The Payback. Mike Lawson

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       4

      Carmody was at the rendezvous point at exactly eight p.m. This time the woman had picked a little-used lakeside picnic area fifteen miles from Bremerton. She picked a different place every time they met.

      He knew he’d have to wait at least twenty minutes, maybe longer. She was already here, somewhere, but she’d be watching to make sure Carmody hadn’t been followed. Half an hour later he saw her. She materialized out of a small stand of trees on his right-hand side and began to walk toward him. She was dressed in black – black jeans, a long-sleeved black T-shirt, black Nikes – and carried a shoulder bag. She was tall and lithe and she moved quickly but gracefully. When she entered his car, she didn’t greet Carmody. She unzipped the shoulder bag, took out a laptop computer, and turned it on.

      The woman’s hair was dark, cut short and spiky, the style as edgy as her personality. Carmody figured she was about forty, though it was hard to be certain. She didn’t have a single wrinkle on her face and the reason for this, Carmody believed, was because she was the most unemotional person he had ever encountered. Her face never changed expression. He had never, ever seen her smile.

      The laptop ready, she finally spoke to Carmody. ‘Give them to me,’ she said.

      Carmody reached beneath the driver’s seat and took out a flat plastic case holding an unlabeled compact disc. He handed it to her.

      ‘Just one?’ she said.

      ‘Yeah.’

      She started to say something but checked herself. She put the CD into the laptop’s drive. When the document opened, she scrolled down a few pages, stopped and read the words on the screen, then scrolled down a few more pages. She did this for about ten minutes, never speaking. She didn’t examine the entire document, that would have taken too long, but she looked at enough of it to satisfy herself. She finally shut down the laptop and returned it to her shoulder bag.

      ‘You have to do better than this, Carmody,’ she said. ‘In a month, you’ve only delivered seven items.’

      ‘We have to be careful,’ Carmody said. ‘And sometimes the material you want just isn’t available, somebody else is using it, so we have to wait.’

      The woman’s eyes locked on to Carmody’s. Her eyes were black and they were the coldest, most lifeless eyes that Carmody had ever seen in either a man or a woman, eyes completely devoid of warmth and humor and humanity. Carmody doubted that she had been born with eyes like that; something in her life had caused them to be that way.

      ‘Carmody, do you understand what’s at stake here?’ she said.

      That wasn’t really a question – it was a threat.

      ‘Yeah, I understand,’ Carmody said. His big hands were gripping the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles were white. And she noticed.

      Carmody watched as she walked across the grass and disappeared once again into the trees, back into the night she had come from.