"You all heard him say, 'Please shoot at him, right?'" Woody gestured toward Leif with both hands.
"I didn't hear anything." Forrest stepped over to the bodies for a better look. He pulled out his phone and disappeared into the corridor, presumably to call someone to clean up the mess before someone else came along. Not to mention replacing the doorframe, door and surrounding flooring.
"Is there any chance they have friends?" I leaned back to look up at Leif. "Their boss went to a lot of trouble, destroying the door and all. Only sending three seems, I don't know…"
"Unrealistic?" Leif suggested.
"That's a good word for it, yes." I half-expected a horde of paid thugs to swarm in, overrun us, and then… I didn't know what. Something bad.
"I don't suppose they were organized before the auction and didn't get the message?" The senator might have assumed he'd fail to kidnap me from the Halloran Hotel and had this as a backup plan. Now, after Woody and I killed him, they didn't know not to carry out those orders.
"It's possible, but my spidey sense says otherwise," Leif admitted reluctantly.
"We'll never know," Woody said, looking at him darkly. "He killed them before they could explain."
"My theory is," Leif said, "they wouldn't have told us anything. If they did, it wouldn't have been the truth. Not to mention guys like that usually don't know the answers. They don't get paid to know things. They get paid todothings."
Woody grunted, the closest to acknowledging Leif was right that he'd probably give.
"If there's someone else out there, he's going to send other people," I reasoned slowly. "This is the same person who organized the auction, isn't it?"
"That would be my guess," Forrest agreed as he stepped back into the apartment. "They've figured out we're coming for them. They decided to try first."
"Looks like we better keep a low profile for a few days." Leif didn't sound too bothered about the prospect.
"We go on as normal," Forrest said, after a few moments thought. "We act like nothing is wrong, but we be careful."
"'We be careful'?" Woody echoed, staring at him. "Is that all you've got? We'll becareful?"
"What would you prefer?" Forrest asked. "Should we go into hiding for the rest of our lives?"
"I don't hate that option." Woody stalked over to the table where we'd sat eating only an hour earlier. He started rifling through the containers before he found an uneaten spring roll.
Before he bit into it, he said, "We could hole up somewhere, get food delivered. Why would we need to leave?"
"Because we have lives," Forrest said. "You can disappear for as long as you like, but I can't, and neither can Leif."
"Not to mention, if we were holed up somewhere, sooner or later you'd get annoyed with me and try to kill me," Leif said lightly. "I agree with Forrest. We make these pricks disappear." He jerked his thumb toward the corpses outside the door. "We go on with our day. Uh, night."
I didn't know who to agree with. On one hand, I also wanted to keep living my life. On the other, hiding away where it was safe sounded pretty good to me.
"Do we get to vote on this?" Woody asked.
"No, this isn't a democracy," Forrest shot back.
"Of course it is," Leif said. "But if we vote, we're going to vote for living our lives. Right, Sable?"
I didn't know how to respond to that. "Woody has a point," I said carefully.
"Of course I do," Woody said. He scrunched up his brow and stared at me. "Did you just agree with me?"
"No, I didn't agree with you, I agreed with what you said." It amounted to the same thing, but if we didn't make some sort ofdistinction, we might think we were starting to like each other. Which we were, but I wanted to keep him on his toes for a bit longer.
I hadn't forgotten our tally of kills.
"Leif got two of them. Who killed the other one?" I asked.
"I did," Woody said quickly. "That's six."
