"Wally." Rex seemed calm. Did he know something was up? That is, besides a cousin of mine showing up from the Alamo? "Did you see much of Merry when you were kids?"
Wally smiled at my husband. It was chilling. "Not until she was older. But we have been out of touch for a few years."
"How are your parents?" I reached over and took a plate from Rex. "Aunt Susie and Uncle Max?" No such people existed because, as far as I knew, Wally was birthed from a feral goat.
"They died." Wally picked up his sandwich. Was it too late to poison him?
"Oh, I'm so sorry," I lied. "They were nice."
Wally nodded toward Riley.
"You worked with Fi…Merry, right?"
"That's right." Riley cradled a bottle of beer in his hand as he surreptitiously studied the man. "But that was years ago. We're friends now."
Wally took a bite of his sandwich, and his eyes grew wide. As he chewed, he groaned with delight. We watched as he swallowed. "What is this? Is best thing I have eaten in America!"
Of course it was. Chechen cuisine left a lot to be desired. It was basically leeks, dough-based food, and mutton. A lot of mutton. Which is why, to this day, I don't like mutton.
Rex explained the nuances of the American sloppy joe as Wally listened raptly. I took the opportunity to kick Riley's left foot under the table. Then I slid the salt toward him but kept my hand on it for a moment longer than normal.
He nodded as he picked up the salt but didn't use it on his fries. Riley was a health food nut. Salt was not something he ate. For me, it was one of the main food groups…along with sugar.
My motions told him that Wally was here for sinister purposes and that he should stay after Wally left. Either that or I'd just informed him that my cow was ready to breed and that he shouldn't buy bread in Uzbekistan today. I was a little rusty. I took his nod to mean I'd nailed it.
The small talk turned to Wally getting the recipe from Rex, and I was starting to relax a little when, once again, the doorbell rang.
This was turning into the longest day ever, second only to the four-hour mime performance by the aforementioned prime minister of Argentina. I'm not sure anything could surpass that.
"I'll get it." I sprang from my chair toward the living room and front door.
"Hi!" Hilly said as she walked past me. In a quiet voice she said, "I've been watching. I saw Riley and Wally come in. You okay?"
"I am now." I grabbed her by the arm and dragged her into the dining room, happy that the odds had improved greatly.
"Look who's here!" I announced.
Rex got up and set another place at the table in the spot next to Riley. Good thing he'd made a lot of food. He usually did because I wasn't a great cook. He'd probably planned to take this in his lunch for the next few days, but his polite demeanor demonstrated that he was more than happy to share.
Riley was less impressed. He'd never been Hilly's biggest fan. But I was happy because someone besides Wally and me knew what was going on.
The strongman's eyes bulged, and his mouth fell open as he took in the athletic Amazon. Hilly introduced herself and took a seat next to Riley, directly across from me. Did Wally know who she was? And if he did, would that be enough for him to change his mind and leave town forever?
Wally had stood up as Hilly sat down and then resumed his seat, but he never stopped gaping at her.
"Merry," he finally said correctly. "Who is this charming creature?"
I introduced Hilly as a friend and watched in amazement as the Chechen flirted with her.
"You are lovely!" he enthused. "A goddess!"
What?
Oh right. Wally, despite his short and skinny stature, had a thing for tall women. When the Eastern European Women's Basketball League was in town, we had to physically restrain him from annoying the women with constant professions of love. He was thrown out of the arena five times before they finally banned him for life. It was the only time I'd ever seen him cry.
I winked at Hilly. She smiled back. We just might have a card to play after all.
We ate in silence for a bit. Riley trying to figure out what the hell was going on, Wally in love with the food and Hilly, Rex on alert, but acting completely casual, while Hilly put away seven sloppy joes.
And then there was me, hoping this was all a dream.
As Rex and I cleared the dishes, Wally ignored everything but Hilly. Could I use this somehow to get the hit lifted from Riley and, subsequently, Rex?
