Cooper dropped the duffel on an empty work bench, yanked the zipper, and began to count out bundles. Criminal etiquette would have been to do it in private, but he didn’t care. Let one of these people jack the forger. Not his problem.
“Here. These are bundles of ten thousand.” He pushed the stack of twenty across the bench. Then he reached into the bag, pulled out two more bundles, and dropped them beside the others. “And that’s for the other guy. The one you cheated out of six months.”
Schneider looked amused. “A noble gesture.”
“He gets his ID tomorrow. Same as us.” Cooper laid a hand lightly on the stack of money, tapped his fingers. “Yes?”
The man shrugged.
“I want to hear you say it.”
“Yes,” Schneider said. “Tomorrow morning. Now,” he waved a smell away again. “There is work.”
Cooper spun on his heel and walked out, Shannon slipping like his shadow. He pushed through the aisle, down the steps, out the door. The night was cool, and he sucked the air deep, stalked to the car. Shannon let almost a mile of pavement slide beneath their wheels before she asked the question he’d seen her wanting to. “Why did you—”
“Because I don’t like the way he doesn’t even hide the way he sees us. As livestock, or slaves.”
“A lot of people do.”
“Yeah. But with Schneider, it’s truly impersonal. He could watch you burn to death and not make a move to pour water. It’s not hate, it’s…” He couldn’t think of the word, couldn’t put his finger on what exactly it was that so pushed his buttons. “I don’t know.”
“So paying for the guy was to show that you were Schneider’s equal?”
“Something like that. Just to make him notice, I guess. Shake him.”
“But it didn’t. You were still livestock. Like a cow learning to dance; it’s amusing, but it’s still a cow.”
He didn’t have anything to say to that, just drove in silence for a moment.
“It’s kind of ironic, actually,” she said. “Those clothes were knockoffs of Lucy Veronica’s new line. You know her stuff?”
“I know her name. She’s gifted, right?”
“Jesus, Cooper, pick up a magazine. Her styles have reinvented the fashion industry. The way she sees things—she’s spatial—changed everything. Her clothes are fetishized by socialite women. And those rich women are fetishized by middle-class suburban chicks, who want to be like the socialites, but can’t afford original Lucy Veronica. So what do they do to get the next best thing to couture designed by a brilliant? They buy a knockoff sewn by a brilliant. In a sweatshop.”
“Yeah, well, Sammy Davis Junior got to be in the Rat Pack, but that didn’t mean we had racial equality.”
Shannon half nodded, a noncommittal sort of gesture. He read her desire to launch into rhetoric, but instead she leaned back, slipped out of her shoes, and put her bare feet up on the glove box. “Anyway. It was nice of you. Paying for him, I mean. A nice thing to do.”
“Well, what the hell, right? Got to help each other out.” Realizing as he said it that he meant it, that it wasn’t just a line to play her. He was finding things murkier out here than he had expected; the relative clarity of his position at the DAR didn’t seem to translate. But you’re still with department. Don’t forget that. “Anyway, it wasn’t really my money.” He looked over at her, putting on a smile. “Turns out, I’m a pretty good thief.”
That got a laugh—he really liked her laugh, full-spirited and adult—which morphed into a yawn.
“Tired?”
“Dodging sniper fire, riding on top of a train, touring a sweatshop—it’ll wear a girl out.”
“Wuss.”
“I rode. On top of. A train.”
It was his turn to laugh. “All right. We’ll find a couple of beds.”
“I know a place we can go. Some friends of mine. We’d be safe.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they’re my friends.” She looked at him quizzically, the exterior lights glowing off her eyes. “Not everyone’s friends shoot at them.”
“Yeah, well, how do I know your friends won’t want to shoot at me?”