Her bedsit felt grubby and even tinier than usual with company. “Make yourself at home.” She’d turned the bed back into a sofa before she went out, for which she was suddenly grateful. To have invited Rebecca back to slept-in sheets would have been beyond awkward. In truth, she hadn’t imagined bringing anyone back here when she’d headed out that morning. It just seemed like a good idea to hitch a ride home, a decent idea to talk to the Deliverator somewhere where she knew they couldn’t be overheard, and … she was running out of excuses. She popped the fridge door. “Beer?”
“I’m driving,” Rebecca deadpanned, holding her hand out.
“Not right at this instant, I hope.” Wendy passed her a can. It was the last of a six-pack of Heineken she’d been rationing all week. “Can’t offer you any weed, I’m afraid: current employer insists on having a stupid piss-test clause in my contract because they do jobs for the Home Office. Maybe next year.” The office was abuzz with rumors that the New Management was going to decriminalize cannabis and opium, the better to raise tax revenue.
Rebecca sighed as she pulled the ring. Her can hissed like an indignant cat. “I wasn’t expecting beer or grass. Beer’s good, though. You wanna make out?” She eyed Wendy with such frank curiosity that her mouth dried up.
“Not on a first date.” She opened her own beer and gulped a mouthful of mostly-froth, acrid and sharp. Reconsidered: “Maybe?”
“Is this a date?” Rebecca asked ironically. “Because it started out really fucking badly. You need to work on your pick-up technique, girl.”
“Yeah well I’m sorry, I—” Wendy was close to babbling—“you were freaking out on me and I thought you were going to run and I wasn’t sure how else to find you—” this was a lie, but only a partial one—“and we needed to talk. You, me, your friends. Like I said. But I need you to trust me and I get that you’re not going to take me to see them so where does that leave us—”
Rebecca tugged her down to the sofa beside her, and she sprawled, off-balance. “Sit. Drink. Shut the fuck up for five minutes while I think,” said the Deliverator, not unkindly.
Wendy sat and drank and STFU’d in hope.
After a minute or so, Rebecca sighed and leaned back, stretching her arm along the back of the sofa behind Wendy’s head. “Feeling better now,” she admitted. “That drive took more out of me than I expected.”
It seemed to call for a response, but Wendy kept it to a laconic “True.” She drank another mouthful, suppressed an increasingly urgent need to burp.
“Tell me again why you ain’t arresting me.”
Wendy glanced at Rebecca sharply, but saw only heavy-lidded amusement staring back at her. “Like I said, my manager ordered me off your case. Somebody paid more for us to drop the investigation than the underwriter was paying us to carry it out. It’s how the system works: the company is in business to make money, not uphold the law.”
“But you didn’t know that when you put the cuffs on me, you were just off-duty.” Rebecca grabbed Wendy’s wrist, nearly spilling her beer, then leaned across her to grab her other arm. She brought her wrists together—She’s really strong, Wendy registered—and held them above her head.
“Hey!”
“Let’s see how you like it,” Rebecca said, then leaned in and kissed her. Wendy squirmed, uncertain where this was going—trick or treat?—but she kissed back. Felt Rebecca pressing up against her flank, warm and solid. Eventually, Rebecca pulled back. “What do you want with me?”
“You—” she hesitated, not ready to continue this line of questioning, and shied away from the personal—“I still need to know what was in that box,” she said, heart hammering between her ribs. “What the letter was about.”
“That’s not what I was asking.”
Rebecca kissed her again, and this time Wendy whimpered quietly into her mouth.
Oh God, she thought. “Your interrogation technique needs more practice,” she whispered, and Rebecca snorted back laughter. “Like this,” she added, and now she was the one nibbling at Rebecca’s throat.
“The letter.” Rebecca moaned softly. “What’s so important about it, anyway?”
Wendy stilled. “Four mobbed-up heavies with AKs shoot up a bank, then a bloke with light artillery smears them all over the walls and tries to take out your friends, then someone else pays my employer to drop the investigation, and you don’t even know what it says?” She retreated from Rebecca. “Has it occurred to you that someone wants whatever’s in that letter badly enough to kill for it? And if I could find you, maybe they could find you as well?” Shit, she realized with a sudden pang of remorse, I’m frightening her. The Deliverator’s crew didn’t carry weapons; at worst, they hired actors armed with stage props. “I mean, they might not try to kill you,” she backpedalled awkwardly. “They might just want to invite you back to their place for tea and crumpets and a chance to discuss the works of Søren Kierkegaard—”
“Is that a new band?” Rebecca’s brow wrinkled for a moment before she elbowed Wendy in the ribs: “Just kidding.” She took a deep breath. “Okay, you got a point.”
“Look. Just give me your phone. Uh, and my hands?” Rebecca released her, and handed over a cheap Android. Probably a burner, a little corner of Wendy’s mind that wasn’t quite as irrevocably compromised as the rest noted. She dialed her own phone, waited for it to ring, then disconnected: “Look in your call log, that’s my number.”
“Uh, okay—”
“Listen.” She stared into Rebecca’s eyes, unsure whether she was talking to Rebecca, a woman she really fancied, or the mad-eyed Deliverator storming around the M25 motorway at more than two miles a minute in a fiery Porsche: “When you go home to