"I assume," Rex said once we were in the kitchen, "that you will fill me in once our guests are gone?"
There were a couple of ways I could play this. I could tell Rex everything. Which would result in chaos, the Feds and CIA swarming Who's There, and a possible shootout. Or I could play dumb and figure out how to deal with this myself…like an idiot.
"I've no idea what you're talking about." I plunked the dishes into the sink.
"Right," Rex said.
One of the things I loved about Rex was that he never panicked. The man could literally jump into any scenario and handle it. The fact that I'd been a spy and that terrorists dropped dead around me all the time hadn't dampened his interest in me. Which was amazing. And possibly stupid. No, I take that back. Rex was never stupid. More like optimistic.
We joined the awkward after-dinner chatter back in the dining room.
"Thank you for wonderful dinner," Wally gushed as he got to his feet. "But we must go."
"We?" I asked as the Chechen ran over and pulled out Hilly's chair.
She stood and nodded. "That's right. Wally and I are heading out."
My mouth fell open. I closed it quickly. "You are?"
Riley still looked wary but stood and shook the man's hand. "Nice to see you again. Maybe we'll run into each other again."
Wally was too busy staring at Hilly as if he'd won the Amazonian lottery. Maybe she could distract him enough so that he'd forget why he was really here.
"Yes. Maybe" was his reply.
I escorted them out, unable to think of anything to say that would help Hilly.
"I'll go start vehicle." The little man smiled at the assassin.
"I'll be right there." Hilly smiled back.
"What are you doing?" I hissed.
Hilly shrugged. "He said he'd buy ice cream. I'd never turn that down." She patted my arm and skipped down the steps.
I watched as she got into Wally's car, waving at me as they drove away.
Either Wally was going to turn up in a dumpster tomorrow (Hilly's preferred method of disposing of bodies), or he was going to propose to the woman who'd killed more than one hundred and fifty people. Either way, it meant that they were no longer my problem right now.
"What is going on?" Riley joined me on the stoop, closing the door behind him. "Why is Aslan here? How did he find you?"
Awwww. The bastard was worried about me.
"When were you going to tell me about the video of me?"
He frowned. "The video?"
"You know the one," I snapped. "The video of me escaping that bar in Chechnya as CNN outed me."
The man turned a little green. He was saved by Rex, who opened up the door as he shrugged into his suit jacket.
"Sorry, babe." He kissed me on the cheek. "I have to run. Apparently there are a couple of men with strange accents harassing a clerk at the Git and Go." He paused, taking in the expressions on Riley's face and mine. "You wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you?"
I shook my head. "Not a clue."
"Can you use some backup?" Riley asked a little too hopefully. Perhaps his sense of self-preservation was overriding his curiosity.
Rex clapped him on the back. "No. But thanks."
We watched as he got into his car and drove away.
"Let me sum this up," Riley said, ignoring what I'd accused him of earlier. "Aslan, a Chechen strongman, is here with some men who Rex is going to meet right now. And Hilly, the CIA assassin—"
"Who isn't an assassin,"
I corrected.
Riley ran a hand through his hair. "Hilly is also in town."
I gave up on the video for now. "Come inside." I opened the door. "I'll fill you in."
He followed me. "I'm not going to like this, am I?"
"Nope" was all I said as the door closed behind us.
CHAPTER FIVE
A few minutes later, Riley sat on my couch looking dumbfounded. "You're supposed to kill me? Seriously?"
I rolled my eyes. "It's not like I haven't been asked to do something like that before. The difference is that I might actually kill you this time."
He narrowed his eyes. "Is that because of the video or to save your husband?"
"Both," I replied. "But one of those reasons is more than enough."
Riley and I had a complicated relationship. And very briefly we'd dated, for like a Bangkok minute. When that failed spectacularly, we settled on friendship. Now that he was retired and operating as a private investigator here, we were still friends, but I found that I wanted to kill him even more often.
Okay, so I wasn't serious. In fact, I was more than a little worried.
