by F P Adriani
“Pia-babe,” Nell said now, “the thing is…I’m pregnant!”
“What?” I asked, my face twisting in confusion.
Her palm lay flat on her belly now. “I’m pregnant—Derek and I are going to have a baby. Know what I mean? …Pia, you look a little faint or something, and I’m the one who’s pregnant!”
“It’s just—I’m shocked. Really—I’m so happy for you, Nell!” I hugged her then, not too hard though, my hands shaking on her back.
I really was shocked. Her pregnancy seemed to have happened so fast. Nell and Derek had met the same way Tan and I had met—yet their relationship had gone smoothly whereas mine and Tan’s had gone almost as rough as possible, and the roughness still showed no signs of smoothing.
When I pulled away from Nell, she said she was only just pregnant; the baby wouldn’t be here for seven months.
I smiled at her. “Wow…I can’t believe this—I mean, I don’t know what to say. I’ve never had a pregnant friend before. What’s the etiquette involved?”
Nell burst out laughing. I would have laughed too, but I suddenly remembered what had happened today, I suddenly remembered this whole business, this business that occasionally involved danger. A pregnant Nell and danger—I didn’t like this equation.
But before I could bring up the issue, Nell soon did—sort of. I wasn’t sure if she meant to, but I interpreted her statements similarly to what I’d been thinking: that MSA and Nell wouldn’t be mixing too well soon.
“I’m tired of playing the lovable-big-black-bear role,” Nell said. “Like at the mine job and with the you-know-what too.” She rolled her eyes upward; then her hand slid over her belly again where her new life lay. “I may be big, but I like the small things in life the best.”
“You’re your own person, Nell. You’re unique.”
“We both are. That’s why we click together so well,” Nell said, looking directly at me.
I smiled again. “I think I really lucked out coming back here. I don’t know where I’d be right now if I hadn’t.”
“You’d probably be somewhere else in the galaxy, kicking some dumb ass—hard.”
This time, we both laughed, at the exact same time and loudness. Then our laughing faded into an awkward silence, awkward on my end. I stared down at the floor.
“What’s up?” Nell asked me then, leaning forward and peering into my face, forcing me to raise mine.
Nell hadn’t done nearly as much undercover-type work as I had, nor had she been nearly as much of a muscle as I had. But she still had the sharpened senses of someone who’d been around the undercover block.
“It’s that girl,” I said, “that situation. I don’t want you around that kind of thing.”
Nell frowned, a touch of anger shifting her face. “The last thing I want is to be treated different because I’m pregnant. I want to do whatever I’ve been doing.”
“Okay—that’s fine for you. But I don’t want to be responsible for my friend’s kid’s health. I can’t live with that.”
“So what should I do—spend the next seven months on an easy chair?”
“Maybe. Would that be so bad? You’ve been scrambling alongside me here, trying to get this place to fly, and it’s still barely left the nest. And I don’t mean to argue with you. I’m just concerned…that I’m still the same-old person, and danger follows me wherever I go. Constantly on my ass like a spouse who just won’t let up. And you’ve got your other business, don’t forget.”
“All right—look. Let’s compromise, Pia-babe. I’ll come into the office once or twice a week only—I’ll handle even more paperwork at home. You keep in touch with me there. Call me whenever—visit me whenever! You’re right about my other business—I really can’t keep up with the orders. IIII may need an assistant soon.”
“See? I was right,” I said now, but I felt sad as I said it. First Tan had pulled away from here, and now Nell. I seemed to be losing everyone important to me, like I was on my own yet again.
Part of my life’s corner-turning had been learning to appreciate how much I might need—or want—others in my life. Yet now it seemed as if those others were more in their own lives than they were in mine.
…Though maybe that was always the case with adults. Maybe I was too immature, maybe I had become too needy. Maybe I had to grow up more.
“I’m happy for you,” I said again to Nell. “And will I be an aunt someday soon then? You think that title would suit me—or not?”
Nell laughed, shaking her head. And I wondered what that shaking meant.
Then Nell said, “I love you, Pia-babe,” as she pulled me into a hug, and now I saw that what her head-shaking meant really didn’t matter.
*
A little later we sat down together at Nell’s desk while she started on the paperwork—the paperwork generated because of my morning meeting.
She asked me what she should specifically document about it, and at first I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t have much information to give her about that. I couldn’t. Or maybe I could.
Now I silently told myself that, technically, when I’d said to Lori and Julianne that what they told me wouldn’t leave this office, I could have meant my whole office, including this outside part.
But, but-but-but, my potentially breaking a promise there really wasn’t my problem with discussing the Julianne situation with Nell: I simply didn’t want to endanger Nell.
But-but-but again, in recent months I’d become obsessive about documenting everything, and my obsession had rubbed off onto Nell—you just never knew what you might need if something you’d been involved in finally went bad. Read: always cover your goddamn ass.
So I had to give Nell something, I had to give myself something to reference later on if I needed it. Shit—if situations like this morning would be coming up more often now, I might start recording everyone who set foot within three feet of me, even in the fucking grocery store.
