The Paris Betrayal by James Hannibal (the dot read aloud .txt) 📗

The young clerk at the register kept his eyes buried in a phone. That suited Ben fine, until he saw his own picture in the kid’s Twitter feed—a grainy shot of him dragging Clara backward with a gun to her head. The photographer had snapped the shot from high up, probably through the window of a nearby building. The clerk scrolled on.

Had he seen it?

Ben snatched up a basket and picked out a box of dye marked Autumn Sunrise in four languages. The wavy locks in the picture looked amber to him, but what did he know? He dropped it in the basket and added a half dozen other items on his way to the counter.

“Bonjour.” The clerk kept scrolling his Twitter feed. With the other hand, he ran Ben’s items across the scanner and dropped them into a plastic bag. “Comptant ou carte de crédit?”

Ben slapped down a fifty-euro note. He had several midsize bills left, thanks in part to the cash he’d taken from Duval. But if he, Giselle, and Clara had to hold out on their own for a couple of days or more before getting Company help, he might have to find someone willing to break a five hundred.

The clerk punched a button to kick open the register drawer and counted out the change. “Merci.”

Ben headed for the street.

“Wait.”

He stopped, watching the rounded mirror above the door. For the first time since he’d walked in, the clerk had looked up from his phone.

“I forgot to scan the bag. They are fifteen cents.”

Ben rubbed his eyes to obscure his face as he returned to the counter, playing the part of a man still in need of his morning coffee. Through his fingers, he spied his picture once more on the kid’s Twitter feed. Same pic, different post. Below the main text, he saw #savethedachshund.

Great.

He held up the bag for the kid to scan.

“I am sorry.” The clerk ran a handheld laser over the barcode. “But my manager—he does not like it when I forget.”

Ben set a one-euro coin on the counter. “Keep the change.” He walked out.

The forest reserve began one street to the south, after an abrupt end to the city—a twelve-hundred-acre reserve with soccer fields and cricket pitches nestled among its oaks and chestnuts. The most direct route to the cottage involved more than four kilometers of trails, but Ben led Clara an extra five hundred meters out of the way to a runners’ club called Le Sentier.

They hadn’t officially opened for the day, but Ben slipped the manager a hundred—well above the cost of a locker rental—then walked Clara around the long green cinderblock building to the women’s locker room. “You mentioned wanting a shower. There’s no need to make you wait. Besides, we should change your hair color sooner than later.” He gave her the bag from the pharmacy. “I’m fairly certain you know how this works.”

She opened the plastic bag and peeked inside. “So do you. Shampoo. Applicator. Gloves. You’ve done this before.”

“The need to change my appearance comes up a lot in my line of work.”

Clara lifted out a bag of gummy bears. “And this?”

“You said you were hungry. And . . .” He glanced away, keeping an eye on their six. At least, that’s what he told himself. “I, uh . . . I’ve seen those in your groceries once or twice when we’ve bumped into each other in the stairwell.”

That earned him a smile. “Give me a few minutes, okay?”

“Yeah. Sure.” He retreated to a wooden bench across the trail.

A few minutes became twenty, then twenty-five. A couple of customers went in. Ben watched the sky through the bare oak branches with growing unease. Only the most diehard runners hit the forest trails in the dark of a winter’s morning. That would change once the sun came up. Hikers. Runners. Too many people who might have seen the social media posts. Why’d the Twitterati have to make such a fuss about the dog? He glanced down at Otto. “You’re going to get us all killed, you know.”

The dachshund lowered his chin to his paws.

Clara emerged a moment later, and Ben hopped up, more quickly than he’d intended. She’d pulled her hair back into a tousled ponytail, now a light amber brown. She did a slow twirl. “Well?”

She looked different. She looked good. “Uh . . . Good work with the dye.”

“Yes. Because ‘good work’ is what every girl wants to hear about her new hairstyle.” Clara kneeled, calling Otto to her side. She scratched his chin. “I will say, you matched my natural color. How did you know?”

“Seemed right for you. That’s all.” It did seem right, more so than the blue, which he realized now had never let her eyes take center stage. He cleared his throat. “Let’s go. We’re losing our darkness.”

Ben set a quick pace on the trail, gauging how fast he could move without leaving her behind. As they found their rhythm, a cross breeze brought a scent to his nose. Lavender. Ben had bought Clara a small bottle of generic shampoo. No scent. “Where’d the soap come from?”

“I borrowed some body wash from a runner. Nice girl.”

He tried not to growl.

She looked up at him. “I didn’t tell her anything.”

“You didn’t have to. There’s no way she missed the fact you were dyeing your hair.”

“She would have noticed anyway. And I spent the night in a tiny boat on a dirty river with an angry, smelly spy. I needed some pampering. Sue me.”

“I don’t smell.”

Clara raised an eyebrow. “Mm-hmm. So, this woman. Giselle.”

Ben’s answer came as quick as his steps. “She won’t mind.”

“Won’t mind what?”

It took him a full second to realize Clara had moved past the spent-the-night-together-in-a-skiff topic to a new one. “Nothing. What were you saying?”

“How long have you been seeing each other?”

“A few weeks.”

“And this is enough to know you love her?”

The question’s abruptness nearly cost him his footing. A runner passed by, giving him time to compose his answer. “A few days ago, Giselle risked getting infected