“Well?” Dwight said.
Reese turned the phone off and put it away. “She’s not lying. There is over three million in the account.”
“Three million,” Dwight said, putting the gun away. It might have been her imagination, but he looked either impressed or confused. Maybe somewhere in between. “You willing to give two of that to us?” he asked her.
“Only if you agree to my proposition,” Allie said.
“And what would that be?” Reese said, also turning to face her.
“I’m looking for a girl named Faith.”
“Never heard of her,” Dwight said.
“You wouldn’t. Two years ago, she was taken off the road in a nearby state during a cross-country road trip with her boyfriend. He didn’t survive.”
“Sister?” Reese asked.
“No,” Allie said.
“Friend?”
“I’ve never met her in my life.”
Reese gave her a quizzical look, then exchanged the same with Dwight.
“So what, her parents paid you to find her?” Dwight asked.
“Her mother asked me to,” Allie said, “but she’s not paying me.”
Dwight scratched his stubble, not even bothering to hide the confusion on his face this time. “So what are you, some chick with a Robin Hood complex who just happens to have three million bucks sitting around in a foreign bank account, accumulating interest?”
“What I am, or why I’m doing this, is my business.” She looked at Dwight, then at Reese. “The question is: You want to try outrunning your pissed-off employers with what you have on hand, or would you rather do it with an additional million each?”
The two men exchanged another look, and this time it was much longer than the first.
Reese finally turned back to her. “So that’s it. The reason you climbed into our car in the first place. This girl, Faith.”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“So what was the plan?”
“Let you take me to your employers, and from there, find out where they’re keeping Faith.”
“She’s with them?”
“If she’s not presently, then they would know where she is.”
“So you’re going to pay us to find a girl who is currently working for the same assholes we’re trying to avoid?” Dwight said. He sounded on the urge of either laughing or crying. “Which part of trying not to get dead by running don’t you get, Alice in Wonderland?”
“He’s got a point,” Reese said. “It rarely happens, I’ll grant you, but this is definitely one of those rare occurrences.”
Dwight snorted, but Reese ignored him and continued:
“Your big sell is a million dollars each to help us run from the men trying to kill us, but in order to get that payday, we have to actually go back into the viper’s nest.” Reese shook his head. “You didn’t really think this through, did you?”
“On the contrary,” Allie said, “I’ve thought it through enough to know you’ll do it.”
“Is that so?”
“Your former employers are looking to either silence you or punish you for your failures. Either way, it ends with the two of you below ground. The smart thing for you to do is run. And they know that. The last thing they expect is for you to head right back into the belly of the beast.”
“It’s the last thing they would expect because it’s the dumbest thing,” Dwight said.
“I don’t want you to take them on. I want you to go around them. Use your knowledge of their operation and help me locate one girl. After that, you’ll both have a million dollars each to run to your heart’s content. Tell me that’s not a better plan than just disappearing tomorrow with what you have on hand.”
“What makes you think we don’t already have a million bucks socked away?” Dwight asked. “You know how long we’ve been doing this?”
“Because you wouldn’t even be considering my proposal if you did,” Allie said and smiled back at him.
Dwight grunted, but that resulted in a third exchange of glances between him and Reese in the front seats.
“Maybe,” Reese said.
“Suicide,” Dwight said.
“Not if we’re careful.”
“Too many guns. Too many meatheads. Too much everything bad.”
“There are always too many guns, always too many meatheads. At least this time we come out of it a million dollars richer. That’s a lot of operating room. We can run pretty far and pretty long with that kind of bankroll.”
She sat quietly in the backseat and didn’t interject. Despite his reluctance, she could almost sense Dwight coming around. Reese was already halfway there.
“It’s still suicide,” Dwight said.
“You already said that,” Reese said.
“That’s because it deserves to be said twice.”
“There’s a way…”
“A good way?”
Reese shrugged. “A better way.”
“Go on…”
“The houses.”
“The houses?” Dwight repeated.
“The houses,” Reese nodded.
“Maybe…”
“What houses?” Allie finally said.
Reese turned back to her. “You wanted to know where the girls were being taken. The houses. There are a handful of them spread across the countryside — four that we know of in this region alone, three that we’ve delivered to in the past — where they receive the girls and groom them.”
“And you think Faith might be in one of these places?”
“It’s possible. You said the girl was taken off the road in the state next door?”
Allie nodded. “Yes.”
“Then the closest house wouldn’t be the one we were headed to originally; it’d be the one north of us. If she’s not there — but she was, once upon a time — they would know where she was moved to, like you said. These people keep meticulous records, but they don’t trust computers. It’s all written down.”
“I got a better idea,” Dwight said. “We give you the locations of all the houses, and you send in the Feds. We’ll even only take a million between us.”
“Sounds fair,” Reese said.
“No,” Allie said without hesitation. “But you’re still going to give me the locations, except we’re still going to the one you think Faith might be at anyway. I know how law enforcement works. Even if I handed them the addresses on a silver platter, it would take weeks, maybe months to get any movement. I can’t afford to wait that long. Faith’s already waited too long.”
“The houses are well guarded,” Reese said. “We won’t just be able to walk inside and ask to see their records.”
“Guys with guns,” Dwight snorted. “A whole lotta them.”
“I know,” Allie said. “What? Did you think I was just going to hand over two million dollars for a couple of addresses? Oh no, boys, you’re going to have to earn your money.”
They exchanged a fourth glance.
“We’ll go in, and if we can’t find any information on her, we’ll move on to the next house,” Allie continued. “We’ll keep going until we find either her or her trail.”
“And what if we get killed along the way?” Dwight asked. “You think about that?”
“That’s why you’re going to give me the addresses first. If anything happens to us, my friends will have the location and they can give it to the Feds. Until then, it’ll just be the three of us. We can do what the cops can’t.”
“You sound like you have personal experience with this,” Reese said. “Run afoul of the law a time or two, have we?”
“I guess you could say that.”
“I was right,” Dwight said, and let out an almost resigned laugh. “I knew the first time I saw you that you were bad news, Alice in Wonderland.”
“Yeah, well, suck it up,” Allie said. “Now, do we have a deal or not?”