I turned my attention back to the gorgeous paintings, the vibrant colours whispering to me of passion and life. I listened. How long had it been since I’d heard passion and life? For the last few years my internal monologue had been overripe with a terrible combination of boredom and flaccid angst. My stomach tensed into a twisted knot. I took a deep breath. Another. The knot began to melt.
I wiped away the unexpected tear in my eye and swallowed with difficulty. Nate, my stranger/swindler, had breathed life into me. For better or worse. It might be disastrous to follow him, but being sensible was killing me slowly. Autopilot had navigated my existence for so long. Even stupid decisions were preferable to no decisions at all, right?
I giggled. I hoped against hope the Kandinskys were real. That they’d been stolen from some douchebag like Oliver in order to decorate the walls of a vastly sexier man’s house. I was becoming a wicked, wicked girl.
“Sam?” Nate leaned in the doorway and stared at me, the crazy lady who wriggled and cried on the bed. I sniffed loudly, full of snot. That made me giggle even more. Nate chortled back at me. “You’re making my bed soggy.”
“Don’t act like that makes you unhappy. Me wet in your bed.” I pushed to sitting and smiled between tear-streaked cheeks.
Nate exhaled laboriously, his eyes never leaving my face. “You need to get off my bed so we can leave. We’ll pursue this…this…” His eyes searched the room for a word. He didn’t find one. “Later.” He gripped the door and closed it behind him.
The door flew open again. “Are you—?” He cut himself off. “I mean—” He began to chew his lip. His eyes took on a puzzled expression as he carried on a conversation with himself. I never heard the end of the question, only a faint whoosh as he shut me in.
The door vibrated back and forth, banging softly. Knowing I would jump Nate the moment he came in, and not considering this an ill-advised idea at all, I gave my boobs a quick fluff and hurried to let him in again. No Nate—only the cat at my feet, his dirty, knowing sneer brimming with disapproval.
“Like you’re so much better,” I muttered.
Captain Taco froze there. Silently judging me. I patted him on the head. He accepted it for a moment, then wandered farther into the bedroom.
My eyes ached now. But my heart ached a little less. I needed to stop thinking so much. Stop analysing from every angle. Stop contemplating every nitpicky word here and action there. Yes, not thinking was exactly the thing to do when you were behaving stupidly.
I slipped the boxy uniform on and pulled my hair into a ponytail. Squaring my shoulders, I stared into the standing mirror. A sneaking sense of power pulsed through me, despite the dumpy duds. Time to act. Finally.
Nate sat in the living room, dressed the same as me. Bond would be ashamed, but tuxedos were simply not appropriate for every sort of undercover activity. In fact, they were appropriate for almost no undercover activity.
“I have a scarf for your hair and a fake nose,” Nate said.
He’d better stop with the sexual banter.
“Let’s do this thing!” I exited to the pink-tiled bathroom with his makeup kit. How very non-hetero-normative of him. My rusty college theatrical makeup abilities came to the fore as I blended the larger nose onto my own. See? I did so have life skills. I ruddied my face and added a little age, nothing crazy. Most of becoming a new character involved mannerisms—a walk, demeanour, a gesture.
Samantha the Failure had become Gladys the Maid, secret undercover art thief. I smiled at my reflection. The change felt invigorating. It should have felt idiotic, but it didn’t. Feelings were a choice, for now.
Nate entered the bathroom and his eyebrows rose. Despite my unfortunate nose, his gaze caressed me with admiration. “You’re a hell of a broad, Sam.”
“Are you gonna talk like James Cagney all day?”
“I’m gonna do whatever you want, boss lady. You’ve got the gun.”
It was a pleasant lie.
But he had let me keep the gun.
New Samantha melted like Old Samantha under his green-eyed gaze. Rather than bury the stomach flutter that flew through me, I chose to embrace it. I turned to him and took his face in my hands for a kiss. An intoxicating flick of a kiss. A blink-and-you-miss-it kiss. He didn’t blink.
“I dented your nose,” he said.
“Let’s go.” I walked out of the front door.
