Tiny Glitches: A Magical Contemporary Romance

by Chastain, Rebecca

  The galley door slammed inward, and men in head-to-toe black with enormous guns boiled through. I spun around. More men flooded the room behind us, rushing through the back door.

  The lights crashed. Everyone was shouting, but I couldn’t make sense of the words. In the noise and panic, someone grabbed me from behind and slammed me to the floor. My arms were wrenched behind my back, and for the fourth time in five days, I was handcuffed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “Where are you hiding Jennifer Winters?” Coutu asked.

  “I already told you: I’m not hiding her.” I wanted to put my head in my hands and close my eyes. I was handcuffed to a table in an interrogation chamber, where I’d been for an eternity along with my similarly shackled partners in crime. Sevallo stood with his hands braced on the table in front of me, his back to the large, one-way mirror. He wore a Santa hat, and fuzzy socks lay in front of him. I still couldn’t figure out those fuzzy socks, and frankly, I was too tired to care.

  Coutu was seated, a folder open in front of her. A riding crop dangled from a wrist strap on her right arm and a judge’s gavel floated in her left hand. I appreciated the translucency of her apparitions: She wanted to beat the information out of me, and she was going to be the judge of everything I had to say.

  Standing quietly in the corner was an unfamiliar woman who had yet to speak. Five-ten, rail thin, and dressed in the most expensive suit I’d seen outside of a Hollywood premier, she didn’t look like an FBI agent. She didn’t even appear interested in the interrogation. She looked like we were wasting her time. I’d have been happy to get out of her hair, but Sevallo and Coutu had just settled in to question us after leaving us shackled and alone for an endless hour, and neither agent seemed to be in a hurry.

  In the chaos after the SWAT team had stormed the building, I’d lain stunned, facedown on the concrete—as instructed by a woman with a no-nonsense drill sergeant voice—overwhelmed by despair. Jenny and Kyoko had been right there, within our reach, and then they’d been taken. Again. The authorities had arrived too late. The retrievalist had disappeared, escaping all detection. Unless Hudson had some magic up his sleeve, we had zero leads and no way to track the invisible man. All the threads of information that had gotten us this far had been played out.

  We’d failed.

  Jenny and Kyoko would be shipped back to Japan, where they would be tortured and dissected to get the life-lengthening formula, and I was going to be arrested. My thoughts bounced between fear for humanity’s future and Jenny’s, and fear for my own.

  I’d rested my cheek on the grimy floor and fought back tears.

  It wasn’t until the yelling had died down and I was in the quiet interior of the patrol car that I began to formulate a strategy. It would not do Jenny or humanity any good to keep the life-lengthening formula out of the U.S. government’s hands, only to have it used by the Japanese. We’d exhausted our meager abilities, resources, and luck; it was time to bring the FBI up to speed. But maybe I could control the information and still help Jenny.

  The interrogation room’s lights spasmed in a seizure-inducing pattern. Coutu glanced up, then rose, flipped them off, and propped open the door. Light spilled into the room from the hallway beyond, but it made it difficult to see the agents’ faces with their backs to the door.

  When Coutu stood, I could see Hudson in the mirror. He looked tired, and shadows rested in the grooves around his mouth and under his eyes. He met my gaze, and I couldn’t read anything there. Rotten banana slices cascaded down his chest. He thought this situation stank. I got that much. Between us, little green army men lined the edges of his pity-party red wagon. I hoped the army men meant he was still up for a fight.

  On the other side of Hudson, propped in a booster seat that had been the cause of a verbal deluge of complaints and threats of a lawsuit, sat Dempsey, glowering at everything in sight. Her red crest glistened in the dim light as if it were under a spotlight, and the beaded breastplate was set in the design of a giant hand flipping off the room. I smiled a little at that. Dempsey didn’t waste a lot of respect on authority.

  “What were you doing in that warehouse?” Coutu directed this question, as she had all the rest, at me.

  “I know my rights,” Dempsey yelled, not for the first time. “Nobody speaks until we have a lawyer.”

  “Let me do the talking,” I said.

