Strike (21 page)

On the front porch, we find two bags waiting for us. One is my hated faux purse from my trip to Mark's, and the other is a ratty black backpack. Both are filled with nut cans. Almonds, peanuts, cashews. But when I lightly shake one, nothing rattles. When I try to pry the top off like the one Leon showed me, I find that it's been superglued on and won't budge. Could you even hide a bomb in a can this small? Just like with the Wipers, I'm going to have to trust Leon and the CFF, even if I never really trust Leon and the CFF. I shove the can back into the bag and figure that if Leon wanted me dead, he could've shot me on my doorstep, easy as pie.

The list on top of the bags is typed out and has thirty stores,
most of them the sort of place that would assign a cashier to follow me around, expecting me to steal stuff. If I'd known that all my work at the CFF would involve pretending to be an honest shopper, I wouldn't have bought so many black hoodies. Five twenty-dollar bills are included, paper-clipped to the list along with the note,
In case they get suspicious, buy something small
.

Wyatt drives, singing along as his music blasts. I put my feet on the dashboard and watch, as always, for evidence of the Valor government, out in the world. All black cars look like bad guys now. All men in dark suits become agents. Even the black-and-white police car in front of the doughnut shop doesn't feel safe. But how many people driving around with their lattes even know that? Considering the full parking lots, Valor has to be in control of the media. Even if the poor folks at Big Choice know that something's fishy, plenty of people in town are still willing to wait in line for overpriced coffee at Starbucks.

My breath catches as we drive by the road that leads to Wyatt's neighborhood—and mine. I look for smoke but don't see any. Then again, it rained last night. Maybe all the smoke is gone. After this job, we'll check. I don't want to, but we will. Because I have to know. I pull the rosary out of the neck of my tee and roll the beads between my fingers like they're wishes. I'm not supposed to go home, but what part of my life now involves doing what I'm supposed to? If my mom's alive, she'll forgive me, and so will her messed-up God.

Too soon we pull into the outlet mall. It's a few minutes before ten on a Monday, which means that there aren't a ton of people shopping. If this were Black Friday or Christmas, we'd have to park at the closed fish restaurant across the street; this lot totally fills up in a mad thrash to buy crap. I think I've been here only once before, when my mom needed a dress for a wedding.

Wyatt stops at a parking lot stop sign. “What's the first store on the list?”

“The stupid luggage store. Over there.”

“Guess it doesn't matter where we park, then, since we're going to be all over the place.” He parks slightly far out, pointed toward the exit.

We think like criminals now.

Because we are criminals.

“One bag at a time?” Wyatt asks.

I pick up the stupid brown one I hate. “Yeah. One bag, then lunch, and then we'll load the cans into this bag. That backpack is just asking for a cop to search it, and I don't know how we'd explain away twenty pounds of fake nuts.” I shake my head as I get out of the car. “This is so stupid. This is not how wars are fought.”

Wyatt gets out and stretches, revealing a strip of tummy that never fails to mesmerize me. “I was there for the Battle of the Nut Cans,” he says in a raspy old-man voice. “And I tell you, sonny, it was nuts. Pure nuts.”

I giggle, and he reaches for my hand, and then we're walking toward this luggage store that I would never, ever go into in real life. Everything is monogrammed and quilted and displayed with dozens of smaller, identical baby suitcases that fit inside one another like nesting dolls. And everything, as Leon predicted, has a big dye pack attached to it.

“Can I help you?” It's an older woman, and she's eyeing me up and down as if looking for evidence of an orange prison jumpsuit.

“Just looking for a birthday gift for my mom.” I give her my most innocent smile and pull Wyatt toward a sale rack of wallets. She follows us like a ghost as I pick through the overpriced wallets, any of which my mom would adore. I find one for fourteen dollars and hold it up for Wyatt's inspection.

“We have the entire matched set,” the woman says, popping up behind us.

“Maybe for Christmas,” I say, but she doesn't move, doesn't blink. Whatever happened to trust? I reach into my bag and pull out my cash before handing the big, brown monstrosity to Wyatt. “Hold my purse while I buy this, will you, sweetie?”

