by Audrey Faye
Three sets of eyes zinged my direction. I’d flatly refused to give anyone any hints about my brainstorm, and Lelo and Carly hadn’t been quiet about their impatience. I knew that good ideas needed time to percolate—and bad ones needed time to strangle themselves and die. Unfortunately, after an afternoon of driving everyone crazy, I still wasn’t sure which category this particular crackpot notion of mine fell into.
“Spill, J.” Carly had her gunslinger act down cold. “Or I’ll slit your throat and leave your gizzard out back for crow pickings.”
“Humans don’t have gizzards.” Lelo contemplated her cards one more time and then raised Rosie’s call. “Just dinosaurs and earthworms.”
Our host snickered and laid her cards on the table. “You know the weirdest shit, skinny girl.”
Something gleamed in Lelo’s eyes. “I know a full house beats that sorry hand of yours.”
That sorry hand was better than anything I’d had all night. I watched the byplay—a certain sixteen-year-old hadn’t laid down her hand yet.
Rosie helped herself to a brownie and waited. She had the kind of poker face that made for long, interesting careers, and unlike me, she also had the guts for the game.
“Shit.” Lelo laid down her cards. “Handful of crap. How come you always know when I’m bluffing?”
The gypsy florist just grinned and gathered up the monster pile of chips.
I felt a rout in the making and leaned Lelo’s direction. “Does anyone ever beat her?”
“All the damn time.” Rosie rolled her eyes. “The kid either cheats or has the luckiest draw east of the Mississippi.”
Great. We’d gotten ourselves into a game with a poker shark and a walking four-leaf clover. I tilted my chair and reached for a brownie. High time to get back to the reason we were still in Lennotsville. Maybe I’d get to escape with most of my clothes still in place that way.
Carly looked up, well able to read my miscellaneous wiggles on a chair. “So what’s this brilliant idea to slay Mr. Berrington and leave his earthworm parts for the birds to eat?”
Lelo snickered and dealt the cards.
I wasn’t used to such a big audience for my thought processes. “I just connected some of the dots.”
Rosie looked up from her hand, eyes neutral. “I bet you’re good at that.”
I was, but I had no freaking idea how she knew it. Playing poker with florists shouldn’t be this fraught. I studied the backs of the cards on the table in front of me and tried to keep it simple. “The basic problem is that the guy’s image doesn’t match the reality, right?”
Lelo snorted. “He’s totally got the wool pulled over the town’s eyes.”
Blindness wasn’t something that happened unless you allowed it to. And somewhere in there lay my second dot. “He’s in control of the story of Chadwick Berrington.” Even if it was a load of crap.
“Exactly.” Lelo’s finger traced around a pile of poker chips. “And even when one person here and one person over there find out differently, it doesn’t change what everyone thinks. Especially when Sir Fuckwit sucks up to all the important people.”
“Small towns are kinda like that.” Rosie shrugged. “It’s like urban legends. Some stuff just never dies.”
I connected them to a dot a little further down the trail. “It doesn’t have to stay that way.”
Three faces looked exceedingly skeptical.
Finding words for the pictures in my mind has always been crazymaking. It’s like Charades—blindfolded and in Chinese. “I know it seems like he always comes up smelling pretty, but why?” I turned to Rosie. “How many women has he sent flowers to in the last six months, trying to smooth over some small problem?”
She blinked. “Including the ones old enough to be his grandmother? Three dozen, at least. It’s mostly little stuff, though.”
Carly looked ready to stab someone. “So he uses the same damn excuses on a couple of women a week and nobody notices?”
I knew exactly how effectively quantity could change a tune. You don’t need volume to seed an earworm in people’s heads—you just need a clear beat and lots of repetition. “I’ll bet all anyone ever says is how sweet he is.” That was the guitar riff he planted over and over and over. It was a big payoff for a bunch of daisies. “He gets a lot of people nodding and smiling and agreeing he’s a great guy, and the details stay quietly in the corner where he wants them.”
His own personal drip-marketing campaign.
