Bad Boy Next Door (A Romantic Suspense)(5)
“Right,” I sigh. “It’s time, Dale. I need to disappear.”
“Got it. I’ll set you up,” he says.
Dale is one of the best forgers on the East Coast. In this era when everything is so heavily hooked into everything else and there are databases of government information detailing everything from your favorite porn sites to the last time you shaved your ass, it’s tough to create a fake identity. The main problem is that the identity will be clean, and that’s more suspicious than a lifetime of dirt.
If you just suddenly walk onto the world stage and say, “Here I am!” like you’ve been living off the grid your whole life, it raises more red flags than if you’d just gotten out of prison. Dale is the solution to that problem. He does more than work up a fake driver’s license and passport. He can fake a whole history behind a name given enough time. Besides identity papers he’s my major supplier for weapons, and so on, and so forth.
He doesn’t hand me a driver’s license. Instead, he hands me a key, drops it on my palm. Attached is a little tag with an address on one side and a pass code on the other.
“I knew this one was coming for a while,” he says sadly. “You’ve been lucky so far, but…”
“I know,” I say sharply.
This is something of a sore point between the two of us. I have scruples. Dale…doesn’t.
By the look of him you’d think, oh, what a dumpy little geek. Thing is, that dumpy little geek worked for some very shady people until a back injury took him out of the game. I’ve been trying to pry his story out of him for years, and succeeded at only chipping away at it. Sometimes he mentions El Salvador, or Saudi Arabia, offhandedly with the familiarity of someone who’s been intimate with a place.
Bloody intimate.
Deep sigh.
“I need a place to stay.”
“All taken care of. I took the liberty of charging your account and I’ve set up a transfer to your backup holdings. You can’t take it all. Did they pay you before they tried to kill you?”
“Yeah.”
He nods. “Insurance. If the one they sent after you failed her job, they can trace it if you try to move their payment into another account. It’s gone, Quent. Let it go.”
I nod. I’m going to miss that half a million dollars, but I have enough saved up to get by on in a pinch. You don’t do a job like mine without a lot of insurance policies, contingency plans, and a few Hail Marys to throw if shit really hits the fan.
“How long can I stay here?”
“It’s better if you go as soon as possible. Take a nap, see if you can walk okay when you wake up. I’ll be over in the other room.”
I let out a long sigh as he flicks off the lights and let my head fall back against the pillow. Sleep lands on me heavy and hard.
When Dale comes back I’m already sitting up, having removed the intravenous line he put in by myself. He kindly left me a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt and hoodie. I pull all that on and test my weight on my leg. I should stay off it, but it’s not gushing blood. That works for me.
“Get your weight off that when you can,” he says. “I’ve got some cash. Bus fare. There will be everything you need at the dead drop.”
“Yeah. Thanks, man.”
“It’s always been a pleasure working with you.”
“Yeah.”
Do I say goodbye? We just sort of stare at each other before I lurch back out. The sun is too low; my nap must have lasted all day. At Dale’s direction I walk two blocks south and flop on a rickety bench and wait for the bus to pull up, checking the route number to make sure I have the right one before I board and pay the fare in cash, fling myself into a seat, and sit back, fighting fatigue.
Karma, man. Karma is a bitch. As my head bobs with the motion of the bus I can’t escape the feeling that this is going to be it.
You know how they say old soldiers never die, they just fade away?
Old hitmen never retire, they get their brains blown out.
It’s not a long bus ride. The mini-storage place is in a slightly nicer part of town, richly appointed with barbed wire around the fence. I have to walk up and tap in the code, and trust that Dale isn’t screwing me.
There’s a half second when I think I’m really in trouble before the gate rumbles open and I walk inside, staring up at the numbers painted over the plain metal doors before I find the right one. The key unlocks the padlock and the door rolls up with a rumble.
Inside, there’s a metal wire utility shelf with the rudiments of a new life. A little metal box too small for a pair of shoes holds the keys to the car and a new driver’s license, passport, social security card, the works. An envelope holds several credit cards and bank information for my emergency funds.
There’s also an address and a set of house keys.
Oh, and my Impala. Hello, beautiful.
I sit in the front seat of the car and try to figure out where the hell I’m going.
Rose
I hate teeth.
I spend my days behind a counter, which sits at roughly eye level. Sitting on that counter is an oversized model of the human mouth, propped open to proudly display big fake pearly whites.
Something about that bothers me more than it should. I want to close the damn thing, or better yet pitch it across the waiting room and watch it fly apart when it hits the painting of the sailboat on the far wall.