“Always with the purse,” he grumbles, and the lady leads me to the counter with a resigned sigh. Along the way, just to mess with her, I exchange the wallet for an even cheaper key fob with a leather lobster on it. My mom would hate it, but it's half as much.

“You don't think your mother would prefer the wallet?” she asks, mouth turned down.

“Oh, no. She loves lobsters. She's just crazy for crustaceans. This is perfect.”

She gives me my change and drops the hideous key chain in a bag, then basically herds us out of her store before we can be more annoying, calling, “I'll keep that wallet on hold, if you change your mind.”

It occurs to me that if a store with six-hundred-dollar suitcases is that desperate for seven dollars' worth of business, then the economy is truly screwed.

“I stuffed a nut can into an expensive suitcase,” Wyatt mutters once we're outside.

The next store on the list is full of hipster clothes, and the workers stay as far away from us as possible, as if cheap clothes are an epidemic. We leave a can of pistachios at the bottom of a bin of flip-flops. Then we're in a store full of leather jackets, and I nudge a can of almonds under a leather fedora while Wyatt talks up an aging biker about leather jackets. The kids' store is the hardest, since neither of us knows anything about anything in the entire store. I end up buying a pair of four-dollar arm warmers for my made-up cousin while Wyatt sneaks a can of mixed nuts behind a collection of sparkly snow boots.

The good thing is that I don't see a single cop, mall variety or
possibly real variety. The bad thing is that I keep leaking money just to buy time, and if it keeps up at this rate, I'm going to have an entire stack of shit I don't need and no more twenties to distract an endless line of desperate and suspicious cashiers.

With one nut can left in the bag, we head into a ladies' boutique where there's nothing below forty dollars. I end up trying on ten pairs of hideous shoes, pretending that none of them are quite right, while Wyatt hides the can behind a potted plant. When I buy nothing, the middle-aged lady grumbles, “Cheap-ass kids,” as we walk out the door.

We use some of the change to buy soft pretzels and drink water from the fountain in the food court. As usual, Wyatt's eaten his entire pretzel before I've even tapped all the salt off of mine. We don't talk much, because what are we going to talk about? Our lives are frozen. Our hobbies? Eating Pop-Tarts with my dead uncle's dog in a trailer full of ghosts. Turn-ons? Lockable doors and mail vans. Turn-offs? Those pesky bloodstains that never scrub off and the fact that we're never really alone. Or safe.

I'm not hungry anymore. I give Wyatt my pretzel, and we head back to the car for the next batch of nut cans, which I pack into my purse. At first everything goes fine—at this point, we're old pros. I've still got two twenties left, and it's easy enough to buy a pair of socks out of the clearance bin or some new shoelaces from the designer boutique. At one store, I manage to get a black tee with
Catwoman on it for three dollars, so in terms of my new life, that's winning.

We've got four cans left when we walk into the sort of super-expensive mini department store that can smell the poverty on me the second I open the door. The girl behind the counter gets right up in my face with offensively aggressive politeness.

“Can I help you?”

“Just looking, thanks.”

“For anything in particular?”

I dodge around her and head for the clearance section, where I might believably belong. “Nope. Just looking.”

Wyatt wisely says nothing and follows me. He looks like a bull in a china shop in here, among the dainty wisps of shirts and leggings hanging from clear plastic hangers like strips of discarded snakeskin. Whoever put this place on the list has clearly never been inside it. There's no place to hide something as ungraceful as an old nut can, there are cameras everywhere, and the shopgirl might as well be riding me like a jockey.

I snatch a filmy pink thong out of a bin and hand it to Wyatt, along with a twenty.

“Buy this for me, lover?” I say, batting my eyelashes. “I need to use the ladies' room.”

There are no words for the look on his face. Damn, I miss my phone's camera.

“Uh. Yeah. Okay.”

I head for the bathroom as the lady leads him to the counter with the thong draped over his finger; even it has a dye pack attached. At least the two-stall ladies' room doesn't have cameras, but there aren't many permanent hiding places for even the smallest little almond can. I settle for putting it in the trash can, then wash my hands with hot water and tons of soap. Just for fun, I pull out the can of red spray paint and stare at the cold, white tile wall. What to do for my first act of graffiti rebellion? I decide on
DEBT SWEET DEBT
. The paint is shiny red and runs a little where I was too heavy-handed. There's something to be said for the way it drips like blood does in the movies.

