I blink at her. “You are?”
“I take that as a compliment.”
“You should.”
She grins. “Hey, age ain’t nothing but a number. Who said that again?”
“R. Kelly.”
“Oh, right. Gross. Never mind.”
The flip phone dings, and she turns to me. “What’s it say?”
I pick the phone up from its resting place under the radio. Flip it open and read the text:
Where are you now?
“She just wants to know where we are.” I look for the nearest mile marker and text it.
Another text quickly arrives—a set of directions, beginning with a drive through the town of Red Hook and ending on a small stretch of access road that doesn’t even have a name. “Okay,” I tell Wendy. “We have to keep our eyes open now.”
She nods. I tell her to make a left on Old Post Road and she does, slowing down so we can read the signs. “So,” she says, “where do you think this night will take us?”
“No idea.”
“Are you nervous?”
“A little.”
“Me too. I mean . . . We were given each other’s real first names and asked to use them a lot, which can only mean alibis, right?”
“Yep.”
“Triple-Oh-One said we’ll be fine as long as we follow the instructions, and if we can’t trust her . . .” She doesn’t finish the sentence.
I glance at the text. We have two miles before the next turn, which is enough time to ask her what I’ve wanted to, this whole ride. “Wendy?”
“Yeah?”
“Have you ever killed anyone?”
She answers more quickly than I expect her to. “Yes.”
“For the collective?”
“Yes.”
“How did it feel?”
Wendy watches the road. Her face is uncharacteristically still, and it strikes me how different she looks when she isn’t smiling. “Easy,” she says. “Surprisingly easy.”
WE’RE SUPPOSED TO switch cars with two other women on the unpaved stretch, but once we reach it, it’s so dark that I don’t see the other car until we’re just feet away from it.
“Our partners,” says Wendy, and I see them in the glow of our headlights—two figures, all in black, same as we are, hoods pulled over their heads.
I flip open the phone and send the text I’ve been told to send:
We are here.
The reply comes fast:
Is the other car there too?
Yes.
Leave the keys in your car. The two sisters will drive it to the park and ride at Exit 19 off the NY Thruway and leave it there, to be picked up once the assignment is complete. In exchange for this burner, they will hand you a sealed envelope. Inside will be the rest of your assignment. DO NOT OPEN IT until you are in the other car and they have left in your car. Understood?
Yes.
Go.
I show Wendy the text thread. We slip our hoods over our heads and open our doors at the same time. The black-clad “sisters” approach us as we reach the distance between the bumpers of our two cars, one slipping me the envelope, one taking the burner from Wendy. It almost feels biological, the rhythm of it all—as though we’re working parts of the same organism, our movements as perfect and involuntary as the beating of a heart. There’s comfort in that rhythm, in the way we move in unison, in not seeing either of the sisters’ faces until we’ve switched cars and I catch a quick glimpse of the Camry’s new driver, adjusting her hoodie and cracking her neck.