“Look,” I said to Nell as I got up and locked the door to the hall. “I’m going to tell you what happened—loosely. And then I want you to lock this file in the safe.”
“Okay, babe,” said Nell.
We got to work on recording the Castano meeting’s facts and the afterward’s facts. Out in the street.
“Well, where do you think he went?” Nell finally asked about that John person.
“Fuck if I know,” I responded. “Fuck if I know where he came from either.”
A few hours later, I’d have the answer to that last bit.
*
Shortly after Nell and I had finished our documenting session, she went home and I was left in the office alone, trying to arrange a new security job for a bank—awesome!—that had just sprung up via telephone. If I handled this job right, it could wind up being a very big contract for me, very lucrative for my getting future bank jobs.
By the time I got off the phone over an hour later, I was a bit frazzled, as Nell would usually handle these initial calls, which I found difficult to navigate: I wasn’t as phone-charming as she.
But, I’d have to get used to feigning this more—or hire someone else for client chatting. Or maybe Roberto could take up the slack. I was sure he’d be happy doing that…not. He wasn’t, exactly, a desk-and-phone-work type of person….
Speaking of Roberto, I now looked up at my wall clock and wondered where the hell he’d gotten to: he’d been gone too long for just a drive-them-home job. Had something bad happened again?
I sighed, feeling a throbbing begin in the center of my forehead, and the throbbing intensified when the phone rang and I picked it up expecting it to be Roberto-with-bad-news. Only it wasn’t Roberto. It was Tan.
“Hey,” he said in his pleasant, slightly gravelly voice. “How’s your day?”
As I answered, I tried modulating my perturbed tone, but his normal one had only perturbed me even more. “How’s my day? Tan, do you have any damn idea what’s been going on here?”
“No, that’s w
hy I asked,” he said, his voice shifting to sarcastic now.
“Do you know a Julianne?”
“Who— …Oh, oh yeah, the Castano girl. She was here the other day. She asked me for help, and I—”
“—sent her to me. I know. She came this morning. She said someone murdered her mother and she wants me to find out who. There’s some trouble there. And you pointed it here. Toward me.”
“Well now hang on a second,” he said, and I sensed another argument brewing between us, one in a long line of past arguments. “I just mentioned you after she asked some questions—so what? She was here with her guardian—her mother just died. They clearly have a lot of money. And I know how important that is to you.”
“Why do I get the feeling you’re sneering behind your words?”
There was a pause. Then he said slowly, “I doubt that anyone killed her mother. The kid seemed so sad to me; guess I was just humoring her. If she wants to throw away her inheritance, she might as well throw it your way.”
“You made a basic judgment mistake,” I said now. In the past I’d told Tan that I thought he romanticized women, and then felt sorry for them and trusted them too easily; apparently, that tendency also extended to child-women. “On her way out of here, she was robbed of something—something important.”
“What? Her virginity?”
“Don’t you dare make a sexist rape joke like that—it isn’t funny.”
“Well, I didn’t mean rape, and if you’d just tell me what the fuck you’re talking about—”
“You assumed the situation with her was benign, and then you threw a bad scene my way. You wound up sending me exactly what you urge me to get away from. Congratulations!”
“Well, you don’t have to take the fucking job,” he growled then. And I pictured his face, his beautiful but angry pouting mouth, his dark eyes looking darker than ever. And then there was that shock of straight thick black hair, that angled piece that kept falling in front of his right eye lately, even while we were humping.
“Mmmmm,” I said, thinking about just that humping and feeling heat fill my face now. I forgot the rest of our conversation—poof! Just like that. One thought of his dick pumping inside me, and my brains dove right into my crotch. “Will I see you later today—or tomorrow maybe?” I asked urgently.
“What?” he said, sounding confused at the abrupt change in my conversation.
“Tan, I don’t want to talk about that job anymore. I don’t want to argue. Just—just let’s focus on us. Tonight, tomorrow night—when? Your place?”
“All right,” he said. “Tomorrow.” And then he hung up.
“Goodbye to you too,” I said in a snotty voice to the annoying dial tone.
I put down the receiver and suddenly realized that actual food hunger was mixed in with my arousal hunger at the thought of Tan and I in bed. I was starving for both, but I could only satisfy the one hunger right now. I could pop across the street to that greasy restaurant—
The phone rang. Once again I expected it to be Roberto, but, once again, it was not.
And I had one of the biggest shocks of my life when I heard the voice on the line’s other end, a voice that said, “Senda, it’s me: Hu. What happened today—with Julianne?”
“WHAT?” I said, my hand curling a death-grip around the receiver, and my drab office suddenly taking a sharp spin to the right around myself. “Who—who did you say? Who’s this?” I asked, even though I could never forget that cool voice. It was her. Hu.
“You heard me,” she said now. “The girl—she was coming to see you this morning.”
“How do YOU know?” I ground my teeth together.
“I’ve been watching her. She’s got part of the map.”
“So then it was you who stole it!”
“What—what did you say?” asked Hu, her voice deepening, sounding not so cool, sounding very worried, something I’d never heard from her during our, um, brief in-person acquaintance while she’d held me captive in a cave.