Lelo’s arms were crossed, her spine stiffer than the chair that propped her up. “It’s not all little stuff.”
It wasn’t, but the same principle applied. “It all swims in the same lake. With the bigger stuff, people get angry, they get embarrassed, they feel a bit squirrelly about the whole thing—but they don’t say anything because they know it isn’t enough to change the story when there are two little old ladies a week acting as Chad’s propaganda machine.” I carefully didn’t look at Carly. “But anger and embarrassment don’t just disappear. They simmer underground. We can work with that.”
Lelo breathed out carefully. “You’re saying we need to lance the boil, or whatever.”
Something like that. “We need to make the ooze visible. Let people know they’re not alone and they’re not the ones with the problem.”
Hermits know better than anyone the power that lives in isolation—and the power in finally breaking it.
“I still think you should just knife him in an alleyway.”
We all stared at the kid in black.
And then Carly stared at me. Buck, passed.
Dammit. Life was way easier when it was just the two of us. “We can’t just around go killing all the Fuckwits of the world.”
Lelo just rolled her eyes at me.
Kids these days. “We don’t kill him—we kill his legend. Change what everyone thinks about him in one fell swoop.” He’d been writing his own headline song up until now, and we needed to change the tune. And when you’re fighting big-amp speakers, it helps to make some noise of your own. “We need to do it in a big push when he’s not expecting it. There’s another story here—we just need to make it visible.” I hoped like hell this wasn’t another one of my connect-the-dots screwups.
“With what, a freaking support group or something?” Lelo looked unimpressed and more than a little mad. “Graffiti on the cows?”
“He kicks at the people who don’t matter,” said Carly, siding with the kid. “Nobody cares what they say—that’s why they don’t talk in the first place.”
The currents in a small town were never that straightforward. “Some people listen. And some would listen if the story got loud enough.”
“No way, that’s—” The kid stopped dead, her face the jumbled mess that happens when anger crashes headlong into a glowing lightbulb.
“You have an idea.” Which was good. I hadn’t exactly figured out all the pieces of moving a mountain of dirt with a plastic dump truck just yet.
“Yup.” Her grin amped into high gear as she looked over at our sexy-gypsy host. “You know Cici Boyer, right?”
“The TV reporter?” Rosie’s eyebrows winged up. “She loves Chad. They run totally simpering stories on him all the time.”
“Exactly.” Lelo leaned back, a sly smile in place. “So we give her another one. Nominate him for citizen of the year or something. Anonymous tip about all the flowers he orders. Chad Berrington’s secret do-gooder side.”
Carly frowned and bit into another brownie. “And this makes him look bad how, exactly?”
“Well, she’ll go interview people for the story, right? Rosie first.” She glanced at the florist. “And you can play dumb, but be sure to give her a list of people he sends flowers to on the down-low.” She grinned. “A carefully chosen list.”
I was beginning to smell the smoky wisps of something that just might work. “Along with some hints about what she might find if she asks the right questions.”
Lelo nodded at me, one dot connecte
r to another. “Start Cici off with a couple of sweet little old ladies, but then we start handing her bits of the truth. Small ones—make her dig for them.”
Rosie was nodding slowly. “We could send her to Laurie Bigelow. He sent her two dozen calla lilies last year when he was accidentally late driving her to her condo association meeting. He also sent flowers to three other people in her complex. Bet they didn’t make it to the meeting either, and Cici could find out what was on that meeting agenda.”
“And Martha Winston.” Lelo looked at us. “She’s a sweet little old lady who happens to have a granddaughter Chad couldn’t keep his hands off in high school.”
I knew who Martha was. She’d been in The Cuppa, and what I’d seen in her eyes when she looked at him hadn’t been friendly.
Lelo’s fingers rapped out a drumbeat on the back of her cards. “Cici will start putting the story together if she talks to the right people.”
