by Beth Yarnall
“Your…are you sure you didn’t hit your head?”
“I’m fine.” Sort of. I glanced up at the chunk of stone missing from where Chuck Puckett’s permanent nameplate would eventually go. “That could have been me.”
Super Agent’s mouth flattened into a bleak frown. “Yeah.”
“Thai Dinh?”
“You can say his name?”
“Not saying his name would be running from what happened. I can’t do that anymore.”
He gave me a small smile and lifted a lock of hair away from my face. “Good for you.”
“Did they catch him?”
“No.”
“You’re the freakin’ FBI, for crying out loud. You know what brand of tampons I buy, but you let a murderer get away from you twice?”
“We’ll get him.” He was all defensive about it, as though I’d questioned his manhood or something.
I shoved what was left of the keychain in my pocket and got to my feet. A little shaky and lightheaded, I swayed, catching myself on the half wall.
Super Agent was at my side faster than you could say “murder attempt”. “I think you should get checked out.” He started to call for an ambulance.
“Don’t. I’m fine. It’s just the adrenaline.” Mostly.
I spotted a figure jogging toward us and ducked back behind the wall.
“Come on up. It’s just one of my guys.”
He walked over and met the man. I could tell something was up by the way Super Agent kept looking back at me, his expression growing darker as the other man spoke. By the time he returned to me, he looked downright dangerous.
“We need to move you. Now.” He took me by the elbow and hustled me to where we’d parked the car. The other FBI dude was gone.
“How’d he do that?”
“What?”
“Disappear like that?”
He bundled me into the car without answering. As we pulled away from the curb, an ominous feeling came over me, and I shuddered.
“That wasn’t Thai Dinh who shot at me, was it?”
“No.”
“Who was it?”
“We don’t know. It seems there’s a new player in the game.”
I’d lived my whole life on the principle I won’t pee in your pool and you don’t pee in mine.
Somebody was not only pissing in my pool, they were defecating in it.
I couldn’t go back to my apartment, because as Super Agent had put it—it had been compromised. Compromised. A stupid word with a double meaning, neither of which were of any use to me at the moment. So there I sat in an impersonal apartment somewhere “safe”, surreptitiously listening in on Super Agent’s cell phone conversation with his superior. So far I hadn’t been very impressed by this other agent’s superiority, as it was his foul-up that had landed me here.
Super Agent ended the call and let out a frustrated sigh. “They were able to salvage a few things from your apartment. The rest is a total loss.”
Total loss as in fire. Fire as in firebombed. Firebombed as in a total and complete screw-up.
“Fantastic.”
“Insurance should cover most of it.”
“Yeah, if I had any.”
He stared at me as if I’d broken out my rusty Greek. “You don’t have insurance?”
“Oh, gee. Did we just stumble on the only thing you didn’t already know about me?”
He scrubbed his hands over his face. “Holy hell.”
“Yup. My thoughts exactly.” I opened my purse for my Furious Fuchsia lipstick, because what do you do when everything you own has been destroyed and you have two people out there who want to kill you? You freshen up, naturally.
“You amaze me.”
I looked up from the mirror. “How so?”
“You’ve just been shot at, everything you own is gone, and you’re sitting there touching up your face.”
“If I’m going down, I’m going down with lipstick on.”
He grinned at me, and I realized how long it had been since I’d seen that smile. There hadn’t been a lot to get cheered up over lately. Seeing it now put a lump in my throat the size of my Pontiac.
“I’m so freakin’ crazy about you.”
All I could do was stare at him. Stupidly.
He held up a hand. “I don’t expect you to respond. I just wanted you to know.” He came over to me and kneeled down beside me. “Will you go out with me?”
“Like a date?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry. I just…I don’t know. Maybe.”
His smile widened. “I’ll take that maybe.”
“You’re a very odd fellow.”
“This is a very odd situation.”
I couldn’t deny that. This whole thing couldn’t get any stranger if a troupe of circus elephants suddenly traipsed through this crappy apartment with monkeys on their backs, juggling cats.
“What’s the plan?” I asked.
“The plan is for you to get some rest while I do some work.” He got up, kissed me on the cheek and went back to his computer on the rickety little dining table in the corner.
“It’s the middle of the day.”
“Watch a movie or something.”
I dropped the lipstick back into my purse, and it suddenly occurred to me that everything I owned was either in this bag or parked at the curb across from my burned-out apartment. I blinked, expecting tears, but it seemed I was all out.
Instead, I turned on the TV and flipped through some channels. “There’s no cable.”
“Sorry.”
I got up from the couch and wandered over to the window.
“Don’t stand there,” Super Agent said.
“What?”
“Get away from the window.”
Oh, right. Don’t make the killer’s job easy. I moved to the little kitchenette that was part of the living room/dining area and started opening doors. Not much to look at. Not much to do. I leaned against the counter and crossed my arms. I could see the computer screen over Super Agent’s left shoulder from this angle.
“Why are you looking at pictures of Quinn?” I asked.
Super Agent half spun around in his chair. “You know this guy?”
