“Don’t sweat it. The fridge is empty, but I could ask the guards to rustle somethin’ up, if you’re hungry.”
“No, we’re fine.” Mirage was looking around the small living room, at the McDonalds’ bags wadded in the garbage, at the plasma screen which was running CNN and a stream of data across the bottom. Anywhere but at him, he noticed.
She must be, he thought, new at the game. To be embarrassed still. Or at least, to show it.
“So what can I do for the O.S.I.?” he asked, figuring they might as well get to it.
“There’s no easy way to say this,” Jennifer began, “so I’m just going to say it. They’d like you to go back. To that, er, Snakepit.”
“Ah-yup. And do they have some sort of plan so I don’t die?”
“Sure!” Mirage said heartily. “There’s a plan. Of course there’s a plan! And it’s a big plan, too. Oh, the plan they have!”
“Can I get you a shovel for all that bullshit?”
Color rose in her cheeks and she looked away. “Uh, no thanks, I’m fine.”
“And they sent the receptionist here to soften me up?”
“Hey,” Mirage said, offended. “She’s a business manager.”
“Who answers the phones. Yes. I think—” She looked around the room and raised her hands, palms up, for a moment. “I think The Boss has plans for me.”
“And we’re here because we wouldn’t let her come alone.”
“Honey, I’m sure The Boss has plans for you.” That was how the guy operated; if he couldn’t recruit you into the O.S.I. by playing the patriot card, or suck you in with your own curiosity, he’d outright kidnap you as an indentured servant. “Just like he’s got plans for all of us. Now: what are you gonna do when I tell you no, I ain’t going back?”
“I’d tell you to drop the act and do what you’re dying to do anyway?” she guessed.
“Way to soften him up,” Mirage muttered, looking relieved when he laughed.
“Are we just gonna stand around in this crappy living room all night?” he asked. “Or are you bums gonna take me out and buy me a drink?”
The Bucket
1st Avenue, Minneapolis
Three hours later
“Kevin! Watch this!”
He groaned. “Come on, Caitlyn.”
“Are you watching?” She steadied herself on the edge of the bar and almost—but not quite—tipped over. “You’re not watching.”
“I’m watching, Crissake.”
“She has issues with authority,” Jennifer told him. “She alternately resents it, and craves attention from it.”
“Great.” Louder, so she could hear him from their table. “I’m watching, go ahead.”
Caitlyn finished the last of her margarita (peach) and hurled darts across the room too quickly for his vision to track. They seemed to sprout from the center of the dartboard all at once, like a magician’s trick.
“Ha-hah! I told you I could do three at a time.”
“Yeah, you’re a fu—a genius,” Kevin said. A drunken, nutty genius with baby robots in her bloodstream that made her deadly even when she couldn’t hardly stand up. Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen. “Have another drink.”
“Don’t mind if I do.” Caitlyn plopped back in her chair and signaled the harried waitress. “You know, ever since my accident it takes a lot to get me drunk. But I think I’m managing nicely.”
“That’s your ninth margarita. If you weren’t so perky, I’d call an ambulance.”
“Oh, well.” She shrugged and nearly fell off the chair. “I’ve got a really great metagonism. Mantabonistic. Megabogibbin.”
“Metabolism,” Jenny suggested.
“No, that’s not it. You’re just making up drunk words, Jenny.”
“The Boss’d choke you like a rat, he saw you doing all that stuff in public.”
“Really?” She seemed pleased by the idea. “Think he’d be pissed? Think he’d fire me? Not that he can, because—hic!—I don’t work for him.” Then she looked around. “Where’s Dmitri?”
“I’m right here, dear.”
She jumped and nearly spilled her drink, which the waitress had just set down. “There you are. Don’t sneak like that. You’re always sneaking.”
“Sorry.” He eyed her drink. “I’m surprised the waitress hasn’t cut you off.”
