Mud Run Murder

by Leslie Langtry

  "Well, good luck with that." Kelly shoved her empty plate away. And that's when I noticed the dark circles under her eyes.

  "What's going on with you?" I asked. "You look terrible."

  Kelly agreed. She knew I didn't mean anything bad by it. "I'm exhausted. Robert's been working a lot of overtime, so I'm the only one taking care of Finn most of the time."

  "I've never known Robert to do that." I tapped my chin.

  Robert worked for the local headquarters of an international farm implement manufacturer. I had no idea what he did, mostly because every time he told me about it my eyes sort of glazed over.

  "He got a promotion a few months back. But I think that he's really avoiding taking care of our daughter."

  My jaw dropped. "You're joking. Your husband wouldn't do that!"

  She shrugged. "It's a lot of work. Plus the hospital can't give me time off because we have two women out on maternity leave. We're strapped."

  "Can I help?"

  "Not at the hospital. You'd probably kill off half the patients."

  "Hey!" I was a little hurt. "I meant babysitting. You could drop Finn off at my…I mean, Rex's place now and then, and you could get a nap in."

  "That's not a terrible idea…" Kelly bit her lip. "I could use the sleep. It's either that or a medically induced coma so that I can get some rest."

  We went over her schedule for the week and decided I could take Finn the next afternoon for about four hours. This was going to accomplish two things. One, Kelly would see that I am a grown-up. And two, it would distract Rex from talking about moving forward with our relationship. Bonus! We finished eating, and Kelly dropped me back at Rex's through the alley.

  Philby met me at the door. Something was up.

  "Hey there, girl." I reached down and stroked the top of her head between her ears.

  It was her favorite spot, and her eyes usually glazed over. Except for this time. Instead, her eyes were narrowed, and she seemed to be angry. Have you ever had a cat that looks like Hitler glaring at you? It's unnerving to say the least. Martini came racing into the room, eyes bulging. She stopped suddenly then raced back out of the room, her tail about five times thicker than usual. Philby never took her eyes off me.

  "I don't have time for this," I explained as I walked past her.

  I settled down on the couch with my laptop, facing the window so that I could keep an eye on my house. Maria still hadn't let me know if anyone was on their way to "deal" with me, but I wasn't taking any chances. Philby took up position at the other end of the couch and continued her stare down.

  "What?" I asked. She didn't respond.

  Ignoring her, I went back to the computer. My cat didn't appear to like this. Within seconds she was sitting on the keyboard, her butt hitting keys that turned the language from English to Swahili, and strange Web pages came up and disappeared again. I lifted the cat from the laptop and set her down beside me.

  This didn't seem to deter the feline führer. Without taking her eyes off of me, she swatted at my arm. With a sigh I put down the laptop and got up. Philby jumped down from the couch and started trotting toward the downstairs bathroom, looking over her shoulder every few seconds to make sure I was following. I did because this cat wasn't going to leave me alone until she showed me whatever it was.

  Once inside the bathroom, she jumped up on the edge of the tub and looked meaningfully from me to what was inside and back to me again.

  A dead mouse lay across the drain.

  "Did you do that?" I asked Philby, who began strutting around the edge of the tub like a Roman conqueror with tributes.

  At this point I wasn't quite sure what I was supposed to do. Philby now added yowling to her swagger, but I couldn't take my eyes off the deceased rodent. Clearly, I was expected to do something.

  "Good kitty!" I stroked my cat's head. "Such a brave and vicious killer of mice!"

  Philby stopped and gave me a satisfied look. I did something right I guessed. Reaching into the tub, I plucked up the mouse by its tail, and while holding it as far away from my body as I could, moved through the house, went out the back door, and deposited it into the trash can.

  I washed my hands for what felt like two hours. It was less of course, but I felt a little like Lady MacBeth trying to get rid of the blood on her hands, if Lady MacBeth had to dispose of dead mice too.