I walked over and looked at the screen as he clicked through some of the photos.
“Yeah. He worked on Chuck Puckett’s reelection campaign. An assistant to the assistant or something. Why? What’s he got to do with any of this?”
“That’s what we’ve been trying to figure out. The background search on him came back with some inconsistencies. Our surveillance only picked him up a few times and yet his name came up a lot in the senator’s correspondence. What do you know about him?”
“He came around more often in the last couple of weeks before Chuck Puckett was killed. His job was pretty much limited to being a glorified errand boy, as far as I could tell. He’d drop off this or pick up that. Those guys always used the back door, never the front. I don’t know. I didn’t pay close attention to him or any of them. All that campaign strategy stuff bored me.” I hitched a shoulder. “Mostly I just showed up looking gorgeous to attend his political events, shook some hands, drank some crappy champagne, and then he’d take me somewhere nice afterwards.”
“Arm candy.”
“Yeah, pretty much. I would have done more if he’d asked. He never asked.”
“Do you know Quinn’s last name?”
I thought for a moment. I hadn’t been lying when I said I hadn’t paid close attention to Chuck Puckett’s business. He bought me a dress, I wore it. He told me who to schmooze and I schmoozed ’em. He pulled me in front of the camera with him and I smiled. It was the least I could do for him after all he’d done for me.
“Taylor. No, Trask. Oh! I got it. Boyd. Quinn Boyd.”
“You went through the T’s to get to Boyd?”
“My mind is a strange and wondrous place.”
“No kidding. Can you tell me anything else about him?
Maybe something about his background or something the senator might have said about him? Sometimes it’s the smallest slip that trips up these guys.”
“That’s kinda it. Wait. There was this one time when I caught him in Chuck Puckett’s home office going through his desk drawers. He claimed he was looking for a pen and paper to write a note. It didn’t make much sense to me at the time, but I let it go. Chuck Puckett seemed to trust him so I did too.”
“Did you ever see him use the senator’s computer?” he asked.
“Once, but Chuck Puckett was with him. They were working on something. Don’t ask me what. They’d been holed up in his office for a couple of hours. I went in to prod Chuck Puckett to eat something. He’d get busy and forget sometimes. He was diabetic, so eating was important. And I have no idea why I told you that last part.”
“You took care of him.”
“Someone had to. Anyway, they spent a lot of time together in those last few days, and it struck me as odd at the time. Quinn was just a flunky, but Chuck Puckett treated him as though he was absolutely vital to the campaign.”
“Hmm.”
“What does that ‘hmm’ mean? You know more than you’re telling me, don’t you?”
“You’ll probably find out eventually.”
“Find what out?”
“The senator and Julius Clemmons, AKA Quinn Boyd, were having an affair.”
“Who wasn’t Chuck Puckett screwing?” I asked. “Oh, wait…me.”
“Maggie…”
“I don’t even think you could call it betraying, could you? I mean there would’ve had to be something to betray. Some faithfulness for there to be unfaithfulness. Some one-timing for there to be two-timing. Well, I guess there was some one-timing…all on my part. I went through more batteries… Anyway, yeah. Another affair. Got it. How does Quinn boinking my boyfriend fit into the picture?”
“He was a jerk to do that to you.”
“I’m not mad at him. Mostly. I’m mad at myself.”
Super Agent reached up and touched my cheek. I leaned in to the caress. It felt good to be touched. To have a guy interested in me for something more than my photogenic-ness and my ability to charm political snakes.
“Don’t be. He should’ve been honest with you.” He pulled a chair over for me. “Come and sit down.”
“More bad news? Don’t tell me…you and Chuck Puckett?”
“God, no. It’s pretty clear where my interests lie.” He winked at me, then cleared his throat back-to-business-like. “I’ve been considering why someone would go to all the trouble of torching your apartment. I want you to think hard.” He pushed a piece of paper and pen toward me. “Write down everything the senator ever gave you, no matter how incidental.”
“Why?”
“I have a feeling someone doesn’t want whatever it is found.”
“So they destroyed my entire apartment?”
“Exactly.”
“Isn’t that rather like killing the dog to get rid of the fleas?”
“They must want to get rid of whatever it is very badly. Yes. I can’t come up with another reason why they’d destroy your apartment.”
I got to work on my list while he went back to clickety-clacking at his computer. Thinking back to when Chuck Puckett and I first met brought back some nice memories. He’d walked up to the Estelle Landers counter just as I was pulling my purse out of the drawer to go to lunch. Normally I didn’t let anything get between me and a meal, but he had the most amazing blue eyes, crystalline looking, almost like glass. I’d dropped my purse as if it held a nest of spiders and shouldered my coworker out of the way.
By the time I rang up the perfume he’d bought for his mother, I’d worked my wiles on him. He asked for my number. I gave it. And for the next year, my life was filled with beautiful places, not-so-beautiful faces, and never-ending political races. And I wouldn’t have changed a day.
