They had been driving for the last five hours, most of it in silence. Reese was the type who didn’t need to occupy every single second of their traveling time with inane chatter, though she was surprised by Dwight’s mellow (and quiet) presence.
After a while, Allie said, “Juliet told me she never stayed with you guys long enough to reach the end of the line, and that was why she didn’t know where the girls were being taken. Was that a lie?”
“No,” Reese said. “She usually left us before we made the final deliveries.”
“Why?”
“I told you before; Juliet was smart, she preferred not to know all the details. The first time, we insisted she stick around to the very end, but it’s hard to make a woman with a gun do something she doesn’t want to.”
“And yet you brought her back again and again…”
“After a while, it just became a part of our modus operandi. It was working, so why change it? Besides, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Alice, but good help is very hard to find these days.”
“Really, really hard,” Dwight chimed in. “For instance, shit never hit the fan with Juliet around.”
Allie ignored him and stared at Reese and wondered if there was something he wasn’t telling her, something between him and Juliet that even Dwight might not know. Nothing about Juliet’s relationship with these two men really made sense even as Juliet was laying it out for her, but maybe Allie just didn’t fully understand the way their criminal minds worked.
Maybe sensing her stare, Reese turned in his seat to look back at her. “You said you were one-hundred percent sure the Faith girl is alive. How?”
“Her mother found her on social media almost a year after she went missing,” Allie said. “One of her johns secretly taped her in their motel room and uploaded a five-second video. It was a quick shot of her face and the quality wasn’t the best, and she looked older, with a lot of makeup, but it was enough for someone she knew to recognize her and contact her mother. Susan took the evidence to the authorities, including the FBI. The agent in charge did his best to push her back to the forefront, but the government is more concerned with devoting manpower to terrorism and other headline-making cases these days.”
“And you confirmed it was her?”
Allie nodded. “Five months ago.”
“How?”
“Does it matter?”
“Maybe it does, and maybe it doesn’t. We won’t know until you tell us.”
“Maybe you’re sending us on a wild goose chase, hoping we’ll get capped along the way and you won’t have to pay us,” Dwight said.
“Is he always this paranoid?” she asked Reese.
Reese shrugged. “It’s one of his better qualities, actually.”
Dwight grunted but didn’t say anything else.
“One of the men who handled her appointments confirmed to me that she’s still alive,” Allie said. “I found him through the john who posted the five-second video.”
“The handler just confirmed it because you asked?”
“I didn’t exactly give him a choice.”
“Of course you didn’t.”
“But he didn’t know where she came from or where she went after she passed through his area. He was just a freelancer, like you two. He did, though, give me a name.”
“Juliet,” Reese said.
She nodded. “They crossed paths enough times that he knew where to find her when she wasn’t working.”
“And Juliet set you up with us.”
“It was awfully nice of her to do me the favor,” Allie said, remembering how seething with rage Juliet had been in that unflattering Mexican prison jumpsuit when they first met in person.
“Right. Favor,” Dwight smirked. “Remind me never to cross you.”
“All of this from a grainy five-second video on social media,” Reese said.
“It’s the digital age,” Allie said. “You can find out anything on anyone if you look hard and long enough.”
And know the right people to dig through all the virtual trash heaps and other unsavory things, for a price.
“This is why I stay off Twitter,” Dwight said. “Well, one of many reasons.”
“I thought it was because you couldn’t type?” Reese said.
“That too. But mostly the whole lack of privacy. Makes my skin crawl.”
That makes your skin crawl? Allie wanted to ask him, but bit her tongue.
Reese had taken out the cheap burner phone with the black and white photo of Faith and showed it to her, as if she didn’t already have every inch of the girl’s face etched into her mind. “Just to make sure you understand, we’re looking for this girl and no one else.”
“Didn’t we already go over this at the motel?” she asked.
He ignored her and continued: “We’re not going in there for any other reason. If the other girls at the house take the opportunity to flee while we’re there, so be it, but we’re not spending even one second rounding them up and delivering them to a women’s shelter or anything similarly altruistic. That’s the deal. Now, I need you to tell me you understand the perimeters of our partnership.”
Allie clenched her teeth. “Agreed.”
“Just as long as we understand each other.” Reese turned back around in his seat. “This is probably a stupid question, but I don’t suppose I have to tell you not to hesitate if you get one of the house enforcers in your crosshairs?”
“What do you think?” she asked, staring back at him in the rearview mirror.
“These aren’t pissant lowlife criminals off the streets,” Dwight said. “The hombres they have babysitting these houses don’t fuck around, and they sure as hell weren’t hired because of their looks. The more blood you have on your hands, the higher your standing in the organization. That’s how fucked up they are. Why do you think Reese and I were ready to tuck our tails between our legs and run?”
“Dwight isn’t exaggerating,” Reese said. “They’re the kind of pricks that will cut their losses if they think an operation has been compromised. For example: back at the truck stop with the girls, or with us at the previous motel. They’re ruthless, Alice. You need to absolutely understand that. So when we go in there, don’t hesitate. Because they won’t.”
“Are you both done?” she asked, staring at one, then the other.
“Just as long as you know what we’ll be facing,” Reese said.
“I understood it the first fifty times. You can both shut the fuck up now.”
Dwight chuckled. “Man, I like this Alice way better than that other bitch from yesterday.”
Reese and Dwight didn’t have to tell her anything she didn’t already know or hadn’t thought about countless times on the long road just to get to this point. She’d always known the odds were against her, but it wasn’t in her DNA to let go or give up. If it were, she would never have caught Carmen’s killer ten years after the sonofabitch took her little sister.
Burn in hell, Beckard.
She was drifting off again, the pills playing havoc with her concentration, and she almost missed Reese talking in front of her. She sat up in the backseat and forced herself to zero in on the here and now, on the sound of his grating voice:
“If this doesn’t work and she’s not in there, or if we can’t find traces of her, this might be our only chance. After this, they’ll put the other houses on alert and you might have to rely on those slow-moving Fed dinosaurs after all. The people in there might not trust technology, but they aren’t living in caves, either. They do have phones.”
“The only way to keep them from calling it in would be to kill everyone on site,” Dwight said.
“There’s that,” Reese nodded.
“And even then, there are no guarantees someone won’t notice the house going dark.”