by Diane Kelly
Yep, if Nick didn’t return, a piece of myself would be forever missing.
I’d never be the same.
Ugh.
I reached into my purse and pulled out my rarely used checkbook. Tearing a check from the pad, I dated it for the twelfth of Never. I made it out for $15,000, payable not to the U.S. Red Cross, but rather to U. R. Busted. In the memo section, I wrote “Neener-neener.” I signed the check with a flourish, thus completing my prop. Hey, if you can’t be a smart-ass on the job, you should get a new job.
I was checking the secret phone for the millionth time that day when Will Dorsey stepped into my office, a fancy camera hanging around his neck. “Ready to go nab that Facecrook?”
I stood, stuffed my handcuffs into my pants pocket for easy access, and slid my gun into the hip holster hidden by my blazer. I might be missing my cheerleader, but it was nonetheless time to go, team, go. “I’m ready now.”
It was only five blocks to the central library, so Will and I decided to walk it. On the way, I asked how his three boys were doing.
“They’re great,” he replied. “Thanks for asking. They sure do wear me out, though. Between potty training and homework, my wife and I don’t get a minute to ourselves.”
Although his words made it sound as if he were complaining, his tone made it clear he didn’t really mind his situation one bit.
As we approached the library, we glanced around for Peter. There was no man holding up a sign with my alias written on it. The only men we saw were making their way in or out of the building. None appeared to be waiting for do-gooder Sara Galloway to show up with a $15,000 check.
We stopped at a spot about thirty feet from the front doors, far enough from the bustle that we wouldn’t impede traffic flowing in and out of the building and where we could execute a bust without interference. As we stood there, I glanced around, searching the moving masses for a man who appeared to be looking for a free meal ticket. Unfortunately, I had trouble seeing much through the black pair of sunglasses I’d purchased at the car wash. The shades were excessively dark, making the entire world appear to be at dusk. Frustrated, I ripped them from my face, marched over to a nearby trash can, and tossed them inside. I really needed to find time to get over to the Brighton store for a good pair.
As we continued to wait, I pulled the check from my purse and held it in my hand as if ready to hand it over. I glanced around, noting nobody of interest except, perhaps, a stocky man in a nice suit leaning back against a light post half a block down, smoking a cigarette and talking on his cell. His gold watch glinted in the afternoon sun as he put the butt to his lips and took a puff.
“Think that’s him?” Will asked.
“The guy in the suit?”
“No. The nerdy-looking dude heading our way.”
I followed his gaze to a man in khaki pants and a pink button-down who proceeded slowly toward the building, glancing left and right, clutching something tightly to his chest as if to hide it from passersby. It was flat and rectangular. A book? I shrugged. “Maybe.”
As we stood there watching, the man scurried up to the book drop, took one last, quick glance around, then shoved the book he’d been holding inside. Just as quickly, he scurried off.
Will stifled a laugh. “I bet I know what kind of book that was. He’s looking fifty shades of pink right now.”
We continued to wait, the minutes ticking slowly by.
3:04.
3:05.
3:06.
The man in the suit ended his phone call, but continued to puff away on his cigarette. He glanced our way a couple of times, but I supposed that was to be expected. We’d been standing out here quite some time. He was probably curious why.
3:07.
3:08.
3:09.
When my cell phone showed 3:12, my anticipation turned to annoyance. “Where is he? Do you think he figured out this was a ruse?”
Just as the words left my mouth, the man in the suit tossed his cigarette butt aside and aimed directly for us. I realized now that he’d been performing his own surveillance, watching me and Will to figure out if we looked like some benevolent bookkeeper and her friend along to snap a photograph. Looked like we’d passed muster.
“Here he comes,” I said under my breath to William.
As the man approached, I opened my eyes wider, hoping to look innocent and excited.
“Sara Galloway?” the man asked when he was twenty feet away.
“That’s me!” I called, walking toward him with my hand extended. “You must be Peter Stanovich.”
