by Diane Kelly
Back in Nacogdoches, I’d been known to curse a time or two, but I was trying to change my uncultured ways. Still, I couldn’t let Eddie’s blatant affront go unchecked. “Kiss my derrière.”
“Classy comeback,” Ross said. “What with the French and all.”
Eddie wore his double-breasted gray power suit and shiny silk black and gray checkered tie, clearly attired for a major bust.
I shielded my eyes from the sun as I looked up at him. “Who’s going down today?”
“The owner of Chisholm’s Steakhouse.”
Chisholm’s was a popular high-end restaurant downtown, near the financial district, the kind of place where expensive wines were uncorked and slaughtered cattle found their way into the arteries of the rich and famous while million-dollar deals were sealed.
Eddie slid his sunglasses into the breast pocket of his suit. “The owner and his wife are in the middle of a nasty divorce and she ratted out her husband for cheating on his taxes. Of course, she claims she knew nothing about it until just recently.”
“How convenient.”
In the restaurant business, cash transactions were common, which made it easy to fudge the profits. That type of garden-variety tax fraud offered little intrigue. I was glad I had my own case to work on instead.
Christina rounded the corner in the pink Cadillac, the back tire riding up on the curb as she cut the wheel a little too close. Driving that long car was like steering a cruise ship. She rolled to a stop at the curb and leaned over in the front seat to peek up at me through the passenger window. She wore a skintight cap-sleeved pink top along with black imitation-leather pants and high-heeled black boots. Her hair was floofed within an inch of its life and her boobs were hiked up so high in a push-up bra they’d virtually become shoulder pads. “Your face looks much better today. Ready to head to the Taj Ma-hurl?”
“Yep.” I picked up the cooler, my suitcase, and my backpack and put them in the trunk next to a small television set Christina had brought with her. I slammed the trunk closed and climbed into the front seat.
Christina had just put the car in gear when the Lobo stepped up to my window and rapped on it, ashes falling from the cigarette in her hand. Today Lu wore a clingy knee-length dress in a swirled pattern of turquoise and pink, the bottom trimmed with balled fringe. At first glance she appeared to be wearing coordinating blue tights, then I realized the blue swirls on her legs were varicose veins. Instead of go-go boots, today she sported cork platform shoes. Talk about a fashion victim. This outfit should be a felony.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” she demanded through the glass.
I unrolled the window. “We’re heading out to stalk the ice-cream man.”
“Didn’t you get Viola’s message?” Lu took a deep drag on her cigarette, letting the smoke waft back out through her nose. “She left one on your cell.”
I opened my purse and pulled out my mobile phone. The battery was dead. Oops. “What was she calling about?”
“Your hearing on Battaglia’s shooting is at nine.” Lu jerked her head toward the building. “Get your butt in there.”
I glanced at my watch. Eight fifty-three. Dang. No time to change my clothes. I’d have to defend myself in this skanky outfit.
I showed Christina where to park and we went into the building, Christina’s leather pants making that odd crunching sound, her heels again click-clacking as she followed me inside.
“Good luck,” Viola called as I passed her desk.
“Thanks.” I was going to need it.
Josh eyed Christina and me as we walked by his office, stepping into the hall and following us as we made our way to Internal Affairs. “Tara’s going down,” he called after me, following his comment with a “Boop … boop … boop,” like the sound of a submarine diving.
Christina glanced back at Josh. “Who’s the dork?”
“That’s Josh,” I said. “He’s a cyborg. His dad was human, his mom was a Pentium III.”
When I arrived at the conference room, Eddie was waiting outside. He’d just received word of the hearing, too.
I stepped closer to my partner. “Eddie,” I whispered. “I’m scared. What if I get fired?” No way could I go back to desk work. I’d sooner die. Maybe I’d have to shoot myself next time.
Eddie squeezed my shoulder. “You’ll do fine. Besides, this type of experience builds character.”
I punched him in the arm.
He rubbed his bicep, then held the door open for me and Christina. When Josh tried to come in, Eddie put one hand on each doorjamb, blocking the doorway. “This doesn’t involve you.”
