Meerkats and Murder

by Leslie Langtry

  Anyway, my parents wouldn't let me keep the cat, so Kelly took it. Her parents didn't bat an eyelash when their daughter came home with a scruffy kitten. Kelly, even in second grade, rarely took no for an answer.

  "You"—Rex pointed his napkin at me—"became a spy because you traded snow day intelligence for a kitten?"

  I nodded and picked up my fifth piece of pizza. "The rest is history."

  "It all makes sense now." Rex gave me a lopsided grin that was adorable.

  Leonard, eyeing the stack of pizza crusts, began to whimper. Philby jumped onto the table and looked down at him because she could, which made the dog complain even more. Rex handed Leonard two crusts, and he devoured them in one gulp.

  Philby was not amused. In her squirmy, diabolical brain, she couldn't understand why an inferior being such as a dog got treats when she didn't. I set a few lumps of sausage in front of her. She glared at them and then at me. Finally, when she realized she wasn't getting her own plate, she ate them.

  "How did the investigation go?" I asked.

  Rex poured me a glass of wine. "We found a few scuff marks made by his shoes. Nothing substantial. We couldn't get a shoe size off it. That's all. He was very careful."

  I peeled bits of cheese and pepperoni from the now empty pizza box. "I told you that."

  "I know. And I think it would be a good idea if you didn't go across the street for a few days."

  My jaw dropped open. "What? Why?"

  He leveled his gaze at me. "Oh, I don't know…because someone held a gun against you and threatened you?"

  "But I'm used to that. It happened all the time when I was working!"

  "But you weren't my wife then."

  I wiped my mouth on a napkin and tossed it into the box. "How very gorilla-like of you. Next thing, you're going to be pounding on your chest and marking your territory."

  Rex grinned. "That is funny. But this is serious. What if he'd come in when the girls were there?"

  "I'm pretty sure Betty and Lauren could've disarmed him. Philby had my back."

  My husband sighed. "That's not the point, Merry. I don't want anyone in danger."

  I nodded vaguely, as if agreeing to his request. I'd learned that a nod seemed to appease Rex without the exact verbal cue. "Did the lab find anything on the blood?"

  He shook his head. "You know that takes a long time. We won't have a DNA match for a while, I'm afraid. And even then, there has to be a match in the system."

  "Maybe he's gone for good. Embarrassed that he picked the wrong house. Afraid of my attack cat."

  "You're not going to investigate this, are you?" Rex warned.

  "Of course not!" I lied.

  He sighed heavily. "Why do I even bother?"

  I helped myself to a slice that was on his plate. "Because you can't resist my mad cooking skills."

  He laughed, and we cleared the table. I pretended that he wasn't wondering how to trip me up from investigating, and he pretended that I really was giving up checking out my gunman friend.

  After all, every marriage has its little white lies, doesn't it?

  CHAPTER THREE

  Rex didn't give me a moment alone that night. Which was good because it gave us a little romance time but bad in that I couldn't check out the info on Joe Hanson. Which meant I was up in the living room in the middle of the night, researching him on my laptop.

  My husband was a very sound sleeper, but I decided it would still be safer to be a floor away, especially sitting so I could see the stairs if he came down. Why was I hiding this from him? Because I was a spy once and was used to hiding from everybody.

  Break-in Guy (let's call him Bart for ease), could have been looking for Hanson. It was worth a shot. If he checked out, I wouldn't need to mention it to Rex. But if there was something there, well, then I'd be a hero for helping.

  Unfortunately, there were thousands of Joe Hansons in Iowa alone. Fortunately, only one ever lived at my address. How did I know that? Because the CIA has some pretty amazing access to certain databases, and I knew how to hack into most of them. You probably think that's hard. You've also probably heard that 90% of Americans have super lame passwords that they never, ever change.

  You also would surmise that employees at the CIA are smarter than that. And that's where you'd be wrong. I happened to know the head of the IT department when I was there. Back in the 1980s, an unnamed director used his pet cat's name for the password, followed by 1234. No one has ever changed it. Not ever.

