Bulletproof Mascara: A Novel

by Bethany Maines

  “Following us . . .” Nikki was taken aback. “No . . .”

  “Yes,” Val contradicted.

  “But I think that guy was already there,” said Nikki. She couldn’t remember why she thought that. “I didn’t hear him come in,” she said quickly, knowing that her time to speak was quickly running out. Her breath was evening out. The panic was starting to ebb, but she didn’t feel any better about it.

  “He probably slipped in the back,” Val said dismissively.

  “How could he have known we were there?” asked Nikki, still not quite following Val’s rapid words.

  “That’s what I’m saying!” exclaimed Val, as if they’d already covered that ground. “I know I didn’t tell anyone where we were going, so someone must have followed us. And since your boyfriend, the lawyer, is the only one who knows where we’re staying, I’m going to go with him as a prime suspect.”

  “I didn’t see anyone following us,” said Nikki doubtfully.

  Val rolled her eyes. “You weren’t exactly looking, were you now?” Nikki bit her lip and said nothing, knowing that this was true. She hadn’t been really careful about checking for tails.

  “So you were right,” continued Val. “We need to investigate the lawyer.”

  “I think”—Nikki tried to marshal her thoughts, but they kept straying away—“I think we need to check out other guys, too. The purple shirt guy, Victor, and Sarkassian. You spent some time with Sarkassian. What did you think? Did he say anything suspicious?”

  “Suspicious, double entendre, whatever. Look, Sarkassian’s out of your league, kid. Leave him to me.”

  “OK,” Nikki agreed readily. “But don’t you think we should check them out?”

  “Yeah, sure. We will,” said Val, although there was something less than reassuring about her tone. “But we need to stay focused on our mission. Lawan is our first priority.”

  Nikki nodded. That was true.

  “We need to search her apartment before we worry about Sarkassian.”

  Nikki scratched the back of her neck, pushing tendrils of hair out of the way. Searching Lawan’s apartment had been second on the list of duties for the day, but Nikki felt that somehow a mysterious gunman and his death should dislodge the day’s to-do list.

  “OK,” she agreed reluctantly, picturing a repeat of the hours spent at Lawan’s office, but on a larger scale.

  Lawan’s apartment was in a shabby turn-of-the-century building with clear British influences and a very sturdy iron gate. Val punched in the code from the numbers that Laura had scrawled on the back of a business card and they entered a quiet courtyard with a slightly rusty swing set in the corner. The interior of the house was clean and nearly spartan in its lack of clutter. The two exceptions were the little girl’s bedroom and Lawan’s home office.

  The girl’s bedroom was an explosion of pink and purple. No surface seemed to have escaped being treated with paint or ruffles. Even the mosquito netting over the bed had been dyed purple. The office was just as cluttered, but clearly not through intentional design. Magazines, newspapers, and piles of computer printouts, were scattered everywhere. But pictures of Lawan and her daughter covered the walls.

  “Check this out,” Nikki said, picking up an award nearly buried beneath the clutter. “I saw her get this, in the documentary they showed in training. She rescued some Russian women who’d been sold into prostitution. She got an award.”

  Val shrugged.

  “You don’t think that’s cool?” asked Nikki.

  “It won’t do any good,” said Val impatiently, poking at a pile until it toppled over onto the floor.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Rescuing people . . . it doesn’t do any good.”

  “But you’ve rescued lots of people,” protested Nikki. “Those five women doctors in Afghanistan.”

  “One,” said Val, holding up a finger. “Just one. The rest have died or thrown themselves into some fresh mess. And the only reason the one who’s left hasn’t done anything to get herself killed is because she’s too busy dying of cancer. You can’t really save anyone, Red. The best you can hope for is to save yourself.”

  “No,” protested Nikki. “You saved people.”

  “I’ll search the rest of the house,” Val said with a shake of her head. “You start in here.”

  Nikki eyed her partner in dismay as she walked away. Then she looked back at the disaster of the office and groaned. With a sigh, she crossed the threshold and set to work.

  An hour later, Val reappeared with lunch and then went away again. Two hours after that, she poked her head in the doorway once more.

  “When is your boyfriend coming over?”

  Nikki stared up at Valerie, lost for a moment as to whom she was talking about. “He’s not my boyfriend,” she said, at last aligning her thinking with Val’s.

  “Boyfriend, lawyer, whatever,” Val said with a shrug.

  “He said six,” answered Nikki, checking her watch. It was a quarter after four.

  “And what’d you say?” asked Val.

  “I don’t think I had time to say anything,” Nikki replied.

  “There’s always time,” said Val. “You’ve got to start asserting yourself.”

  “I’ll work on that,” Nikki agreed halfheartedly. Her mother frequently gave these kinds of pep talks, and she didn’t mean them, either.

  Val walked to the window and stared out at the dusty narrow alley behind the house. Above them the bass thump of a stereo drifted down from a neighbor’s apartment.

  “We should go,” said Val. Nikki had gone back to reading and it took her a moment to register the words. “You need to be getting ready for your date.”

