by David Beem
Good morning, yes, I’m here, says Nigel. Did I miss anythi—wow. Hello!
Go back to bed.
Why isn’t she wearing more clothes? Is this about having the sex?
“Edger, are you all right?”
“I’m okay,” I reply, squeezing the base of my neck. “Just a little tense. I feel hungover.”
“Roll over.” She strokes the swath of bed next to me. “I’ll work on your neck.”
I comply, my head still boozy and spinning on the dream. Mary’s bare leg slides over my back, and the feel of skin-on-skin shoots a kind of swish through me, like a water strider bisecting the surface of a lake.
“Lie down.”
She straddles my butt. Her fingers glide into my neck. I close my eyes, and Nigel’s psychic sense is like dog breath on a hot day.
A little privacy?
Not on your bloody life!
“Is it too hard?” she asks, her fingers stroking up into my hair.
Earthquakes in Argentina! yells Nigel, his psychic sense like he’s settling in with a bag of popcorn.
“Edger?”
“Mm. No.”
“Tell me what you were dreaming about.”
“The UN,” I mutter, relaxed and unthinking. Her fingers work into my scalp and neck simultaneously. My arms, shoulders, and back simmer with pleasure. A picture of the UN General Assembly forms in my mind’s eye. I push it away. It’s interrupting the seared memory of Panties Mary, the feel of her skin on mine, and the sizzling dopamine popping like donut oil in the deep fryer of my head.
“What about the UN?”
“I don’t know,” I mutter. “We were on a mission. Mm—I couldn’t find you.”
Her thumbs work the muscles along either side of my spine. Goose bumps march over the top of my shoulders. I shiver. She changes direction.
“Ooh. Feels like a knot.”
“Mm-hmm,” I reply, wondering what else she’d expect after working me like a Rubik’s Cube. I mean, the more she works, the harder I get.
Too effing right, says Nigel.
“So, we were on a mission,” she prompts me.
“Hmm? Oh.”
I tense as it comes flooding in. My eyes open. Mary slides off my butt, and I roll over eye level with her belly button. My gaze rockets up to her startled face. She jerks a pillow over her crossed legs and tucks a lock of hair behind her ear.
“What is it?” she asks, her cheeks reddening. “You remembered your dream.”
“You were the shooter.”
Her expression neutralizes like I flipped a switch. She slides off the bed and strides from my room.
Good job, says Nigel. You couldn’t have lied? You couldn’t have just kept this to yourself for another hour?
“Hey.” I scramble off the bed and start after her—whoops. Pants! Pants! I cast around for something to throw on—then drop it. Let her be uncomfortable for a change.
I pick up the chase. The door to her room is shut. I clear my throat and throw it open. Mary’s got one leg into a pair of yoga pants. Her Death Star Superlaser gaze opens fire.
“Ground rules!”
“You were literally just on top of me in your panties. Wait—did you drug me last night?”
She scowls and tugs her yoga pants up over her butt. “I don’t know what I have to do to earn your trust.”
“My trust? You Bill Cosbied my drink!”
She waves this away like it’s the single weakest point of all time.
“Oh, you’re fine. It was just a mild sedative.”
“You undressed me!”
“Carefully,” she replies, avoiding eye contact. “And I put you right to bed afterward. There was no Bill Cosbying. Honest.”
“Mary!”
“What? I knew you wouldn’t be talked down. You left me no other choice.”
“Except to talk? You know, talk?”
“I don’t see why you’re making such a big deal about this.”
“Because pretend wives don’t drug their pretend husbands!”
“Well, now you’re just being silly. They do it all the time.” Her nose scrunches, and her head tilts. “Have you never seen a spy movie? Honestly, this is Spy 101.”
A violent shiver zaps through me, followed by a weird and embarrassing shrug that rockets out of my shoulders and caroms around in my head like a demonic possession. When it’s done, my fingers are splayed as I shudder one more time just thinking about it.
“You okay?”
“I don’t know how I can trust you.”
“Trust me? Trust me? Edger, I saved Gran. I saved Shep. I even saved Fabio.”
“Fabio? When?”
