by Elise Sax
“Oh my God,” my boss said, surprising me, as I crouched on my hands and knees, searching for the damned book behind the stacks. “Did you do this?”
I sat up. “What? Did I do something wrong?”
“Uh, no. I mean, you’re doing an adequate job. Keep it up. But it’s closing time.”
“It is?” I had never worked beyond my hours before. I normally watched the clock, like a lion watches a gazelle at lunch time. “I spent eight hours nonstop, organizing books?”
“That’s what you’re supposed to do,” she said, looking at the pristine bookshelves.
She had a point. It was my brightest moment in my long and varied work history. But I hadn’t found the book yet, and I wasn’t ready to quit. I needed to know what happened to Harriet Hard.
“Do you mind if I stay a little longer?” I asked. “I just have a little more I want to finish before I leave. I promise to lock up.”
I watched my boss’s face as she debated leaving me alone in the store in the evening to do God knew what. But the possibility of having even more beautiful, pristine bookshelves was a strong temptation.
“You don’t have to pay me for the extra hours,” I added, and her eyes widened, like she was on a really good date with George Clooney.
“Don’t forget to lock up after,” she said and then she was gone.
I stood in the center of the stacks and turned around, slowly. The book had to be there, somewhere. I scanned every shelf, and miracle of miracle, I spotted about a dozen paperbacks on top of one bookcase, crammed into a corner.
“Oh, please. Oh, please. Oh, please,” I muttered, as I climbed up the step ladder. I knew that the chances that the book I was searching for was among a small pile on top of the bookcase were slim to none, but I still held out hope.
I stretched my hand out and managed to reach one of the books. “John Grisham,” I read. “Who gives a shit?” I tossed it off the bookcase and reached the next book. “Stephen King. He can kiss my ass.” I was down to the last three books, and I was losing hope. I couldn’t reach them, no matter how I stretched, so I stepped onto one of the bookshelves and pulled myself up. Bracing my elbows on the top of the bookcase, I looked over the top. I couldn’t make out what the last three books were. I needed to get closer.
I stretched out one hand toward the books and lost my balance, my left foot slipping off the shelf. Just before I fell to my death, I caught myself and got my foot back on the shelf. I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself while clutching onto the top of the bookshelf. Wow, being a reader took a lot of commitment.
My hand was hurting, and I noticed that it was bleeding. I must have cut it during my almost-fall. My stomach roiled, and I willed myself not to vomit. I couldn’t stand blood. Any blood. Or violence. Or horror movies. In fact, I couldn’t even handle bruised fruit. I was hyper sympathetic—or just a wimp. The actual diagnosis was up in the air. But the end result was that the drops of blood on the side of my thumb were making me dizzy and lightheaded. I looked down. It would be painful if I passed out and fell off the bookcase.
“Keep it together, Gladie,” I told myself. “Stop being a wimp. Shut up. I’m wimp, and you’ll have to deal with it.” It was hard arguing with myself because I was really stubborn. But while I was battling my own neuroses, my thumb stopped bleeding, and the bookstore stopped spinning around.
After recovering, I grabbed two of the books. It turned out that they were the first two Harriet Hard books. My pulse raced, and my heart pounded in my chest. So close. So close. I tossed the two books onto the floor and squinted at the third book.
Hard to Die.
Bingo.
I found the book. I was three inches away from finding out if Harriet Hard survived, and if she took revenge on her arch-nemesis turned lover turned arch nemesis, Hugo Rockchenko. I couldn’t wait!
All my hard work had paid off. I gave a cry of victory, shrieking in joy. The noise echoed in the empty store. I couldn’t wait to get home with the book and get back into the Harriet Hard world. I stretched out my hand. My fingertips touched the spine of the book. I almost got it. I stretched further, and then finally, the book was in my hand.
And then it wasn’t.
As I grabbed the book, I lost my balance. I swung my arm wildly, trying not to fall. The book flew from my hand and hit a wall before falling to the floor. My feet slipped, and I grabbed onto the top of the bookcase, hanging precariously in place. But the bookcase wasn’t staying in place. With all of my movement, I had thrown the bookcase off balance, too. It rocked from side to side, spilling the books out onto the floor.
