He felt an unholy glee as the girl blushed brightly. She deserved a little discomfort out of this, the little brat.
“I have teams, son, but I don’t have them sitting around idle. Even pulling in what I can, with this sudden work increase, I am pressed. I will be putting together a team from our operatives in, and new recruits from, DAG. I will be sending that team on a vital mission. That mission will be directed at killing one of the individuals responsible for one of the dependent murders. Miss Reardon will be that team’s driver. Would you like to volunteer for this mission, Sergeant Privett?”
Cargo suppressed a sigh. Completely suppressed it. Acting anything less than the complete professional he was would only make him look bad in front of God’s right-hand man and encourage the brat.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“Good. I’ll send the details to your buckley. You’re dismissed,” the priest said. “Not you, Miss Reardon. Stay a moment.”
Not for anything would he let either of the two of them see any of his relief that little Deni — Denise — couldn’t follow him. God, even his wife thought she was cute.
Cordovan Landrum wished his parents had picked a different way to honor his mother’s surname of Brown than to name him after a shoe color. Since nobody had asked him, he had picked one he liked better out of his favorite series of the weird two-Ds that his dad watched obsessively. At the age of five, he had begun the practice of beating the crap out of any boy who would not call him “Luke,” and finding other ways to get even with annoying girls, whom he couldn’t beat up. Not and survive his dad.
Luke looked at his team roster and winced a little at the driver’s name. He wasn’t supposed to know her age, but Cargo had clued him in. He had made the executive decision to keep the information from Tramp and Kerry so as to not make them nervous that the kid was driving. As Bane Sidhe, he knew a bit about how the O’Neals ran their place. That kid would have been driving motorized go-carts as soon as she could reach the gas pedal, progressing to dirt bikes and cars, again, as soon as she could reach. If O’Reilly was sticking him with a gal this young, the girl could drive like a bat out of hell.
She was sitting across from him now. He’d gotten the gum out of her mouth by the simple expedient of looking at her like the seventeen-year-old she was supposed to be — i.e., like fair game — and telling her huskily that she looked about twelve when she did that. She’d swallowed the gum so fast she’d almost choked. And blushed like hell. But no more gum chewing to give her age away to Kerry and Tramp.
Even in a good cause, it had felt kind of icky to know he was making eyes at a thirteen-year-old, although she sure didn’t look thirteen. She looked like an O’Neal. It was less a matter of facial features and more something the family seemed to carry on the inside.
The head of the O’Neal Bane Sidhe had told him she’d taken an assassin’s audition and passed. More importantly, a month later she still wanted the job. He didn’t like having a kid driver, but he’d take the top guy’s word on the competence of this one.
When his other three guys came in, Cargo nodded to her and just kept quiet, glaring at Kerry and Tramp when they tried to get friendly. The other two men, of course, chalked that up to entirely wrong reasons and would have gotten more enthusiastic if Luke hadn’t taken them in hand.
“Okay, just to go over the crap I know you guys will have already studied, this is the scumbag on the menu for the evening. Linda, display scumbag,” he instructed his buckley. “This is said scumbag’s house.” The buckley obligingly changed the holo it was projecting above the table. The table and conference room were complete pieces of shit, but he’d grown up in the Bane Sidhe and only noticed it from the difference between the facilities here and at Great Lakes.
“This is the route to scumbag’s house.” The buckley switched to a street view, projected as if they were looking at a sand table, with the route outlined in red.
Landrum looked up at Denise to make sure she was paying attention, focused in, whatever. She was.
“This is our kind of mission. Scumbag’s house is a little isolated. Got a vacant house on one side, an empty lot on the other. We go, we kick in the door, we kill the bastard, we come back. Standard building clearing, don’t hit the no-shoot targets. Wife and kid. Any questions?” The latter was the rhetorical question that traditionally ended all mission briefings. There were never questions.
“Why are we killing him? Or does it matter? To the mission, I mean,” the girl asked.
Luke carefully avoided being either terse or patronizing. If nobody had told her, it was a damned good question. Why the hell hadn’t anybody told her? “He killed Shark Sanders’ grandmother,” he said. When the kid’s eyes widened then narrowed coldly, he gave her a couple of points. She actually looked a bit scary, considering.
“We know because he obligingly left a bit of his DNA—” The kid wasn’t stupid or naïve, and she was clearly getting the wrong impression. “Blood. He stuck himself on a pin.” The girl’s shoulders relaxed fractionally, but the chill in the room from all five of them was arctic. When you murdered a harmless old granny at her quilting, you just didn’t get any brownie points for what you didn’t do.
Snow was falling heavily, and the wind was squealing too loud to hear the clank of the chains on the tires as they drove out from their staging area, a dinky, ugly little car repair shop. The car, which Reardon had spent at least twice as long checking out as he would have, would be carrying them from Fort Wayne to Cincinnati.
She had grudgingly agreed to let the four DAGgers share the driving to Asheville, but Landrum noticed she was real uncomfortable that Privett was driving.
“Have you ever driven in snow before, Cargo?” she asked.
“What? Of course I’ve driven in snow. We’re — were — stationed up in Great Lakes!” He sounded indignant.
“And you know the first rule of driving in snow, right?”
“I can drive, Deni.” He rolled his eyes.
“I’d feel better if you slowed down about ten miles per hour,” she said.
Landrum looked over Privett’s shoulder at the speedometer, which was holding on sixty. He looked out at the road and the weather. It was a little faster than he would have driven, considering.
“There can be ice under this shit that you don’t see,” Reardon insisted.
Privett sighed exasperatedly, but Landrum felt the car slow.
“You can get some sleep while you’re not driving, you know,” Luke told the girl, who was sitting in the middle of the back seat, between him and Tramp.
She looked at the back of Cargo’s head suspiciously, then down at her buckley. “Maybe later. I think I’ll read for now.”
Tramp looked entirely too happy about the seating arrangements, which prompted Landrum to shoot him a dirty look over the back of the kid’s head. His buckley vibrated softly, and he touched the screen to bring up the text.
“What? Are you calling dibs?” The message had Tramp’s user icon in the corner.
“She’s underage,” he typed back.
“Not by much.” He and Tramp were both typing by touching small typewriter keys displayed on the lower half of the screen. They were only there when the buckley was in text mode, but they did help with brief, silent communication.