  Nikki shook her head. “I think this is more important. It’s a bunch of stuff on Rival Shipping. Lawan had piles of it. Google searches. Financials. Articles from the English-language Bangkok paper. Gobs of stuff. On a hunch, I called Jane. She hasn’t had time to look over the stuff I downloaded, but she could tell me that Victor’s phone was being paid for by Rival Shipping.”

  “OK,” Val said with a shrug.

  “They’re a shipping company.”

  “I gathered that from the name.”

  “Mostly container ships to the U.S.,” continued Nikki, trying to maintain her line of thought.

  “Yeah?” said Val, looking bored.

  “Well, didn’t Laura say that Lawan’s most recent project was antiterrorist measures in the port? Searching cargo containers, stuff like that?” Val yawned, and Nikki clenched her jaw in frustration. “It also has an interesting logo,” she said, holding up a printout of a circle containing a serif letter R with a line through it. “Look familiar?”

  “Not especially,” Val said.

  “The guy in the antique shop, the one who tried to kill me, this was on his jacket.”

  “Well, we’ve already established that Victor and the lawyer work for the same place. So I can’t say I’m surprised. Now, really, shouldn’t we be going?”

  Nikki glanced at the clock. It was a quarter after five.

  “Yeah, we should. Did you find anything in the rest of the place?” Nikki shuffled all of her pages into a bunch before looking at Val, who was looking at the stack of papers.

  “Nah,” she said. “Nothing worthwhile. Come on, let’s go.”

  “I need another shower,” said Nikki, as they rode the elevator up to their room. She hadn’t noticed before, but now, in the harsh light of halogen, the streaks of dust, grime, and what she really hoped wasn’t a blood spatter were painfully apparent.

  “Traffic will do that to you,” Val agreed, and Nikki wanted to say that she hadn’t been thinking about traffic, but she let it go.

  In the shower, Nikki scrubbed her hair and tried to bully the events of the day into a linear story, where one thing led to another. She felt that if she could just get a reason for everything, put a label on it, and put it into the correct box, she’d be able to figure everything out. But she was troub
led by Val’s theory on Z’ev. She knew Val was the more experienced agent. And her reasoning about Z’ev sounded logical. But she couldn’t quite bring herself to believe it. He just hadn’t seemed like . . . well, he hadn’t seemed like he wanted to kill her.

  She thought back over the night at the club. He had been abrupt and slightly suspicious, but he hadn’t seemed threatening. In fact, he had seemed far more suspicious of Victor—what with the searching of Victor’s coat and all. And he had been such a good dancer. Nikki stopped herself before her thinking got muddled by emotions. She needed to concentrate on evidence.

  After her shower, Nikki laid her clothes out on the bed and looked at her shoe selection. She glanced at herself in the mirror and had a sudden flashback to the hotel in Canada, when she had tried on interview outfits. She could almost hear her mother humming in the bathroom. She felt like a Virginia Slims ad. She’d come a long way, baby. Thinking of cigarettes reminded her of Val, and she wrapped her towel more tightly around herself and dashed next door.

  “Come help me pick out an outfit,” she demanded when Val opened the door.

  “Wear what you’ve got on right now.”

  “I’m wearing a towel!”

  “It’ll knock him dead.”

  “I’m not looking to knock him dead. I’m looking to . . . well, I don’t know what I’m looking to do, but I know I’m going to be doing it in underwear.”

  “That’s an option,” suggested Val, and Nikki glared. “OK, fine,” she said, and they trooped back to Nikki’s room, where Val surveyed the clothing laid out on the bed.

  “Go with the green shirt, the khaki capris, and the wedge sandals,” she said without hesitation. “The shoes will give you height, so you can look him in the eye; the pants show off your ass, and the shirt is a good color without flashing any cleavage. Sexy without looking like you’re being sexy for him.”

  Nikki nodded. “I’ll wear some big earrings and put my hair in a ponytail.”

  “Spunky and functional,” Valerie agreed. “OK, we good?”

  Nikki nodded and Val walked to the door. She was about to leave, but she paused, with one hand on the doorknob. “And you should wear a thong. Those pants are low cut; it will show if you bend a bit.”

  “The whole point of a thong is to be discreet,” Nikki said sternly. “It’s not supposed to show. No matter what the pop stars say.”

  “Well, you’ve got to even the odds somehow. Use the weapons you’ve got.” Nikki threw a shoe at her. “And don’t forget your gun,” Val added, ducking out of the room.

  After Val left, Nikki guiltily picked out a green thong that matched her shirt and put on the rest of her clothes. Thongs were not an unfamiliar item in her lingerie drawer. Visible panty lines were an evil in the Lanier household, second only to polyester track suits, but she felt it was wrong to wear one solely for display and distraction.

  Nikki was applying the last stages of her makeup when someone knocked on the door. She checked her first instinct to answer the door and looked through the peephole. It was Z’ev, standing with apparent impatience in the hallway.

  Nikki practiced her smile once, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

  “Hi,” she said with perk. “Come on in. I just have to finish putting on my face.”