“This is going to be bad,” I said.
The bookcase rocked until it couldn’t rock anymore, and fell, taking me with it. The bookcase knocked into the next one, slamming me against the books. I slid down the other bookcase and fell to the floor. Luckily, the fallen paperbacks broke my fall.
“I survived,” I said, surprised. I checked my body for broken bones, but I was fully intact. It was a miracle. I looked up to thank heaven for surviving. That’s when I saw the rest of the books succumb to gravity and begin to rain down on me.
My first thought as the paperbacks hit my head was that critics called romance and mystery “light reading,” but it sure felt heavy as it knocked me into unconsciousness.
CHAPTER 4
My eyes opened slowly. My head hurt, but it wasn’t worse than the time a grenade went off in my bathroom while I was taking a shower. It would take more than a grenade to kill Harriet Hard, and if a grenade wouldn’t kill me, I would definitely survive this.
Whatever this was.
Somehow I had been buried under a tower of books. I must have walked into the bookstore, looking for some research on weapons of mass destruction when my arch-nemesis Hugo Rockchenko attacked me and left me for dead.
“Not this time, Rockchenko!” I yelled, lifting my fist over my head.
I must have been getting close to zeroing in on his criminal enterprises, and so he decided to get aggressive. But it wouldn’t dissuade me. I was going to shut down his nefarious activities, and make sure that he was brought to justice.
“Justice!” I announced and clutched my forehead. I was tough, but a couple of Advil would have come in handy while I worked for truth, justice, and the American Way.
I tossed aside the books that were on top of me and left the bookstore. As I reached the street, a car drove in my direction. I jumped in front of it and waved my hands. It screeched to a stop in front of me. I approached the driver’s window and tapped on it. He opened.
“I’m an agent of a secret government agency,” I told him. “I need your car. The lives of everyone in this country and a bunch of other countries depend on it.”
“Are you fucking crazy?” the man demanded.
I put my head back and guffawed, loudly. “I wish,” I said, seriously. “Being crazy would be a lot less stressful than trying to save the world. Open up and take me downtown. Now.”
He unlocked the car, and I slipped into the passenger seat. “Burn rubber,” I insisted. “Your country is depending on you.”
We arrived at the Italian restaurant in fifteen minutes, and I thanked my driver. I walked inside. “A den of iniquity and infamy and other ‘I’ words,” I announced loudly in the restaurant. It was late, and there were only a couple of diners left. “Don’t think I don’t know what is or isn’t happening here.”
“Hey, how are you Gladie?”
It was Jordan, the young, attractive man who was completely ignorant of the evil deeds around him. Oh, sweet, innocent, naïve man. But innocence never lasted long, and I knew that Jordan was going to be initiated in the world of international intrigue and villainy. It was just a matter of time.
I took his hand and pulled him aside. “Jordan, this is important. Rockchenko found me. We don’t have a lot of time. There’s a rat here, somewhere.”
“Rat? We have an A-rating. Gladie, are you okay? Your head is bleeding.”
&
nbsp; “I don’t care about blood, Jordan. I laugh at blood. And you might as well call me by my real name. I’m Harriet Hard, spy catcher.”
He ran his fingers through his hair. “Huh?”
A man dressed as a chef ducked his head out of the kitchen and locked eyes with me. I squinted at him. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. Though he seemed to recognize me, and I scared him. He quickly averted his eyes and ran back into the kitchen.
I gripped Jordan’s shoulders. “It’s time to be brave, Jordan. Are you ready to help me in this battle against Rockchenko?”
“Gladie,” he started.
“I told you, I’m Hard. Harriet Hard.”
“Ms. Hard. I mean, Harriet. Harriet? Okay, Harriet. You see, Harriet, I think you might have gotten some bad medical marijuana. Or maybe one too many martinis?”
Jordan was good-looking, but he wasn’t particularly bright. “I can assure you that I’m sharp as a tack, Jordan. As a tack. Besides, I have an almost inhuman ability to handle alcohol, illicit drugs, and Adam Sandler movies. Now, stiffen your spine and get ready. There might be bullets. Do yourself a favor and stick a frying pan in front of your face as soon as you can.”