I jotted down all of the clothes, jewelry, shoes, and other trinkets Chuck Puckett had bought me during our year together. He’d had fantastic taste. The list was going to be longer than I thought. Sadly, they were all ashes now. I was on my second page when there was a knock at the door.
Super Agent produced a wicked-looking gun from out of nowhere and went to the door. Whoever was on the other side must not have been an assassin, because he opened the door, had a brief conversation, then closed it again. He came back with a paper grocery bag and sat it on the table.
“This is what we could salvage from your apartment. Any of it come from the senator?”
I stood up and peeked inside. It smelled like my three-pack-a-day Aunt Esther’s old romance novels. The items were completely random and from different rooms of my apartment—a Christmas ornament, a mug, a photo in a frame of my brother and me at our graduation, a troll doll and a pair of emerald-green satin heels that Chuck Puckett had bought me to wear to some gala. I mourned the dress they’d matched; it had been a work of art.
And that was it. Everything I owned reduced to a stinky grocery sack.
“The shoes,” I told him.
Super Agent took them from me and went to the kitchenette. A series of bangs and curse words ensued.
“What are you doing?”
“Examining the shoes. Did you finish your list?”
“Almost.”
“Finish it.”
I sat back down, worried about my shoes. Something pinched. I dug into my pocket and pulled out the broken keychain. Huh.
“Um, Mr. Super Agent?”
He turned to me with a half-torn-apart shoe in his hand. “Yeah?”
I sucked in a shocked breath. “What have you done to my shoes? My beautiful shoes?”
“Sorry.” He had the good sense to look ashamed. “They might’ve had a clue inside.”
“I can assure you they don’t.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I think I’ve got what everyone’s been looking for right here.”
I held out one of the broken pieces in my palm to show him. He took my hand and brought it up for a closer look.
“Well, I’ll be damned. That’s clever,” he said.
“What is it?”
“A microchip. Congratulations. You found what everyone’s been looking for.”
At some point, unbeknownst to me, Chuck Puckett had switched the original keychain he’d given me for an identical one with the hidden microchip. Handy things, microchips. As I found out, you can store information people would kill your ex-girlfriend for and firebomb her apartment over. Things like bank codes and safe deposit box information. A safe deposit box with evidence that Quinn/Julius had been accepting bribes in Chuck Puckett’s name.
“Bribes for what?” I asked Super Agent.
We were on night four of being stuck in this crappy apartment together, which was starting to feel more like a hamster cage without the wheel. And I was either getting a contact high off all the cheap Chinese plastic furniture in this place or somehow, some way, Super Agent was growing on me. Like drawing-our-initials-in-hearts, scribbling-my-first-name-with-his-last-name, imagining-our-children kind of growing on me.
“An online gambling scheme,” Super Agent answered between phone calls to and from his fellow agents. “Julius Clemmons used the senator to cover up an elaborate online gambling ring. If it were ever discovered, everything would’ve come back to the senator. From what we can gather, the senator found out what Clemmons was up to and tried to put a stop to it. That’s when their relationship went south and Clemmons hired Thai Dinh to get close to the senator. He needed someone on the inside to plant more evidence and control the senator. Except the senator caught on again. We think that’s why Dinh killed him.”
“Why didn’t Chuck Puckett just go to the authorities?”
“We think he was planning to but got killed before he could.”
“So what you said before about Chuck Puckett being involved in gambling and all, that stuff was a ruse?”
He n
odded. “A very elaborate one, yes.”
“It sounds like you’ve got it all figured out. So go arrest Quinn so I can get out of this crappy apartment and back to my life.”
“We’re not sure where he is.”
“We’re back to that? Really?”
“If we could find anyone anywhere, there wouldn’t be an FBI’s most-wanted list, would there?”
He had a point. A very frustrating, infuriating point, but a point nonetheless.
“What’s the plan then? Please tell me there’s a plan,” I said.
“There’s a plan. Of sorts.”
“If it’s anything like the plan that got me shot at and my house torched, then I think you need to replace your planning committee.”
“I’m on the—” He let out a frustrated sound. “The FBI is not the garden club. We don’t have committees.”
“So what’s your sort-of plan?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?” I looked around the thrift-store-furnished shoebox I was temporarily calling home. “Who am I going to tell?”
“It’s not a matter of you telling anyone.”
“I found the microchip,” I grumbled. “You’d think that would earn me a hint.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t. But I did get you cable,” he offered.
“HBO?”
“No. But you have more channels than just the local ones now.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He went back to staring at his computer screen.
All this confinement was doing weird things to my judgment and perception. So was everything about Super Agent, from his scent to the way he said crick instead of creek. The other day he’d asked about laundry and added an R to wash. I’d nearly jumped him. And right now, the way the computer made his skin glow was having a peculiar effect on my underused libido.
“I’m bored. Let’s have sex.”
His head jerked up. “As tempting as that offer is…and you have no idea…I know you’re not really serious.”
“I might be half serious.”
“I’d rather you be completely serious.”
“Have it your way.” I got up from the couch. “I’ll just be in the bedroom…you know, going it alone.”