Chapter 7
The bundle of twigs that hung above our front door was stale and cobwebby, since Crash’s monthly cleansing ritual was coming up any day now. Even so, Jacob and I bent together, whispering a few last minute plans beneath it. He put two fingers to my forearm—a little reminder we’d developed to keep one another from getting carried away when talking plainly wasn’t safe—but that was fine. I’d be able to get my point across while keeping what I said uselessly vague. “Don’t worry. I can do this.”
He pressed his forehead into my temple. “Just…be careful.”
“Believe me, I know how to bullshit. I’ve been practicing my whole life.” With the sí-no holding out on us, somebody needed to start scrutinizing Laura Kim. Since I didn’t really know her, it would sound less fishy if I was the one to ask the questions…even though it was killing Jacob to turn over this critical piece of his investigation to anyone else. Even me. In my fantasies, I would come up with a question that bowled her over to the point where she readily admitted exactly what she’d been doing that day, then signed an affidavit to seal the deal. But since Laura was no slouch in the brains department, it was doubtful I’d stun her with my clever interrogation skills.
We’d cooked up a plan that had seemed plausible when it was whispered beneath the comforter in the dead of night. Now, though, I was getting cold feet. Jacob climbed into the big black Crown Vic and pulled away, and there was nothing else I could do other than follow through.
I took my own car, once I’d smeared off the words WASH ME with a handful of gray snow. My unimpressive compact was a critical part of our plan. I fidgeted in my seat all the way there, and followed Jacob into the underground parking garage with a death-grip on my steering wheel. He pulled into a numbered spot, and I slotted my car into visitor parking and cut the engine.
Pulling the keys from the ignition was so automatic for me, I did so despite the fact that I’d been planning to deliberately lock them in. As I put them back, I tried to recall ever having locked my keys anywhere and came up blank. Maybe the part of my brain that’s responsible for lock awareness was more highly developed than your average Joe’s. Probably so—the sight of the keyring dangling from the ignition made me uneasy. But according to Jacob, this would be the best way for me to get Laura Kim alone. So I opened my door, powered the locks down, made a silent apology to my keys, and slammed the door shut behind me.
Jacob and I got on the elevator, and I said, “Shit, I left my keys behind.” I thought it sounded reasonably natural.
“Check your pockets,” Jacob said, which we hadn’t planned, and damn if it didn’t sound even twice as natural as my remark. He was good.
I patted them all down, locating a couple of aspirin, a few packets of salt, a small flashlight, and a breath spray container Zigler had refilled with Florida Water. “Not here.”
The elevator sighed open and we strolled out into the classy FPMP lobby. “Vic locked his keys in his car,” Jacob announced to Laura—again deviating from the script. It was supposed to have been me admitting my negligence, but somehow, this flowed. “Can you pop the door?”
“Onboard navigation will open it for you,” she said. “I can make a call.”
“It’s an older car,” I said.
“Is there a car alarm?”
“No.” I’d figured my Fraternal Order of Police window decal was deterrent enough. So far I’d been correct. Either that or it was obvious there was nothing in there worth stealing. “As cars go, it’s pretty low-tech.”
“I can take a look, but if it’s not the right kind of lock, it won’t work.” Laura took off her headset, routed her multi-line phone somewhere else, then opened up a desk drawer and fished out a long piece of metal.
Jacob caught my eye and held it for a fraction of a beat, then said, “Call me if you need anything,” before he keycarded himself away.
And then it was just Laura and me and the slim jim. And the awkwardness. Yeah. That was pretty present, too. Riffing with Jacob had felt pretty good. But now I was alone, and I realized that I actually had no desire to be there, and the thought of being alone with Laura wasn’t exactly heartening. Without my sympathetic Jacob audience to play to, I realized I was actually fairly rusty at bullshitting.
