It took her three hours and seventeen minutes after she stopped running to work up the nerve to head back to the target site. This time she came in from the opposite direction, circling around and coming up along the access road. The approach wasn’t as good for a Retrieval—the road was public access, and anyone might come along at exactly the wrong moment—but with luck maybe Max wasn’t watching there, or didn’t care so much about it. Maybe whatever it was that he was hiding, or protecting, was only on the other side of the woods.
Maybe was a pretty flimsy word, when it came to wizzarts.
She tried to focus on the job and only the job—timing and distance, plus the approximate weight of the Retrieval as given by the client, equaling effort to get back to the road and across the state line—but her brain kept skittering back to Max’s words.
No, not his words. His emotions. The bastard had been angry, and he was crazy as a sewer rat with rabid mange, but unless he’d dropped way under the wizzart sanity range, such as it was, in the past year, he’d been overreacting. Last time she had gotten full warning before he went psycho on her. This time he came in primed at the pump. Why? What had scared him enough that he came out specifically to scare her, to warn her?
Enough she thought. It doesn’t matter why, not right now. Focus. Job. With Max possibly still in the neighborhood, she didn’t dare draw down current, for fear of alerting him to the fact that she’d come back. That meant changing more than the direction of her approach; she had to change the mode, too.
Walking up to the pull-off to the house, Wren made sure that her thigh-pack was securely fastened, drew in a deep breath, held it for a moment, and then exhaled. Calm. Calm and collected and loose and all those other things that made you aware of every inch of your body but not so aware that you were distracted by it. Normally she would have invoked her no-see-me, that inner and innate skill of deflecting attention that made her a natural Retriever, but she wasn’t sure if even that would be enough to trigger Max’s return.
Instead, she had to do it the old-fashioned way, crawling through the shin-high grass toward the house, keeping herself as low-profile as possible, alert to every sound and smell that might mean danger or discovery.
Breaking into a house in the middle of the day was something best left to either rank amateurs or seasoned pros. She enjoyed it, herself—during nighttime most people tended to be paranoid, and early morning or dusk was tricky—the few times she’d gotten shot at, it was at dusk. Daylight, targets were relaxed, less likely to start at an unexpected noise or shadow, less likely to call the police or trigger an alarm.
“Hi.” A voice piped a greeting unnervingly close to her ear.
Plus, people tended to be a lot more understanding of someone caught in their backyard midday, as opposed to midnight.
“Hi,” she said back after she got her heart down from where it had lodged in her throat, rolling onto her side but staying down and as relaxed as possible. The grass—probably not mown all summer—tickled her nose.
“Whatcha doin’?”
Her interrogator was blond, blue-eyed, and two feet tall. All right, maybe three. Shorter than she was, but since she was lying down, it was hard to judge for sure by how much.
“Your dad sent me to get you.” Sometimes honesty was so startling, it worked.
“Oh.” The target considered that for a moment, thankfully not sucking his thumb or whatever else disgusting or otherwise unhygienic that small children did, and then nodded. “Okay.”
He dropped to his own stomach and looked at her as though expecting something.
Well, she thought, amused. If it’s as easy as that, who the hell am I to argue? She tilted her head to indicate the way she had come, and he nodded, getting up on his elbows and knees, echoing her posture. She turned, keeping him in sight out of the corner of her eye, and they started to snake-crawl back through the grass. Kid was a pretty good wriggler, although he kept his butt too high in the air. His cute little denim coveralls were going to be ruined, though.
“Marc? Marc, where are you?”
A woman’s voice, clear and far too close: coming from inside the house. Back of the house, through an open window, Wren estimated. The voice was slightly concerned, maybe a little annoyed, but not really worried. Not yet. Damn. From the way the target froze, it was mommy dearest. His blue eyes flicked toward the house, and then back to her, clearly looking for guidance. His skin was milk-pale, as if he never got much sun and would burn badly if he did.
“She won’t let you go back to your dad,” Wren whispered, feeling like several different kinds of sleaze. Never mind who the actual custodial parent was—she hadn’t bothered to ask Sergei—Daddy was the client and she worked for the client and anyway, the court would decide eventually unless Daddy did a runner with junior, too, and she was thinking too damn much again.
“I don’t like either of them right now.” Such a serious little voice, confiding such a huge secret. Wren swallowed, and forced herself to meet that blue gaze.
“Wiggle this way, and keep your butt down,” was all she said.
Once she had gotten the kid away from the house and down the road a bit, she coaxed him back to his feet, and they had headed back to the main road. Only one car had driven past them, heading toward the house, and Wren made sure the kid was tucked against her side, barely visible against the deflecting properties of her slicks, unless you were looking specifically for a wee one. From there, it was a relatively easy walk to her job-cache, an abandoned tree house in the back of someone’s summer home, where she had stowed her regular clothes, wallet, and other forms of identification and civilization. Her slicks packed away securely, they walked on toward the previously arranged rendezvous site. The kid had kept up reasonably well, staying quiet and only needing to be carried the last mile into town. He didn’t whimper, sniffle, or pick his nose, for which Wren was endlessly thankful.
As they walked she tried to sort through everything that had happened in some kind of calm and distanced way. It was no use: whatever had happened back there needed more thought and calm than she had right now. Finish the job, then worry about crazy Max.
To that end, now dressed in a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt under her leather jacket, her hair pulled into a careless ponytail, Wren looked to the casual observer like a young mother out for an afternoon with her offspring, waiting for Daddy. The thought made her cringe, but she had to admit that it was perfect camouflage in this SUV-and-picket-fence town.
By the time she found a pay phone and checked in with her partner back in Manhattan, her sense of humor about the entire situation had returned, and she could—almost—laugh about it. Her partner wasn’t quite so sanguine.
“Max? Stewart Maxwell? Our least favorite loon of all the loons we know?” Sergei’s normally calm and crisp voice was less doubting than exasperated.
Wren kept most of her attention on the kid sitting on the curb eating an ice-cream cone with both hands and his entire face. “Yeah. That one.”
“You’re sure? Of course you’re sure. Never mind. Damn. I’d hoped he was dead already.”
There was no love lost between her partner and Max. In fact, they pretty much loathed each other.
“He was acting pretty weird,” she continued, ignoring Sergei’s last comment.
There was a telling silence at the other end of the phone line, and Wren leaned against the open booth and grinned despite herself. “Weird even for wizzed,” she clarified.
“I don’t like this,” Sergei was saying, back in his office in the city. She pictured him, sitting behind his huge wooden desk, the one he wouldn’t let them have sex on, even though he got a glint in his eye every time she brought it up, surrounded by paperwork and expensive artwork, and the lovely hum of the city outside the gallery’s door.
“You and me both, partner,” she responded. “But I finished