  “Don’t say nothing, woman!” Dempsey ordered. She spun to face me, standing on the lip of her chair in front of the booster seat and using the bar we were all cuffed to for balance. The chair tipped forward alarmingly. “Don’t you dare. Don’t let them get in your head. Don’t let them—”

  I cut her off with a look. “Let me talk.”

  “But—”

  “Let me talk.”

  Dempsey sat down, muttering under her breath.

  “Like I told you,” I began, “I don’t know Jenny. She’s an acquaintance from high school, and honestly, I wish I’d never agreed to help her. She needed a simple favor: move her truck and trailer from the street where it would be towed.”

  I flicked my gaze to Hudson’s. He had leaned back in his chair as far as the cuffs allowed, and he watched me with hooded eyes. I hadn’t been able to tell what he was thinking ever since we had both been shoved in the back of a police cruiser hours earlier. I half expected him to agree to tell the FBI everything if they cleared him of all charges. That would be the smart thing for him to do. Get out while he could, and without a criminal record. His career in security would be ruined with a criminal record, especially if breaking and entering was one of the crimes. I waited for him to decide he was done—with Kyoko, with Jenny. With me.

  When he said nothing, I plowed on with half-truths, starting with revealing Sofie’s kidnapping.

  “Jenny must have made some powerful enemies,” I said, “but you know more about that than I do. They ransacked my place and must have found out about Sofie because they kidnapped her from her sister’s house yesterday.”

  I didn’t think either believed my excuse that we hadn’t mentioned the kidnapping yesterday in the park because Sofie had been exhausted and hadn’t wanted to deal with questioning.

  “How did you know your aunt had been kidnapped by Winters’s enemies?” Coutu asked.

  “The ransom note.”

  “You read kanji?”

  “No, but I only know one person who was recently in Japan, and given your investigation into Jenny, I thought other people might be looking for her, too. And wanting something from her.”

  “So you called Jenny . . .” Coutu prompted.

  I shook my head, avoiding the innocuous trap. I’d already told Coutu I had no way of contacting Jenny. Instead, with complete honesty, I confessed to being so distraught over my aunt’s abduction that I didn’t know how Jenny had been contacted, only that she’d shown up at my mother’s house and set up the drop. While I spoke, Sevallo’s Santa hat grew long enough for the fuzzy tip to touch his hip and Coutu’s bologna sandwich stretched across the table. They weren’t buying what I was saying, but as long as we got to the important part and I didn’t implicate myself, Hudson, Sofie, or Dempsey in the process, I was fine with their skepticism.

  “And we have your aunt to thank for the sketches ‘anonymously’ given to the FBI?” Coutu asked.

  I nodded, mentally crossing my fingers that when the agents cross-checked my story with Sofie, she wouldn’t reveal anything I hadn’t.

  “Why didn’t you contact the authorities when your aunt was abducted?” Coutu asked.

  “I was too scared at first; Jenny said the note said they’d kill her if we did. But once we had the exchange location, that’s when I asked Dempsey to call you. ”

  Coutu’s lips tightened.

  “Okay, let’s see if you can explain how you ended up at that out-of-business bookstore today,” Sevallo said. He leaned closer, Santa hat swinging forward through the table.

  “With a shotgun,” Coutu said.

 
“I have a permit for Attila. I have a right to bear arms. I—”

  “We thought we saw one of the women in Sofie’s sketches,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “Going into the back of the store.”

  “So you were just out shopping, the three of you, and you happened across the woman your aunt identified as her kidnapper?”

  I met Coutu’s stare head-on. “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you call us? Or the cops?”

  “None of us had a phone.”

  Coutu ran flat eyes over the three of us. Hudson raised his eyebrows. Dempsey tried to plant her hands on her hips but was brought up short by the cuffs.

  “Check with Mr. Grabby Hands out there,” she said. “The only thing I had on me was my purse, and he took that.”

  “How’d you get into the store?”

  “It was open,” Hudson said.

  “It was open,” Coutu repeated, deadpan.