“In this place?” Kevin snorted. “Y’all could strip and set your butts on fire, and the booze would keep on coming.”
“What a charming thought,” The Wolf commented.
“Friday night on the Ave, friends and neighbors.”
Jennifer sipped her cherry Coke. “You brought us here to drink, and you’re not drinking.”
He didn’t touch his ice water. “Oh, you know. Just wanted to get out of there for a while more’n anything else.” And see if you’re real people behind those bland government faces. And talk to you some more, blue-eyes.
“It must be sweet to be out.”
Actually, it was nerve-wracking. He’d been under so long, he wasn’t sure he knew how to be Kevin Stone again. He changed the subject.
“Him, I know why he’s not drinking, he’s decided he’s on point. How ’bout you, sunshine? Nothing in your Coke but grenadine—how come?”
She shrugged and smiled vaguely. “Designated driver.”
Lie.
“Cuz I’m buyin’, honey, if you’re, you know, a little light in the pocketbook.”
“No, it’s fine.”
“Yeah,” Caitlyn said, and belched lightly against the back of her hand. The nails, Kevin noticed, were talon-long and painted dark pink. “So drop it, bud.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to get anybody’s hair up.”
“It’s fine,” Jenny said, still smiling that odd smile.
“Yeah, s’fine, so butt out,” Caitlyn slurred.
“Caitlyn. It’s fine.”
“Yup, everything’s fine,” Kevin agreed, wondering about the tension. Funny thing, the tension wasn’t coming from Jenny, but from her pal. Caitlyn had the protective instincts of a grizzly.
“Quite,” The Wolf said.
Kevin searched for a fresh spork, failed, rooted around some more, gave up. “So, what? What’s up next?”
“That’s up to you,” The Wolf pointed out.
“Is it?” he said, looking at Jenny.
Caitlyn yawned. “So, when y’gonna make up your mind?”
“Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next month.”
“No one would blame you if you didn’t want to go back in,” Jenny said.
I’d blame me. “Thanks.”
“Do you want a ride back to the safe house?” Jenny asked.
“I’d love one, sugar.”
“I better not drive,” Caitlyn said, “but Dmitri can get the car—”
“—and drop us off,” Jenny finished.
“Us?” Caitlyn asked.
“Us?” Kevin asked.
Chapter 10
“So.” Jenny had looked at all the bookshelves (stocked with Dan Brown paperbacks and back issues of Oprah), poked around the near-empty kitchen, and examined the DVD collection (all the Harry Potter movies, Gladiator, the Austin Powers collection, and every Superman movie). “You know, this looks a lot like—I don’t know.”
“Yeah, they can’t quite get it right. It gives off cheap-hotel vibes, even if it’s supposed to be a house. Not lived-in enough.”
“Or only lived in by strangers passing through,” she said absently, flipping through Angels and Demons.
“Yup. Get you anything?”
“No, thank you.”
“No booze or anything…how about some O.J.?”
“No, thank you.”
He plunked down on the couch. “So, what? What’d you come back for?”
She glanced at him, chewing on her lower lip. “I don’t know. I guess—I guess I wasn’t ready to go back to my life yet.”
“Tell me about it.”
She laughed.<
br />
“So, tell me about yourself.”
“You first.”
“Aw, it’s boring.”
Her gaze sharpened. “Sure.”
“Naw, it is.”
“Well, my life story is a tiresome tale as well.”
“So.”
“So,” she replied.
“So we’re both pretty dull, then?”
“Yup,” she said, aping his accent.
“You don’t wanna tell me one thing about yourself?”
“Not especially. But I’m kind of wondering what led you to the Snakepit.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what. Let’s trade. I’ll give you something and you return the favor.”
She fluttered her eyelashes. “Why, I hardly know what to say.”
“That sounds like a ‘no’ to me.”
She shrugged.
“Tell you what.” He tried to think of something. And it came to him while he was glancing around the room and saw the magazine rack, which was filled with games instead of magazines. “Play you for it.”