  The cats were nowhere to be seen, so I figured it was okay to go back to the laptop. I must've done the right thing because they came nowhere near me. Time to do a little research. I had connections in LA and I had to find them. The good thing about being a spy—someone always owes you a favor. Even if they really don't, most of the time you can convince them that they still do. Spies spend so much time in so many different countries on multiple cases that it's easy to forget to whom you owe what. An hour later I had a couple of phone numbers, and I began to make calls.

  "Zeke! It's Finn!" I said as a gruff voice answered. I had to use my spy name, Finnoughla Czrygy, because he probably didn't know I'd changed it to Merry Wrath when I had left the Agency.

  "Finn! How are you?" Zeke's big voice was a tonic.

  Zeke was a very large man who had been a field agent for ten years when I'd first started at the Agency. By the time I left he'd moved pretty high up in administration. One day, for reasons known only to him, he just up and quit. He moved to LA and became a consultant in the film industry. His specialty was spy movies, but he could pretty much handle everything. That man was a walking encyclopedia when it came to covert activities.

  "Um, not so great." I wanted to chat a little, but this seemed like the perfect opening. "Are you on a secure line?"

  He laughed. "Of course! I'm not an idiot. What's up?"

  "Do you know anything about Spy Diary? It just came out…"

  "…And was soon shut down. Yeah, I heard about that. But I didn't work on it."

  "Do you know who did?"

  "Why do you ask?" He didn't sound suspicious. It was a normal question for a person whose life had been clandestine for years.

  "Well…" I hesitated a little. Did I really want to drag him into this?

  "What's going on?"

  After a very heavy sigh I spoke. "There are a few things in that movie that seem to be pages stolen from my career playbook."

  There was silence on the other end. It worried me a little because you can take the spy out of the business, but you can't take the business out of the spy. Would he clam up? Tote the Agency line?

  "Wow. I didn't know that. And it was such a bad movie."

  I wasn't sure if I should be offended by that. I chose not to be. "Yeah. It wasn't great. I saw only about a third before they shut it down."

  "And now the CIA thinks you leaked secrets."

  I nodded, even though he couldn't see me. "That's right. I'd kind of like to have this tied up before they arrive."

  "Okay. I'll see what I can find out. Give me at least twenty-four hours."

  "It's a deal." I hung up and felt a little better. Zeke could sniff out a plot like a bloodhound ferreting out the sausages in the deli aisle.

  I made a couple of calls after that, but came up empty-handed. Sometimes you get lucky…sometimes you don't. Hopefully Zeke would give me the information I needed.

  Now what? Rex was looking into Dewey Barnes' murder, and Zeke was working on intel about Spy Diary. What should I do next? I texted Maria but got a message that said she couldn't talk now. That could mean anything. I reminded myself that I shouldn't read too much into that.

  It was getting late. Looking at my watch told me it was five thirty. What time would Rex come home for dinner? Was I supposed to get that started? If I moved in here, would he expect me to do that? If so, that might be a deal breaker. Rex ate fairly normal food, while I subsisted on canned ravioli and pizza rolls.

  Wow. Thinking about that kind of domesticity came a little too easy. Maybe Kelly was right, and it was time to step up. Rex had a really nice house. It was larger than mine, and h
e actually had furniture. And nice furniture. I had a couch, a TV, and a crappy coffee table from IKEA that I hadn't put together right. In fact it was only recently that I finally got real drapes to replace the Dora the Explorer bed sheets that had been hanging in my living room. I put them up in my bedroom windows instead. I really liked those sheets.

  Rex had a piano and coordinated furniture that matched the floors and drapes. He even had plants. I just wasn't that into permanency. My adulthood had been spent moving from one crappy town in South America to another in Japan. Or Russia. Or the Middle East. A regular routine wasn't my strong suit.

  "I guess I'd better make an attempt at dinner," I said to an unimpressed and possibly comatose Martini, who was lying on her back on the table, sound asleep.

  The kitchen was well stocked. Rex had pasta, fruits, vegetables, sauces, meat…stuff you could throw together to make dinner. The only area in which he'd failed was in cookies. I'd sold Rex a case of mint cookies. But they were nowhere to be found. I made a mental note to buy a case of Oreos.