“It doesn’t involve her, either.” Josh pointed to Christina.
“No,” Eddie said. “But she smells pretty so she’s allowed to stay.” He stepped inside and slammed the door in Josh’s face.
The Lobo stood at the window, a crumpled green pack of cigarettes in hand, ready to take another smoke break as soon as my hearing was over.
Eddie gestured to the pack in the Lobo’s hand as he walked past her. “That’s not your usual brand.”
“I switched to menthols,” she said. “They freshen your breath.”
Yeah, right.
On the far side of the long rectangular conference table sat two older men, one white-haired, one gray—the director of field operations, or DFO for short, and a seasoned investigator from Internal Affairs. Both wore navy blue suits and condemning expressions. They took one look at my outfit, exchanged glances, and frowned.
“Please excuse my attire.” I unknotted my T-shirt so it would at least cover my belly button and attempted to smooth my untamed hair. “I’m working undercover and only got word about this hearing five minutes ago.”
I slid into a seat across from the men, folded my hands on the table, and tried to appear as calm and professional as possible under the circumstances. Not easy when you’ve broken out in a cold sweat and every muscle in your body was so tense it hurt.
“Hi, y’all,” Christina chirped. She hiked her thumb at me. “This is one smart, tough chick you’ve got working for you.” She smiled and put her hand out across the table, leaning forward, her boobs likely to pop out of her shirt any second. “I’m Christina Marquez from the DEA, by the way. I’m working with Tara on the undercover case she mentioned.”
The men looked at each other as if unsure how to respond to the big-haired bimbo before them. Finally, the DFO slowly extended his hand across the table to shake hers. The investigator followed suit. Christina plunked down into the chair next to me.
My first reaction was annoyance that Christina didn’t seem to realize the critical nature of this meeting, but when the men kept sneaking glances at her as I related the events of last Friday’s bust, I realized her bust served as an effective distraction.
I explained I’d been innocently perusing documents in the office of the auto parts store when Battaglia entered, wielding the box cutter. I pulled back the fresh bandage on my arm and showed them my stitches, hoping to earn some pity points in my favor.
Christina gasped. She sat bolt upright, slapping her palms on the table, opening her big brown eyes wide, and poking out her breasts in indignation. “My God! He cut you?” She turned to the men across the table. “Clearly Tara did what she had to do.” She crossed her arms under her cleavage, pushing her breasts up even further. “Case closed.”
“I agree,” said the DFO. The investigator murmured his assent.
I signed the record of their findings to be placed in my permanent Internal Affairs file. The Lobo signed off, too, and handed the form back to them. They slipped the form into a file and opened the door to leave. Josh fell forward into the room, obviously having been listening at the door, the nosy twerp. He turned and quickly scurried away like the little rodent he was.
Once the higher-ups had gone, Lu shook a cigarette from the pack in her hand. “That went much better’n I expected.” She stuck the cigarette between her lips and shooed us out the door.
“Everyone back to work now.”
Eddie walked me and Christina out to the Cadillac. “I can’t believe I didn’t have to testify,” he said to me. “I figured we’d be begging them not to transfer you to the audit department.”
“Oh, please,” Christina said. “Men are so easy. Just show them some boob and you can get whatever you want.”
Aha. I’d had my suspicions she’d been playing a part back there. Under all that poofy hair was a nimble brain.
“I owe you one,” I told her.
The two of us climbed into the Caddie and waved good-bye to Eddie. Standing alone in the parking lot, he looked wistful, as if he wished he were going undercover on a stakeout. Beats the heck out of reviewing accounting ledgers all day.
* * *
On the way to the crack shack, I quizzed Christina about her date with Dr. Maju. “Fess up. How was your date with Ajay last night? Did he rock your Casbah?”
“We had a great time. I’m hoping to see him again.” She honked the Caddie’s loud horn as a silver Mustang sailed across three lanes in front of us, nearly taking off our front bumper. That’s Dallas traffic for you.
“Well, I hope I never have to see Ajay again.” I scratched at the itchy tape holding the bandage to my forearm.