He nodded as he shook my hand. “That I am. Sorry I’m late. Had a phone call I had to take. Seems there’s been a mudslide in Blefuscu.”
Blefuscu? Wasn’t that one of the fictional islands in Gulliver’s Travels?
Still holding on to his hand, I cocked my head, forcing a smile. “I thought you said you’d be holding a sign with my name.”
“Forgot paper and a pen.” He shrugged nonchalantly and gave my hand a final squeeze before releasing it. “It’s so nice to meet you, Sara.”
Nice?
Ha!
He’ll soon be eating his words.
Stanovich glanced at Will, his expression questioning.
“I’m Sara’s friend. LeBron Tee.”
What the—
Will held up his camera. “She asked me to take a photo for her.”
Peter, or whoever the heck he was, smiled a stiff smile. “How nice.”
Will waved his hand. “Scootch together while she hands you the check. That’ll make a nice shot.”
Stanovich turned to face the man he knew as LeBron Tee. I turned, too, and sidled up to Stanovich on the left, holding the check face out in front of us. He reached out and grasped one end, as if afraid I might change my mind and decide not to give it to him.
Will raised his Nikon to his eyes. “Say cheese!”
“Cheese!” called Stanovich.
Sucker.
Before Peter could figure out what was happening, I pulled my cuffs from my pocket and snapped one of them onto the wrist of his hand that was touching the check. Click.
“What the—” His brain apparently worked faster than his mouth. He yanked his cuffed hand aside, yanking the check with it.
Before I could get the other cuff snapped he took off running. Luckily for me, those cigarettes had taken their toll, and within a few yards the man was huffing and puffing like a big bad wolf trying to demolish real estate owned by swine.
I ran around in front of him, put my arms out like a basketball player blocking a shot, and yelled, “Federal agents! Hands up!”
He, too, was ready to play ball, faking a left but then heading right, getting an advantage as my momentum carried me several steps in the wrong direction.
“Get him!” I yelled to Dorsey.
Will ran after Stanovich and circled around in front of him. As we closed in from both sides, Stanovich walked backward now, his hands half raised, the cuffs dangling from his wrist. In a panic, he glanced left and right. Realizing there was no escape, he turned and ran toward the library. In a split second he’d yanked the door open and run inside.
Dorsey and I were after him in a flash, careening into each other as we both tried to go through the same door at the same time.
I pulled my gun from its holster. I had no idea whether Stanovich was armed, but it never hurt to be safe rather than sorry. “Everyone down!” I called to those in the vicinity. “Federal agents in hot pursuit!”
Rather than ducking, the bewildered woman working the circulation desk put her hands in the air instead. Instinctive reaction when seeing a gun, I supposed. Several others nearby followed suit, surrendering rather than taking cover. Oh, well. I supposed it didn’t much matter. By that point our target had run farther into the room. These people were safe.
My eyes spotted Stanovich rounding the reference desk up ahead and bolting into the monolithic shelves of the nonfiction section. Running after him,
I darted past biographies of Hillary Clinton, Jim Henson, Desmond Tutu, and at least eight different offerings on the band One Direction. Heck, those boys hadn’t been alive long enough to fill a book with their life stories, had they?
I continued to chase Stanovich into the children’s section.
“Stop!” I hollered.
A woman and her daughter who were seated at one of the child-sized tables nearby looked up and scowled. They put their index fingers to their lips. Shhh!
Sheesh, people! ’Scuse me for trying to bust a criminal here!
Stanovich ran deeper into the kids’ area. Just as he passed a bookshelf, a stroller appeared right in front of me, blocking my way. With all the momentum I had going, I knew I couldn’t stop myself in time. My options were to slam into the stroller at full speed and risk injuring the child, or to dive over the thing, execute a rolling somersault, and leap to my feet to continue my pursuit. Hey, they did it in the movies all the time. I’d even seen Keanu Reeves do it once. And if that guy could do it, surely I could, too.