"And I have only four days to do it," I added.
Riley frowned. "I thought you said five?"
"I did say five, and Wally agreed, but I think we should go with four, just in case he really meant four."
In my years as a spy, I'd found that it's always better to subtract one day from a villain's timeline. Every time I'd been asked to take care of a problem, it'd always been in a foreign country where the person who demanded it usually wasn't as fluent in English as they thought they were. On the other hand, Russian, Spanish, and Japanese weren't my first languages either, so I'd been known to get things wrong myself. Which was why I'd made it my policy to always subtract a day.
Several years ago, in Tokyo, for instance, I somehow mixed up the difference between the numbers three and three hundred, which was super awkward when I ended up planning a tea service for three ranking members of the Yakuza instead of one hundred times that. That was one of those moments when your stomach drops to the ground and gets stomped on by clowns.
You try cutting up three petit fours to have enough for everyone—and with an eleventh century samurai sword at that (as was the custom). Fortunately, before the Yakuza boss found out and beheaded me, I found a caterer who was able to run over 1500 eclairs on short notice.
The great thing about Yakuza mob guys is that they don't ever want to criticize the head boss, largely because they worry about surviving the tea ceremony. So everyone ranted and raved that the only thing they'd ever wanted in their most likely short lives was a metric ton of chocolate eclairs. I ate two dozen myself.
"Let's just fake my death." Riley interrupted my thoughts. "Like we did in Estonia that one time."
I shook my head. "The Peruvians didn't know what you looked like, so it was easy to substitute a corpse. Wally knows who you are and now has seen you up close. We can't fool him that easily. Besides, we got lucky that a man who had blond hair had been hit by a truck full of chickens just before I had to deliver your body. And even though this is small-town Iowa, we won't get that lucky here."
"Why did you tell Rex that he preferred Wally?"
"It's a nickname," I said quickly.
"For Aslan?" In spite of his death sentence, Riley grinned.
"Just… It… I told him…" I struggled with what to say but gave up. "He calls himself Wally. Drop it." There was too much to explain, and I wasn't in the mood to do it.
"So he knew that was me across the table." Riley rubbed his chin.
"Just like you knew it was him," I added.
"We could still pull the Peruvian bit. The Agency has a drug now that mimics death. You take him to Soo Jin's morgue. He sees me and leaves satisfied."
"I don't want to drag Soo Jin into this." Our county medical examiner was a friend and helped out with my Girl Scout troop. I wasn't going to risk anything happening to her, especially since she was the one person who could keep Betty from shanking Boy Scouts.
"You could shoot me with blanks," he suggested.
"And have Wally put a real bullet in your head to make sure? Forget it. These guys practically invented the double tap."
No one really knows who invented the double tap, which included a second shot to the head just to make sure you'd died. But everyone knows that Chechens are notoriously paranoid. Well, that and they had the worst aim, which usually meant that their victims survived the first shot.
He got to his feet. "I'll leave town. Draw him away from here."
I considered this. "Too risky. He would think I told you, you took off, and then he'd kill Rex."
"Wrath." Riley sized me up. "You're not really thinking of setting fire to the ham sandwich, are you?"
I must've looked mystified because he added, "New agency guidelines. They're testing…"
Oh. Right. "Testing out euphemisms, yes, I know. How did you know?"
"I keep up with things." He shrugged. "And by the way, nice job with the hand signals in the kitchen. I'd almost forgotten about that."
I considered flipping him a hand signal right now.
"You're mad at me!" he realized.
"One." I ticked off my fingers. "You are making me want to kill you for real. Two, you made me look like a fool at Langley by leaking that video."
"An error in judgement that I wish I could take back," he apologized.
I threw my hands in the air and screamed. It helped. A little. "We need to come up with something so that they don't kill Rex and I don't have to pay Hilly to kill you!"
Riley looked me in the eye. "You'd pay Hilly to pop all the balloons?"
"Will you please stop doing that?" I said evenly.
