When he does, I explain the situation. It takes fifteen minutes before he has a car ready to pick her up. In that time, Cherry tells me about her family. About her younger sister that has cancer and her poor single mother. She works this job to pay the medical bills, but she confesses that she doesn’t know if it’s worth it if she’s killed and the extra income stops. She won’t ever have to worry about taking care of them again. Or being killed because of a broken glass. Jay watches the camera feed and directs me towards a back door exit without detection. I grab her wrist before she walks out of the door. The nondescript black sedan is waiting ten feet away, and the door already open for her. “I know,” she says softly. “I don’t know your face. I’ve never seen you before,” she guesses. I shake my head. “Cherry, you’re not going to a place where you’ll ever be questioned about something like that. You and your family will be taken care of and safe. I promise. All I ask is that you do something meaningful with your life. That’s all.” A single tear slips from her eye. She hurriedly wipes it away and nods. Her brightened eyes shine with hope, and doing this shit, involving myself in the worst of humanity—it’s all worth it when I have a survivor look at me like that. Not like I’m a hero, but like they can actually envision a future. She stumbles off to the car, and I make my way back inside, making sure no one spots me. “Jay, clear the cameras,” I say before taking the earpiece out and slipping it back in the hidden pocket. The cameras will be spliced. If anyone reviews them, they’ll see me dragging a dejected Cherry into a room and us walking out separately. It’s one of my specialties that I mastered and then trained Jay in. Taking parts of a camera feed and manipulating them to look exactly how you want them to, without even the best hackers being able to detect manipulation. I crack my neck, and ready myself for a very long night of shooting the shit and becoming BFF’s with a fucking pedophile.