I took his large, manly hand and pulled him into the kitchen. I handed Jordan a frying pan and faced the chef who had hid from me. “Who sent you?” I demanded, sticking my finger under his nose. He had a large nose, as if a prawn was trying to eat his face.
“Who sent you?” he asked, shaking. Scared. Jackpot. There was nothing better than an operative way down the totem pole to get intelligence. And this guy was way down the totem pole from the looks of him. The bottom of the totem pole.
“I know everything,” I told him, watching sweat roll down his face, like he had just run the hundred-yard dash in three seconds. “Everything. You’ve fallen in with a bad group. Evil. If you don’t surrender yourself immediately, I can assure you that you’ll wind up in a Supermax prison. Or worse.”
“Worse?” he breathed, touching his throat. “But they’ll kill me if I talk. Kill me!”
“I’m so confused,” Jordan said.
The chef moved quickly. He was a ninja in a white chef’s jacket. I had made the unforgivable sin of underestimating him, and now I was going to pay the price for it. In a whir, he grabbed a long knife from the counter and waved it at me. With my lightning-fast reflexes, I jumped back in the nick of time.
“Jordan, the frying pan!” I yelled. Jordan threw the pan at the chef, managing to knock the knife out of his hand. I jumped at him, ready to subdue him with my judo, but he was wiry for a chef, and fast. He zipped out the back door before I could catch him. I started to run after him, but he was like the wind, blowing ahead of me and impossible to catch. So, I stopped, and with my sharp senses, I noticed the chef had dropped a scrap of paper. I picked it up and read it.
“Bruno Dominguez. Malibu.” I tapped the paper against my chin, thinking. “Bruno Dominguez could be anybody. I need to get the agency’s top cryptologists to figure this one out.”
“Bruno Dominguez, the drug lord?” Jordan asked. His face was red and sweaty, like he was going to have a stroke. Since the rest of the kitchen staff had run for their lives, I got a glass and filled it with water for him. He took a sip. “They say Bruno Dominguez has killed ten thousand people. That’s a lot of people, Gladie. I mean, Harriet.”
“Not so many,” I said, studying my nails. They were a mess, as if they hadn’t seen a manicure in weeks, which was impossible because I had a weekly spa day that I never missed. Spy catchers have to look their best.
“They say he lives in a fortress in Malibu,” Jordan explained, his voice strained. “It’s a huge compound. His goons strong-armed Barbra Streisand and Suzanne Somers into giving up their properties so he could enlarge his compound. I hear that he has mutant, killer dogs that roam the property and eat trespassers, and that’s the best way to go, because if Dominguez finds a trespasser, he kills them by removing body parts until they finally die.”
I smiled. “Sounds perfect. We’ll go just as soon as I get dressed.”
I marched through the empty restaurant and climbed the stairs to the upstairs apartment with Jordan close on my heels. “Maybe we should call the police. Or maybe a doctor,” he said.
“I told you, I’m fine.”
“I meant for me. I don’t know what’s happening. One minute I’m Jordan, waiter and accounting student. And the next minute, I’m fending off knife-wielding chefs with ties to the most infamous drug lord on the planet.”
“Oh,” I said, waving my hand at him dismissively. “That’s Tuesday for me.” I tried the door of the apartment I had been using. “It’s locked. Open it for me.”
“I don’t have the key.”
I didn’t have the key, either. I didn’t have any belongings, it seemed. Obviously, the dastardly Rockchenko had stolen them.
“Break the door down,” I told Jordan.
“Excuse me?”
I pointed at the door. “Give it a little shoulder action. The door is ancient. Balsa wood. It won’t take much muscle,” I said, eyeing his long, lean body. I was used to working with bulkier men than Jordan. Killers. Juice heads with serious knife skills.
Jordan crossed his arms in front of him. “Hey, I don’t have a lot of time to work out, you know.”
“Door.”
“When I’m not working, I’m taking accounting classes. I’m buff for an accountant.”
“Door.”