She nods, her eyes fierce and wild. She scowls at her leather jacket tossed over a chair. She snatches it and punches her arms through the sleeves like she’s throwing knockout blows in a cage match.
“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,” she says in bullet staccato. “I caught that little troll climbing into your window. Nostradamus would’ve blown him up too if I hadn’t—” She closes her eyes, and her head tips back. “Why. Why can’t he use the door like a normal person?”
“Wait—he never told me—but you—I mean…the door? He’s a best friend. Best friends come in through the window. It’s like a thing. It’s like this whole thing.”
“Wrong! It’s not a thing! It’s stupid. It’s a stupid thing to do.”
“You came in through my window.”
Her face darkens. And here, we have arrived. This expression is the sum of all fears. I take a reflexive step away. Please don’t list my retinas on eBay. Well, at least the last thing I’d see would be her face. And I’ve got good retinas. I bet I could list them in like-new condition.
I take a deep breath and blow it out, cross to her bed, and take a seat. The fire in me is gone. I don’t know, seeing her upset… I don’t want to fight. Even if she did drug me.
“Mary. I don’t know what’s going on with you. But this isn’t you. I don’t know, maybe it is you. Maybe it’s a part of you I don’t know. I don’t know you the way I want to know you. All I know is we’re meeting Caleb and Alex in a few hours and, one: you still don’t want me to tell them about my powers, and two: you won’t tell me why you want to kill your dad.”
“You’re dreaming of the future.”
Her words land like a sledgehammer to a watermelon.
“Okay,” I reply. “I did not see that coming.”
Her eyes—indigo blue in the hotel light—search mine as the room seems to shrink.
“Are you telling me you’re going to kill your dad?”
She shrugs, her eyebrows coming up, then plops down on the bed next to me, her in her leather jacket and yoga pants, and me in my hairy chest and boxers.
“Can’t say I don’t want to,” she says. “I’ll try not to. Edger, please, let that be good enough?”
She peers into her lap. Her shoulders lift, then forcefully drop. When her eyes again catch mine, they’re round and guileless.
“I was raised by Nostradamus. They trained me. They’re the ones who made me like this. But I didn’t turn out the way they expected. I’m not the person you saw in your dream, okay? These skills…whatever stupid strand in my DNA that makes me a natural spy, assassin, martial artist, the person I am chooses to use those skills against Nostradamus.”
“I know that.”
“I need you to see me as I am.”
“I do. I do see you.”
She smiles, and the room seems to spring back to normal size. “Good.”
We sit in silence, her spacing and twirling a lock of hair, and me trying to clear the fog in my head so I can process her pledge to try not to be the assassin we’re supposed to stop.
“I’m going to share one of my secrets now.”
I shift to face her. She’s got a solid two inches of her hair twirled tight around her finger. Her eyes dart to mine before questing for ninjas in the armoire, the curtains, the bathroom, the dresser—
“Hey-hey,” I
say, taking her hand. “It’s okay. You got this. Breathe.”
She takes a deep breath, releases the death grip on her hair, exhales. “I’ve…”
“Yeah?”
Her jaw clenches, her head tilts. I give her hand a bracing shake.
“It’s okay,” I say. “It’s me. You can trust me.”
“I’ve… I’ve never had a boyfriend.”
My limbs lock. “Wow. Okay. I, um, didn’t expect that.”
She snatches her hand away and shields her eyes. “So embarrassing.”
“What? Why?”
“Why? Because normal girls don’t get to their twenty-seventh birthday without dating.”
I duck my head to get eye contact. “Especially ones as all-around amazing as you.”
She clicks her tongue.
“No, really. Let’s take a look. You’ve got all the main attributes down. For starters, you’re funny. You’re fun. You’re easy to talk to. You’re mysterious—sometimes a little too mysterious—but, you know, better too much than too little. If you ever stop drugging the nice guys, you might even meet someone great and do whatever it is spies do instead of settling down. Maybe pick out dead-body disposal cupboards together.”
“But I’ve already met someone like that,” she says, holding eye contact. “And I wanna go out on a date with him. With you, Edger. Not a fake date. A real one. With real possibilities.”