“Did you say stolen?” she asked now with that same worried tone.
“I sure did. And you know full well it was stolen, because you no doubt did it.”
“No—no, it wasn’t taken. Don’t tell me that,” Hu said now, and unless my ears were playing tricks on me or she was the best actor ever in the Universe, she really sounded perturbed.
“I already have told you,” I said, feeling triumphant at her discomfort. Sometimes you had to take the little wins when they came, and her sounding upset was definitely a little win for me. “It happened today. And if you were watching her, why don’t you know she was robbed?”
“My man lost her—she has a bodyguard, understandably. They snuck away.”
“You’re making no sense. You knew where I am. You said you knew she was coming here. So if you were watching her, why not get here before her?”
“You’re too fast for me…. All right. The bodyguard is my man—I put her on to using him. But he hasn’t reported back about the theft. Maybe he was afraid to.”
“Gee, I wonder why that would be?”
When she spoke now, she sounded even more serious. “As much as I’d love to banter with you while we butt our she-antlers, I’ve got a proposition for you. In fact, I intended to call you and ask anyway, but now it looks like there’s no other choice. You and I will have to work together.”
“WHAT?” I shouted for the second time during our conversation.
“Senda, you need to listen. Amy Castano and I went back a long way. She gave me some of the map for safe-keeping months ago, and then she turned up dead.”
“So fucking what? What’s this all got to do with me?”
“Well, if you care about Diamond, you’ll work with me,” Hu said, and then she hung up.
What the hell was this shit? Everyone was fucking hanging up on me lately. Not that I really gave a shit with Hu—really, what the fuck was going on? I could not get over her having called me and the things she’d said. I felt as if I were losing my mind, as if the conversation really hadn’t taken place and I had imagined every goddamn word. I also felt myself breaking out into a sweat as I suddenly thought back to when I’d last seen Hu, thought back to my confinement, at her hands, in that dark cave, my agonizing shoulder, being drugged….
My hands shook as I laid down the receiver onto the phone base.
Hu. She had been watching the girl—and me too apparently.
What the fuck had Tan sent my way?
*
I spent the next several hours first at the greasy restaurant and then back in my office; I jumped around inside, writing out some bills and reading about that bank—and keeping my eyes above me on the wall clock as the little hand moved closer to the time Tan would probably be getting home….
Roberto suddenly walked into my office—or, more correctly, suddenly burst into my office.
“Goddammit,” he proclaimed to the room.
“Where the hell have you been all day?” I demanded from my perch behind the main desk.
He ran a thick flat palm over his messy graying blond hair, the bottom of which curled around his even thicker neck. Roberto looked like a cross between a human and a tank; in other words, he looked quite scary. Especially when he was frowning, as he was now. “Well, Boss, I did what you said, and wouldn’t you know? We get there, and someone just broke into the place—took off. But didn’t take nothing. Least that’s what the girl said.”
“I don’t believe this,” I said, sighing hard.
…But then Hu knew the girl hadn’t been at home. Had Hu done the break-in?
What the fuck was going on? And would I ever get an answer to that question?
“Are you sure nothing was taken?” I asked Roberto now.
“How the hell should I know?”
“Did they call the police?”
“That’s what I told them to do,” Roberto said, but that didn’t answer my question.
Now Roberto added, “I’ve gotta take a leak and
I’m hungry. Shit, I’d like to go home.”
“Just go then,” I said. “Get here first thing in the morning though. We’ve got work to do.”
*
When Roberto left, I pulled out Lori’s contact information and called her telephone number. I got a voicemail service, so I left a message for her to call me back. She did—right after I’d hung up.
“Lori Godwin here,” she said in a rushed voice.
“Roberto tells me someone broke into Julianne’s house—your house now too, I’m assuming?”
“That’s correct, Miss Senda. Julianne’s so frightened. I was just about to call for another guard—”
“Where?”
“Well, for John I found an advertisement in my mailbox. I’ll just call there again. But what on Diamond happened to him? I don’t like guns. I don’t have one. I’m afraid for Julianne.”
“Don’t worry about that. Don’t call that same place. Someone else’ll be there tonight—I’ll take care of that. You have an alarm system?”
“Yes, but a lot of good that did earlier—”
“Well, it’s possible no one meant to do any harm.”
“You really believe that?” she asked.
“Do you? You didn’t say you called the police.”
There was a pause, a long one. I could have sworn I heard some thinking coming over the line….
Then she finally said, “I’m not sure what to believe. This is all over my head, frankly.”
“Oh I doubt that,” I replied.
She ignored my statement. “Does this mean you’re doing that job for us, Miss Senda?”
“Not necessarily. I’m doing this job. Tonight,” I said. Then I added, “And don’t call me Miss Senda anymore. My name’s Pia.” I hung up.
*
Using my contact list on my computer, I phoned any-and-all suitable security guards, but I couldn’t get anyone to go to the girl’s house that night. And, shit, I’d promised Lori I’d fix this. Maybe I shouldn’t have jumped the gun there, but it was too late to take that gun-jumping back.