* * * *
I’d never visited the Steak on a Stick building on a Sunday before, so the weekend security guard in the lobby didn’t comment on my new, Streisand-esque schnoz.
Nate wheeled the big vacuum-thing we’d brought to the reception desk and gave a winning smile, only slightly mitigated by the brown-tinged, misshapen teeth he’d donned for the occasion. He jerked his baseball cap low over his forehead and leaned on the Formica. “Carpet cleaning for suite”—he pulled a paper from the front pocket of his shirt—“twenty-four-hundred.”
“I didn’t know about a carpet cleaning,” replied the security guard, whose name was Bruce. Bruce flicked his eyes to me. I scratched my ass and suppressed a yawn.
Nate fiddled around in his pocket and fished out an ID badge for a cleaning company called ‘Service Wizards—we clean like magic!’ On it was the most spectacularly ugly photo I’d ever seen. Nate with gross teeth, eyes half closed, definitely veering towards ‘serial killer’. He also produced a crinkled service order for carpet cleaning, dated today, for Steak on a Stick. As he smoothed it over the desk, I noticed my name was on it as the requestor. Nice touch. “Sounds like they had a big Christmas blowout a couple of days ago. Made a mess they’d rather not remember on Monday morning.” Chuckling, Nate winked at Bruce and gave him a knowing nod.
My breath held, I leaned on the carpet cleaner and waited. Bruce snorted in agreement, made a ribald comment about drunk, horny secretaries in tight skirts and fist-bumped Nate. We were sent up with security’s compliments. We crossed the lobby, which seemed eight times larger than usual. I shuffled to the elevators gladly, eager to escape the Axe-body-spray-scented bro-verse I’d inadvertently stumbled into.
We were alone in the elevator. He handed me a pair of rubber gloves and donned some himself. “Charming guy, Bruce,” I said.
“You should ask him out. He’s obviously got a thing for cute secretaries.”
“Executive assistants.”
“Wear the brown, tweedy skirt you have. The one with the little ruffle at the bottom. Your executive assistant ass looks amazing in that skirt.”
With a leer only slightly diminished by the fake teeth, he led me to the Steak on a Stick lobby.
Despite the classy compliment, my spirits flagged as we crossed to the double-front doors. What had seemed like a badass operation an hour ago seemed dumbass now. I took a deep, shaky breath and pressed my hand against my stomach. My heart stopped like a kid faced with a giant, terrifying Santa who reeked of sour cocktails.
“Stay with me.” Nate held my arm and stood steady, the shadows from the harsh fluorescent lights rendering his features a diabolical mask.
I nodded and applied my spy expression—kind of a grimacey-determined seriousness. I used the same bitch face when walking alone at night.
He peeked through the glass doors, his eyes swivelling in a slow, thorough circuit of the darkened offices. “Key,” he prompted.
He broke the spell. With a sureness and speed I had not displayed since the Spice Girls monopolised the radio, I whipped out my SoaS key ring and tried the front door. It turned. I grinned. He gave me a placating pat on the back and shoved me through the doors. The lock clicking behind us sounded louder than it ought to have.
In silence, we wound our way to Oliver’s executive suite. The salt-water aquarium gurgled, the fish swimming to the glass to investigate their weekend visitors. I think they recognised me, even with my altered face. It was strangely touching. I waved to the little puffer fish—my favourite, I called him Spike—and thanked the good Lord that sea creatures were unreliabl
e witnesses in a court of law.
At Oliver’s office door, Nate tried my key. Our luck had run out.
“The locks have been changed,” I whispered.
“I figured. Hang on.” Nate’s nimble fingers produced several pointy metal objects, and he deftly worked the lock to tease it open. He chewed his bottom lip. My mouth became dry and not from fear. My heart thunked. Or maybe that was the lock. “Bingo,” he whispered, a giant whiff of self-congratulation in his tone. I suppose it was only natural to take pride in one’s underhanded work. It wasn’t as if he could list lock picking as a special skill on his résumé.
He swung the door open and moved fast to drag me inside and close it again. Breath held, I discovered they had changed not only the locks, but also the code to the special room.