I pop the top back on the spray paint, resettle the hideous purse on my shoulder, and push out the bathroom door feeling like a badass.

And that's when I hear the first gunshot.

I draw my gun and hold it a little behind me as I peek around the door. The shopgirl has her hands up, her mouth open but thankfully silent. Wyatt is still standing, thank God. And he's holding the gun. But I don't see blood. I don't actually realize what's up until I see a black-clad leg and a shoe on the ground.

“Hank?”

His head jerks to me, his eyes frantic. He looks at the door. And we run.

It's weird how quiet and normal it is outside, like no one even heard the shot. There are no sirens, no footsteps. Far away, a golf cart trundles toward us with its lights blinking red and blue, but the rent-a-cop inside it couldn't outrun a dead elephant. We say nothing,
and our jog picks up to a run, and then we're throwing ourselves into the car and speeding out of the outlet mall parking lot.

“What happened?” I ask. I'm out of breath, and my heart is freaking out. For once it's scarier being the person who didn't pull the trigger.

“She tested the twenty. It was counterfeit. So she called the cop. He was right outside. But I couldn't leave because you were in the bathroom. And he was trying to take my gun and cuff me with those zip tie things, so . . .”

“So you shot him?”

He shakes his head and swallows hard. “No. I mean, I guess. I didn't want to. I didn't mean to. But he was trying to take my gun, and I wouldn't let him, and he was old, and we were wrestling for it, and he got shot in the leg, not even a bad hit. I think he maybe had a heart attack or something. He just fell over. Jesus, I feel bad for him.”

“I'm sorry. I mean thank you. I mean . . . that sucks.”

He nods. “Yeah.”

“I wish you'd shot her instead.”

Wyatt looks at me funny as we speed down the highway. “Don't say that. She was just doing her job.”

“Yeah, and we were just doing ours. And the Cranes set us up.”

“What do you mean?”

I pull the last twenty out of the bag and hold it up to the light.
It looks normal. Even has those little yellow lines in the corner from where it's been tested for counterfeit in the past.

“So she used the yellow pen, and it didn't work?”

“Yeah.”

“So that means that not only are the Cranes making fake money and sending us out with it, but that they're going to the trouble of marking them up like real bills. That's probably what the tent people are doing. Turning crispy new counterfeit twenties into slightly used, wrinkled, yellow-penned cash.”

Wyatt's hands are shaking on the steering wheel, and he looks like he wants to cry. I reach for his arm, and he shakes me off. “I just . . . Don't touch me right now, okay?”

“It's not your fault.”

He pushes his hair back and dashes at his eyes with a fist. “He was just an old man. I didn't want to shoot him. What if he dies? We know nine-one-one isn't working.”

I take a deep breath. For all the times Wyatt has talked me down from the ledge when I was losing my shit, this is the first time the tables have been turned, and I don't know what he needs. The best thing he's done for me is to hold me close until the shaking stops and tell me it's not my fault. But he doesn't want me to touch him, and even though I told him it's not his fault, I don't think he believes me.

“Do you want a hamburger?” is the best I can do.

He snorts and looks at me, half crazy. “Yeah, I do. But all we
have is counterfeit money, and I don't want to shoot anyone else today.”

I dig around in the bag and hold up some ones and fives. “We have the change. Which probably isn't fake.”

He turns into the first fast-food place he sees and doesn't ask me if I want anything, which is okay, because I don't. He's crammed an entire burger in his mouth before we're back on the road.

“Where's your house?” he asks, mouth full.

“I . . . We don't have to do this now.”

“We do. I need something to do. Something else to think about. Where is it?”

“Okay, just . . . head toward your house. Your old house.”

I realize immediately that I've just reminded him that his dad is dead and he can't ever go back home. My face goes red with shame. That I've done the things I've done, that I've forced him to do horrible things too. I didn't mean to shoot my uncle Ashley, either. My hand was sweaty, and the trigger slipped. But whatever allows me to keep going anyway, to forget it . . . He doesn't have that adaptation. He can't ignore it. Can't repress it. His hands are still shaking. This is why he wasn't tapped by Valor. He's on his third burger as he turns onto the familiar road that leads to both our houses.