The elevator doors were a dull, brushed metal that only reflected us back as fuzzy blobs of light and dark, but I was probably a head taller than her. We were both wearing black, with black hair and pale skin. I could make out her glasses frames as a dark smear. My reflection had a spot of red where the knot of my tie was. We rode down without a word, unless you counted the screaming in my head that said, Make conversation! Say something! Anything! “So. You’re the resident locksmith?”
“I guess I’m pretty handy.”
As I wondered whether that was supposed to have a double meaning, the doors opened onto the garage level. I then began to doubt the intelligence of placing myself with someone I suspected to be an assassin in a deserted underground parking facility. It hadn’t struck me as particularly creepy when I’d convinced Jacob to let me try it—but that was then. And Jacob was upstairs somewhere now. When Laura left the elevator ahead of me, I unbuttoned my overcoat and my jacket, and shrugged back the right side. Given her training, Laura could probably shoot circles around me, even if she didn’t practice on human-shaped targets. Still, I felt better knowing I could draw if I had to.
There were no windows, just wall-mounted lights every few yards. The concrete looked white and fresh, and the framing was painted yellow. Still, there was an underground oppressiveness to the garage that no amount of lighting and paint could illuminate, and a chill that settled on my skin where sweat prickled at the back of my neck. I cuffed it away and followed my subject, only slightly behind, so it didn’t seem too obvious. Either she didn’t notice, or didn’t care. Probably she was just trying to make sure I knew she was on to me by deliberately ignoring my tension.
She paused a few steps away from the elevator and said, “Where’s your…oh.” The other vehicles were sedans and SUVs. Mine was a compact. The others were garage-kept, and they’d seen the inside of a car wash within the past week. While I’d managed to rub Richie’s message off my trunk, there was still a salt coating that speckled my car without obscuring the shopping cart dent on the rear passenger door. My little Ford stood out like a sore thumb…a cheap thumb covered in salt. “I should be able to pop it,” she said.
She moved to a rear door, the dented door, then said, “Are you sure you don’t want to call a locksmith? A car door’s got all kinds of wires in it, and there’s always a chance to mess up—”
“You’ve done this before, though?”
“More times than I can count.”
What was the encore, hiding in the back seat and introducing a well-placed bullet to the unsuspecting driver? I stood several steps away while she peeled back the weather stripping and slid the tool in. “You’ve gotta take your time,” she said. “When you finally do grab the lock, you can tell by the way it feels.” I checked her side. Was she packing? It didn’t look like it, not unless she had a really, really small firearm under her fitted suit.
“Sorry to pull you away from your…” I let it hang, hoping she’d fill in the blank with her job title.
“No problem. I don’t mind.”
I so sucked at covert questioning. I gathered myself for another try. “When you’re not popping locks, what is it you do?”
She laughed. It sounded a bit self-conscious. Maybe I made her as nervous as she made me, which was never a good sign. That’s what they always say about things like bees and stray dogs, right before you end up in a world of pain. “Agent Dreyfuss calls me The Fixer. Because I can fix just about anything.”
Anything at all…like the Roger Burke situation? Hoping she might be circling around to an explanation, I said, “Like what?”
“I think I found the spot.” She paused in her lock-fishing and did a few shoulder rolls, then looked me in the eye. “Things like s
topping a movement to have Psychs disqualified for state college aid. You wouldn’t have heard about it—we nipped that one early. Things like locating partners and allies in the business community willing to provide us with additional monitoring. Things like checking out our personnel.”
She dropped her gaze as she said that last item. Since I was on the FPMP hire-list, I could only presume it meant she knew every last thing about me. In other words, the balance of power here was way more skewed than I’d thought. I did my best impression of “comfortable” by aiming for a light tone. “As job titles go, it’s got a better ring to it than PC-M5.”
Maybe she had perused all my un-private records, but she didn’t know me well enough to see that I was faking comfort. She laughed nervously. “It is pretty catchy. Too bad all my official paperwork says Operations Coordinator.” She turned back to the car door while a million grisly variations of fixing things flashed before my mind’s eye. “I think it was…okay, there. Right there.” Pull, click, and the rear door was open. “You can reach into the front to hit the power-lock. You’ve got longer arms.”
