Bryn put the bag on the desk and turned to go.
“Hey,” said a soft voice from the shadows.
She spun, pointing the flashlight, but the voice echoed weirdly in the empty room, and she couldn’t pinpoint where it had come from.
“Hey,” the whisper came again, closer.
Screw it. Bryn unzipped her sweatshirt and pulled her gun. The weight of it made her feel less off balance, less vulnerable, even though she knew that was an illusion; she’d seen comrades chewed up by small-arms fire even through ballistic nylon vests. Human beings were always vulnerable.
Not that she was legally considered human anymore.
The voice seemed to come from behind her this time, startlingly close. “Hey, sugar, where you goin’?”
Bryn spun, gun in a firing stance, just as something lunged at her from the darkness on her left. The man skidded to a stumbling halt, the muzzle pressed to his face.
“I’m leaving, sugar,” she said. “Sit your ass down on the floor, cross-legged, hands behind your head. Now. ”
He sank down and complied without another word. Homeless, she guessed, and definitely high, from the way his pupils failed to contract in her flashlight beam. He was wearing faded surplus military khakis under layers of coats and dirt-stiff scarves. ‘“Sup?” he mumbled. “Just tryin’ to be friendly. ”
“Yeah, I can see how friendly you want to be by the bulge in your pants. Just your way of saying hi? Stay down. ” Bryn took three giant steps back, and then paused. She was leaving a hundred thousand in cash sitting there with a homeless would-be rapist. If she turned her back, he and it would surely be gone. “Okay, I’m going to need you to get up. We’re going to take a walk. ”
“A walk?” He went from menacing to pathetic in the blink of an eye, and raised his hands over his head. “Please don’t kill me; I didn’t mean nothin’!”
“I’m not going to kill you. Stand up. I can’t leave you here. ”
“It’s my place. I got stuff. I leave it, it gets took. ”
“Get up, now, or I promise you won’t need stuff ever again. ”
He scrambled up, awkward with fear, and she knew this wasn’t the first time he’d had a gun pointed at him. His head was tucked down, his hands trembling, and his posture was totally submissive.
“Walk,” she said, and circled around so that his path was clear and not within grabbing distance of her.
Her captive shambled out, hands raised, and she followed, careful not to close the distance as he slowed down. “Move. Head for the fence. ” He glanced back, and she noticed something strange about him.
His eyes. They didn’t look right. Still dilated, but …
Contacts. He was wearing some kind of costume contacts.
This was him. The one collecting the money. Maybe even the mystery caller himself. It was a great disguise, and she’d almost completely fallen for it.
“Wait,” she said, but that tipped him off that the game was up, and he dodged, blindingly fast, out of the beam of her flashlight.
She lost him.
Bryn switched the light off—had to, to use the starlight effectively—but it took time for her eyes to adjust to the change, and in the second or two required, he just … vanished.
Bryn backed up toward the building, then plunged inside and turned the penlight on to illuminate the desk.
The bag was gone.
The whisper came again, raw and amused. “I think I like you, sugar. You can handle yourself. ”
“Show yourself!” she yelled. “I don’t do business with jackasses in clown makeup!”
She got nothing in reply but echoes, but she heard a scrape from a side passage. Her blood was pounding in her head, and she knew the smart thing to do was withdraw, regroup, wait for backup … but he was going to get away clean if she did. I had him, she thought. I had my gun in his face.
She also knew that she’d never be able to identify him. She’d seen what he wanted her to see—the filth, the straggly hair, the clothes, the contacts hiding his real eye color. First rule of disguise was to distract, and he’d done it brilliantly, right down to the submissive body language.