“He’s a great kisser, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know. He’s never slipped me any tongue. Just a tongue depressor.”
“He was all over me last night,” Christina said. “Like that Hindu god with all the hands. What’s his name?” She twirled a finger in the air as she tried to remember.
“Vishnu?”
She snapped her fingers. “That’s the one.”
Twenty minutes later, we pulled into the gravel driveway of our shack-away-from-home. Across the street, two young Latino men wearing jeans and white wife-beater shirts leaned over a primer-gray seventies-era Nova, tinkering under the hood. The portable stereo at their feet blasted Tejano music. A huge, muscular black dog was chained to a tree in the yard, eyeing me and Christina and drooling, as if wondering what we might taste like. Chicken, perhaps? He hadn’t been neutered, sporting a pendulous pair of egg-shaped testicles. He appeared to be part pit bull, part Rottweiler. What would that make him? A pitweiler? A rottbull? Either way, it didn’t sound nearly as cute and friendly as a labradoodle.
Next door, a heavyset frizzy-blond woman stepped out onto her porch, a cigarette in one hand, a can of beer in the other, and a scowl on her face. “Turn that goddamn wetback music down!” she bellowed.
The young men pretended to ignore her, though one of them nudged the volume button with the toe of his work boot, turning the music down a few decibels from earsplitting to simply irritating. The other muttered something about “white trash.”
“Shouldn’t these people be at work?” I asked.
Christina just snorted in reply.
I grabbed the roach bombs we’d bought the day before out of the plastic bag. “First things first.”
After we triggered the bombs, we had to stay outside for two hours, giving the fog time to work its deadly magic. I retrieved my cooler and backpack from the car, sat down next to Christina on the front steps, and unzipped the bag. I’d brought my tax return—filing single yet again—but I really wasn’t in the mood to work on it.
“I’ve got some magazines. Want one?” I pulled out the most recent issue of Reader’s Digest and held it out to her.
Christina slapped my hand and hissed, “You get caught ‘improving your word power’ around here and you’ll blow our cover.”
“Oh. Right.” I wasn’t very good at this undercover thing yet. “How about this?”
Christina accepted my second offering. “Cosmo. That’s more like it.”
I handed her a Diet Coke from the cooler and the two of us spent some time checking out the latest fashions, sniffing perfume samples, discussing the ridiculous crap written up in the Agony Column.
“‘My boyfriend says I’m too loud when we make love,’” Christina read aloud. “‘But I can’t help expressing my pleasure. What should I do?’”
I rolled my eyes. “The answer’s obvious. Get a new boyfriend who knows a good thing when he’s got it.”
One of the guys across the street glanced over at us, called out in Spanish—something about a puta, was it?—and the other laughed. Christina glared at them and raised her middle finger.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“He asked if we were prostitutes. He won ten bucks on the Lotto and wanted to know how much that would get him.”
When I’d first moved into my town house, my neighbors had brought me homemade oatmeal cookies in a cute little basket. Things apparently worked differently here. I looked across the street and raised my middle finger, too, treating him to a French-tipped bird. Turning back to Christina, I said, “That’s great you can speak a foreign language.” Though Spanish hardly qualified as such in Texas. Since I grew up near the Louisiana border, French was standard high school fare. But I’d long since forgotten everything I’d learned, which wasn’t much to begin with. “Are your parents from Mexico?”
She shook her head. “My family emigrated from Uruguay three generations ago. My parents only speak English. I learned Spanish from the live-in maid.”
Christina certainly wasn’t the stereotypical Latina woman. “You had a full-time housekeeper?”
Christina nodded. “Daddy’s loaded. Coffee imports. But he’s very controlling. Typical Latino machismo bullshit. I originally joined the DEA to piss him off, but then I discovered I actually liked the job. Who other than the federal government would pay me to read Cosmo all morning?” She fanned the pages of the magazine and handed it back to me.
I checked the time on my silver bangle-style watch. “It’s been over two hours since we set off the roach bombs. Should be safe to go back in now.”