Mary inventories my face, but I’m barely seeing her through the screen of malfunctioning fireworks melting my brain. It’s Fourth of July Armageddon in there. Candied dopamine must be solidifying over my medulla oblongata. Hey, I’m not breathing. I should totally do that now. Is this silence lasting too long? I should totally open my face hole and produce word-type things.
“Be-yorp. Lerp. Bang.”
Through the screen of fireworks, Mary frowns.
“Gerp. Bing.”
Her frown deepens. Worry lines crease her forehead. “But if you think it’s a bad idea…”
“Nerp! Idea bad not. Mary idear good make.”
I make a fist, thump my chest. There. Oh good, she’s smiling.
“Wow,” I say, my eyes going wide. “From full-on caveman to actual words. That’s thirty thousand years of evolution between one sentence and the next.”
Her face brightens. “It’s a date, then. But let’s do it after the UN General Assembly. That way it won’t be awkward”—her head sort of jiggles like Alfred’s butler bell ringing Batman for lobster cakes—“with you worrying about whether I’m gonna shoot my dad and everything.”
“Ha-ha, yeah, that would be awkward,” I say, my voice one octave too high. I try to smile—maybe half my face is doing the right thing? Do eyebrows usually go up this high over a lopsided smile? I mean, how does a normal person smile?
“Edger, promise me you won’t tell them about your powers. If they kick me off the team, I can’t protect you. I’d die if anything bad happened to you.”
“You’d die?”
“Say it,” she says, her head tilting and eyes narrowing.
She’d die if anything ever happened to me? She feels that strongly?
“Say it!”
“I promise.”
A mass of lavender-rich blonde hair launches at me. Her leather jacket arms wrap me up, cold on my bare skin. My arms twitch, then rise and return the hug. I breathe her in, and it’s all sunshine in Argentina. The moment is limitless, like a too-good-to-be-true memory. Her hands glide down my arm. Her Pacific-blue eyes are round. She pulls away in slow motion, rises from the bed, and takes me by the hand. She leads me to her bedroom door and guides me through amidst the climax of exploding fireworks, bubbling candied dopamine, and the remnants of my lizard-brain caveman speak, even as a tiny alarm is triggering. A blink later, I’m staring back at her from the wrong side of the door, and our limitless moment has reached its limit.
“We will figure out this problem with your powers,” she says. “I promise. Edger, I won’t let you down. You’ll be glad you trusted me.”
I smile, and it takes me back to the one I gave Jenny Burton, the first time I noticed she was pretty. Mary smiles too, but hers is more of the “Hang in there, good buddy” variety. She shuts the bedroom door in my face, leaving me alone to contemplate how this is completely the wrong way to go about things. She’s manipulated me. I get it. But there’s no fighting this. She could tell me the world is upside-down, and I’d say, “Then let’s rehang all the pictures.” Then again, the world is upside-down. I just promised I’d lie to our team. The old Edger would never do that. Who is this new guy?
CHAPTER Eleven
Across the street from the I-70 Exit 101 7-Eleven, an ’84 black Cadillac Eldorado crawls to a stop. Leo shuts the engine off and steals a glance at his partner. Sling on his left arm. Purple-and-yellow eyes. Poor bastard’s got to be hurting. He’s like a battered spouse—which may sound delicious, but it still ain’t right.
In their twenty-five years working for Madame Hooch at the Haunted Bush, he and Danny had never put stock in those rumors the ladies were going to muscle in on their highly specialized skill set. Who would? Beating the living shit out of rich men who can’t pay their bills is a man’s game. And before this gig, neither of them had ever taken a beating like Danny’s—let alone one dispensed by a little girl.
“I can’t find it,” says Danny, his gaze darting every which way for any sign of the candy apple red Mustang they’d identified as Black Widow’s.
“Relax. I’m not gonna have you talk to the scary lady again.”
“Screw you,” replies Danny. “I’ve taken lumps from stuntmen who weren’t half as dangerous as she is, I’m tellin’ you.”
“I know. And you’ve been tellin’ me for the last four hundred miles.”
