Chapter 13

"No fucking way!" Case practically yelled into the pay phone.

She turned towards the phone in order to get a little more privacy, though there was no one around to listen in on her conversation. The sun hadn't even risen yet, though the sky was beginning to lighten. She'd gotten up to use the bathroom and had decided to check her voice mail while she was at it. She'd been surprised to find a message from Doc telling her to call him. Now, she was just annoyed and beginning to get a little pissed.

"I've barely had three days with her. She's not ready," Case insisted more quietly.

"What's there to be ready for? And anyway, you'll be there to help her make the delivery. He wouldn't make her go solo her first time."

"I did."

"Yeah, well, you were different."

Case sighed away from the mouthpiece and turned around to look up at the purple sky. The distant stars were beginning to fade in favor of the closest star's greater light. She shook her head. There was no getting out of this.

"All right. What's in the package?"

"A telescope. It needs to be hand-delivered and keep the receipt. No fireworks."

Case straightened.

"Doc, she's not ready for that. Those things are heavy."

Looking down the sight of a sniper rifle and pulling the trigger on an unsuspecting Target required a detachment she wasn't sure Rain was capable of yet.

"That's why you're going to be there to help her carry the thing. You just make sure the package gets delivered. If she can't handle it, she can go work for the local florist."

Pushing up daisies. Fuckin' great.

"He chose this job himself?"

"Yeah. He wants to know what she's made of."

"And I'm supposed to have turned her into Employee of the Month in less than a week? He's being fucking stupid."

"Yeah, well, he's the boss. He's allowed," Doc chuckled.

Fuck.

"Window of delivery?" Case asked with resignation clear in her voice.

"The next forty-eight hours. It's a private delivery, for his eyes only."

Witnesses would not be acceptable.

Case heard typing in the background and then one last key tap.

"I'm sending the complete file to you now," Doc said.

"Anything else?"

"If there is, it's in the attachment."

Case hung up the phone, loudly, and then scrubbed her face with her hands before running her fingers through her short hair. She looked up to the sky again and noticed it had turned light blue in the last couple minutes. She waited for answers to questions she hadn't asked, but none came.

Case headed back to the campsite. There were a few other early risers stumbling around their camps and Case nodded to them when they noticed her. As she came up to the site she was sharing with Rain, she saw the woman buried underneath the sleeping bag Rain had pulled over them during the night to protect them against the cold. Case could only see the top of the woman's dark head and she had to grin at the image of someone like Rain attempting to hide from the cool morning air.

Case knelt down next to the huddled body beneath the sleeping bag and pulled back the top edge to expose Rain's face. Rain's expression turned sour and she groaned a little as she tried to scoot down to regain the protective warmth of the cover. Case grinned again.

"Hey, sleepy. Time to get up."

Rain half-whined, half-groaned something unintelligible, but which was probably supposed to be a request for more sleep. Case thought about giving in, but only for a second. They would need all the time they could get.

"Come on. You gotta get up. Don't make me get rough," Case said in her most stern voice.

Rain opened one eye and looked at Case to gauge her seriousness. She decided Case didn't look like she was joking, so she sighed and turned over enough to face Case.

"What's so important that we have to be up before the crack of dawn?"

"Your first hit."

That woke Rain up.

"What?"

All trace of fuzziness left her and she sat up to get her blood flowing better.

"I talked to Doc. Antonio's decided he wants to know if you're up for this kind of work."

"Trial by fire, huh?" Rain tried for a little levity.

"Looks like it. Come on. We gotta get a move on. We have to get to New York, then get some stuff, and then I've got to walk you through a sniper hit before you do it for real."

Case stood up and began moving around the camp to gather their things and load them into the truck. Rain's stomach knotted up and she felt vaguely ill.

A sniper hit. She was going to have to kill someone or the last three years of her life would be for nothing.

Rain got up and began zipping up the sleeping bags, so that they could be rolled up and put away. The queasy feeling didn't go away, but Rain did her best to ignore it. She was just glad Case hadn't mentioned breakfast.

Rain looked over at Case and saw her sorting through things in the back of the truck. She carried the rolled up sleeping bags over to the truck and stashed them to Case's right. Case looked up at her.

"Hey. Why don't you go see if anyone around here would like any of this stuff? We can't take any of it with us on the plane."

Rain nodded and started with the campsite across from them, since it was clear they'd been up for a while.

In less than an hour, they'd given away all the camping equipment they'd bought and cleaned themselves up as best they could in the campground's sparse bathroom facilities. There was no sightseeing on the way back to the airport and almost no conversation either.

Case took care of everything with very little fuss. She returned the rental and bought their tickets, slipping the clerk the usual amount of money to allow them to carry their weapons on the plane, and Rain quietly followed her.

Rain couldn't seem to snap herself out of the strange daze that had come over her. Everything seemed surreal. It was like she'd gone on vacation and come back to an alternate universe.

When it came right down to it, Rain had never killed anyone in cold blood. She had killed before, but there had always been some kind of immediate threat that had needed to be eliminated. Pulling the trigger had never been a calculated maneuver on her part. Now, she wasn't sure she could do it, no matter what the consequences might be.

