Page 65 of Girl Anonymous

He seemed to be dismissing her abilities, and that irritated her. “Why do you know that’s not me? Anyone can arrange a hit, and after that scene at your mother’s funeral, I could be perceived as having motive.”

“If you were going to kill somebody, you’d do it face-to-face. For instance, me.” He put his hand to his chest where, after their shower, the blood welled up again and formed a smear of crusty reddish-black over his skin. “Suitcases are over there. Yours ispacked. Car’s out back. I need my cell phone and that knife I tossed last night when you—”

She pointed at the suitcases.

“Son of a goddamn bitch!” He stared at the knife hilt buried in the cloth side of the wheeled briefcase.

She grinned at him. After that display in the hotel room in Sacramento, sticking his writing pen into the wall to scare Tabitha the snitch into a faint, Maarja knew he must be able throw aknifeand hit his target 100 percent of the time. Right now, he was down to 99 percent because he’d wanted to get in her—

“All I wanted was to get into yourchatte.”

“Pants.” She took a calming breath. “You wanted to get in my pants.”

“I don’t give a damn about yourpants.” He lifted the matte gold hardside suitcase onto the bed.

“I’m simply saying—”

“I know.” He opened the zipper, pulled out a compressed packing bag, and handed it to her. “You want me to use some manners when I talk to you.”

“Do you know how?” she snapped.

“I know how. I like to see you flinch when I say the bad words.” He grinned at her the way she grinned at him. “Get dressed, take a piss, and we’ll get going.”

She sighed in mighty exasperation. “Do we have to call it that?”

“What girlie thing do you call it?”

She cackled a little.

“What? What do you call peeing? Pissing?”

“I’ll tell you if you promise to use that term from now on?”

“You call ittaking a winkleor something, don’t you?”

Still smiling, she shook her head.

“Okay, I promise, what?”

He really wanted to know, and she really wanted to hearhim use this euphemism. “After Chrispin graduated from high school, the family took a trip to France. We were exploring a park in Alsace–Lorraine, we watched the sunset, we wandered toward the parking lot—and the gates were closed. Locked. No one around. We hiked to another gate. Locked. We wandered until Alex snarled, ‘I don’t care, I’ve got to take a leak.’”

He was getting the drift, and grinned.

“She headed into the bushes, dropped her pants, and for the first time, a policeman showed up. He yelled,‘No make à le pipi!’and we’ve called it that ever since.”

“That sounds like pee-pee to me.”

“Yep, but it’s spelled differently in French.”

“You want to me to call taking a pissmake à le pipiin front of my tough-guy relatives?”

She crossed her arms and waited.

He stared forbiddingly. Sighed. Said, “Gomake à le pipi.”

She went into the bathroom and shared a smirk with her reflection. She and Dante had started a relationship—she refused to call it a marriage—and they were testing each other. She supposed that was what couples did and at this point, she refused to worry about that. Staying alive had a way of re­arranging priorities.

As she slipped out of the robe, she saw the smear of his heart’s blood between her breasts, and she was right back to the conflict of being a modern woman who half believed all his talk about fate.

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