She almost smiled but didn’t quite manage it. “I suppose that’s part of the reason I’ve always hated you. You never seem to struggle with it.”
“You’ve always hated me? This is quite a time to find out, Natalie. We’ve known each other for four decades. I’ve literally trusted you with my life.”
“And you still can. That’s the job. I’d jump in front of a bullet for you and you know it. Besides, only a small part of me hates you. A tiny, tiny part of me.”
“What, like a mustard seed of hate?”
“Chia. I have a chia seed of hate. Get with the times,” she said, smiling a little.
“You have a chia seed of hate for me. Want to tell me about it?”
She picked at her fingernails. “I always wondered how you managed to just ease through without ever being touched by it all.”
“By what?”
“The job. What we do. Who we are. It should leave scars, don’t you think? I’ve got some. Helen does. Mary Alice does. But you don’t seem fazed by it.”
“Nat, that’s some mark of Cain shit and I don’t believe in it. What we do for a living doesn’t strip us of our souls or make us terrible people. We’re exterminators.”
“That’s really how you see it, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Do you sleep well at night?”
I thought about that. “Most of the time. Look, if you’d have asked me when I was seven years old and playing with a flea market Barbie knock-off what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’m pretty sure assassin wouldn’t have made the top ten list. But it’s what I do. And I do it well. And when I’m finished with a job, the world is that much safer,” I said, holding up my thumb and forefinger, a quarter of an inch apart. “Maybe at the end of a mission I’ve stopped a trafficker from getting his hands on some eleven-year-old who will get to sleep in her own bed that night. Maybe I’ve prevented an arms deal that would have wiped out a settlement of villagers who won’t have anything more to worry about than getting their crops in the ground. Or maybe I’ve broken up a cartel that terrorized people into leaving their homes so they could have free run of the farmland to grow their shitty crops. I think about the people we’ve saved before I sleep.”
She was quiet, looking at her new friend, St. Rosalia, for a while before she turned back to me. “I should have called him. Sweeney, I mean. I should have called him and maybe asked him out for dinner. I should have asked him to stay for breakfast. Hell, I should have at least slept with him again.”
“Really? Was he that good?”
She shrugged. “Average-sized dick but he really knew what to do with it. I just feel bad I dodged him. And now I won’t have the chance to let him know that he was pretty good.”
I leaned back and looked at the ceiling. “You know,” I told her, “most of the decorations here are trompe l’oeil. All those moldings and stars aren’t wood or plaster. They’re just paint. They’re not really there, but it looks like they are and that’s enough for people.”
She turned to me. “Really? Metaphors?”
“It’s all I’ve got.”
“Sweeney’s dead,” she said. “And it was a shitty way to go.”
“He made his choice. He chose wrong. Unless you think you’d have done any differently if he’d pointed a gun at you.”
She forced herself to take a deep breath and shake off the gloom. “I’d have killed the asshole with my bare hands. You were right to take him.”
I cupped my hand over my ear. “Say that again. The part about me being right.”
She nudged my shoulder with hers. “Bitch.”
“Said with love?”
“Always.” She breathed deeply, a slow, tired breath. “I kind of wish we could stay here, you know? Get Minka to make us up some new identities. Maybe get jobs. Turn the page and write some new story. Just walk away from it all.”
“Okay, let’s call that door number one,” I said evenly. “But we’ve already agreed on door number two. If I remember, you were pretty enthusiastic.”
I looked at St. Rosalia’s sweet smile and unnaturally long toes. And then I shifted my gaze to the front of the church to the statue of St. Michael. He was a very casual St. Michael, one arm upraised like he was hailing a cab, his hair tousled by an invisible wind. But his spear was thrust right through the heart of the dragon at his feet. The sculptor had caught it in its death throes, head back, tongue lolling out as it gasped its last breath. It looked pretty cheap; I was pretty sure I could order something better from the Toscano catalog. But that wasn’t the point.
“He knew what the job was,” I said, pointing to St. Michael. “Get in, kill the bastard. Get out alive.”
She nodded. “Door number two.” She lifted her pinky and I linked it with mine.
“Door number two.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Dawn was just beginning to break over the Quarter when the six of us went our separate ways. We stood around the kitchen table with our packed bags and reviewed the next stage of the plan.
“Alright,” I began, “today we’re taking the first real step towards making this happen. If anybody wants out, this is the time. After we walk out that door,” I said, gesturing vaguely towards the street, “we’re all in.”
I looked around the table at each of them in turn. Helen’s face was cool, remote. Natalie was fairly vibrating with excitement, and Mary Alice’s jaw was set. Akiko and Minka each nodded, and even Kevin looked committed—although that may have just been the kitty Valium Akiko had forced down his throat.
I gave Minka a sign. “Since we’re traveling separately, Minka has gotten everybody phones. They’re preloaded with contact info for each of us so we can get in touch.”
Mary Alice was the first to power up her phone. She clicked into the contacts list and frowned. “The address book is empty.”
“Not there,” Minka said, scrolling through the apps until she came to a gaudy pink cartoon kitten wearing a big yellow bow and waving a paw.
Helen peered at the screen. “Is that one of those Japanese lucky cats?”
“A maneki-neko!” Natalie said, pulling up the same icon on her phone. She looked at the caption and did a double take. “You have got to be joking.”
Below the waving kitten was the word “Menopaws!” in a font that looked hand-lettered. Natalie touched the cat and it meowed and twitched its ears.
“What in the name of hormonal hell is this?” Mary Alice demanded. She opened the app and scrolled through the features. “Hot flash tracker? Last menstrual period? Vaginal dryness log?”
Helen let out a little moan of protest, and Minka reared back as if she’d been slapped. “I worked many hours on this!”
“I can tell,” Helen said, making an effort to smile.
“There’s a sex chart,” Natalie said. She hit the button to open that page and the kitten threw back its head to yowl, sending Kevin diving under the table. Soon everyone’s phone was meowing, purring, hissing, and generally making more noise than a herd of howler monkeys.
“It’s awful,” Helen said, hands clamped over her ears. I picked up her phone and closed the app, cutting the kitten off mid-screech.
“It’s perfect,” Mary Alice said, demonstrating the direct message feature. “Look here, we can communicate with each other without texting or emailing. Minka has set us each up with a profile and we’re connected already.”
She flashed her screen where the pink kitten was strolling past a blue postbox, its tail swishing as it pointed to the letters stuffed in the box.
“Oh, that is smart,” Natalie said. “Look, I made my kitten striped. It looks like a tiny ocelot now.”
“I added personalization feature,” Minka said sulkily. “Kittens can be made to look different.”
“It’s very clever, Minka,” Akiko said. She’d made her kitten white and gave it a pair of glasses.
“It’s exactly what we needed,” Mary Alice said, closing the screen on her calico and its tiny top hat.