He shrugged. "I can't help it if you haven't kept up with the latest news in the profession."
"I just might take the easy route and kill you for real."
Riley held up his hands. "Okay, I'm very sorry about the video. Truly. I'll see what I can do to get it erased from the face of the Earth."
I nodded. "Or else I'll erase you from the face of the Earth."
"Fair enough." He got up and headed for the door.
"Where are you going?"
Riley stopped, his hand on the doorknob. "To see what I can do to die in the next four days."
I shouted as he walked out, "Make it messy, please! I think Wally would appreciate that."
CHAPTER SIX
Once Riley was gone, I grabbed my keys and fled through the back of the house to the garage. As I pulled my minivan out onto the street, I prayed for invisibility. And driving a silver minivan should grant me that. I can't tell you how many times my nondescript vehicle had come in handy.
Everyone noticed the souped-up pickup trucks, the brightly colored SUVs, and the whimsical Volkswagen Beetles. But hardly anyone paid attention to a boring, old, silver minivan. I wished I'd had one during my spy years. It would've come in extremely handy during car chases I'd had through Islamabad, Mexico City, and during a particularly tricky escape from one of Carlos the Armadillo's associates, where I drove a lime green VW micro bus through a New Jersey mall parking lot, filled with thousands of silver minivans.
A few minutes later, I was parked across the street from Sugar Lips' Feeling Lucky House of Delights. The ice cream shop had been open only a few months and was owned by a middle-aged woman named Doris Bean, who had recently retired from a career as a copywriter for both the Victoria's Secret and Frederick's of Hollywood catalogs.
Why did she give the place such an unusual name? I had asked her that while wolfing down three scoops of Sinfully Silky Satin chocolate ice cream in a Madonna's Brassiere waffle cone. Doris told me that the name was an amalgamation of her three favorite pieces of lingerie, which included a corset, a peekaboo nightie, and strapless panties—which sounded like a crime against the laws of physics.
Folks around here called it "The Whorehouse." Best ice cream in the county.
I ducked down in my
seat and stared at Wally and Hilly through the window. I wasn't worried about my former colleague. She could take down a whole drug cartel with a bullwhip and jar of mayonnaise (which is a hilarious story for another time). I just couldn't think of anything else to do.
An hour passed, which seemed odd since they were only eating ice cream. The whole day, from the swim party to Wally's arrival to Hilly's arrival to an extremely tense dinner, was taking its toll, and I found myself drifting off to sleep.
Bam! Bam!
The noise jolted me upright in my seat, where I discovered two familiar Chechen goons smiling at me through the driver's-side window. One of the men was missing his front tooth. I immediately regretted doing that to him, even though it was his fault because he ate all of our Oreos one night in the Caucasus Mountains. Those cookies were for everyone and were supposed to have lasted through the weekend.
"Is that really you?" the man with the missing tooth asked.
I rolled down the window. "Hey, Ivan. Ron. How are you?"
At one time I'd been so close to these guys that I'd kind of thought of them as big brothers. Of course, they were terrorists and I'd been spying on them, so that wasn't ever going to work out.
The thought made me a little sad. Of all the groups I'd infiltrated, that group of Chechens had welcomed me the most. Then again, maybe that was because I'd had a Pampered Chef potato peeler—a rarity in those parts.
The men smiled. I couldn't tell if it was a good smile or a bad smile. To be honest, they looked the same. These men weren't Mensa geniuses. They were muscle. Wally didn't need them to be smart, which made it easy for them to carry out his orders.
Both men were about six feet in height, with short dark hair and zero body fat due to all the bulging muscles. They really liked working out. They even got me into a little weightlifting while I was undercover with them. By the time I left, I could bench a small donkey with two chickens on his back. And I don't mean that figuratively. Out in the middle of nowhere, you had to work with what you had. Norman, the donkey, never did like being manhandled and was very bitey. The secret was in how you snuck up on him.
Macho Man Murder Page 3