Cargo

Rule one: never look in the bag. Mara has driven forty-one jobs without breaking it. She keeps the engine warm, the radio off, and her eyes on mirrors. Tonight the crew is sloppy — too fast out of the service door, too loud, and the duffel they throw into her back seat is heavy in the wrong way. It shifts. Bags of cash don't shift. She pulls into the river road like she's supposed to, headlights dark, heart steady at a professional sixty beats a minute. Behind her, the bag breathes. Mara stops the car on the old toll bridge, where the cameras have been dead for years. She unzips it three inches — just three — and a girl's eyes look back at her, wide over a strip of silver tape. Her phone buzzes. The route. The drop point. A bonus, already wired, twice the usual. Rule two: never miss the drop. Mara looks at the river, then at the mirror, then at the girl. Forty-one clean jobs, and every single rule she has ever lived by now fits in three inches of open zipper. She puts the car in gear. She just hasn't decided which direction yet.