  “We heard Jenny in the warehouse once we were inside,” I said, drawing Coutu’s attention from the staring contest she and Hudson had engaged in. “She was talking in Japanese. She sounded scared. That’s when the man showed up. He had two guns, and he surprised us.”

  “Yeah. Otherwise I woulda got the drop on him!”

  “Which is why you found Dempsey’s gun in the bookstore. He marched us into the warehouse, tied up the ninjas, and took off with Jenny in their van.”

  “After tossing a flashbang at us!” Dempsey added, slamming her hands into the table, then exploding her small fists above the surface in a fair mime of the concussive charge of the object the retrievalist had tossed under the bay door. The businesswoman in the corner jumped, then ran her hands down her suit as if she’d not been startled. Coutu lifted an eyebrow at Dempsey before turning back to me.

  “It was very disorienting,” I said.

  “I couldn’t tell my toes from my tits,” Dempsey said. “Toppled right over. My ears are still ringing.”

  “Then you guys showed up,” I finished.

  Coutu leveled me with a look of open skepticism. The riding crop slapped itself against her thigh.

  “What about the elephant?” The question came from the woman standing in the corner. In the time it took her to voice her question, she became pregnant, and not just-starting-to-show kind of pregnant, but enormous, hiding twins, if not sextuplets, under her thin suit.

  The woman shifted, and her gigantic stomach swung through Sevallo’s back. I blinked at the apparition and fought to keep my lies straight.

  “Uh, what elephant?” I’d left Kyoko completely out of my story. There’d be time enough to mention her if—when—they tracked Jenny down. Plus, if this woman already knew about Kyoko, she most likely was from Evolution Solutions, Jenny’s American employer, and was one of the people Jenny had been hiding the elephantini from, which put her at the bottom of my confession list. It also explained her presence. She must be working with the government to track down Kyoko.

  I checked Sevallo’s and Coutu’s expressions, but they looked as stoic as always, making me think they already knew the woman’s true goal and about Kyoko—or at least about an elephant. Had Evolution Solutions revealed the true nature of the elephantini to the FBI, or were they hoarding the information until they could get the patent? I shook my head to dispel my runaway paranoia.

  Sevallo straightened and crossed his arms. “The three women tagged and bagged with you, they say there was an elephant. A baby elephant.”

  “I think I would have noticed an elephant.”

  “How about you guys? Notice an elephant?” Coutu asked Hudson and Dempsey.

  “What is that? A crack at my size?” Dempsey demanded. She stood on her chair again, tipping forward. “You see a little person, and the first thing you think is circus? There’s a short person; there must be an elephant around here somewhere.” She mimed scanning invisible crowds.

  “Please answer the question.”

  “No, I didn’t see an elephant. Can your questions get more ridiculous? Shouldn’t you be out there, after that son of a bitch who kidnapped Jenny, not wasting our time?”

  “Hudson, what can you tell us about the elephant?” Coutu asked.

  “Nothing. I didn’t see one.”

  He looked as laid back as a man at a barbeque. Perhaps a little more tired, but not frazzled, like I felt. With a jolt of surprise, I realized I was the weakest link in this room. Dempsey was a pro at interrogations, and Hudson appeared to be Mr. Smooth under pressure. I wondered if the agents had been aiming the interrogation at me because they could tell I was the most likely to crack under the pressure.

  It’s never fun to realize you’re the least competent person at a task, especially if that task is lying to federal officers.

  I straightened in my seat. “That’s everything I know.”

  “That’s everything we all know,” Dempsey said. “What now?”

  They took us through three more rounds of questions, during which my answers grew increasingly curt. Hudson refused to speak. Dempsey alternated between glares and yelling. The agents tried threatening us with obstructing justice and bribing us with immunity deals, but we stuck to the story I’d created. They even started to take us to separate rooms, but Dempsey loudly demanded a lawyer, and Hudson and I echoed her, bringing the interrogation to an end. Coutu released us to work with a sketch artist, and the woman produced a quick and accurate drawing of the skip tracer.

