The Girl Who Would Be King(90)

Inside, I can make out a dark-haired woman throwing an impressive right hook at a man twice her size. I blink as he takes the punch and rolls backward. She spins on her heel to address another man coming at her from behind and kicks him, catching him hard in the gut and doubling him over. I have no idea what’s going on, but it‘s at least six against one, and one of the six has just picked up a heavy wrench from a tool bench and all of that makes it easy to decide who to help. I dive into the fray just as the man with the wrench brings it down toward the back of the woman's head. I leap between them and block his downward motion with my forearms crossed in front of me. He blinks twice as if I’m a mirage he dreamed up. His face contorts and he starts cussing. I uncross my arms, pushing out as I do, and flinging him away from us. He goes tumbling end over end with the force, dropping the wrench in the process. We stay that way, she and I, with our backs facing one another and waiting for the next wave. I'm not even sure if she knows I’m here, but there’s something comforting for me in knowing she’s there, in hearing her grunts and punches that sound just like mine. It seems like we fight forever, knocking them down and then waiting for them to come back around, but it's probably less than ten minutes. Finally, they stop coming and it's just us – our hearts pounding loudly, our breath ragged – standing in the middle of the mostly dark, mostly empty warehouse, a pile of men, broken and bleeding, coughing and wheezing, and no longer interested in getting up, surrounding us. I turn to her, not sure what to say after such a strange event and see, through the slats of moonlight, that it's the girl from the fire escape window. The girl that used to live in my room at Liesel's. Bryce. Liesel said her name was Bryce. I squint my eyes at her a bit and say her name as a question. "Bryce?" She cocks her head at me slightly, confused, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.

"Do we know each other?" she asks. I break into a broad smile.

"It seems like maybe we should," I say. She breaks into a similar smile and takes a look at the jumble of men, a few of them struggling to get to their feet and failing.

"I'll say," she agrees. After a minute of looking at the men she turns back to me. "So, what's your name?"

"Bonnie," I say, reaching out my hand. She takes it and we shake.

"You've got a great right hook," she says.

I arch my eyebrow. "No better than yours."

"Thanks," she nods appreciatively and then adds, "C'mon, let's go."

I look uncertainly back at the pile of men. "Do we need to-"

"Eh, just leave them," she says casually waving them away.

"Um, what did they…?” I'm suddenly afraid they've done nothing wrong and I just beat up a bunch of innocent bystanders. But as I try to finish the sentence she opens a door near the warehouse exit to reveal a room filled with hot stuff. Full purses, jewelry, leather coats, watches, anything that could be grabbed off a person and run off with is there, piled high on a long table and spilling over and off of it onto the ground. Must be hundreds, maybe thousands of stolen items.

“Not exactly the Elephant and Castle Gang, but still, quite a haul,” she says, letting the door fall shut on the piles of stolen stuff. I raise an eyebrow at her. The Elephant and Castle gang, a group of smash and grab artists in London that began as far back as the 18th century is not exactly run-of-the-mill reading material. Bryce either had a first-class education, the likes of which I can barely comprehend, or she reads as much as I do.

“Should we?” I’m about to suggest we call the cops, or tie them up, or both, but before I can finish the sentence I hear sirens in the distance.

“I called it in before I showed, they should be here any minute,” she says, her grin wide and pleased. “But we should get out of here; I don’t like questions.”

We slip out the big warehouse doors and head up the dock and toward the city, just as the first cop car pulls into the area. As we walk, calmly and deliberately, careful not to rush, I examine Bryce, though I try to keep from being obvious. She’s almost as tall as me, about 5’11” and has long lean limbs and curves. She’s wearing all black and no jewelry except a small silver key linked through a thin silver chain around her neck. Her skin is a little on the pale side, and her hair is such a dark black that in the light it almost has a Superman-ish blue tint to it. It falls in long waves down her back, nearly to her waist, it’s so long. Her eyes are big and blue, clear and sharp, and her mouth is wide and pretty. Mostly, I’m struck by how unbelievably beautiful she is. Really. Seriously, intoxicatingly beautiful. The kind of beautiful that you would turn to gaze at if it passed you on the street, just so you could look at it a little bit longer. She looks like a movie star or a model, although her right cross and the twinkle in her eye makes me think of her more as a rock star.