A generic beep heralded the reply’s arrival. Reese read it: “Password.” He looked up at her. “That’s all it says. No question mark. Just password. All in lower case, if that means anything.”
“Cabin in the woods,” she said.
“What about it?”
“Type cabin in the woods back.”
He typed it, then pressed send. This time, it only took four seconds to get a reply.
“What’s up,” Reese read. “Again, no question marks. Who is this guy, and why doesn’t he follow proper punctuation?”
“Give it a rest, school marm, and type back ‘Send picture of Faith.’”
“School marm? I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s an old lady who taught school back in the ol’ days,” Dwight said. “Sort of like how you’re being right now, dude.”
“Ah,” Reese said, and typed out Alice’s message.
He waited five seconds before the message “Downloading image” appeared on the screen, along with a progress bar that didn’t seem to move — no, there, it just moved. It was just slow. He shook the phone, thinking it might do some good, but of course it didn’t.
“Not exactly the most current model,” Reese said.
“Try shaking it some more,” Dwight chuckled.
“Maybe soak it in water? I hear rice is good for fixing bad phones.”
“I think the correct order is to soak it in water, then shove it into a bowl of rice.”
“I’ll try that next,” Reese said.
Finally, the image finished loading on the phone. It was a picture of a young girl, blonde from what he could tell, though the hair could have been white for all he knew, since the screen only showed a black-and-white photo. The image looked like one of those semiprofessional glamour shots with a faux background. He couldn’t make out the color of the girl’s eyes, but poor quality, black and white or not, it was easy to tell that she was pretty. Very, very pretty.
Reese checked the image against Alice. Maybe if he squinted hard enough there might have been some resemblance, but it wasn’t really close. So she hadn’t lied to him about the Faith girl not being related to her after all.
Reese showed her the photo. “Our girl?”
She nodded. “That’s Faith.”
“Blonde?” Dwight asked.
“Blonde hair and blue eyes,” Alice said. “She was seventeen when she was taken, and her nineteenth birthday was two months ago.”
“They probably cut her hair and dyed it so she wouldn’t be recognized,” Dwight said.
“I don’t think they did,” Reese said.
“No?”
“You don’t snatch a blue-eyed, blonde all-American girl with long hair only to change her appearance. Defeats the whole purpose.”
“Hunh, good point,” Dwight said.
“I know; that’s why I’m here.”
“You think way too highly of yourself, dude,” Dwight said, and went back to loading a Glock. “There’s a word for that.”
“Self-awareness?”
“Not even close.”
Reese looked across the table at Alice. “How are you so sure she’s even still alive? Two years is a long time in this trade. Girls come and go. They get used up and tossed aside. It’s not a pretty business.”
“She was alive as recently as five months ago,” Alice said.
“You know this for sure how?”
“The same way I came across you two. I asked around, made friends with the right people, enemies with others.” Alice nodded with absolute certainty. “She’s alive, and she’s out there, waiting, and you two are going to help me bring her home.”
Nineteen
“She’s alive, and she’s out there, waiting, and you two are going to help me bring her home,” or die trying.
Of course, she didn’t say that last part out loud, though she suspected they probably knew it already. She had seen people do worse things for the chance to make much, much less than a million dollars. For killers like Dwight and Reese, she had a feeling her proposition was not even close to being the most dangerous — or questionable — thing someone had offered to pay them to do.
If she had to, Allie would kill the both of them. Or finish the job, in the case of Reese. Whether they knew it or not, absolutely no one was going to miss the two of them if they disappeared from the planet tomorrow. She had a hard time imagining either one with loved ones waiting for them back home, wherever “home” was. England for Reese, but it was anyone’s guess where Dwight hailed from.
It was better she didn’t know too much about them anyway. It was easier if she just thought of them as bad men who had to be dealt with. Listening to them joke with one another, even with her, took away some of that edge, but all she had to do was remind herself that they were not her friends and that they were mercenaries who would do anything for money, even transport young girls to a miserable new life.
If they honored their part of the deal, she would, too. Two million was a steep price to pay, but it wasn’t as if the money belonged to her in the first place. The only reason she had taken it was to help ensure Lucy’s future, and there was still more than enough in the trust fund she had set up for the girl to do that. The fact that the money came in handy when she started searching for Faith was a bonus. It was nice to have, but she had gone through all her life without it, and she could do so again. After all, she hadn’t needed a cent of it to hunt down Beckard not all that long ago.
Allie reached into her jacket pocket now and took out the pill bottle Reese had given her and shook out two more of the white meds. She glimpsed Reese watching her in the rearview mirror (So what else is new?), probably alerted to the sound of the pills clinking in the bottle. She ignored him and chased the painkillers down with a bottle of water.
“Might want to take it easy with those,” Reese said.
“I don’t see you taking your own advice,” she said.
Reese smiled. “I was shot, remember?”
“And I was run over by a car. So what’s your point?”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Dwight said. “You jumped before I hit you. It was barely a glancing blow.”
She smirked. “Right. Glancing blow. Fuck you, Dwight.”
Dwight chuckled but didn’t reply.
The afternoon sunlight flashed by around them in a blur of green woods and flat farmland, with a roadside establishment every other mile or so. They had crossed the state line sometime in the early morning of last night, though neither man had bothered to tell her that until they left the motel behind. The white, unassuming pickup they were in now was another stolen vehicle, this one pinched from a rest stop, its license plates swapped with those of a black GMC’s. At the rate Dwight was going around stealing cars, they might have enough to start their own used car lot within a month.
She sat in the backseat, listening to the engine struggling against the smooth, paved road. Maybe Reese was right; maybe she had taken one painkiller too many, if the brief bouts of drowsiness were any indication, but there was no way around it and she wasn’t going to let him know that. Besides, parts of her body, especially from the waist down and all over her back, still throbbed and hurt too much when she moved even a little bit, and the continued dosage helped to ease a lot of it. Sooner or later she was going to have to visit a hospital to make sure nothing really was broken, but that could wait.
If nothing else, Reese was still moving with a hole in him, and she would be damned if she gave in to her injuries first, even if her insides did feel as if they had turned to mush.