Working Stiff

goes in after you.”

“Guns blazing,” Joe added. “And nobody wants that. Gets real messy. On the upside, if I shoot you, it really doesn’t matter.”

“I thought you were on my side.”

He winked at her. “Good luck.”

Bryn took a deep breath, nodded to both of them, and got out of the passenger side. She retrieved the black canvas bag full of cash and began walking. She’d dressed practically—dark pants, dark sweatshirt, running shoes, her hair tied back in a sloppy knot at the nape of her neck—but even so, she suddenly felt very exposed, very vulnerable. Her gun was under the sweatshirt, one zipper pull away. And as Joe had so not-kindly said, she could take a bullet if she had to and survive.

So why was she so damned nervous?

Because I feel like a mousetrap tester, she thought. And I’m the mouse.

Not all of San Diego was shiny and tourist friendly; this area was inky dark, very few lights, and most of these feeble security lighting trying to protect what was surely a losing investment for some poor real estate company. Everything was graffiti covered, weed overgrown, and littered with trash and broken bottles. She felt the crunch of ground glass under her feet as she walked.

The address from her e-mail was on the right, behind a rusty chain-link fence with a No Trespassing sign on it. The sign had been defaced, mangled, and shot three times, and right below it someone had chopped a gash in the links big enough to squeeze through, if you were reasonably small and didn’t care too much about tetanus. Bryn sucked it up and scraped by. The fence snapped back with a dry rattle, and a random breeze pushed trash past her feet in a postmodern snowdrift of cups, plastic bottles, and torn paper.

The building she was facing had started life as some kind of a factory for a product probably made with great success now in Asia; signs were long gone, and the paint was faded and covered in a thicket of colorful but also fading neon tags.

Bryn watched her corners, just the way they’d taught her in urban combat training, and kept walking toward the dark hole of the entrance. It used to have an accordion gate across the doors, but the doors were gone, and the security barrier was ripped off and dangling by one hinge.

Bryn heard a stirring inside the building, and paused at the threshold. This wouldn’t even be a third choice for the homeless, but she still felt stiff with tension. Rats, she thought. This place was probably a playground for them.

Now that she’d stepped into the mouth of the beast, there was no particular reason to stay stealthy; she switched on the penlight she’d brought with her. The narrow, stark white beam didn’t make her feel any better; if anything, it only increased her anxiety about what was in the ink-black edges of her vision. In and out, she thought, like a mantra. Get in; get out.

The clock was running.

The main entry room was large and had four doorways leading out. There was a metal desk left abandoned in the approximate middle of the room, bolted in place. It listed to one side like a sinking ship and was covered with rat droppings, trash, empty bottles, broken syringes … the typical treasure trove of an abandoned building. Everything stank like a molding sewer.

Bryn put the bag on the desk and turned to go.

“Hey,” said a soft voice from the shadows.

She spun, pointing the flashlight, but the voice echoed weirdly in the empty room, and she couldn’t pinpoint where it had come from.

“Hey,” the whisper came again, closer.

Screw it. Bryn unzipped her sweatshirt and pulled her gun. The weight of it made her feel less off balance, less vulnerable, even though she knew that was an illusion; she’d seen comrades chewed up by small-arms fire even through ballistic nylon vests. Human beings were always vulnerable.

Not that she was legally considered human anymore.

The voice seemed to come from behind her this time, startlingly close. “Hey, sugar, where you goin’?”

Bryn spun, gun in a firing stance, just as something lunged at her from the darkness on her left. The man skidded to a stumbling halt, the muzzle pressed to his face.

“I’m leaving, sugar,” she said. “Sit your ass down on the floor, cross-legged, hands behind your head. Now.”

He sank down and complied without another word. Homeless, she guessed, and definitely high, from the way his pupils failed to contract in her flashlight beam. He was wearing faded surplus military khakis under layers of coats and dirt-stiff scarves. ‘“Sup?” he mumbled. “Just tryin’ to be friendly.”

“Yeah, I can see how friendly you want to be by the bulge in your pants. Just your way of saying hi? Stay down.” Bryn took three giant steps back, and then paused. She was leaving a hundred thousand in cash sitting there with a homeless would-be rapist. If she turned her back, he and it would surely be gone. “Okay, I’m going to need you to get up. We’re going to take a walk.”

“A walk?” He went from menacing to pathetic in the blink of an eye, and raised his hands over his head. “Please don’t kill me; I didn’t mean nothin’!”

“I’m not going to kill you. Stand up. I can’t leave you here.”

“It’s my place. I got stuff. I leave it, it gets took.”

“Get up, now, or I promise you won’t need stuff ever again.”

He scrambled up, awkward with fear, and she knew this wasn’t the first time he’d had a gun pointed at him. His head was tucked down, his hands trembling, and his posture was totally submissive.

“Walk,” she said, and circled around so that his path was clear and not within grabbing distance of her.

Her captive shambled out, hands raised, and she followed, careful not to close the distance as he slowed down. “Move. Head for the fence.” He glanced back, and she noticed something strange about him.

His eyes. They didn’t look right. Still dilated, but …

Contacts. He was wearing some kind of costume contacts.

This was him. The one collecting the money. Maybe even the mystery caller himself. It was a great disguise, and she’d almost completely fallen for it.

“Wait,” she said, but that tipped him off that the game was up, and he dodged, blindingly fast, out of the beam of her flashlight.

She lost him.

Bryn switched the light off—had to, to use the starlight effectively—but it took time for her eyes to adjust to the change, and in the second or two required, he just … vanished.

Bryn backed up toward the building, then plunged inside and turned the penlight on to illuminate the desk.

The bag was gone.

The whisper came again, raw and amused. “I think I like you, sugar. You can handle yourself.”

“Show yourself!” she yelled. “I don’t do business with jackasses in clown makeup!”

She got nothing in reply but echoes, but she heard a scrape from a side passage. Her blood was pounding in her head, and she knew the smart thing to do was withdraw, regroup, wait for backup … but he was going to get away clean if she did. I had him, she thought. I had my gun in his face.

She also knew that she’d never be able to identify him. She’d seen what he wanted her to see—the filth, the straggly hair, the clothes, the contacts hiding his real eye color. First rule of disguise was to distract, and he’d done it brilliantly, right down to the submissive body language.

There was another scrape, behind her, and she whirled with her gun ready and braced. She wasn’t going to take another chance, not this time….

And she barely stopped herself from putting a bullet center mass in Joe Fideli’s chest.

He held his hands out to the sides, his gun pointed up, until she came off the shooting stance. She started to speak, but he shook his head, and she fell back into military hand signals to show him where their suspect had gone. He pointed at the penlight, and she clicked it off, and for a moment she felt claustrophobic, swarmed by the dark, until her eyes adjusted enough to make out shadows and shapes.