Danny shifts to face him. “Why don’t you go over there, then? Shake him down already, tough guy.”
Leo strokes his bottom lip and mulls this over. It is, he must admit, the perfect opportunity. All the ass-cans are inside. That stupid cameraman’s pumping gas. The actor’s scrolling his phone. None of the others filling up have recognized “Dak Q. Neutron” yet. It doesn’t get better than this.
“Unless you’re afraid of the scary lady?” prompts Danny.
Leo screws his face up. “I ain’t afraid of no skinny skank.” He pockets his car keys and kicks the door open. “Be back in a boot scoot.” He climbs out, pauses, and then pops his head back in. “You want anything? Coffee? Candy bar?”
Danny eases a knot in his shoulders. “Just get it done, man. Shit.”
Leo grins and shuts the door.
Rings of gold and pink light kaleidoscope across his vision as he measures traffic, stopping and starting until he reaches the other side of the street. He raises a shielding hand against the glare. There—the A-Team van. And there, the cameraman setting the pump onto the terminal. Gemini’s still scrolling his phone. Smiling, Leo gives another once-over on the cars parked at the 7-Eleven.
No candy apple red Mustang. No Black Widow.
Leo swaggers into the filling station area. He swings behind Gemini and the cameraman—when a roar like a Zambian Nile crocodile almost stops his heart. His gaze snaps right.
That’s no crocodile.
Bearing down on him from the direction of the glaring sun is the grill of a candy-red Mustang. Pain lances through his right side as the car clips him. He’s airborne, flying out of the filling station. His shoulder collides with the ground. His teeth clack shut. Grass and mud flings into his face as he tumbles wildly end over end. At the bottom of the stormwater runoff ditch, his head smashes into concrete.
CHAPTER Twelve
In a preschool cartoon universe, Underwearld East’s scaffolding, spotlights, tarps, exposed gypsum boards, and wall studs might make for a great crossover event. I’m thinking Bob the Builder meets Handy Manny. Wendy and Kelly could sit at the bar drinking mai tais while Bob and Manny order their tools to whip everything into shape faster than you can whistle a snappy
theme song montage. In this universe, though, they’re going to have to skip the commercial breaks for the rest of the month if Underwearld East is going to be ready for prime time.
Quarterback for the LA Chargers, HARDON secret agent, and God of Thunder incarnate, Caleb Montana admits us through the front door. His smile is dialed down to level one, which is good because I’m feeling insecure enough as it is, the way Mary’s been running me around. He leads us into the coat check area, and I spot Alex showing the workers out through the back. At her signal, Caleb leads me and Mary inside. My stomach is in knots as we cross the unfinished dance floor, and not only because I’m dreading what’s coming. The floor plan here is identical to Caleb’s club in San Diego. Unpleasant visions of nearly drowning inside a disco ball to the tune of Rapture by Blondie claw at my memory. I swallow a hardening lump in my throat and glance at Mary. Her face is ready for battle. We belly up to the bar on either side of Caleb.
“No Fortress?” I ask.
“Yeah, bro,” he replies, tilting his head to indicate a hallway closed off by construction tape. “Access is through my office. It’s not quite ready, though. But check this out.” He holds up a pen and aims the tip at a two-by-four at the end of the bar. He clicks the back. A dart fires and stabs the plank. My head ticks back. Mary and I exchange a smile.
“Look at you,” I say. “Caleb Bond.”
“Yeah, bro.”
“Have you had time to think about your contribution to this mission, Mary?” asks Alex, returning from the back like a storm rolling in.
“If you’re asking if I’m planning on betraying my team,” she replies. “I’m not.”
“Good,” says Alex. “Because if you were, I would personally take it upon myself to ensure you spend the rest of your natural life in a hole in Guantanamo.”
“Come on, Alex,” I say. “That’s not helping. We’ve got a prime minister to save.”
“I don’t have time for games, Mary,” says Alex. “Our funding isn’t unlimited. We don’t want the pencil sharpeners in Washington looking too closely at our operation. If we can’t score a win on our first sortie, don’t expect a second.”