“I can’t believe we did that! Fuuuuuuuu…!”
“Chill out, kid. We escaped, didn’t we?”
“Did you see her on those blades? Where the shitting hell did she get them from anyway? She was chasing us like the fucking T-Rex from the first Jurassic Park—”
“She saved our lives.” Imp tiredly cracked the ring-pull on one of Doc’s cans of highly regrettable lager. “Sure, she was trying to arrest us, but she wasn’t trying to shoot us.”
“She saw our faces,” said Doc. “Fuck. Who am I kidding?” He ran shaky fingers through his hair. “It was a trap and she was waiting for us and we sprang it. She probably knew what was in the deposit box all along.”
“I need to talk to Eve—” Imp cleared his throat—“our employer. No way did she set this up, but there might be a leak in her organization.” She’d told him as much, he just hadn’t felt the need to share it with his family. He was looking out for them, he rationalized: Why worry them needlessly? Now he was regretting it as three pairs of eyes swivelled his way. He took a swig of beer. “What?” he asked.
“There were guns, Jeremy!” Game Boy’s voice rose to a squeak: “Fucking guns!”
“Yeah.” Del was uncharacteristically repressed. “I didn’t sign up for guns, man.”
“Neither did I,” Imp pointed out, but nobody was listening to him.
“We should ditch this job,” Doc proposed. “You can’t make movies if you’re dead, can you? Remember rule number one? Don’t die. If you break rule one, you automatically lose at everything. Don’t do it, Jeremy, it’s not worth it.”
Imp sighed. “Yeah, I guess.” He took another mouthful of regrettable beer. “Um. This.” He brandished the letter they’d found in the deposit box. “It’s probably worth something to Eve anyway, so I should maybe go and haggle with her. See if she’ll pay extra for it. But you’re right, this shit isn’t worth what she’s paying us.”
Del’s sharp-eyed gaze tracked to the letter. “So what’s it say?”
“Bear with me…” Imp smoothed the crumpled paper out. “It’s pretty much what I was expecting: an invitation to submit bids for a map leading to the location of a lost manuscript. There’s some crap about a Darknet marketplace—”
“Let me see that.” Game Boy grabbed at it and the paper somehow slid through Imp’s fingers. “Huh. Good luck tracing this, it’s almost definitely offshore. Bids with a deposit paid in US dollars to a numbered bank account in the Cayman Islands, to be held in crow—no, escrow, whatever the fuck that is—”
“It means the bank holds the money and releases it to the—”
“Enough already.” Imp flapped his beer-unencumbered hand: “I hear you. We don’t like the guns, we can’t go any further without spending a metric fuckton of money that we don’t have, so we’re out of the game, yes? Are we all agreed? So all that remains is for me to sell this to Eve for as much extra dosh as I can guilt-trip out of her. Yes?”
“Yes!” Game Boy shouted at him excitedly.
“Great.” Imp necked the rest of his can, then chucked it atop the overflowing pile in the far corner of the room. “I’m going out. Give me that,” he added, taking the letter back from Game Boy. “Don’t wait up.”
Eve was not happy to be summoned by her brother. She was even less pleased by his choice of meeting place, even though it was within easy walking distance. “You did not bring me here for the coffee,” she hissed. “It’s terrible!”
“It’s Costa.” Imp shrugged. “Would you prefer Starbucks?”
Eve’s gaze flickered briefly to the Gammon she was test-driving today. He stood close to the entrance, furtively sipping the spiced vanilla chai latte she’d inflicted on him, as if he was scared it would cost him his man card. (He’ll never do, she decided, what if an assassin ambushes me in the fitting rooms at Dolci Follie?) “You did this to punish me for something,” she guessed, projecting wildly.
“Busted.” Imp smiled crookedly. Today he wore his normal art-student-gone-to-seed costume: a beautifully tailored wool coat that featured oil stains and a Frankensteinian line of stitches across the shoulders, paint-spattered jeans, and a once-smart dress shirt.
“So what is it?” she demanded. “Did you get the book?”
“Nope.” He reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a creased envelope which he placed in front of her, oblivious to the Gammon frantically scrambling for his concealed pistol. “This is the bid letter you wanted me to retrieve. They want funds to be placed in escrow. I can’t proceed any further.”
Eve smiled. “Leave it to me.” Behind Imp, the Gammon began to relax.
“No, I don’t think you understand. I can’t proceed any further.” Imp glowered at her. “We were made, Eve, we nearly got caught! A bunch of thugs with guns hit the bank while we were in the back, they were clearly after the same thing, and there was an undercover cop waiting to arrest us. Explosions! Machine guns! Car chases! Not my cup of orange pekoe at all.” He gesticulated dramatically, nearly spilling his espresso.
It all sounded a bit overblown to Eve. “Are you exaggerating?” she asked, raising one perfectly threaded eyebrow at him.
“Am I—” He recoiled indignantly, the picture of aggrieved innocence.
“It’s just that you have a history of, shall we say, creative confabulation. Remember the hijacking incident?”
“I was eight.”
“You cleared out an entire airport terminal! And you kept doing it. There was that time when we went to the zoo and you gave lollipops made from energy drinks to the chimpanzees—”
“It was hot! I didn’t like to see them suffer. And I was drunk.” He crossed his arms defensively. “Right now I’m sober. The bank was full of lunatics with assault rifles, sis. I don’t like it when bad men point big guns at me,” he said plaintively. “I should have listened to—”
“Wait.” She laid a slim, cold hand on his wrist. “It’s going to