I beseeched his eyes. “Don’t look at me for this one,” he said. “It’s a movie fallacy that I whip out a fancy computer that breaks into electronic locks, or produce a portable cutter capable of melting six inches of steel.”
Plopping on the edge of the couch, I said, “What the hell good is a crook without a magic laser?”
“I’ll show you my magic laser…”
“Unless I can use it to unlock this door, keep it in your pants.”
Think, Samantha, think. What would Oliver reprogram the door code to? I tried his birthday and various combinations of one-one-one-one-one, two-two-two-two-two, etc. Nothing. Nate went back and forth between making vulgar observations about my secretarial wardrobe and checking his watch. Then it hit me, thanks to sexual harassment. I punched in six-zero-zero-six-five, which, as anyone who passed through middle school knows, spells ‘boobs’ on a calculator.
The door sprang wide.
Nate’s head whipped up. “What was it?”
“Boobs.”
“Is there anything they can’t do?”
I giggled and presented the open door à la Vanna White.
Wham, bam, boom the painting hung on the wall again. “Nicely done, Sam,” he said.
“Nicely done, yourself.”
He fixed me with a glance that melted not only my panties, but the polyester uniform on top of them. No stopping for horizontal playtime this time, though—we hurriedly boogied out the way we’d boogied in.
I thought being a thief involved cool gadgets and neat wall-climbing suction cups. Carpet cleaner equipment did not qualify as gadgets, and only my nerves climbed the walls.
My broad smile was inexplicable. It lasted down the elevator and out of the building. Soon we were away, on the street, the caper accomplished. I followed him for a few blocks. After some twists, Nate dumped the vacuum at the back door of a Rug Doctor, wiped it down with one of those pre-soaked bleach cleaning cloths and just kept walking.
He hailed a cab.
I held myself taut while we drove through the bright, shiny Los Angeles afternoon. “So that’s that?”
“Yes.”
“Easy!”
“Don’t say that.”
“Are you superstitious?”
He turned around and checked behind us. “I’m super careful.”
“I’m supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” Thievery was better than calling in sick to go to the beach. Although it wasn’t thievery if you returned an item instead of stealing one. But ‘returnery’ doesn’t sound half as glamorous and is not, technically, a word.
“You’re a loon.” He grabbed my hand and pulled it into his lap. Brown, serious eyes admonished me. “You need to calm down.”
“I’m calm!” I replied turbulently. “I’m brilliant. I figured out the secret code, thanks to a sense of humour based on infantile sex puns.”
“Don’t I get any credit? I’m the one who compared your magnificent rack in the yellow, see-through blouse you have to a—”
“Just like a man to steal my thunder.” I laid my head on his shoulder and breathed in the scent of his yummy neck—candy, liquor, drugs. He was crystal meth, but not bad for my teeth.
“I’ll show you my thunder…”
The sooner the better.
We drove in silence for fifteen minutes. “Stop here,” he ordered the cabbie. Nate paid and pulled me onto the sidewalk on some little street in Hollywood. We doubled back six blocks.
I wasn’t sure what his plan entailed, but I let Nate do his thing. If we were forced to audition for a sitcom, I’d spearhead things. “Is crime really this easy?”
“Yes, crime is easy, life is hard. Come on.” Nate tugged me into an empty alley. He threw his fake teeth into a dumpster and continued, “That’s why I avoid life. Take off your uniform.” Uniforms, nose, evidence—deposited into the trash.
We walked again, to a pay phone.
Crime is easy, life is hard. This brilliant over-simplicity brought a fresh smile to my lips. I usually played life like it was a game of checkers—neat rules, easy jumping and the pieces all the same. I felt stupid when I lost. But life was really a game of chess. Life was the world’s largest chess-playing supercomputer, programmed by a genius Russian recluse, and I sure as shit wasn’t the queen. I was more like a gouge on the chessboard.
Nate used a handkerchief to hold the pay phone and called in the stolen painting to the LAPD tip line. He replaced the receiver and turned to me.
“All done?”
Nate slid his arm around my shoulder. “Let’s go home.”
“Let’s.” I didn’t know when I’d become a ‘let’s’ with Nate, but it was better than being only a pawn in the game of life, like Mongo.