  Whoa. Now that was interesting. Joe Hanson showed up in agency records! How was that for a smack in the face? Two people connected to Langley both lived in Who's There, Iowa in the same house, one right after the other?

  Sadly, I couldn't hack any deeper. Hanson was listed as CLASSIFIED. And it was too early to call the CIA and ask my contact there for more info. Dang it. He owed me for a special delivery of Thin Mints out of season. That's like asking Santa to embrace Satanism or getting one of my cats to do…anything.

  After turning off my laptop, I leaned back and closed my eyes, trying to make sense of it all. I couldn't wrap my head around it. No matter how I tried to justify it, this had all the hallmarks of being staged.

  I shook my head to clear it. That was ridiculous! How could the CIA stage me picking out my house? Clearly I was overly tired. And when I was overly tired, I did things like mow the lawn at three a.m. (which did not endear me to the neighbors) or that time I binge watched bad TV sitcoms from the 70s that featured Bert Convy while binge eating four pints of Ben & Jerry's Phish Food (which resulted in a nightmare where Bert Convy, Hervé Villechaize, and Captain Stubing travel through time to erase the existence of ice cream). I should just head back to bed to snuggle with my husband and cats…

  I'd just stood up and switched off the light when something caught my eye. A light was on in my house. The gunman was back! Without thinking (as usual), I snatched up my keys, pocketed my phone, and ran across the street in my Dora the Explorer jammies and bunny slippers, landing on my porch in seconds.

  My house was a simple ranch style, built in the 1950s. You entered through the living room. The kitchen was straight ahead and had access to the basement and garage on the right. A hallway on your left led to a bathroom and two bedrooms.

  The second I turned the doorknob, the light in the kitchen went out. I had to rethink this. Either Bart saw me coming and ran out the back again, or he was moving to the basement. At any rate, going inside now would be treacherous.

  That was okay, my sleep-deprived brain thought as I pushed inside and quietly closed the door behind me. I kept weapons in every room. I'd had visitors before and made sure I always had something handy. In the living room, it was a retractable baton in the umbrella stand. Scooping that up, I took a second to listen.

  No sound. No movement. Ugh. I'd have to clear every room. I hated that. I know, it looks easy on TV. But it isn't. Moving silently through a dark house toward someone lying in wait to ambush you was never easy. Oh sure, sometimes it was fun, but never easy.

  I've cleared many buildings as a spy and hated it each and every time. Well, that one time where the bad guy was holed up in an ice cream factory wasn't so bad. Somehow I'd convinced Riley—my former handler—that it was imperative that I taste test each and every flavor as I went. Talk about brain freeze… It's a wonder that I didn't shoot the guy once I'd found him.

  I started with the kitchen. The garage door was closed, and so was the basement door. When someone breaks into a house, they usually leave all doors they come through open to make a getaway easier. I know because I've done it at places I won't name, a few more times than Rex has been comfortable with.

  Bart would've left the door to the yard open in a haste to escape. I slowly opened the door, my eyes adjusting to the darkness. The door to the backyard was closed. In fact, the bolt was drawn, locking it from the inside.

  That could mean only one thing. He was still in the house.

  I've had to clear my house before.
Once, I even shot up my guest room to catch someone, turning the bed and closet door into Swiss cheese. But I'd recently gotten new furniture, so I didn't want to do that again.

  It was a good thing that I also knew my floorplan in the dark. In fact, I'd memorized it when I'd first moved here, walking through the house at night with my eyes closed (creating unusual bruises in unusual places) so I'd be able to do it if necessary. Surprisingly, "necessary" came up more often than I thought it would.

  I thought about the hiding places available. Down the hallway, the first door on the right was the bathroom, which also connected to the master bedroom. The shower was the best location to hide in there. It was also my least favorite because some weirdo standing in my shower gave me the heebie-jeebies.