Maybe—but I didn’t like leaving it all in the hands of a woman who apparently liked to simper. I gritted my teeth and headed into the wild hinterlands of insanity. “What about if we give her an assist?” I’d hunkered down in too many coffee shops not to respect their power, especially in small towns. “Pull all the people together for a party to give him whatever award you were going to make up, and invite her and her camera to the coffee shop. She can interview people right on the spot.” And if she couldn’t put the pieces together, the listening crowd just might.
Lelo’s eyes shone. “We bust him on live TV.”
That would be a Lesbian Assassins first.
CHAPTER 16
I set down my cell phone, shaking my head at my partner, who was still stuffing her face with Lelo’s cheese scones just like she’d been doing for the last three days. “If you eat any more of those the price of cheese will double and small children will starve all over the world.”
“It’ll be worth it.” Carly brushed crumbs off the table and dumped those in her mouth too. “What’d Rosie say?”
We were the acting headquarters of the Screw Chadwick Berrington to the Wall sting operation. Which mostly meant that we sat and did nothing while Lelo and Rosie did all the legwork. They had the small town cred to get things rolling—we didn’t. They’d convinced the garden club that Chad was an excellent recipient of the first inaugural Role Models of Lennotsville Award and by now, town scuttlebutt had it as the garden club’s idea in the first place, which suited our purposes just fine. “Mrs. Beauchamp is decorating a cake in his honor.”
I’d seen Mrs. Beauchamp’s outfits. The cake would be colorful. Very, very colorful.
Carly ran a meditative finger around the top of her coffee mug. “This is so weird.”
It was more than weird. I’d come up with the beginnings of an idea, put Rosie and Lelo on the scent, and now we’d been sitting here for days like bored Army generals. Ones who needed to keep a low profile.
I looked up as a body slid in the fire escape window. “Don’t you use the door like regular people?”
“I’m on a stealth mission.” Lelo grinned. “And I forgot my key.”
Climbing in a second-floor window on main street in broad daylight was about as stealthy as an invasion of Teletubbies. “My generation did this crazy thing called knocking.”
“Your generation is old and cranky and puts nasty little pink packages of fake sugar in their coffee.”
Low blow. “I use the real stuff.”
“Children, children.” Carly looked amused, which is hard to do when your cheeks are full of cheese scones.
Lelo examined the empty plate. “Someone needs to teach you how to cook.”
My partner threw me under the bus without a glance. “Teach Jane.”
“No way. Old and cranky people like me can still learn new things, but we forget them by the next morning.”
The two of them just grinned at me, and dammit, I almost grinned back. “Did you climb in the window just to harass us, or have you managed to invite a few people to this party we’re throwing?” Or more correctly, the one the garden club was throwing.
“I invited a bunch of people.” Lelo sounded a little distracted. “Most of the people on your list.”
Between me and Rosie, we’d been able to come up with most of the people in town who gave Chad Berrington the quiet side-eye, and the ones who might if they got a nudge in the right direction. I’d mostly known them as “the lady with the squished green hat” and “the guy who looks like he burps turpentine,” but Rosie had always seemed to know who I was talking about. Sometimes, a few quiet afternoons in a coffee shop make for pretty good ammunition.
Carly kicked me under the table. I blinked and tuned back in to Lelo’s face. Something was brewing. “What’s up, kid?” I’d have offered her the last cheese scone, but it was currently stored in my partner’s gizzard.
“When the baseball team won the Little League regionals in the spring, he sent candy baskets,” said Lelo quietly, “Cammie’s son didn’t get one. She thinks Chad just forgot.”
My instincts started doing a country line dance. “Who’s Cammie?”
“Single mom. She sweeps the floors at the bar.” Lelo’s smile looked sad and envious at the same time. “She’s a great mom—her son’s a lucky kid.”
That might be, but in the pecking order of a small town, sweeping floors probably didn’t make her very important.
“I wonder if that’s the only kid he forgot.” Lelo’s fingers played with the fringed edges of a banana-yellow napkin. “I was thinking I’d drop by some houses, ask a few more kids on the team.”
I never asked questions when simple watching would do, but in this case, our sidekick already had all the data we needed. “Who are the three kids on the team most likely to have been left off?”