Rain watched Case as she walked slightly behind the short woman heading towards their plane's boarding gate. How did Case do it? How did she kill over seventy people just because Carlotti or Doc told her to?

Rain felt an urge to cry, which she quickly tamped down. It was something that happened to her sometimes when she unintentionally attempted to empathize with the people she profiled. She wasn't sure if she wanted to cry for them because they couldn't or because of the horrors they'd usually perpetrated by the time their list of crimes landed on her desk.

That thought reminded Rain of the files stored on her laptop regarding Case and she took comfort in the analytical side of her mind. She hadn't been able to do much more than save the files to the hard drive and she hoped she'd get a chance to read them soon. There were a lot of blank spaces in Case's story that she wanted to fill in.

Case came back from checking in and sat in the chair next to Rain.

"They'll be boarding us in about fifteen minutes. We timed this really well," Case said.

Rain nodded.

Case continued to look at Rain and decided she needed to say something to calm Rain down. She'd been wound pretty tight ever since Case had told her about the upcoming job and Case knew she had to get Rain to relax.

"Look, it'll be all right. It's really not that hard. You just can't think about it too much," Case advised.

Rain stared straight ahead for several moments before turning her face to look Case in the eye.

"How did you do it the first time?" Rain asked quietly.

Case looked around at the crowd and shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

"The first time it was a job, I just didn't think about it a whole lot. I just did it and that was it and then I did it again the next time and then it was just 'This is what I do for a living, that's all.'" Case finally looked at Rain again. "You just get used to it," she said, as she shrugged her shoulders and looked towards the windows that gave a clear view of the plane they would be flying in soon.

"But how?" Rain asked insistently.

Rain was very aware of the psychological qualities of the people who became serial murderers, but that was different from killing for hire. People who killed for money tended to be sociopaths rather than psychopaths, or they simply liked the money and power that came with the occupation.

But Case didn't fit any of those descriptions. She didn't have the charm of a sociopath, or the insanity of a psychopath. She disliked showing off her wealth and she didn't appear to be on any kind of power trip.

If the situation had been less serious, Rain would have had to say she thought Case had simply fallen in with a bad crowd and hadn't found her way out yet, but they weren't talking about cutting class or smoking weed. They were talking about killing people for the mafia.

"The people that we deliver packages to... They're not innocent. They're part of the business. They fucked up, pissed off the wrong people, and we're the messengers. That's all. We don't judge. We don't try to figure out if there's another way. We just do our job and get the hell out."

Case looked away again and heaved an internal sigh of relief when the boarding call was announced for first class passengers. She stood and picked up her laptop's briefcase and waited as Rain did the same.

They were in the air half an hour later and Case brought out her computer to work on, while Rain stared out the window. Case hooked up her cell phone and downloaded her e-mail. All the information she needed was there and Case did a quick search through her database for the best contact she had in New York for sniper rifles.

It would have to be something generic, so that when the bullet was identified, there would be too many possible leads for the police or FBI to follow. And since they would be keeping the gun and disposing of it quietly somewhere else, they wouldn't have to worry about having the bullet matched to it.

Case mentally crossed off several potential dealers, as she scrolled down the screen. Sometimes it was helpful to use a weapon whose markings could identify it as having been used in a previous unrelated crime, but she didn't think this was one of those times. Case continued with her mental planning and note taking until she was satisfied and closed down all the programs she'd been running. She opened up Minesweeper and began to play.

Rain watched the clouds go by and tried to relax. She was more shaken up about Case's announcement that she was going to have to kill someone than she had imagined she would be. Actually, that wasn't entirely true. She really hadn't thought much about what her new training was for. She'd been so focused on Case that she'd lost sight of the reality of the situation she was in.

Since going under deep cover, she'd been repeatedly forced to hurt or kill people because they'd attacked her or the person she was supposed to be guarding. But they'd all been "bad guys" in her mind, people indirectly responsible for her brother's death and directly threatening her or her employer, so she'd had a clear conscience about it all.

But the idea of simply killing someone when that person was not attacking her made her stomach flip-flop and her heart rate increase. She hadn't felt so nervous and out of control since her first field assignment, but she'd settled down as soon as she'd gotten to work.

Maybe that was the problem. She didn't have anything to do yet.

"Holy shit!"

Rain jerked her head around at the exclamation and found Case staring at her computer screen.

"What's wrong?" Rain asked.

"I just hit one-fifteen on the expert level. I don't believe it. Fuckin' aye. I am never gonna be able to beat that," Case shook her head in amazement.

Rain smiled slightly at Case's excitement over a computer game.

"Never say never," Rain said.

Case looked over at her and grinned. She turned back to the screen and typed her name into the box for the high score. She clicked OK, then exited the game and shut down the laptop before putting it away. She rested her head back against the seat and closed her eyes.

"I'm going to take a nap. You planning on staying up?" Case asked.

"Yeah. I think I'll play around with my new computer."

Rain grinned and saw Case smile, obviously hearing Rain's expression in her voice, since her eyes were still closed.

"Okay. Wake me up when it's time to land," Case requested.

"Sure."