  The hiding places in the master bedroom were the bed and closet. I'd since blocked the underside of the beds in both rooms so no one could fit under there. At one point I tried electrifying the space under the bed, but I didn't do it right, and the one time I'd spilled water on the mattress turned bad when Philby was mildly electrocuted. She'd spent a month looking like a hedgehog with every hair standing on end. She got even by throwing up in my shoes. Four times.

  I hadn't gotten around to booby-trapping the closet yet. For the past few years I'd been idling between tripwire that would make my clothes explode or shoot ricin pellets. I finally gave up because neither idea seemed beneficial to me. I mean, who wants their clothes to explode?

  Back in the kitchen, I found my options were limited. Either I announce my presence and hope they come to me (which would work out great for me), call Rex, or silently stalk the intruder. I retrieved my .45 pistol, which was taped to the inside roof of the oven.

  By the way, if you choose to store your firearms in an oven, make sure you remove them before turning it on to, say, oh…bake a frozen pizza. When a gun gets extremely hot, the bullets explode. The one in the chamber is the most dangerous, as I learned when I was nearly shot in the head taking the pizza out.

  The other cartridges burst inside the magazine. Which left a large hole in my door to the garage and a mangled, extremely hot gun in my oven. I had to buy a new door and new gun in one day. And because this is Iowa, I was able to do both in the same place.

  My eyes were itchy, and I yawned. I was too tired for this. My adrenaline had abandoned me to dealing with this without the characteristic energy shot. I wondered if I had time to brew a cup of tea? Or I could suck down those Pixy Stix in the cupboard. I'd confiscated them when one of the Kaitlyns decided to bring pure sugar in giant plastic straws for the snack. Kelly had told me later she would've quit right there and then if I'd allowed it.

  Screw it. I was going to make this guy come to me.

  "Helloooo!" I called out cheerfully. "I know you're in here! You might as well come out. There are three policemen with me and one enormous sheriff with an itchy trigger finger. Make it easy on yourself."

  There was no answer. Not too surprising. This guy didn't want to walk into a trap, which meant I had to. Damn. Pulling a couple of stun grenades out of the pantry, I stuffed them into the pockets on my Dora jammies, the baton into my waistband, and with the gun raised, made my way down the hallway.

  I cleared the bathroom with no problem and with no icky dude standing in my shower, which was a plus. After a few excruciatingly long moments where I banged my knee on the dresser I'd moved a week ago, I found that the bedroom was empty and he hadn't touched Rex's patch-up job on my window.

  That left one room.

  I really didn't want to destroy it with a stun grenade. I'd bought all new furniture last summer, and I was pretty sure Rex would try to talk me out of doing that again should I shoot up the room again. His argument for the past few months had been that we don't need two houses. I'd held out, mostly because at his house, we actually used his oven. A lot. For things other than frozen pizza.

  And I hadn't practiced walking through the guest bedroom in the dark yet. I knew this place like the back of my hand. The guest room, however, was untested.

  Taking the flashlight from the nightstand in my room, I set down the grenades and went to the guest room door and waited. There could be no doubt he'd heard me walking through the house, even if I'd taken every precaution to be silent, since I'd called out from the kitchen. If he was listening, he'd have realized that eventually, I'd be coming for him.

  Very slowly, I crouched and turned the knob before pushing the door open. Then, I got down onto my side, lying on the floor, and glanced in. Anyone shooting would shoot where my chest would be if I was standing. They never expected anyone to lie on the floor.

  I heard breathing, and my heart sank. I'd really hoped Bart wasn't here. But now that I knew he was, I could at least solve one problem. For the next few seconds, I did not move.

  Neither did he. And from what I heard, this guy was on the other side of the bed. If he was your normal burglar, he'd think I was in the hallway, biding my time.

  Which would've been the smart thing to do. Wait him out. However, being on the floor put me in a very vulnerable position, and my hip bone on the hard floor started to hurt. I'm not big on staying in a position of pain. It's the one thing I'll be a big baby about.

