Working Stiff (Revivalist 1)

“Don’t be,” he said. “I’ll be there after you’re done. ”

She grabbed another set of clothes and went into the locker room at the end of the hall; Riley was in there, changing into jeans and a comfortable sweatshirt with her hair still clinging damply to her face. She looked up, surprised, as Bryn dumped her stuff on the bench.

“Everything okay?”

Bryn didn’t want to talk, but she had to try. “Bad one,” she managed to say. “Major decomposition. ”

Riley nodded and opened her locker. She tossed Bryn a bottle. “Try this,” she said. “Best I’ve found. Use it four times, you should be okay. ”

Bryn didn’t even wait to thank her. The urge to get clean was so overpowering that even after she was standing in the hot spray, soaping herself from head to toe, she couldn’t stop gasping and shaking from the pressure. Two passes with the shampoo and she still felt filthy. By the third she was calming down, and by the fourth she felt almost normal. Her skin tingled from the scrubbing, but that was a good thing; the greasy, horrible stench seemed to have finally rubbed off.

Bryn threw her old clothes into the incineration biohazard bag and dressed in the clean ones, dried her hair, and was just finishing when there was a knock on the locker room door, and McCallister looked in.

He looked rough—pallid, with dark circles beneath his eyes. He’d stripped off his coat and tie and unfastened the top button of his shirt. “All right if I come in?” he asked, and she suddenly felt very selfish for taking up the shower for so long.

“It’s all yours,” she said.

He nodded thanks and opened a locker—Joe Fideli’s—and took out a pair of blue jeans and a clean white T-shirt. “We’re about the same size,” he said. “At least I won’t look like I’m going for gangster style. ”

She passed him Riley’s shampoo. “Four passes,” she said. “It works. ”

He smiled, faintly, and said, “Good. ”

He was already stripping off his clothes before she closed the door, and in those fast, ruthless motions, she sensed that McCallister, too, was on the edge of losing control.

She let him do it in private.

Back in her office, Bryn turned on music, something soft and soothing, and nibbled some crackers to settle her still-restless stomach. Her skin and clothes smelled clean and fresh, but it was hard not to imagine the ghost of that stench still hanging around. She cleaned out the trash can, then used disinfectant spray around her chair and on her shoes. Probably too much.

Finally, she sat down and closed her eyes.

A soft chime made her open them again.

She had e-mail.

Oh, God. She’d actually forgotten all about it.

Sitting in her in-box was a new message from one of those throwaway account services, with the ominous moniker of deadman. There was no subject line, and the message was just an address and a time of day—ten p. m.

McCallister came back, still glistening with drops from the shower, and saw from her expression that something was up.

She mutely spun her computer around and showed him. He leaned over the desk to read it. “Can your tech wizards trace that?” she asked.

“Probably not, but we’ll try it. That is the e-mail equivalent of a burner phone, and if he’s got any sense at all, he hid his IP address through a randomizer. ” McCallister already had his cell out and was dialing.

“Don’t you need my account password?”

“Already have it,” he said, and got up to turn his back and talk to his resources.

Proof, once again, that there was nothing secret in her life anymore. Nothing sacred. She’d expected to feel some sense of burning betrayal, but instead, she felt … tired. And, weirdly, a little reassured.

McCallister stayed on the phone a while longer, and she contemplated opening up another set of drinks, but that seemed less like a necessary safety valve and more like a crutch, at this point. Bryn shut and locked the drawer, and looked at the clock.

It was coming up on six o‘clock.

Four hours to get the money and deliver it to the address—or else what? Lose their potential chance at the supplier.

If they did, Bryn had no doubt whatsoever that Irene Harte would pull the plug on the project, and her, with pleasure. It was that, as much as anything else, that made her step back from the comfort of the booze. I’m not giving you the excuse, she thought. Not you. You don’t get to kill me.