I leaped into the air to execute the dive maneuver. As I flew through the air, realization struck, telling me that my visualization had been overly ambitious. I had neither the flexibility nor the coordination to pull off such an acrobatic maneuver, nor did I have a stunt double to execute the feat for me. I managed to clear the baby stroller and curl myself into a ball, but rather than bouncing to my feet I careened like an off-kilter bowling ball across the floor and into a waist-high bookshelf.
Graceful, huh?
Fortunately, the shelves were bolted tight to the floor so they didn’t fall over onto the trio of schoolgirls perusing the Laura Ingalls Wilder books on the other side. The impact did, however, release an avalanche of heavy hardcover Harry Potter books, which pelted me with bruising force as if they were, indeed, sorcerer’s stones.
While I lay buried under multiple copies of all seven books—seriously, J.K., wouldn’t a trilogy have sufficed?—Will ran past me, chasing Stanovich into the fiction section.
Grabbing the top of the bookshelf, I leveraged myself to my feet, kicked the Half-Blood Prince and Prisoner of Azkaban aside and ran, fast and furious, to the fiction area. I could see Stanovich running down the aisle between the two sets of tall shelves. Sprinting along the outer corridor, I overtook his pace and turned down an aisle to intercept him.
We collided at the intersection of romance and mystery. Thanks to my recent softball game with the Tax Maniacs, today I had the forethought to slide, taking Stanovich out at the ankles. His arms windmilled, the loose handcuff clanking against the bookcases as he grabbed at the shelves on his way down.
Thum-thump!
He hit the ground, his hip making the first impact, his shoulder the next. Will and I pounced on him in an instant. Will rolled Stanovich onto his back, grabbed the man’s free hand and held it still, while I wrestled the other into place and secured the loose cuff with a click.
My quarry now cuffed, I sat back on my haunches to catch my breath. Chasing this idiot had winded me. Phew.
“Let me go!” Stanovich screeched at the top of his lungs. “Let me go!”
I levered myself to a stand and looked down at him. “Not gonna happen, buddy.”
From all around us came shushing sounds. A quick and efficient Sh. An elongated Shhhhh. An emphatic Shh! One bibliophile even offered a melodic and rythmic sh-sh-sh-sh-sh, like a human lawn sprinkler.
Keeping my voice low lest I be shushed to death, I read Peter Stanovich his rights.
“You have the right to remain silent,” I whispered. “I suggest you take advantage of it.”
The moron didn’t listen to my advice. “Let me go!” he shrieked again. “Let me go!”
A fresh medley of shushes came from all around.
“Let me go!”
Jeez. If this guy didn’t have the sense to shut up, I’d just have to shut him up myself, wouldn’t I?
I grabbed a book from the shelf, a juicy Scottish romance featuring a man in a kilt with six-pack abs and a bare, waxed chest on the cover. I wouldn’t mind eating some haggis off his firm tummy.
“Good choice,” Will said, gesturing to the cover.
I cut him a questioning look.
“What?” he said defensively. “My wife reads those books and leaves them lying around.”
“Help!” hollered Stanovich, trying a new tactic. “I’m being attacked! Someone help!”
The library patrons were far less concerned with this man’s safety than they were about the noise level.
Sh!
Shhh!
Sh-sh-sh!
Opening the book, I ripped out page 56. Rrrip! I crumpled the paper and bent down to shove it in Stanovich’s mouth. Ha! Not only had I made him eat his own words, he was now eating those of author Rose N. Bloom, a pen name if ever I’d heard one.
Rrrip! I ripped out page 57 and repeated the process, having to push a little harder to get this page into his mouth given that he was working his tongue, trying to expel the previous one. I continued to recite his rights. “Anything you say can and will be held against you in a court of law.”
Rrrip! “You have the right to an attorney,” I said, shoving page 58 into his mouth now. “If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.”
By the time I was done reading his rights, Stanovich’s mouth was filled to the choking point with all of chapter 4 and a portion of chapter 5. His gag reflex activated. Hork! Hork! Hork! The sound was followed, of course, by a chorus of Shh! Shh! Shh!
