Working Stiff

tissues, then helped her back into her chair as she covered her face and tried to muffle her wild, uncontrollable sobs.

He stroked her hair, very softly. He didn’t say a thing.

Finally, she was able to shut it off, just enough to gather her voice together. “I have to shower,” she said. Her voice was uneven and broken, but he nodded as he looked down at her. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said. “I’ll be there after you’re done.”

She grabbed another set of clothes and went into the locker room at the end of the hall; Riley was in there, changing into jeans and a comfortable sweatshirt with her hair still clinging damply to her face. She looked up, surprised, as Bryn dumped her stuff on the bench.

“Everything okay?”

Bryn didn’t want to talk, but she had to try. “Bad one,” she managed to say. “Major decomposition.”

Riley nodded and opened her locker. She tossed Bryn a bottle. “Try this,” she said. “Best I’ve found. Use it four times, you should be okay.”

Bryn didn’t even wait to thank her. The urge to get clean was so overpowering that even after she was standing in the hot spray, soaping herself from head to toe, she couldn’t stop gasping and shaking from the pressure. Two passes with the shampoo and she still felt filthy. By the third she was calming down, and by the fourth she felt almost normal. Her skin tingled from the scrubbing, but that was a good thing; the greasy, horrible stench seemed to have finally rubbed off.

Bryn threw her old clothes into the incineration biohazard bag and dressed in the clean ones, dried her hair, and was just finishing when there was a knock on the locker room door, and McCallister looked in.

He looked rough—pallid, with dark circles beneath his eyes. He’d stripped off his coat and tie and unfastened the top button of his shirt. “All right if I come in?” he asked, and she suddenly felt very selfish for taking up the shower for so long.

“It’s all yours,” she said.

He nodded thanks and opened a locker—Joe Fideli’s—and took out a pair of blue jeans and a clean white T- shirt. “We’re about the same size,” he said. “At least I won’t look like I’m going for gangster style.”

She passed him Riley’s shampoo. “Four passes,” she said. “It works.”

He smiled, faintly, and said, “Good.”

He was already stripping off his clothes before she closed the door, and in those fast, ruthless motions, she sensed that McCallister, too, was on the edge of losing control.

She let him do it in private.

Back in her office, Bryn turned on music, something soft and soothing, and nibbled some crackers to settle her still-restless stomach. Her skin and clothes smelled clean and fresh, but it was hard not to imagine the ghost of that stench still hanging around. She cleaned out the trash can, then used disinfectant spray around her chair and on her shoes. Probably too much.

Finally, she sat down and closed her eyes.

A soft chime made her open them again.

She had e-mail.

Oh, God. She’d actually forgotten all about it.

Sitting in her in-box was a new message from one of those throwaway account services, with the ominous moniker of deadman. There was no subject line, and the message was just an address and a time of day—ten p.m.

McCallister came back, still glistening with drops from the shower, and saw from her expression that something was up.

She mutely spun her computer around and showed him. He leaned over the desk to read it. “Can your tech wizards trace that?” she asked.

“Probably not, but we’ll try it. That is the e-mail equivalent of a burner phone, and if he’s got any sense at all, he hid his IP address through a randomizer.” McCallister already had his cell out and was dialing.

“Don’t you need my account password?”

“Already have it,” he said, and got up to turn his back and talk to his resources.

Proof, once again, that there was nothing secret in her life anymore. Nothing sacred. She’d expected to feel some sense of burning betrayal, but instead, she felt … tired. And, weirdly, a little reassured.

McCallister stayed on the phone a while longer, and she contemplated opening up another set of drinks, but that seemed less like a necessary safety valve and more like a crutch, at this point. Bryn shut and locked the drawer, and looked at the clock.

It was coming up on six o‘clock.

Four hours to get the money and deliver it to the address—or else what? Lose their potential chance at the supplier.

If they did, Bryn had no doubt whatsoever that Irene Harte would pull the plug on the project, and her, with pleasure. It was that, as much as anything else, that made her step back from the comfort of the booze. I’m not giving you the excuse, she thought. Not you. You don’t get to kill me.

But it wouldn’t be Harte, she realized. When it came to the end, it would come from the man pacing the floor on the other side of her office, talking quietly into his cell phone. He’d be the one told to withhold her drug, reduce her to that decayed, rotting shell. She’d be eaten alive. She’d beg for release until eventually the last of the nanites faded and died….

Or until he dismembered her, out of sheer horrified mercy.

No. He promised. He promised me he wouldn’t let that happen. She closed her eyes and took deep breaths and tried to think of something, anything less painful. He’d promised, and he’d meant it. He wouldn’t let her linger on and rot.

McCallister finished the call. “I have a car and driver coming, and I’m on the way to pick up the money,” he said. “Joe is five minutes out. Stay here, and he’ll take you home. I’ll come by here at eight thirty to pick you up for the rendezvous.”

She nodded. “Thank you.”

“For what?” he asked, and she held his eyes until she saw that he knew. “I meant what I said, Bryn. I won’t let that happen.”

“I know,” she said. “Thank you.” She stood up and hugged him. It was an impulse, and she didn’t mean anything by it except gratitude, until she was in his arms, and then … then it was something else entirely. “Tell me you didn’t sleep with her,” she whispered, very quietly.

He didn’t ask what she was talking about. “I didn’t,” he said, and something brushed her forehead, very gently. It might have been a kiss. “Stay safe.”

And then he was gone.

Bryn arrived home at six thirty, feeling exhausted and not up for family drama of any kind. Luckily, she didn’t get any.

The apartment was spotlessly clean, Mr. French was happy to see her, and the air smelled like rich Italian food.

“Hey, sweetie!” Annie said brightly from the kitchen. “Hope you’re hungry. I think I cooked enough pasta for the complex!”

I can’t do this. Bryn dropped onto the sofa and covered her face with her hands. In a few seconds, she felt Annie’s weight settle in next to her, and her sister’s arm went around her shoulders. She didn’t look up.

“Hey,” Annie said. “Hey, what did I say? You don’t like Italian anymore?”

“It’s just …” For an extremely unsettling second, Bryn thought the dam might just collapse inside her. If she said anything, she’d say everything, everything that she’d promised to keep secret. And that would unburden her, but doom her sister. McCallister’s people were always listening, and someone was always listening to them. “It was a bad day. Really bad.”

“Sorry, honey. Hey, does it have anything to do with the hottie who was here with you before?”

“No! Why would you even assume that?” Bryn looked at her sister finally. Annie cocked an eyebrow and