* * * *
“I’m fine, Mom,” I said into the phone at Casa Nate. I sent a brilliant smile over to him, who studied me with unnerving, undivided attention peppered with placating eye blinks and smiles whose sincerity I doubted.
“Where the HELL have you been? You’re on the news!” When Ellen spoke in caps-lock, I knew I was in trouble.
“Sorry, Mom. I dropped my cell in the toilet.”
“Again?” A sigh. “You’re everywhere, even cable. There’s nothing the bloodsuckers like better than a disappeared White girl. Oliver at Steak on a Stick has offered a one hundred thousand dollar reward for your safe return, which I am considering collecting. Mama needs a new pair of everything.”
“No, you can’t! He tried to kill me!” I squealed into the phone. I belatedly grinned at Nate. The more I smiled, the more he smiled. Soon our faces would break from trying to one-up each other.
“Why would our boss kill you? Because you’re a crappy assistant?”
“I am merely a lazy assistant, and it’s a long story.” I turned away from Nate’s scrutiny. “Listen, Mom. I’m okay. Better than okay. Which is insane, but there you go. Please don’t tell anyone you’ve heard from me. Trust me. I’ll call you again.”
“Sam! Listen to yourself. Trust you? This from the girl who told me I was cute in a pixie haircut?”
“Again with the pixie cut.” I shook my head. “I stand by my evaluation.”
“I looked like Mrs Potato Head!”
“Enough, Mom!” I paused, then whispered, “You are my best friend, and I love you. I am asking you for more time.”
Static crackled through the line. Another sigh. “I’d feel better if I knew where you were.”
“Do you promise not to tell?”
“Yes, the police aren’t talking to me anyhow. They don’t seem to realise you have any friends.”
“Good. I think.” I gave her Nate’s address. “Swear on the life of Sofia Vergara you will not reveal this.”
I heard her smile. “I so swear on the beloved, hot body of Vergara.”
“Good! Thank you, Mom. I love you.”
“Love you, too. Stay safe, please?” Ellen hung up, her reluctance echoing though the dial tone.
I turned around and started. Nate stood directly behind me, green eyes opaque. “Hello there, young man,” I said, elaborately nonchalantly.
“How is your mother?”
“Great!”
“She’s great?” He did t
hat one eyebrow lift thing I wished I could do. “You’re on the news, and she’s great?”
My smile fell. “How’d you know?”
Nate grabbed my hand and pulled me to the sofa. There on KTLA, in high definition, grinned my face—my old headshot, which resembled the demon child of Renée Zellweger and an Oompa Loompa. Spray tan had been a poor choice.
“Oh, jeez! Couldn’t they have used my recent one?” My latest photo was much more Michelle Williams-y.
He snickered. “Damn, that’s a terrible picture.”
“The proper answer would be, ‘No, Samantha, the photo being viewed by millions is lovely’.”
He leant back on the couch with deliberate ease. “I thought you didn’t like it when I lied?”
I controlled the urge to bitch-slap him with a sofa cushion. Barely.
The bastard smiled. “You’re a wanted woman.”
“I’m not wanted. I’m kidnapped. You’re wanted.”
“Am I?” The dimple colluded with the green eyes.
“I am a wise person who is staying out of sight until Oliver the Scorpion is arrested.”
He nodded, dire warnings shining in his gaze.
I shuddered. “Right. So, can I hide here?” I asked quietly.
“Yes. But I’m not sleeping on the couch in my own house.” He rose and sauntered into the kitchen, tight jeans mocking me all the way.
“Always the gentleman,” I called after him.
“Don’t touch anything.”
I touched the remote and flipped the channel away from my unflattering photo. Captain Taco leapt into Nate’s vacated seat and stretched out, taking up an amazing amount of space for such a small cat.
“Hey!” I flinched as a muffin bounced off my head.
“Want a muffin?” Nate called.
Another muffin missed my face by an inch. I threw one back. “I’m touching your remote. I’m getting girl all over it!”
He peeked around the open archway leading to the kitchen. “Don’t make me discipline you.”
The Dimple of Doom (Samantha Lytton) Page 8