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I’m sitting in a small room with one window. The curtains are closed and mandated to stay that way. The door that used to provide any semblance of privacy is gone. I’m on complete display for my current roommates. They are United States Marshals Beth and Luis. Todd’s replacements.
Beth walks down the hallway and pauses at my open door for her regular check-in. They do this every fifteen minutes morning, noon, and night. I’m not sure who was more annoying, Todd and his constant lecturing or these two, hovering like overbearing parents.
Usually, they pause, check that I am still alive, and move back on to their little command center in the kitchen. But this time, Beth lingers a little longer.
“How you holding up?” she asks.
I shrug my shoulders. “I’m alive.” What else matters? To them, probably not a lot.
“Are you hungry? You haven’t eaten anything since we got here yesterday.”
“Don’t really have an appetite,” I confess. After everything that happened in the last twenty-four hours, it’s hard to think about doing anything but sleep and mope. But now sleep isn’t coming, and moping has lost its novelty.
“Hm. Well, it’s my job to keep you alive. And you kind of need to eat for me to accomplish my goal. So why don’t you join us in the kitchen and have some of the frozen pizza Luis just pulled from the oven?”
Frozen pizza. I cringe at the thought of the sodium-laden, tasteless, rubber cheese dish on offer. But the thought of pizza in general sparks something in my stomach, and now the noise it's making is doing little to sell my story to Beth.
“Yeah. That’s what I thought. Come on, we’ve got salad and breadsticks, too.”
I reluctantly stand up and slowly follow Beth to the kitchen. Luis is in there cutting the cardboard pizza into slices with a dull kitchen knife. This place feels like a budget hotel despite being presented like a normal family house. Everything just feels slightly off in the way it’s full of emptiness.
“Hope you like pepperoni,” Luis says.
“Doesn’t look like I have a choice,” I reply with a sigh.
Luis raises his eyebrows and looks at me with concern. “My daughter is a vegetarian. I take the pepperoni off of her slices. I could do that if you want.”
I shake my head. “No, that's… pepperoni is fine.”
Beth makes me sit at the table while Luis places a paper plate with wholesale grocery store food on display. The sight of it makes me ache for an industrial kitchen with a standing mixer and a fully stocked fridge. But, I suppose, there’s something slightly nostalgic about it.
I try to keep that in mind while I chew through the first thing I’ve eaten since lunch with Emile yesterday. The more I eat, the louder my stomach complains. Beth and Luis, having stared me down to ensure I consume enough calories to exist, take their own seats and start eating.
“I want to apologize about Todd,” Beth says between bites of rapidly cooling pizza. “He’s new and everything, but we had no idea how incompetent he really is.”
“Leadership is investigating how exactly he got as far as he did. No one who makes mistakes like that should be put in charge of a witness’ life. Rest assured, he’ll be sorry for his mistakes.”
I frown and stare hard at the wooden table. Somehow, unbelievably, I feel bad for Todd. Sure, he was annoying and an asshole sometimes. Oh, and he almost got meandEmile killed with his stupidity! But still. He seemed like his heart was in the right place.
I hope they don’t ruin him, I guess. Still, it’s nice of them to update me on something for once. I wonder if they’ll tell me about the most pressing issue on my mind right now.
“Did they catch the bad guys?” I ask. I’m too tired to formulate my question in an intelligent way. They know what I mean.
“Oh. Yeah, we got them. Hudson and his three lackeys are in the hospital right now. Hudson himself took a nasty blow to the head. He’s in a coma. They all are. But once they all come to, they'll be booked and charged for attempted murder. At the very least. We have witnesses who saw him shoot at you and your friend out there.”
Myfriend. I guess that’s all Emile and I ever were, at the end of the day. Would he even call me that much now? He looked so hurt when I confessed everything. I’m not sure he’ll ever even want to see me again, much less consider me his friend.
But regardless, Hudson Judge being in the hospital means one thing right now.
“So, it’s over then, right?” I ask. “You guys got him. I don’t have to hide?”
Luis looks at me sadly while Beth shakes her head.
“It’s not over yet, Shauna. I’m sorry,” Beth says. She reaches across the table and puts a comforting hand on my shoulder. “This syndicate is bigger than Hudson Judge. And we still need you to testify against them if we’re going to take them down.”
“Which is why…” Luis turns around and rifles through a messenger bag for a moment. Then my heart sinks as he pulls out a stack of very familiar files. “We thought, because of all the inconvenience, we’d let you pick your new alias this time.”
“Wow. How kind of you,” I say flatly. “Also, because of the inconvenience? Since when is the government run like a department store?”
