He continued to think aloud: “Eve won’t get it herself, but is willing to more than triple her offer to us. She’s worried. She knows—she believes in us—that we can do it, but it’s dangerous.” He met Doc’s transfixed gaze. “So I’m selfish!” He burst out: “I don’t want you to die and leave me alone.”
“But a quarter of a million! You could make the movie! I could be a star!”
“You could die inside and something else would be walking around wearing your body like a cheap suit,” Imp cautioned. “Would it be worth it then?”
“But it’s somewhere upstairs,” Doc pointed out. “Which means nobody else is going to get to it without us knowing. And your sister says the guys with the guns aren’t going to bother us. How about we discuss it when Del gets here?”
“Huh. About that. Where is she?” asked Imp.
Doc looked at Game Boy: Game Boy looked at Doc. And suddenly it was apparent that neither of them knew where she’d gone.
Del walked across the park, her hoodie raised to cover her hair, heading for the side-street where she’d dumped her hot wheels the day before.
Successful career criminals have several rules of thumb to live by. Don’t shit in your own backyard is one; three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead is another; and for a third, never return to the scene of a successful caper. However, Del was not a successful career criminal. Rebecca was the Deliverator—ironic nod to a fictional hero, the protagonist of a cyberpunk epic about ninjutsu, linguistics, and extreme pizza delivery—and she broke the rules in all innocence.
Del mostly didn’t drive: she didn’t have a license for one thing, and she couldn’t be arsed jumping through the flaming hoops of the test process for another. She was happy with her bike, thank you very much. She could get just about anywhere in London on her bike faster than anything with a motor, flowing through crevices and pedestrianized zones like water. She could take it on the tube for the occasional excursion out as far as Zone Six, but her bike had its limits: and one hard limit was that you couldn’t take your crew with you.
Hence Imp’s insistence on teaching her to drive. Which, she had to admit, had been a ton of fun, from the process of stealthily casing her ride, sneaking in and springing the door lock, faking out the anti-theft immobilizer, and hot-wiring the ignition; to the raw physical power rush of putting metal and mass and explosive fuel in motion and taking to the highway. Driving held her attention. And driving spoke to her. Not in the same language as cycling, of course, but driving was like learning a second tongue, one that expanded and illuminated her view of the world. Being trapped inside a padded box and forced to interface with the road through a complicated series of linkages and gears and motors was claustrophobic after the fumes-in-her-face freedom of riding her bike, but some of her mojo came across nonetheless. She could ace the North Circular in a jacked Toyota Tercel faster than Sabine Schmitz could lap the Nürburgring in a Transit van, and the only times the plod had got on her tail she’d left them, well, plodding.
But modern cars were increasingly hard to steal. It wasn’t just the chips and the remote unlocking and the LoJack trackers and the secret policeman in the engine management software. These days you had to worry about the pentacle scribed in goat blood under the driver’s seat, the black tallow candle and the curse-stained ivory gear knob, the nightmares that would follow you home, dreams of your car-smashed carcass in a continuous stream of creative and agonizing exsanguinations whenever you closed your eyes. They’d keep it up until your throat was raw from screaming and throwing up. They’d keep it up until you turned yourself in to the insurance underwriters for exorcism and punishment, or aspirated and drowned on your own vomit without ever waking up.
So the 2010 Cayenne had been something of a sweet find for Del. It was old enough to predate in-car electronics sophisticated enough to support curseware, new enough to be seriously hot, and best of all, once equipped with the right cloned plates it was the identical twin to a wholly respectable Mom’s Taxi in Chelmsford, owned by an investment banker’s wife from the Home Counties who stayed the hell out of the congestion charge zone and used her five hundred horsepower turbocharged teutonic battle wagon to bus Emily and Callum to school and back every day, with a shopping side-quest to Waitrose twice a week.
Even though the Porsche was now dirty—Imp had warned her the bank had cameras out back, so they’d made the cloned plates—Del couldn’t quite bring herself to abandon it for good without at least a token attempt to keep it. I could get new plates, she bluffed herself, if it hasn’t been towed. Because that would be easier than finding a replacement, for sure.
Hence the early morning walk.
Gotcha.
Del swung round the corner and spotted the row of parked cars. The Cayenne was still shoehorned between a BMW and a Fiat, but some arsewipe private security company had stuck a boot on one wheel. Glowing green runes warned of appalling consequences for unauthorized removal. Also, a squirrel had shat on the windscreen. Del fumed silently as she turned away, barely caring if anybody saw her, barely noticing until