Case squirmed around to get more comfortable while Rain pulled out her laptop and waited for it to boot up. Case's breathing had slowed and deepened into the rhythms of sleep by the time Rain was able to pull up the files she wanted to read. She also opened up the standard Windows solitaire program so that she could easily cover the screen if Case happened to wake up before Rain was done. As an extra precaution, Rain pulled the shade on the window and turned in her seat, so that the screen wouldn't be visible to Case if Case opened her eyes.

Rain began going through the records Dawson had sent her and couldn't help looking over at Case's innocent sleeping face after every few paragraphs. She'd read some pretty bad abuse histories, and she knew Case had been seriously traumatized by her father, but the story that took shape as she read about Case's childhood seemed like something out of a movie rather than real life.

Though there had been reports from friends of the family as early as age two describing her father's sexual abuse against Case, nothing had been done about it. Her mother had even reported her husband once when Case was four years old, but had later refused to press charges. The laws at the time had been such that the police couldn't press charges themselves, so the report had been filed away and forgotten.

Report cards showed Case to be an exceptionally bright child, but back then, there had been no resources to help Case explore her potential, so she'd been ignored academically for the most part. She didn't cause any trouble in class and the notes on her behavior talked about how quick she was to offer her help to fellow students.

However, there were numerous notes from teachers that described Case as being socially aloof and always tired. When asked why she kept falling asleep in class, she explained that she had been up the night before. Either Case had refused to give a more detailed explanation or the adults had neglected to ask why she'd been awake all night. But Rain recognized the pattern of a child in a perpetually abusive household.

It wasn't until the sixth grade that things went noticeably downhill for Case. She went from being a straight A student to receiving several F's, a couple D's, and a C- in the space of one semester.

Rain flipped through the windows to the file that contained the police report for the same time period and lost herself in the continuation of Case's life story.

At age thirteen, Case had been arrested for murdering her father. She'd stabbed him nine times in the chest, neck, and stomach with a kitchen knife. When the police had arrived, they'd found her rocking in a corner, covered in blood and seriously beaten. The knife had been on the floor near her father's body with her fingerprints all over it. Her mother had been the one that had called the police and she'd identified her daughter as the killer.

Her mother's statement painted a very different picture of the child Rain had read about only a few minutes earlier. She'd told the questioning officer that Case had attacked her and her husband had attempted to stop her 'crazy daughter.' Then Case had grabbed the carving knife and stabbed him over and over again.

Case's mother had obviously taken several hits to the jaw and stomach, but the sizes of the marks were much larger than a thirteen-year-old girl's fists would have been, especially someone as small as Case. And Case's father's blood alcohol level had been so high at the time of his death that if they hadn't had the puncture wounds as proof he'd been stabbed, they wouldn't have been able to rule out alcohol poisoning as the cause of death.

Case, on the other hand, looked like a truck had hit her. Several times. They'd obviously cleaned her up a little for the mug shot attached to the file, but the cut under her right eye, the split lip, and the egg-sized bruise on her forehead were still highly visible, as was the dried bloody nose.

The medical report inserted into the criminal report said Case had suffered a concussion and several cracked ribs, and was in a state of catatonic shock during the examination. A pelvic exam had also been performed and showed that Case had probably been raped only hours before. Previous scarring had been noted and it was a forgone conclusion that Case would never be able to have children. For reasons Rain could only shake her head at, the medical reports had not been allowed in as part of Case's defense in the trial that had followed.

Case had refused to testify in her own defense and had told her version of that night only once. When the officers had gone through their usual routine of re-questioning the girl about her story on the night of the murder, Case had simply stopped speaking altogether. Future questioning, even by her court-appointed attorney, had proven fruitless.

She'd been found guilty, her mother's testimony and her lack of defense apparently being enough to sway the judge against her. She'd then been sentenced to a juvenile rehabilitation center, a nice label for a kiddy prison. Case had regained her freedom on her eighteenth birthday, and doing a little calculating, Rain was able to figure out that Case had come under Carlotti's power that same year.

Rain looked over the rest of the files. There were notes about Case's incarceration, transcripts from the trial, light background sketches of her mother and father, and subsequent reports by various officers and therapists in Case's life. All of them pointed to a child who had been pushed to the breaking point and then punished for having the strength to push back.

Rain closed each file until she'd cleared her screen of everything but the solitaire game. She started to play the cards that had been dealt when she'd first opened the game, as her mind began going over everything she'd read.

"We almost there?" Case's slow, sleepy voice interrupted Rain's emerging thoughts.

Rain looked over at the bleary-eyed woman. She checked her watch and nodded.

"Yeah. Another hour."

"Whatcha playin'?"

Rain nonchalantly shifted the laptop around, so that Case could see the screen with the solitaire game in progress on it.

"Cool. Can I play, too?" Case asked.

Rain grinned. Case was adorable when she was sleepy.

"Sure. I don't think I'm gonna win this one anyway."

Case looked at the layout.

"Nope, doesn't look like it."

Rain clicked on Game and then Deal and they both set to work on beating the computer's obnoxious layouts until they were signaled that the plane was about to make its descent.