“Have you ever seen an accountant with these guns?” he asked, flexing his biceps.
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Jordan, if you don’t break down the door, I’m going to fashion a bomb out of Liquid Plumber and foie gras, and blow it all to shit. You get me?”
Jordan flinched. “I get you.”
He took a deep breath and knocked into the door with his shoulder. The door gave way. “It worked,” Jordan said, surprised. “How about that for muscles?”
I marched inside.
“Where’s my Versace collection?” I asked, throwing ugly clothes out of the closet. “I know I’m undercover, but this is ridiculous.”
“You always looked nice to me,” Jordan said.
“Well, I’m gorgeous, sophisticated, and worldly, so of course you would think that. Luckily, I can pull off a Target t-shirt, but I shouldn’t have to.”
I ripped off my clothes and tossed them on the floor. I tossed a t-shirt to Jordan. “Put this on.”
He put it up against his body. “It’s too small.”
“Exactly. You need to look the part.” I put on a red bra and a skirt, which I ripped so that it showed as much leg as possible. “Give me your phone.”
Jordan struggled to get the small shirt over his torso. “I don’t understand what we’re doing, and why I’m doing it with you.”
“It’s better to keep you in the dark,” I said, digging his phone out of his pocket while he battled the t-shirt. “You’ll probably die anyway, but the less you know, the more likely you’ll die fast instead of being hanged by your thumbs until dead. Whoa, thumb-hanging is a bad death. It takes days.”
Jordan inspected his thumbs. “They do that? That’s possible? I don’t want to die like that.”
I pushed buttons on his phone, going online. “Ready? Let’s go. It’s destiny time.”
Jordan put his foot down about driving to Malibu. He said something about wanting to keep his thumbs. I had never worked with such a coward, but fearing death was common…or so I had heard. I had no fears, except for the fear of letting my country down. So, when Jordan refused to drive us in his Dodge Geo to the drug lord’s fortress, I hogtied him with his lanyard, stuffed him into the back seat, and took the helm.
It was a beautiful evening in the City of Angels. Little did the citizens of Los Angeles know that there was evil in their midst. An evil that would stop at nothing to destroy civilization as we knew it. Luckily for them, Harriet Hard was on the case and would stop at nothing at stopping the evil fro
m stopping at nothing.
I zipped around the traffic, using every ounce of my training in tactical driving. Time was of the essence when fighting a cartel of chaos commandos.
“I think the lanyard is cutting off the circulation in my legs,” Jordan complained from the backseat.
“Don’t worry. It won’t permanently destroy your blood flow for another twenty-two minutes, and we’ll get to Dominguez’s house in no more than nineteen minutes.”
Jordan whimpered. “I’m not sure I’m ready for my destiny. I’m an accountant.”
I guffawed. “I think we both know that you’re not an accountant, Jordan.”
“I’m not?”
“Nope. At worst, you’re a chef. At best, you’re my new sidekick.”
“I’m afraid to ask you what happened to your old sidekick.”
I turned the lights off as we approached the compound. I parked away from the surveillance and opened the back seat. “I’m going to untie you, now,” I told Jordan. “I don’t want you to run or scream. Your country needs you tonight, Jordan. Do you understand me?”
“I think so?” he said like a question.
I began to untie him. “We’re going inside, and I’m going to interrogate Bruno Dominguez and force him to tell us where Hugo Rockchenko is before he kills us. Got it?”
Jordan was sweating, again. “What if Dominguez kills us?”
I ruffled Jordan’s hair. “Funny one. A punk like Dominguez isn’t going to get the drop on Harriet Hard.”
“How are we going to get in? Do you have a rocket launcher or something?”
I gave Jordan my hand and helped him out of the car. “We’re going to walk in through the front door. They won’t notice us.”
“Can you make us invisible? You’re practically naked, and I’m wearing a shirt that’s six sizes too small for me. I think we’re pretty conspicuous.”
“Not tonight we aren’t. I put an ad on Craigslist with this address on it, and the compound is about to get invaded by about three hundred people, give or take fifty people.”
“An ad? What did you offer? Free cocaine?”