Chapter Ten
Will
H alf an hour later and the house is quiet.
There’s still a light patter of rain outside, but nothing so violent as what we slogged through, and after a shower long and scorching enough to test the limits of even our Cadillac of hot-water heaters and a change into something not crusted in mud, I’m feeling ninety percent human again.
Which means I’m ready to talk to Rob.
I sigh as I knock on his door. I don’t exactly relish this conversation, but if the events of tonight have made anything clear, it’s that this shit cannot continue.
“What’s the password?” comes his voice.
“Fuck you is the password,” I mutter, and open the door anyway.
The room is its usual disaster, clothes and gear flung everywhere and dirty boot prints ground into the carpet. I think about making some wise-ass comment before I remember I’m trying to get him on my side here, so I refrain. Instead, I just nod at Rob—who’s sitting, shirtless, damp-haired, and in joggers, on the floor, propped at the foot of his bed. A nice tableau, if I say so myself. If I were Maren, I’d...
Hm. I look around. No one else here.
“Flying solo?” I ask, by way of greeting.
“What, Maren? Nah. Not tonight.” He shakes his head. “Don’t think she’s in the mood. Either that or Tuck, ah...tuckered her out.” He shrugs. “I’m in no hurry.” He nods at me. “Couldn’t sleep?”
I tip my head. “Something like that.”
“I’ve got medicine.” He lifts a bottle of Jim Beam.
I have to roll my eyes. “Don’t break out the good stuff just for me.”
“Cram it, Boston. Jim and I go way back.”
I close the door behind me and take a seat on the floor next to him, my back against the wall, and accept the two-finger pour he hands me.
“Salud.” I raise my glass, take a sip.
Steady my nerves.
Here goes nothing.
“We have to talk,” I say.
Rob doesn’t move, doesn’t even look my way. “About?”
“I think you know what.”
He cracks a grin that doesn’t reach his eyes. “If this is about the goddamn housekeeper, Scarlet, I swear—”
“It’s not,” I cut in, “although the issue still remains.” I flick a discarded pair of boxers away from me and take a deep breath. “We need to leave Sherwood.”
He stiffens. “No.”
It’s calm, knee-jerk, not unexpected. I suck in another inhale.
“I knew you’d say that. So here’s all the reasons you’re wrong.” I slug back more bourbon for liquid courage and tick out my fingers. “The bounty is making us sitting ducks. The perimeter’s not going to hold forever no matter what I do; it’s not designed to be secure against constant, round-the-clock threats. We don’t help anyone by dying here or getting thrown into whatever kangaroo court Maren’s uncle has in store for us. And Wheatley’s guys won’t be furloughed forever. They figure out a way to escalate this, we’re talking FBI. Federal prison. I don’t think I have to tell you why that’s bad news. For us. For her. We’re all criminals in many, varied, creative ways.”
He grunts. “We’re not just criminals.”
God, he makes me want to tear my hair out. That’s the point he decides to argue with? “Okay, sure,” I say, fighting to keep my voice even. “But we aren’t not. ”
“We help people,” he goes on. “By any means necessary. And sometimes those means are crimes.”
“Frequently,” I correct. “ Frequently they are crimes. In fact, almost exclusively, I’d argue. But guess what? That doesn’t even matter. Because now those same people are trying to kill us.”
“You mean one scared kid with a bargain-bin firearm?” Rob swipes at the air, sips his glass. “Don’t tell me you’re scared of that.”
“You’re being willfully obtuse, Robin ,” I say, letting every syllable drip with the hard prep-school diction I know he hates. “And you know it. Where there’s one, there’s many. Sure, tonight, there only happened to be one stupid enough to go out in a monsoon. But that doesn’t mean other, more capable people aren’t out there. This is the South, for Christ’s sake. You of all people should know that the population’s armed to the teeth.”
Rob muses for a long moment.
“I almost...” he trails off. Another pause. “I almost wish he had been some tactical badass, you know? Someone we could take out and actually fight.”
He’s dodging the point again. But at least he’s not outright disagreeing with me. So I decide to humor him. “That wouldn’t not have been a pain in the ass,” I point out.
“No,” he agrees. “But it’d be simpler.”
“Well, we’ve never really done simple,” I snap. “Why start now?”
Rob nods, staring into the middle distance.
“If we leave, what even are we?” he says at last.
“Safe?” I offer. “For one thing. Alive. Not in the crosshairs of every hillbilly for a hundred square miles who hates us and wants us dead?”
Rob shakes his head. “Nah. Nah, not at all. See, that’s the thing.” Now he looks me in the eye, those green eyes cutting me right to the center. “They don’t hate us. Hell, they like us, or used to. Neutral, at minimum. They’re only hunting us because they’re broke and desperate.”
“Okay?” I shrug. “And?”
“And they’re only broke and desperate because we’re not doing our job.” He scrubs his face with his hand. “Ever since Maren almost hit me with her damn car and broke down off the forest road for you and LJ to find, we’ve been reacting. Covering our own asses, running interference around Guy and Wheatley and John and trying to keep Maren safe. And I don’t think that was the wrong choice, now,” he adds, seeing my mouth already open to counter him. “But things are different now. A little more settled, at least. We’ve recovered. We gotta get back to the damn prime directive.”
I let my eyes flutter closed. No , I think. No, because that is the exact opposite of what I am trying to convince you of. We could be lying on a beach in Mexico eating shrimp cocktail and taking turns doing body shots off our smoking hot girlfriend, but no. No, you have to have it this way.
But I say none of that. Because I know I’m a self-indulgent, self-pitying dipshit.
And I know he’s probably right.
“We start helping people again, proper-like, then what good is a bounty?” He explodes his fingers in the air with a little pfft sound. “No one’s gonna take stupid risks for money they don’t need. Honestly, you could argue we brought this on ourselves.”
I work my jaw. You could, I suppose, but I won’t. Still, I hold my tongue. Take another sip of bourbon, then another. Let my head fall back against the wall.
“You really believe in this shit, don’t you?” I say, without opening my eyes.
“Like you don’t?”
I lean back to look at him.
Rob nods, gesturing with his glass. “I mean, you’re here, aren’t you?”
“I believe in you ,” I correct sharply. “Though sometimes I wonder why.”
Rob just sips his whiskey. Stares and stares at nothing and everything. Then fixes me with those damn green eyes of his.
“Get some rest, Scarlet.”
Fuck you , I think.
Because he’s won the argument and we both know it.
“I’m serious,” he says, when I do nothing but scowl. He looks it, too. “Running on adrenaline’s gonna do you no good. Go sleep.”
“Geez, buy me dinner before you start bossing me around,” I grumble. But I get to my feet.
“Attaboy.” He nods approvingly. “Tomorrow we’re back in the field.”
I groan.
Fieldwork is hard. The shit we do is hard—it’s retail politics, it’s large-scale and petty larceny, it’s money laundering, it’s tax fraud, it’s occasional assault in the name of self-defense. It’s exhausting, and it takes at least four of us. And Protestant work ethic be damned—I’m lazy , and I know myself enough to admit it. Plus, Rob’s right: it’s been so long since we’ve actually done our standard operating procedure that I’m going to have to shake off the rust to even remember what to do.
But at the same time...
Well, it’s the whole reason I’m here. Here, with Rob, and here, in Sherwood.
So fuck it.
“Aye aye, captain.” But I roll my eyes and flip him off. He just grins.
“See you in the morning.”
He gives me a salute, and I pull the door shut, trying and failing to imagine how I’m going to start up all this shit again.