Why couldn’t a person unlock a whole car from the rear doors? Not everyone kept small children in the back seat. Some of us consumers would have preferred to open up the vehicle without exposing our backs to the person who’d just helped us break in. I solved this dilemma by facing her the whole time I stretched over the passenger seat rather than making my back a target. Luckily I did have long arms and I got the car open in a few awkward flails. I then hopped in the front door and grabbed my keys from the ignition.
As I battened down the car, I was relieved our little lockpicking stunt was over. Unfortunately, it hadn’t really told me anything at all about the elusive Operations Coordinator—other than the fact that I’d now need to check my back seat every time I got in my car to make sure she wasn’t hiding there with the ice scrapers and poorly folded maps. All my careful maneuvering, and I’d managed to come up with a job title, one that Jacob could have easily supplied. Super. I attempted to pry out just a little bit more. “So does everyone pack a slim jim…or is exclusive to The Fixer?”
She held up the narrow strip of metal. “This isn’t exactly standard issue.” She began to walk toward the elevator, while I hung back to buy a bit of time. She was clearly baffled by my body language. We pause-walked to the doors, completely out of synch, and finally she needed to reach across me to push the call button. I did my best not to flinch visibly. The doors slid open. We climbed in, the doors closed, and we faced our blurry reflections. The elevator began to rise. “So, what is standard issue?” It would’ve been smooth, if I’d said it maybe five seconds sooner. As it stood, it came off as a non-sequitur.
“What?”
“Weapons. Does everyone have matching sidearms?”
“No…not exactly. Most of our field agents go with a Sig P229. Ex law enforcement tend toward Glocks.”
“And you carry…?”
“Only if I’m assigned to a sensitive location.” I’d been aiming for a make, but she took the question in a different way entirely—whether she packed any heat at all. Like it didn’t occur to her that Jacob had told me she was at the range. Like I didn’t know a shot had likely come from her general direction that day in front of the prison. “Most days I work here. I’m really more effective if I have access to my secure computer and all my databases and files.”
“And your slim jim.”
She gave an edgy laugh and said, “The car I had in grad school was such a beater. The hinges on the driver-side door were rusted through, so I couldn’t open it without the whole door falling off—which it did on Maxwell Street, you know, when they used to have that big Sunday flea market? Someone actually tried to buy it from me, too, like I was going to drive home without a door. Once I wired that back on, my key broke off in the passenger door lock. Slim jim and I got to know each other really well that year.”
“Wow. My first used car smelled like hard-boiled eggs. I hate to think why.”
She appeared to relax, just a bit. “Can I ask you something?”
Hopefully it wasn’t why I was so interested in her gun. “Sure.”
“Is Con going to have you sweep the fifth floor?”
So. She’d dropped the Agent Dreyfuss. Not that I knew what it indicated. “He might.”
“I hope he does.” She gave a shudder. “How can he stand it? That feeling, you know, like someone’s watching you.”
Hard to say if ghosts were her entire problem in that regard. After all, the ex-husband who now signed her paycheck was a remote viewer. Did she know? Or was that fact a strategically placed glimpse good ol’ Dreyfuss revealed to make me feel like a special snowflake? The elevator stopped and I steeled myself to exit, but then I realized we were only on the fourth floor—and that someone was getting on. Someone who’d recently written WASH ME on my beleaguered little car.
“Hardcore Vic!” Richie grabbed my hand and pumped it up and down as if we hadn’t seen each other in years. He wore brown loafers, brown wool pants, and a nubby brown cardigan over a beige permanent press shirt that was buttoned wrong, so one side of the collar rode higher than the other. The top of his head, of which I had a great view, was nice and shiny. His hand was moist. Once he was done giving me the big handshake, he swung around to Laura and said, “There you are. I’ve been trying to call you for like ten minutes.” Then he swung back to me—and Stefan’s Camp Hell impression of him swinging around to look at people when he spoke came to mind, which made me feel like a dick. Because of course that classy boyfriend and I had laughed ourselves inside out over the way Einstein couldn’t talk to someone without lining them up with his whole body. “What’re you guys doing?” Richie demanded, insinuating hanky panky between Laura and me with the subtlety of an eight-year-old.
