Outlaws by Matt Rogers (phonics books TXT) 📕

Violetta looked at them and shook her head.

They all stepped back.

Understanding.

Beckham nodded a farewell to the three of them, and his gaze lingered on Slater. King knew, then and there, that Slater’s words had stuck with the man. Whatever they’d said to each other, it would affect them both long after they left this parking lot.

Then Beckham was gone, vanishing into the centre.

Violetta came back out fifteen minutes later. She looked like she’d lived a decade since she’d first approached Beckham.

She walked up to the three of them and said, ‘Funny how life unfolds, isn’t it?’

Slater said, ‘What did you talk about?’

King knew better than to ask.

She looked at Slater, but didn’t answer.

Alexis squeezed Slater’s hand.

Slater understood, and shut his mouth. Probably made a mental note not to ask again. What was said was between Violetta and Beckham, and nobody else.

King said, ‘How do you feel?’

She sighed. ‘Good, all things considered. I never thought I’d see him again. I never thought I’d get the chance to talk things through.’

Then she looked at Slater. ‘Thank you. For whatever you said to him.’

Slater opened his mouth, but Violetta held up a hand.

She said, ‘I don’t need to know.’

Another moment of understanding.

Then respectable silence.

They stood that way for close to a minute, as if trying to shake themselves from a lucid dream. But it was very real, and it had all unfolded exactly like this, so eventually they peeled off in pairs — Slater and Alexis heading for the Hyundai, King and Violetta for the Ford.

They’d rendezvous at their temporary stronghold and work from there.

And do what? King wondered.

All in due time.

He took the passenger’s seat, and Violetta drove. It was a short ten-minute journey to the Airbnb they’d rented under a false, untraceable profile.

Violetta ran her hands along the wheel before she threw the car into reverse.

King said, ‘What?’

She said, ‘Ever wish you had a normal life?’

‘No.’

‘Good,’ she said, and stepped on the accelerator. ‘Me neither.’

92

Slater and Alexis arrived in Spring Valley first, a couple of miles west of the Strip.

They used the gate code the owner had provided through the Airbnb app to access what was practically a compound. The walls were high for a private residence and the grounds were considerable, although they hadn’t been tended to in quite some time. Most of the grass was dead, and patches of dirt riddled the lawn. The house was impressive, though — a one-storey sprawling homestead made of brick with a sand-coloured tile roof. The weak light of dusk gave the setting an idyllic aura.

They pulled the Hyundai to a halt in the courtyard, got out, and found the key under a pot plant on the front porch, just as the instructions conveyed. They unloaded what meagre possessions they had, dropping them in a sizeable living area with an open bar and an eighty-inch television mounted to the wall.

Then they waited.

Slater leant on the back of the sofa and said, ‘If you ever want out of this life, tell us.’

‘And go where?’ Alexis said. ‘My old life doesn’t exist anymore.’

‘But you can start fresh,’ he said. ‘With your new identity. You can be normal. You don’t have to do … what we do.’

‘I made the choice,’ she said. ‘I don’t go back on my word.’

‘Is this what you want, though?’

She moved to him, and sat down on his thigh. ‘Yes. It is.’

Fifteen minutes later, the low rumble of the Mustang’s engine reverberated through the compound, and a minute after that King stepped inside.

‘What was the hold-up?’ Slater said.

Violetta answered that wordlessly when she came in with two jumbo bags of electronic goods from a tech store.

‘New laptops,’ she said. ‘And a bunch of other stuff.’

She dumped it all down on the great slab of wood that constituted the dining table, and set to work arranging it into the foundations of a makeshift intelligence centre. It would never be as good as the real thing, but they didn’t need the real thing.

All they needed was enough to work.

King looked around. ‘So this is home.’

‘For now,’ Violetta said. ‘Until we grow tired of it.’

Slater said, ‘I think we should clarify a couple of things before we settle in.’

She looked up from the mass of hardware. ‘Like what?’

She seemed disgruntled. She was supremely efficient — just like King, just like Slater. They’d been in the house for three minutes, and already were slotting the pieces into place to establish it as their base of operations.

In that sense, Alexis was the most human of them all.

Slater said, ‘I was the first to step away. I kickstarted all of this. I need to know the pair of you are in it for the same reasons.’

King stared at him. ‘Where you go, I go.’

‘That’s not an answer.’

‘We understand,’ Violetta said, straightening up, suddenly recognising the importance of the conversation. ‘We’re all on the same page. It was impossible for you to continue your role officially, and the same goes for King. There was too much oversight, too many chefs in the kitchen. It didn’t gel with how the pair of you operate. You see problems, you fix them. When the shadow world was sourcing the problems, you constantly questioned them. Which meant you were always clashing with me, because I was the one handing down the orders.’

‘Exactly,’ King said.

‘I always tried to look at the big picture, too,’ Violetta said. ‘It’s a great concept, in principle. But it doesn’t work on the ground floor. I saw it with my own eyes.’

She turned to Slater.

‘When they asked me to help get rid of you,’ she said. ‘That was for the greater good.’

‘Which makes sense,’ Slater said. ‘They can’t have all their operatives going rogue when they please. They need to set an example. They can’t make exceptions.’

‘But that just couldn’t be,’ she said. ‘The moment I started conspiring to keep you alive, I realised what you two had been telling me all along.’

Slater said, ‘To really follow the greater good, you need to be a