Her eyebrows, pale yellow against the perfect cream of her skin, arched. “Really? Play what?”
“Go Fish?” she said again.
He shrugged apologetically. They were sitting, knees together, around the small coffee table in the living room. “Sorry. Couldn’t find any poker chips.”
“I s’pose Monopoly was out of the question.”
“I hate that game. It’s so boring.”
“Unlike the intellectually stimulating Go Fish.”
“Aw, hush up and look at your cards.”
She smiled in spite of herself, and picked up her hand.
“Okay,” he was saying, “so we’re clear on the rules. If you don’t got the card you need, you can draw or you can talk. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“You got any fours?”
“Go fish,” she said gravely.
He hesitated, then said, “Okay, I’ll get this going. I got into the Snakepit to get away from my family. The bad guys.”
She digested that, then said, “Do you have any sixes?”
He put one down.
Nuts.
“Do you have any nines?”
“Go fish.”
He scowled. “This ain’t hardly fair. I’m doing all the talking.”
“You picked the game.”
“Well, I’m gonna draw.” He picked up several cards until he finally put down the nine of hearts. “Got any queens?”
She started to reach for the pile, nibbled her lip, then said, “My parents were alcoholics.”
His eyes were on his cards. “Yup, I figured.”
“Do you have any aces?”
He put one down. “You got any queens?”
“You know I—” Hmm. Irritating man. And damned if she was going to cop out by reaching for new cards. On the other hand, she wasn’t in the mood for This Is Your Life, either.
So she put her cards down, and pulled her tee-shirt over her head.
“Whoa!”
“So, I changed the rules.”
“We’re playing strip Go Fish?”
“We are now.”
“Aw, hell. Uh—not that I don’t like your little bra there, but the point of this was to find out about each other.”
“Well,” she said reasonably, “now you’ve found out I like peach.”
“Umm,” he said. “You got any queens?”
“I think it’s my turn. Do you have any jacks?”
He put down his hand, reached down, and pulled off a sock.
“Now who isn’t talking?” she teased.
“Hey, you changed the rules. You got any queens?”
She stood, unzipped her pants, kicked out of them. Of all the nights to go sockless! “Do you have any jacks?”
He pulled off the other sock. “You got any threes?”
She laid down a three. “Do you have any threes?”
He started to pull his shirt over his head, hesitated, then said, “They were bad bad guys. I mean, they weren’t good at it. So on top of not wanting to be in the mob, it was embarrassing to be in a family of screwups.” Pause. “You got any kings?”
She looked at him for what seemed, to her, to be a long time. Finally, she said, “My parents aren’t around anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s stupid, the whole thing was stupid. They could have done things so differently. Do you have any kings?”
He took off his shirt. She tried not to stare at the broadly muscled chest, the scars. His lips were moving. Was he talking to her? It was hard to hear over the roaring in her ears.
“Sorry?”
“You got any twos?”
As a matter of fact, she did. As a further matter of fact, she was in it now, and decided to just suck it up, the way a kid got rid of too much Halloween candy on November first. “They were both alcoholics—except in those days you called them drunks. And they hooked up in what I suppose was a very natural way—at every party they were the two drunkest people there.”
He kept his eyes on his cards. That made it easier, somehow. She wasn’t sure she could have borne his gaze. Bad enough she was barefoot, and shirtless, with a hand full of twos and queens.
“They’d finish up every party together and then hit the bars. They’d close the bars and go to their apartments and finish a six-pack. My dad would,” she added thoughtfully. “My mom’s drink of choice was the screwdriver. You know how most kids associate their moms with good smells, like chocolate chip cookies or meatloaf or whatever? If I get a whiff of Gray Goose, I get misty.”
“Me, too, but for different reasons.”
She smiled at his poor joke. “Do you have any fours?”
He laid down a four. “You got any queens?”