A petite librarian wearing a pastel yellow dress, reading glasses, and a shocked expression sprinted up the aisle. “What is going on here!”
Her gaze traveled from the choking man on the floor to the book in my hand, a gasp leaping from her throat as she took in the evidence of my horrific act of bibliocide.
A warm blush spread up my cheeks, just like the time my elementary school librarian had caught me looking up the word “erection” in the dictionary. Prior to what I had just learned on the playground, I’d only heard a derivative of the word used in conjunction with the word “set,” as in “erector set.” “Um … is this available for checkout?”
Shh!
Shhhhh.
Sh!
Disregarding the pleas for silence, Stanovich turned his head to the side and—hwaaak—expelled what had to be the world’s largest spitball.
Will looked down at it and snapped a photo. “I’m sending this in to The Guinness Book of World Records.”
I pointed down at it. The words “swollen, engorged manhood” stared up at us. “You might want to shoot from a different angle.”
Will nudged the wad with his toe, rolling it until the words disappeared over the horizon, and snapped another shot.
Bending down, I pulled a wallet from the back pocket of Stanovich’s pants. He had nearly seven hundred dollars in cash inside, as well as a Michigan driver’s license identifying him as Stanley Peters. Like me, he’d chosen an alias not too different from his real name.
“Jig’s up, Stan my man,” I said. “That’s what happens when you let your greed get the best of you.”
While we waited for the marshals to arrive and haul Peters off to the klink, I sorted things out with the librarian. When she learned I was a federal agent, she waived the damage fee for the book. She didn’t spare me the disapproving look, however. “Next time might I suggest you choose a less popular genre with which to disable your perpetrators. A reference book, perhaps.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I did my best to look contrite. Actually, I was feeling pretty darn proud of myself. Not every agent would have been so resourceful. Luckily for me, I was a person who could think on her feet.
Once the marshals had taken Peters away, Will and I started our trek back to the IRS offices.
I turned to him as we waited at a stoplight. “LeBron Tee? What the heck was that?”
“It’s a cross between LeBron James and Mister T,” he replied matter-of-factly. “I
wanted to sound like a badass black dude.”
“You are a badass black dude. Just because you don’t wear gold chains or a sports jersey doesn’t mean you aren’t as tough as they are.”
He sighed. “I suppose you’re right. But when I transferred over from the collections department, I guess I thought special agents would look different somehow. I’m wearing the same suits I wore then.”
“Being a badass isn’t about how you look on the outside,” I said. “It’s about who you are on the inside. But maybe you’re on to something. We could propose a uniform to Lu. Maybe something with tights and a cape printed with dollar signs?”
“Tights?” Will cringed. “I have a hard enough time with briefs.”
chapter twenty-nine
Toga! Toga!
I returned to the office to find that the very last rose petal had fallen off the stem, dropping to its death on top of my Fifty-Yard Line Foundation file. Even though the only thing that remained in the vase were thorny, mold-covered stems, I couldn’t bring myself to throw them out. They might be the last flowers Nick ever sent me.
It was after five o’clock, well past quitting time, but I decided to take one last glance at my inbox. Good thing I did. To my surprise and delight, I found a manila envelope from Anthony Giacomo. The stamp on the outside indicated it had been hand-delivered by a courier.
Inside I found a certified check from Rodney Fowler in the amount of $100,000, less than my last, padded demand but far more than I’d hoped to settle for.
I threw a victorious fist into the air. “Score!”
The attached letter from Anthony, typed up on his law firm’s letterhead, read:
You drive a hard bargain, Agent Holloway, but I’ve managed to convince the Fowlers to bend, at least partially, to your will. Of course my upstanding clients admit nothing, other than that you were an immense nuisance, comparable to a bit of toilet paper stuck to one’s shoe, as well as an artistic neophyte with a pathetic and unenviable lack of discernment. However, it was worth the check’s sum simply to put this matter to rest.
As far as your list of suggestions regarding the operation of the Unic, the staff will implement them as soon as reasonably possible, but in no event later than two months from the date of this letter.