  Once, in Colombia, I was stuck in a cave just big enough to sit in, if I slouched. I was there with binoculars to monitor military troop movements. I sat in that damp, muddy cave for three days before deciding I needed to walk around to stretch my legs. I walked right into an impressively armed soldier. My legs tingled from being asleep for a couple of days, my butt was muddy and cold, so I shot him in the leg and hogtied him to the nearest tree. And then I told Riley I would never do surveillance again without a chair.

  This situation was slightly different. If I got to my feet, I'd give him a nice target to shoot at. If I waited, he could stand up, look down, see me, and shoot. It would be more difficult in my prone position to get out of the way.

  There was a scratching sound coming from the other side of the bed. Keeping my eyes trained on the top of the bed, I strained to listen. No, it was more of a prying sort of sound. Like the guy was…

  "Stop!" I shouted from the floor. "Stay where you are! There are police just outside that window!"

  The scraping stopped. Bart was trying to break out of my house, but the threat stopped him…momentarily. Soon he'd call my bluff, and then where would I be? I decided to take a bold risk. I stood up and turned on the lights, my gun trained on where I'd heard the scratching sound.

  Bart froze. He wasn't even wearing a ski mask, which I kind of got because even though they look cool in movies, they're hot, itchy, and hard to see out of. He didn't have a gun, which was nice because I'd hate to have a shootout in here. That would definitely affect property values in the neighborhood, and no one wants that.

  This guy was middle-aged, with brown hair that was graying at the temples. Giant, bushy eyebrows threatened to overtake two small, beady eyes and a long, straight nose. He stood up, and I realized he had the same build and height as the guy who'd stuck a gun in my back. Last time I'd seen him running through my backyard, I'd sized him up, and like that gunman, this fellow was tall and thin. Spies are good at that. It's a thing.

  "Who's Nye?" I asked, aiming for his head (helpful tip: if you're not a professional and a crack shot like me, aim for the chest because it's a bigger target. If you are a professional, aim for whatever you want—the spleen, for example, makes a lovely target). "What does he have to do with me?"

  He looked surprised. Maybe he'd thought I'd ask who he was or why was he here? I've always found it's best to cut right to the chase. It worked for me in a cantina in Veracruz where I held three men and a donkey at gunpoint (don't feel bad for the donkey—he deserved it more than the men did). Hopefully it would work for me here.

  Bart opted for a surprise attack as he leapt up onto the bed and lunged at me. I shifted to the right and tried to grab him as he landed. Unfortunately, he was ready for this, because he shoved me away before I was completely
ready (how very inconsiderate). I swung and hit him on the side of the head. He cried out but managed to get away.

  Chasing him down my hallway, I decided not to fire. There was a lot of paperwork for Rex if I fired. Instead, I threw the baton at him. It struck him in the back, and he shrieked but kept moving.

  Oh no, you don't. You're not getting away this time. The man wasn't interested in a shootout. He just wanted to escape, not engage. That was aggravating, mostly because I had a rule about shooting people in the back. In the slums of Cairo—sure, anything goes. But in Small Town Iowa when your husband is a detective—not so much.

  I almost had him as he turned right into the living room. I lunged and grabbed him from behind. This time, we both went down like a sack of rocks.

  He squirmed a bit, twisting his torso, but didn't fight me. Something went over my nose and mouth. It felt and smelled like a tissue dipped in chloroform. My last thought as I slid into darkness was that I should've shot him after all.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  "Merry?" A man's voice floated somewhere above me. "Chloroform," I heard him say.

  Another man responded. Their voices seemed familiar but fuzzy, as if I was underwater. "That's right, I need backup. Have Carnack's deputies patrol the roads out of town. Dark green sedan."

  My head was throbbing. I'd never reacted well to chloroform. Sometimes I broke out in hives and my lips swelled to the size of sandbags. It depended on the mix and purity of the chemical. This time, I just had the headache.