“Bubby, Aiden, and Sam,” she answered promptly. “Poor, poor, and another single mom. And maybe Rafael, because his mom is a freaky poet type and she’s been giving Chad the dagger eyes lately.”
It was the kind of risk I hadn’t taken in a long time. Jazz improv could be the sweetest thing in the world—or the biggest disaster.
And I knew we were already all in. “So invite the baseball team to The Cuppa and make sure those four come.” Giving kids candy baskets was a lovely local interest story and good for the whole role-model angle, but if Cici Boyers had any actual reporter blood in her veins, the simpering would stop dead when her camera caught the faces of the kids who hadn’t gotten a basket. “We don’t need to have every person pinned exactly right. We just need to play the odds.”
Knives in alleyways never made my hands shake like this. But our job wasn’t knives this time—it was to collect enough pieces of tinder to catch the spark of the story that Chad Berrington was so damn sure would never get told.
Lelo had just found us some prime dry birch bark.
~o~0~o~
There were streamers. Great heaping wads of them, wielded by little old ladies who probably did war reenactments in their spare time.
Amanda wound her way adroitly around decorations, the members of the gardening club, and the regular early afternoon crew at The Cuppa, delivering coffee, smiles, and an occasional supporting hand on a ladder. She brushed by my table, antennae wiggling. “Need anything, love?”
She knew something was up—I’d seen it in her eyes the second Carly and I had walked in flanking Lelo. Which is why the kid had been sent to help Mrs. Beauchamp portage her cake and my partner had slapped on a florist apron and nominated herself as Rosie’s assistant. Reasons to be here that didn’t scream “setup” to the entire town.
I wasn’t Chad’s biggest fan either, but nobody ever noticed me. Except Amanda, apparently. “I’m good.”
She winked at me. “Okay. If you need someone to create a distraction or something, just let me know and I’ll drop a tray of the old cups. It’s about time we replaced them.”
Yeah, she knew. And if I’d read her right, she’d be fanning our tinder just as soon as we got a spark or two
smoking. I watched her make her way back across the coffee shop, ducking under a streamer and catching a crayon about to roll off the table without even breaking her stride.
Lelo backed in the door, attached to one end of the most lurid cake I’d ever seen, and several of the regulars got up to help. I looked over at Carly making her way down a ladder in the corner and saw the same bemused look on her face that lived on mine.
We’ve taken down a lot of guys in the last three years—but we’ve never done it without lifting a finger. This was beginning to resemble a freaking military operation, and we were hardly doing a thing.
I waited as she skirted the crayons and streamer ladies with far less grace than Amanda and finally made it over to my little command station. “Trade you. They want to cross the red streamers with the blue ones, and I can’t keep my left and right straight anymore.”
I was pretty sure the garden club could recruit better minions than either of us.
She leaned over and peered into my empty cup. “You’re supposed to share the caffeine.”
“We’re sitting in a coffee shop.”
“I’d have to navigate the crazy ladies with streamers.”
I rolled my eyes. “Or wave a hand in Amanda’s general direction.”
She stuck a finger in my cup and wiped up the dribble left in the bottom.
Bored-assassin alert. We never had this little to do this close to an op. I waved my own hand at Amanda and then leaned back and smiled wryly at my partner. Two fish out of water, we were. “Don’t worry. After this, we’ll go read through our emails and find someone for you to use your knives on.”
She grimaced. “It might take more than one. This is so cheerful, it’s creepy—the cake’s got a freaking rainbow on it. At least I think it’s a rainbow.” She looked over at a cluster of ladies fussing over flower arrangements and something that looked suspiciously like a baseball trophy. “Do you really think they’ll all take off their rose-colored glasses?”
“Not all of them.” I was a realist, but it didn’t take an entire town of dissidents to see that the emperor had no clothes. “Hopefully there will be enough to keep watch on him after we’re gone.” Which was a strange feeling all on its own—this case wasn’t going to be as easy to walk away from as usual, and it wouldn’t be bruises and scared eyes trying to keep us around.