”

“You’re the expert!” I say. “You’ve done this dozens of times. There’s a way to do it, we only have to figure it out.”

“I have done this,” Rob says. “I’ve done this work since before you were born. Any script that calls for three people to extract two uncooperative targets from a fenced-in, heavily guarded compound deep in the Burmese jungle completely collapses in the second act. We do not have the equipment, the support, or the intel that would make such a thing possible.”

Staring at Rob, I’m shaking. Deke helped me reassemble myself after everything I thought I knew had collapsed under me. And then he betrayed me, us, destroying my life again. I’m furious. I’m wounded. I’m crushed. And my soul still feels like it’s exploding within me.

“This is an incredibly difficult performance,” Rob says. “I know of nobody who has accomplished anything even remotely this chancy. Our very survival demands perfection. Professionalism. Detachment and dispassion. And you…” Rob shakes his head. “My dear Beaks.” His voice is soft again. Tender. “You cannot be dispassionate now. Not even an ogre could expect that of you. Not now.”

Dispassionate? Noah somehow turned Deke. If I see Noah, even through a sniper scope, I’m likely to put a bullet in him. If I have to smell him, he might just choke on my fist before I can say a word.

Rob’s watching me calmly, trying to pull my focus onto him. It’s an old trick, one I learned from him years ago. I deliberately look over at Bradley, who has shifted a little forward in apprehension or anticipation or both.

The gears in my brain feel jammed, immobile, so it must be my mouth speaking on its own. “Not a chance.”

Rob starts to reply but I steamroller right over him. “You think I’m going to watch this through a sniper scope? I am going in there. I am finding Deke. I am dealing with him myself.”

Rob says “I swear, we shall—”

“Nothing,” I say. I’m not shouting now, I’m too mad for that. “You grab Noah—we grab Noah, and Deke will vanish. He will fade, right into the jungle, or over the border, into China, and then what?”

“He will show himself again,” Rob says.

I’m on my feet. “Thirty days from now he’ll have a new face. He won’t even—smell the same.” Deke’s smell comes back to me suddenly, his own sweat mingled with expensive spicy cologne.

I might smell that once more. Just once.

“We’ll never find him,” I say. “Two months from now, he could walk right up to me and—and I wouldn’t even recognize him. I have to find him now. Or never.”

Bradley stands. “You selfish bitch.”

I turn to her. Bradley’s face is bright red, her teeth clenched.

Rob says “Liza, we agreed—”

“I agreed to let you try” she snaps, standing. “Good try.” Bradley pivots to me. “People are getting killed out there, and all you can think about is your hurt feelings. You think you’re the only one out there who’s lost someone? Who’s gotten backstabbed?” Her forefinger jabs in my direction. “That’s what this business is all about, missy. We get hired—because someone’s betraying someone. Only they can afford to have us do the betrayal for them, and pay again to have us clean up the mess so they don’t have to face the person they betrayed.”

I recoil. I’d never thought about my career in that way—it’s always been about getting rich people to pay me to rob other rich people. But my brain’s already overflowing. “I’m still going after Deke.”

“Do you even know what you’re going to do if you find him?” Bradley shouts.

Shoot him. Hug him. “Get an answer.”

“And what if you don’t like the answer?” Bradley takes half a step towards me. “What if that asshole turns you too?”

That asshole can’t turn me, and he’s not an asshole! “He’s not going to turn me.”

“You’ve already thrown us over for him!” Bradley’s so mad, her jaw shakes. “What would it take for you to forgive him? A crooked finger? Or just a big enough check?”

My hand lashes out. My open-hand fighting isn’t very good, but this doesn’t have any skill behind it. It’s just a rage-backed slap.

Bradley ducks it, coming back up to shove my arm as I swing past her. It’s textbook technique, and she’s got a lot of strength in those brawny shoulders.

I stumble backwards, crashing into the hollow plaster wall. The whole building echoes with the impact and decades of dust rains down from the overpainted crown molding, but I bounce off the wall and find my balance almost instantly.

“Stop,” Rob says.

I freeze.

Every time Rob’s been involved in a gig, he’s been in charge. I’m too accustomed to obeying him. My head throbs with rage, my hands clenched into tight fists just right for belting a self-righteous b***h.

But starting again means Rob will take Bradley’s side. And Rob doesn’t fight to subdue. He goes straight to breaking bones.

Bradley’s still red-faced and has her arms raised before her face, but her hands are open. She’s ready to defend.

I can feel Rob staring at me.

I don’t take my gaze from Bradley.

“I happen to be the only one who knows where Noah’s compound is,” Rob says. His voice holds no emotion, at all. “Fortunately, I anticipated Miss Salton’s decision.” Not Beaks. Not anymore. “As she will not help us with the preferred script, we move to the second.”

I take my eyes off Bradley to see Rob studying me. He’s looking at me like I’m a hostage and he’s debating if I can be trusted to take his list of demands out to the police.

“Second script?” Bradley says. “What’s this plan?”

Rob says to me, “The second script gives Miss Bradley and I an excellent chance of extracting Noah. It also gives you excellent odds on reaching Deke, and the opportunity to suitably resolve your relationship.” Sadness touches his eyes. “The biggest drawback, Miss Salton, is that you very likely will not survive.”

I still ache to deck Bradley, but instead I choke back tangled anger and hurt.

Through clenched teeth I say, “Plan number two it is.”