“Good. Maybe it’s the maid and she can clean up the mess after I blow your ugly hound-dog head off.”
But I rolled off the bed and took a position a few steps from the door, gun raised, as Samuel got up and peeped through the peephole. Then he glanced back at me.
“Extraordinary,” he said. He opened the door and there was Ashley standing in the doorway. She looked at him; she looked at me; and then out came the sunny Southern California prom queen smile.
“Hi!” she said.
Samuel grabbed her arm, made a quick survey of the parking lot, and pulled her into the room.
“Are you going to shoot me again?” she asked me.
I lowered the gun. “How did you find us?” I asked.
“You gave me this, remember?” She was holding the black box. “If you’re going to give someone the slip, Alfred, you should take the tracking device with you.”
Samuel pulled it out of her hands.
“Why are you here?” he demanded.
“The same reason you are,” she shot back, looking at me. “Some things matter and some things don’t.”
“Alfred,” Samuel said. “Give me the gun.”
“He’s going to shoot me, Alfred,” Ashley said calmly. “You can take the Op Nine out of the job, but you can’t take the job out of the Op Nine.”
“You may have been followed. Alfred.”
I handed him the gun and he disappeared into the night. I sank onto the end of the bed. All of a sudden I was very tired, the most tired I’d been in a long time. She sat beside me.
“I thought—I was sure—you were dead,” she said. She took my hand.
“I’m not.”
“I’m glad.”
Then she hauled off and slapped me across the cheek.
“Don’t ever do that again, understand?” she said. She punched me as hard as she could in the chest. “You’re my assignment.”
She burst into tears. I held her while she cried. Then she pushed away and angrily brushed the tears from her perfectly formed, perfectly tanned cheeks.
“You shouldn’t have come back, Ashley.”
“You shouldn’t have dumped me.”
“You know why.”
“Doesn’t make it right.”
“ ‘Right.’ Does it still matter, Ashley? Not what’s necessary, but what’s right?”
“Of course it still matters.”
I nodded. “So if it still matters, if right isn’t wrong, then there’s just one thing left to do.”
“What?”
“Complete the circle.”