  I pulled out my cell and opened an app I'd recently discovered. You plugged in the stuff you had in your kitchen, and it gave you a recipe for something you could make. So far I'd managed grilled cheese sandwiches. I always had cheese on hand. Always. I also had a drawer full of takeout menus…just in case.

  It took half an hour to plug in everything Rex had in his pantry. Which I thought was weird. How many men kept a fully stocked pantry? Yes, my boyfriend could cook. But it's still strange. My pantry looks like it was very carefully planned by a deranged toddler.

  I rejected the first twenty-two recipes because it was like they were written in foreign languages. And I speak Russian, Spanish, Japanese, and Arabic. Words like whip and reduction and colander made me wonder how anyone could understand these things.

  I settled on spaghetti because it only had two ingredients—sauce and pasta. Ingredients that I was just organizing when my cell rang. It was Zeke. I answered on the second ring.

  "Hey!" I answered. "That was fast!"

  "It doesn't take me long. My skills aren't rusty. And there are only a few studios that could've pulled this off."

  "What did you find out?" I asked as I pawed through drawers looking for a measuring cup.

  "It's Flying Bicycle Productions—a subsidiary of something called Black Ops Productions. And Finn, it's crawling with CIA agents."

  "How do you know? Are you there?" I pictured dozens of men in black suits and dark sunglasses poking around a studio lot, trying to seem inconspicuous.

  "No. But since you called I've had fifteen different offers for lunch from old contacts who told me they're in town on 'vacation.' You and I know that when agents go on vacation we tend to spend it close to home, not traveling to California."

  This was mostly true. We were away from home for such long stretches of time that home seemed like an exotic getaway to us.

  "Are they asking you to lunch to pick your brain about Spy Diary?"

  He laughed. "They can try. The funny thing is, none of them knew that the other fourteen were calling. I've set up lunch with all of them at Spago for tomorrow. I can't wait to see them walk in and realize they weren't the only ones who'd invited me to lunch."

  "Put a hidden camera up. I'd love to see the footage."

  "Already done. I've been bugging most of the restaurants around here for years. It helps with my 'networking.'"

  I thanked him and hung up before he told me that he was blackmailing half of Hollywood. I didn't need any more drama. Dropping everything, I ran for the laptop I'd left in Rex's living room and stopped cold.

  Someone was at my house. I slid forward to the window and ducked behind the curtain before glancing out. A man was walking up to my front door, and a strange car was parked in my driveway. Who was it?

  The man, who looked to be in his late twenties, knocked on my door. He waited for a few moments before knocking again. Maybe it was just some salesman or something. When I didn't answer the door, because I was across the street, the guy walked over to my front window and peered inside. There was something slightly familiar about him, but I couldn't pin it down. I shoved that thought aside and focused on why this guy was looking inside my house.

  Huh. That was a bit creepy. When he saw nothing inside, he walked back to his car. I thought he was leaving, but instead he opened the trunk and pulled something out. In my experience, people almost never do that if they're leaving. Unless there's a body in the trunk…but people rarely open the trunk in public if there's a dead guy in it.

  I got a better look at him. I was wrong on the age—he was more likely in his early thirties. And this guy had long, dark hair and was wearing sunglasses with thick, black frames. He was dressed in black pants and a black T-shirt. His overall look screamed tactical. And then I saw what he had in his hands. Some sort of long, metal box. Kind of like the tool kit Rex keeps in his garage.

  I never called a contractor. Had Rex? He was always saying I needed a real security system. Had he called this guy? And why wouldn't he have told me if he had? It didn't make sense. Alarm bells were going off in my head, and my CIA spy-dey senses tingled. Something was wrong here.

  The guy closed the trunk door and started walking the other way. He turned the corner at my garage, and I lost him. This was wrong. All wrong.

  Was this guy someone from the Agency? Maria said she'd let me know when they were coming, and she hadn't called. Or maybe it was the guy who'd killed Dewey Barnes, the pizza guy. I wasn't going to wait to find out.

