“How long do you think it’ll be before they start lookin’ for us?” Sable asked. Cairo was driving, so Sable had her feet up on the dashboard and was eating Sour Punch Straws.
“I don’t expect that they will,” Cairo said. “As long as they never find out we’re working outside of the app, they should have no reason to think we haven’t merely retired.”
They drove along for a while in relative silence, save for Sable’s gooey chewing, the radio, and a beep every so often from the police radar detector, until Cairo’s face shifted into a pensive frown.
“Frenchy could be a problem,” she said.
“How?” Sable asked. She didn’t look up from the candy straw she was peeling apart from the rest in their plastic tray.
“It depends on what she knows. We don’t know when she disappeared or where she fucked off to.” Cairo considered the angles. “If she knows we took the money, she could report that it should be incoming.”
“Wouldn’ be in her interests though,” Sable said. “That was her job. Means she’d be responsible for making sure the money came in.”
“Logically, yes, but she might report the score to explain why we didn’t get the plates. If she does, she’ll be on the hook for the money, but it’ll also point the finger at us.”
“Should probably check if the reviews are in then,” Sable said. She reached down the floorboard to dig her phone out of her backpack purse. She flicked and swiped for a while, going through the newly pain-in-the-assened login procedure for the Hole-in-the-Wall app’s secret backend.
“I tell you what, if we end up leavin’, I ain’t gonna miss this shit,” Sable said. “You log in, and now they send a passcode in a text message and then you have to go back to the app and type – not paste! – but type the fuckin’ combination in. And it’s, like, twelve fuckin’ digits, so you gotta go back and look at it three times before you can get the whole thing in. And then you gotta hope like hell you didn’t mistype it or you’ll be startin’ all the way from the top.”
Cairo’s face scrunched up in empathetic frustration. She hadn’t tried to log in since the day of the bank robbery so she’d yet to contend with the new two-factor authentication that the app had patched in yesterday.
“Ugh, finally,” Sable said. “Reviews, reviews… Nothing from Mitty, obviously. We should report him dead.” Sable opened up his profile, tapped the Reporting Options button, and notified the app of his death. His profile photo reloaded with a black and white filter when Sable backed back out.
“Nothing from Frenchy yet either. Might as well rate each other up while we’re in here,” Sable said. “How did Cleo do? Five, of course.”
“You should at least take some points off for the utter mess I made in the lobby,” Cairo demurred. She had tried to aim below the waist to minimize causalities, but there was only so much care you could take when you were shooting buckshot.
“Pffft!” Sable scoffed. “I, for one, am happy to have less cops to deal with. And they started it anyway. They got exactly what they had comin’ to ’em, endangerin’ civvies like that. ‘Sides,” Sable said seriously, “if this whole thing with Bijou doesn’t pan out, we’re gonna want our ratings as high as possible. Lemme have your phone so I can give myself a five.”
Cairo reached into the breast pocket of her jacket and handed her phone over. After a few moments of frustrated cussing, Sable said, “There. Fresh fives. What do you want to rate Frenchy?”
“Let’s wait on reviewing her. Since we don’t know if she knows that we left with a score, we don’t want to tip our hand or give her a reason to downrate us. We’ll let her make the first move.”
Sable shrugged. “Fine. What about our no-show driver? Hopscotch.” Sable snorted at his codename. “Can we review him?”
“I don’t see why not.”
Sable brought up his profile on Cairo’s phone.
“Huh,” Sable said.
“What?” Cairo asked.
“Hopscotch here’s got almost a perfect rating. Four point nine.”
“That’s impossible. That has to be a mistake,” Cairo said. “There’s no one way anyone has a rating that high. Especially not a guy who flakes on jobs.”
Sable nibbled her lip. “What if he didn’t flake on the job?” she proposed. “What if somethin’ happened to him?”
“Such as?” Cairo scoffed.
“I dunno. Car accident?” Sable said. It’d be the most obvious thing.
“A four-point-nine driver got in a car accident?” Cairo reiterated to emphasize how absurd that was.
“He mighta had to drive through Mississippi on his way, who knows?” Sable shrugged. “I just can’t figure why a guy who had a score that good would fuck it up by not showin’ up. It might not-a been deliberate.”
“Maybe he thinks if his score is that good he can afford to ditch a job from time to time.”
Sable shook her head. “Nope. His reviews would say so if he was in the habit. Nothin’ but recommendations. Pfft!” Sable chuckled at one review in particular. “Well, this guy thinks he’s an asshole, but still said he’s a great driver.”
“I don’t care how great he was on everyone else’s job. He didn’t show up to ours so he gets a zero from me.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sable said. She gave him the score and tapped the confirmation button. His rating went down to a 4.8. Sable set Cairo’s phone in the cup holder and went back to her own phone to give Hopscotch a zero from her own account. There was a new email notification on the lock screen.
Sable opened the email and read it. It was a scan of a hand-written letter from her old school friend, Desi. Sable used a mail forwarding service who would accept her mail and scan it just for Desi’s letters.
Sable frowned at the contents of the letter.
“Bad news?” Cairo asked.
“Desi says they started up some call center for a phone company and they’re taking him off farmwork detail to work there instead. He ain’t happy about it. And he’s up for parole soon too.” Sable exhaled and blew her bangs out of her face. “Gonna have to tell him not to get his hopes up.”
“Is the call center a pay raise at least?” Cairo asked, trying to find a bright side.
“They don’t pay inmates in Texas,” Sable said. She leaned her head on the window and stared out, mood soured by the news.
Cairo glanced over. That was no way to look when you were on your way to Las Vegas. Luckily, something to perk up Sable’s mood was peeking over the horizon.
“Look,” Cairo said when it came fully into view.
It was a simple blue sign with white letters.
Welcome to Idaho
“We’re not in Buttfuck, Montana anymore,” Cairo said. “Now we’re in Buttfuck, Idaho!” She checked the GPS. “Just seven hundred and seventy-eight more miles before we’re back to civilization.”
Comment