She stared at the queen of clubs and continued. “You know how it is when you’re drunk—everybody’s nicer, more attractive. You tell people things you’d normally keep quiet about. And they built this sort of—this false intimacy. They thought it was love.
“By the time my mom sobered up and left the party, she had a four-year-old child in a three-year-old marriage. Only problem was, my dad never wanted to leave the party. So she did A.A. by herself and, later, we both did Al-Anon. She went back to college, got her law degree, got a terrific new job clerking for a local judge, and then, of course, her liver gave out on her and she died before she could get a new one. And I was left with my dad.”
He put his cards down. All pretense of a game was gone. “How old were you when she died?”
“Twelve.”
“But I thought you said your mama decorated cakes for her job.”
“She used to—it was the perfect job. Show up a few nights a week, sample the wine while you’re on break, and use your late mornings to drink.”
“And your daddy?”
“My dad what?”
“What’d he do?”
“He’s in sales.”
“He’s still alive?”
“Sure. Do you have any fives?”
“My brothers are the biggest screwups in the world,” he said. “Bigger than my dad, even. And that’s saying something. They’ve been shot at more than me, and that’s saying something, too. It’s a miracle any of them are still alive. Shoot, if my little brother wasn’t in prison, he’d prob’ly be dead. D’you have any aces?”
“My dad’s still in the house I grew up in. Still drives the same car he bought when I was just a kid. Believe me, we were both counting the days until I left for college. He did not take my mom’s death well, I can assure you.” She laughed, a bitter giggle that hurt her throat. “No, he didn’t care for being a single dad one bit.”
She saw the cards crumple in his grip. “He smack you around a little bit, hon?”
“Oh, no! Much worse. He just didn’t give a shit. I was extremely unimportant in the scheme of things, and he made sure I knew it. Some daughters have fathers who leave them for good one day. I had a fath
er who left me for good, every day of my life. I wish he had hit me, or really took off. But he came back just often enough to kill another piece of my childhood. That’s all he did, I guess.” She laid down her cards, showing him the queens and the fours and the twos and the jacks.
He glanced down, then back up. “My daddy used to say a poor dad’s better than none at all.”
“My daddy never said much of anything besides what a useless little bitch I was,” she replied, and that pretty much closed out the evening for the both of them.
Chapter 11
O.S.I. Headquarters
0845 hours
“Assuming I agree to your request—”
“Think of it more like an order,” The Boss said mildly.
“—what makes you think I can get back in the pit?”
“Why would you even want to?” Caitlyn asked, drumming her fingers on the desk in front of her.
They all looked at her, and she colored defensively. “Look, the guy’s been out on a limb for—what? Four years? How come he’s even considering going back? He’s out. He’s done. Am I the only one who has trouble with this?”
The Boss nodded at Jenny, who almost did some blushing of her own. But, like a good pupil called upon, she answered. “He’s considering it because the Snakepit is up to something.”
“They’re always up to something,” Kevin said glumly.
“And Mr. Stone still has a conscience. He can’t just sit by, knowing what he knows, and wait for the bombs to drop, or whatever.”
“Lieutenant Stone,” Kevin corrected her with a wink.
“Lieutenant, then.” She took a nervous sip of her (excellent) coffee and tried not to stare back at him. God, he was just so great-looking; what was it about men in uniform? Maybe it was just him—the dark fatigues made him look lean and strong, the bristling weaponry made him look dangerous, the smile made him look charming.
To distract herself, she looked around the office again. Jennifer had never been to O.S.I. and couldn’t get over how much like a regular company it looked. Cubes, computers, administrative assistants, clerks, cafeteria workers, conference rooms, restrooms, emergency exits, stairwells, fancy elevators, and executive suites.
“You’re pretty sharp,” he added.
“No, I’m not,” she corrected, almost sharply. “Everybody in the room knows this. It’s just, Caitlyn goes out of her way not to be involved. So by comparison, I look really smart.”