Run Away Baby

She squinted at the driver’s license. “There’s an extra A. I’m not even Barbara. I’m Bara-Bara.”

The guy in the driver’s seat looked at her blankly. She turned to the guy in the backseat. “Is this all you’ve got?”

“These are good. The best. Top quality. Indistinguishable from real.” He was practically shouting. He seemed like he might be high on something. Abby was afraid he might spring over the seat at her if she did anything sudden.

She scrutinized the passport, driver’s license, and birth certificate in her lap. At least they’d been consistent with the spelling of Barabara. Also, she appreciated that she was 5’9” instead of 5’8” and had returned to being twenty-four years old.

“Do these actually work? Like, could I actually board a plane with this thing?” she asked, holding up the passport. “Does it have all the proper… I don’t know what you call it. Is it, scannable or whatever? I think passports have barcodes and stuff now just like credit cards.”

Both guys nodded emphatically. “Good as the real thing,” said the guy in the back seat.

“Really?”

“Best you can buy,” the guy next to her assured her in his weirdo whisper.

“Where do these come from? How do you, like, create them? Or are they stolen?”

“Mmmm, can’t say,” said the guy in the driver’s seat. “We just sell them. That’s all.”

“Don’t worry about where they come from,” said the guy in the back.

“Fine,” Abby said, scrutinizing the documents some more. Before meeting them she’d examined her own driver’s license to get an idea of how it should look, but her new identity was from Mississippi, not Florida.

“I don’t know how a Mississippi license is supposed to look,” she said. “You didn’t have Florida?”

“Mississippi’s as good as Florida.”

“I don’t know about that. But fine. Good enough.” She stuffed everything into the small, greasy manila envelope she’d pulled it all out of. The three of them sat there in silence. It was time to pay up.

Now again for that all-important question she’d asked at the start, the question that hopefully had prompted them to put in a little extra effort for her, and that would theoretically make this whole deal go okay: “And you can get me more if I need more?”

They looked at each other, enjoying the prospect of more easy money coming their way. “Absolutely,” they said in unison.

“Here you go. Seventy-five hundred dollars.” She handed it to the guy in the driver’s seat. He passed it to the guy in the back. She waited while he flipped through it.

“It’s all here,” he reported to his friend, who nodded in response. He stuck his sweaty little hand over the seat for her to shake. “Nice doing business with you,” he said. She shook his hand and then turned back to the man next to her, supposing she’d better shake his hand too. He didn’t extend a hand to her, though. Instead, he gave Abby a menacing look. Like, What’s your story anyway. She had on sunglasses and a brown wig from her pile of sex costumes. She didn’t look like much. Forgettable, she hoped. There is no story, she was trying to tell him back.

“Nice doing business with you guys, too. I’ll be in touch. See you around.”

She shoved the manila folder into her oversized purse and walked back into the mall – one she didn’t normally go to. Once inside she stood by the gumball machines, waiting. The doors were mirrored – Whisperface and Speedball couldn’t see whether she was watching or had moved on.

Don’t worry about me, she tried to psychically tell them. I’m just shopping at Deb.

For several minutes their rusty Subaru stayed unmoving in the parking lot. Finally they pulled away. The front of their car had a little fin on the hood. There was a sticker on the back, the kind that indicated they could park at a certain apartment complex. Abby memorized the details so if she saw them again she’d notice. She watched as they drove down Palmetto Drive, turned right, passed through the green light by a carwash on the corner, and were gone.

When she was sure she was safe, she went back out to her SUV, got in, returned her wig to the plastic bag in her purse, and drove to the real mall. She bought a couple of alibi pairs of shoes, and was back home before the housekeeper was even done with her second load of laundry.

This new housekeeper looked at Abby the same way she always did when Abby came in, giving her a requisite, one-second-long smile. She was no Rosa, that was for sure. In fact, Abby wasn’t even sure what her name was. These days her brain was too full to add any meaningless details she’d soon be dumping back out again.

“Hello. How’s it going today?” Abby asked her.

“Good. Do you need something?” the housekeeper asked, looking up in annoyance from the clothes she was transferring from washer to dryer.

“Take your pick,” Abby told her, placing both shoeboxes in front of her.

“For me?” she asked. Her scowling face softened.

“Yeah. Which would you like?” They were both strappy and impractical.