  I slipped on my shoes, threw on a sweatshirt and baseball hat, and tucked my gun into my waistband. It was five forty-five. Rex would be home any minute. Should I wait? I could call him, and he'd have a squad car here in minutes.

  But then again, what if this guy was booby-trapping my house? It wasn't unheard of, and I'd even gone up against something like that back in the field when a man dressed as a priest had been caught putting a bomb under my doormat. He really shouldn't have done it in broad daylight, nor should he have used a round bomb under a flat mat. Not all spies are smart.

  Did I want the cops to walk into a trap? They weren't prepared for that. I couldn't live with myself if anything happened to any of Rex's men. If this guy was laying mines in my backyard, I was the only one who was going to deal with him.

  I left the house through the back door and walked nonchalantly across the street—as if I was just out for a walk. An alley ran behind my house, dead-ending before the next house. It was completely overgrown with bushes, so if you didn't know it was there, you'd miss it completely. And it offered a perfect position to spy on my backyard. Of course, this meant anyone else could spy on my backyard too. I'd probably have to rethink that once I figured out what was going on.

  I moved carefully through the foliage, trying not to step on a branch and give away my position. In spy movies the agent always runs through the woods with no attention to giving himself away. In real life you moved slowly, watching your feet and your surroundings at the same time. Once, in rural Ukraine, I was tracking a suspected double agent through an insanely dense forest when a large dead squirrel fell out of a tree and landed noisily in an extra crunchy bed of dead leaves. The bad guy had turned around and spotted me before taking off through the trees. I was transferred to Japan the next day. Stupid dead squirrel.

  I finally made it to where I could see the back of my house. There was a back door into the garage that was the only entrance. The windows were too high up to get into easily, and I'd nailed all mine shut in my own attempt at home security. I might not be able to cook, but I can nail a window shut like the best of them.

  The garage door was open. This guy was probably inside my house. I pulled out my cell and called Rex, but it went straight to voice mail. Should I call 9-1-1? What if this really was just a contractor? Maybe Rex had even told me about it and I'd forgotten. That would make sense. I'd kind of been distracted lately. And if it was true, then, I had a great boyfriend.

&n
bsp; I'd always wondered if the guys at the station gave Rex a hard time about me. After all, there'd been a lot of dead bodies around me lately. I didn't want to add to the jokes. If I tackled a contractor called in by Rex, I'd never hear the end of it. On the other hand, if this was a CIA agent coming after me, I'd be better dealing with this alone.

  Skirting the backyard so that I couldn't be seen from any of the windows, I got as close to the garage as I could. Finally I crept inside the house as quietly as possible. Standing in the kitchen, I strained to hear any noise.

  Nothing.

  As far as I knew, contractors made noise. That meant this wasn't a contractor. Which meant one of two things. Either he was here to search and bug my house—which wasn't good. Or he was lying in wait to capture or kill me—also not good.

  My house was a ranch house built in the 1950s, so it was all one level except for the basement. From the kitchen, which was in the back of the house, you could go right down the hallway toward the bathroom and two bedrooms or to the left into my living room. But first, I had to see if he'd gone into the basement, which was accessible right by the door to the garage. If he was down there and I checked this floor first, he'd hear me moving around. And that was an advantage I wasn't about to give him.

  Fortunately for me, I'd installed my own "system." A small piece of clear tape at the top of the door would let me know if anyone had opened it to go downstairs. The tape was there and intact. That made things easier.

  Except for the fact that now I was inside my very small house with a possible killer or the world's quietest contractor. And the only advantages I had were that I knew the layout and he didn't know I was here.

  Hitting the camera app on my cell, I crouched down in the kitchen and held it into the hallway. No one was there. I slid to the other side and did the same sweep of the living room. Again, empty. This gave me another advantage because now I knew he was in one of three rooms at the end of the hallway.

  I thought about how to approach this. The bathroom would be the first room on the right. And it not only opened into the hallway, but also into my bedroom. I'd be able to check out two rooms without being trapped in the hall.