  My curse must have been successful at knocking out the camera in the vacant bookstore’s parking lot; otherwise I was sure they would have pressed charges. But with no legal reason to hold us, and most likely because they hoped we’d serve as bait for the larger prize of Jenny, Sevallo and Coutu walked us to the front doors, delivered a final admonishment to come clean, complete with a promise of indemnity, and then they abandoned us on the sun-drenched sidewalk.

  * * *

  “Now what?” Dempsey asked.

  “I’m going home,” I said.

  It took ten minutes to convince Dempsey I had no secret plans for rescuing Jenny. Hudson concurred. His voice was flat. His expression was flat. He stood with arms crossed and barely looked at me.

  My heart beat heavy in my chest, and any elation I’d felt at being released sank under the weight of my bleak realization: On top of losing Jenny and Kyoko, I’d lost Hudson, too.

  Dempsey took a taxi to her truck. I called Ari from a pay phone, and she arrived in full mother hen mode, complete with a bird-nest hat divination and a roost of chickens across her car’s dash.

  “We’re okay,” I said when I slid into the passenger seat. Hudson got into the back. “The FBI have nothing on us. The ninjas are in custody. The retrievalist has Jenny and Kyoko. I want to go home.”

  Ari studied my face, then nodded sharply. She patted my leg and I gave her hand a squeeze to thank her for not peppering me with questions. I couldn’t handle any more questions. Later, I’d give her all the details, but right now, I just wanted to savor the silence.

  Hot LA sun beat down on my right arm and thigh, and the hum of traffic and the road beneath the tires filled my ears with white noise. I tilted my head back against the headrest and closed my eyes.

  I’d betrayed Jenny, but I’d hopefully helped save her. Guilt and relief. Cognitive dissonance at its most torturous. Back and forth, my mind ping-ponged between the emotions. Guilt and relief. Betrayal and hope. Swimming in the middle was nauseous anxiety about Hudson. What was he thinking? His divinations weren’t helping me. He had on his cowboy boots and the seat around him was covered in little army men performing defensive drills. His roots were showing, and he was still feeling combative. With me? With the FBI?

  “I want to get my car,” he said. He gave Ari directions to where we’d abandoned it. I clenched my hands in my lap and started laying down bricks around my emotions. Men left. Men always left. Attachment was useless and painful; it’s why I liked my relationships light and fun. Men were great for sex, for short-term compani
onship, and for interesting conversations. They were hell on the more delicate emotions like love and hope. Those they trampled, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.

  Maybe there were exceptions, like Ari’s father, Caesar, but those exceptions were not for me. My curse burned through electricity and men with equal force and ambivalence. For me to pretend otherwise was foolhardy.

  Only, in all the excitement, I’d forgotten my own rules, and I’d gotten attached to Hudson. I didn’t want to see him go. Not yet. I wanted more time with him, normal time. I wanted to explore the attraction between us and find out if it could blossom into something more or if that was only wishful thinking.

  In other words, I wanted the impossible.

  It was time to get back to reality.

  “Good-bye, Hudson,” I said when we reached his car and he slid out of the backseat. My voice was a shade too raw, and I forced a smile I didn’t feel.

  “Don’t drive off until my car starts,” he said. He didn’t look back.

  “Are you okay?” Ari asked once he was out of earshot.

  “Peachy.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “You sure you don’t want company?” Ari asked. Her car was rattling and coughing when she killed the engine in front of her house.

  “I’m sure.” Ari’s sympathetic expression grated. “The walk will help clear my head. It’s been a long day. A long couple of days. I think I’ll take tomorrow off work, too. Will you call Sofie for me?”

  “Of course. But your apartment . . .”

  “Is trashed. I remember.”

  “Let me come help you fix it up.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do yet. Let me take a day and think about it.” I didn’t need to think about my apartment. I needed to think about Hudson and about the pain in my chest as I tried to sever all feelings I’d developed for him. I needed time alone to get my head on straight. I had no doubts that I’d rehash everything with Ari, but I needed to understand how I felt first. Or maybe I just needed to wallow alone. “I promise, I’ll come by tomorrow for breakfast.”