“I was helping Detective Bayne unlock his car,” she said placidly. Not like it cost her any effort, either. I wondered how often she dealt with Richie. My guilt over the way I’d mocked and antagonized him would undoubtedly wear thin at some point, and his unbridled stupidity would begin to annoy me. But Laura seemed to have a good supply of patience.
“What a piece of junk,” Richie declared. “Maybe when Agent Marks gets his Lexus, he’ll sell you his Crown Vic cheap.”
“Your concern over my vehicle is touching.”
“Them are like cop cars,” he explained. While no one ever accused me of being the king of grammar, ouch. “And you’d have the same name…Vic, driving a Crown Vic. Heh-heh.”
Laura smiled politely at the witticism. The elevator disgorged us onto the fifth floor none too soon. We made our way to the wide sweep of the big modern desk, and Richie planted his elbows on it, sprawling as if he was about to order a two-for-one drink special at happy hour. “So them guys never installed my new TV last night,” he told Laura.
“Was there a structural issue with your wall?”
“Nuh uh. They just didn’t show up.”
“Okay, I’ll call.”
“’Cos I need my TV.”
“Right. I’ll reschedule.”
“I can’t miss that show. You know. The one I watch.”
“Understandable.”
“It’s just sitting there in the box. I mean, what good is it in the box?”
I was wondering how long he could sustain an argument with someone who kept agreeing with him when Laura nudged him toward the finish line with, “What time should I have the installers come—seven?”
“Uh, yeah, okay. I should be home by seven. It’s all-you-can-eat wing night at The Blue Room.”
“Got it. Seven.”
Maybe I learned more about Laura Kim from that little exchange than I had the whole episode in the parking garage. While it was my experience that technicians supplied a broad window of arrival and then showed up whenever the hell they damn well pleased, The Fixer’s quiet confidence led me to believe she could make seven o’clock happen. She did it with the same cool confidence she’d just employed to get
Richie to stop complaining about the installers, although whether he’d be there to let them in, or whether he’d still be anointing two-ply paper napkins with ranch dressing, chicken fat and hot sauce at that time would be anyone’s guess.
Once Laura fixed her headset in place, tapped a few buttons and listened, she said to me, “Agent Dreyfuss would like to see you in his office. I’ll walk you there.”
“Let me,” Richie said. “I got a question for him. An important one.”
A look flickered across her face. Was that a small calculation? Weighing the pros and cons of setting me loose with only Richie to wrangle me—or determining the most non-invasive way to keep Richie in line? She pressed a button, paused, and said, “Agent Duff would like a word.”
Who?
She listened, then told Richie, “Go ahead.”
Chapter 8
Not that I’d been under the impression Richie’s last name was actually Einstein, but the realization that I never even knew his damn surname was pretty disturbing. Almost as disturbing as hearing him called by the title Agent, which, I gotta admit, looks pretty slick in front of Jacob’s name. Not so much preceding Richie’s.
He knocked on the door, which gave a faint electronic click, then elbowed me aside and bounded in as if we were racing toward a box of donuts with only one cruller. “So I met these guys at karaoke,” he told Dreyfuss, “and they really want to come see the Bears with me on Thanksgiving.”
“How many guys are we talking?”
“Two. Uh…three.”
“That’s a total of thirty-two guests.”
Richie thought about it. Then he started counting on his fingers. Then he got lost somewhere around eight while the repeater beside him took a bullet to the throat. “Well, there’s my bowling team, that’s four. Plus my neighbors Bernie and Meg….”
Spook Squad Page 6