Christina stood and led the way up the rickety steps and into the house. I slammed into her back when she stopped unexpectedly, emitting a cry of disgust. I peered around her to see hundreds of dead or dying cockroaches littering the scuffed wood floor, a few on their backs, their legs dopily bicycling in the air. Nasty.
After we cleaned the place up and aired out the smell of insecticide, we unpacked the cooler, spread a clean sheet over the filthy sofa, and plugged in the television. We spent the afternoon being couch potatoes, waiting for Joe and watching trashy talk shows. Squinting at the small TV screen, I scrutinized Maury’s guest, who paraded back and forth across the stage in leopard-print spandex pants, gold sequined tube top, and black stilettos, her—or his—bleach-blond hair bobbing in long spiral curls.
Christina leaned toward the television for closer inspection. “That’s gotta be a guy.”
“No way.” I gestured at the screen. “Check out the crotch. No bulge.”
“Ever heard of duct tape?”
Sounded like a challenge to me. “Want to make it interesting?”
“Sure,” she said. “Loser buys the ice cream today.”
We leaned forward in our seats as Maury stepped up next to his guest. “Georgina is … a man!” The live audience whooped it up.
“Shoot.” The ice cream would be on me.
My freshly charged cell phone chirped and I went to the kitchen to get it. It was Viola.
“I heard from accounting,” she said. “They denied all your expenses.”
“On what grounds?”
“Unnecessary.”
Those tight-asses in accounting would have me sitting around this roach-infested house in my Donna Karan suit, crouching over a seatless toilet. Sheez. Martin and McGee never balked at reimbursing my expenses. Heck, they even paid for our parking and gave us a generous per diem for meals during tax season. There had been some benefits in working there. Not enough to make me want to go back, but still.
We tuned in to a soap opera as we ate a late lunch. By then it was about time for Joe to make his appearance. I’d brought along a blue nylon fanny pack to hide my gun and cuffs
in, and I set about clipping the bag to my waist in preparation for the ice-cream man. The gun and cuffs probably wouldn’t be necessary, but if I’d learned anything in the last few days, it was to never underestimate anyone. Jack Battaglia had seemed harmless until he was coming at me with that box cutter.
Christina scrunched up her nose. “A fanny pack? That’s so nineties.”
“I’m not trying to be stylish here. I’m trying to conceal my weapons. There’s nowhere to hide a gun in this short skirt.”
“Sure there is. I worked on this at home last night. Watch.” Christina slid her gun into the waistband of her cheap pleather pants, tied the striped scarf she’d scored at Sam Moon around her waist as a belt, then clipped her iPod to the scarf to hold it in place and conceal her gun. She raised her palms. “Voilà.”
“Creative.”
The faint tones of tinny ice-cream truck music drifted in through the open windows.
“There’s our man.” I dug through my purse and retrieved my wallet. Never one to welsh on a bet, I dropped a couple of singles into Christina’s outstretched palm.
We stepped onto the porch to wait. The guys across the street had disappeared, the hood now closed on the car, the dog nowhere to be seen. After a few minutes, the ice-cream truck music grew louder and Joe’s rusty van rounded the corner down the street. He slowly made his way toward us, stopping several times for young children clamoring to buy a cold treat.
As he approached our house, Christina waved and he stopped the truck. She sauntered to the van, doing that sexy hip-sway thing while I trotted along like a pathetic sidekick.
“Hey.” Joe’s gaze ran up and down Christina’s body and his lips spread in a sleazy grin.
“We got money today.” Christina allowed a sexy Spanish accent to ease into her voice as the words rolled slowly off her tongue. She waved the bills at him.
Joe leaned through the window, his eyes darting around as he tried unsuccessfully to hide the fact he was peeking down Christina’s tight, low-cut shirt. “Uh … Fudgsicle?”
Christina tossed her head, her dark locks swaying. “Nah. I want to try something different.” She peeked up at Joe with bedroom eyes. She put a pink manicured nail to her lips, drawing Joe’s attention to her mouth. “What else you got that tastes good?”