  “You took it off somewhere?” he asked dryly, shutting the door behind him. Nikki suppressed a sarcastic reply and laughed instead.

  “It’s something my mother always says. I suppose that’s a good reason to stop saying it.” She pretended to be indecisive about her earrings, and then bent over her jewelry bag on the chair, allowing the thong to show. Her back was to him and she couldn’t see his reaction, but when she stood up he quickly became absorbed in the ceiling, so she knew he’d definitely noticed.

  “Jeez,” he said, taking his eyes off the ceiling and noticing her makeup case. “Got enough makeup?”

  “It’s for work,” she said.

  “My sister would be in heaven.”

  “You have sisters?” she asked, closing the lid to the case firmly and lugging the behemoth into the bathroom.

  “Just the one,” he answered, wandering over to the window and peering out through the sheer curtains. “What about you? Any siblings?” he asked, flipping the ball back into her court.

  “No. At least, not that I know of,” she added, considering that her father had been gone long enough to have given her a few brothers or sisters she didn’t know about.

  “Hmm” was his only reply. He was examining the desk now, staring at a half-written postcard to her mother.

  “So, are you going to explain the whole Canada thing or not?” Nikki asked bluntly, stabbing an earring through her lobe and watching Z’ev in the mirror. He was fidgeting with a pen from the desk and at last pulled out the desk chair and sat down.

  “My name isn’t Jim Webster.”

  “We established that in Vancouver,” interrupted Nikki. “It’s Z’ev.”

  “Yeah, it is Z’ev. Z’ev Coralles.” He paused again, and Nikki felt some sort of reply was in order.

  She leaned against the dresser and glared at him. “I said at the time you were a big fat liar.”

  “No, I’m not,” Z’ev protested. Nikki raised an eyebrow. “Look, when I met you . . .” He trailed off with a frown.

  “Don’t tell me the horse-faced sister story again,” said Nikki disbelievingly, and she watched him grin.

  “I never said she was horse-faced. She’s just really . . . strident I guess would be a good word.” Nikki kept her face skeptical. “The thing you have to understand about Sarkassian is that, well, first of all, he’s Armenian and a bit of a traditionalist about a few things.”

  “Marriage being one of them?”

  “His sister’s happiness being one of them,” corrected Z’ev. “She pretty much gets what she wants. I just thought it would avoid any potential social snafus if I were conveniently unavailable. I never thought he’d actually want to meet my wife. Simple really.”

  “Uh-huh. Why didn’t you use your real name?” Nikki pressed.

  He sighed, rolling the pen back and forth on the desk with one hand.

  “I use it for business. I found Z’ev Coralles was a little too ethnic for some firms.”

  “Hmm,” said Nikki. “That’s stupid.”

  “I can’t account for the prejudices of others,” Z’ev said with a shrug.

  “Isn’t he suspicious that I’m not here with you in Thailand?” asked Nikki for the fun of watching him squirm. His story didn’t quite match the things she’d overheard in the VIP room.

  “I . . . well, I told him you didn’t want to go to Thailand and that we split up.”

  “You ended our marriage? Just like that?” asked Nikki, pretending to tear up. “You couldn’t have even tried counseling?” And if he was so worried about the sister, why had he gotten “divorced”? She thought about pointing out that hole, but didn’t.

  He laughed. “Well,” he said, “we could try reconciling over dinner.”

  “I don’t know,” Nikki said, applying the finishing touches to her eyeliner. “My mother always said to never date a divorced man. They have baggage.”

  “Speaking of baggage,” he said, kicking at her luggage. “Tell me about this new job?”

  “It’s with the Carrie Mae Foundation,” she said, letting him change the subject.

  “Like those makeup people?”

  “Yup, those makeup people.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “I’m supposed to travel around to various conferences, representing Carrie Mae, and liaise with people and try to get them to help with the various foundation projects. It’s kind of exciting, really. Outside of a trip to Paris in high school, I’ve never gotten to travel much.”

  “Pretty cool,” agreed Z’ev. “So,” he said, standing and stretching, which reminded Nikki of how big he actually was. “Does that mean you can put dinner on the expense account?”

  “No,” Nikki sai
d with a laugh. “I don’t think anyone’s going to believe that you’re a useful source of information on women’s health.”

  “Shoot. Guess I’ll have to put it on mine. I’ll call it informational networking.”

  “Lawyers,” said Nikki. “You can think of a way to write off anything.”

  “Of course,” Z’ev said. “It’s our chance to be creative.”

  Nikki grabbed her purse and ducked into the bathroom to arm herself. Sorting through the Borg cube of makeup, she selected the stun gun compact that Rachel had included, but she refused to bring the gun. She knew what Val had said, but it didn’t fit in her purse, with all the other crap she’d stuffed in there. And honestly, she didn’t think Z’ev rated a gun.

  “How do you feel about Muay Thai?” he asked, opening the door for her.

  “Kickboxing?”

  “That’s the stuff.”

  “It’s interesting?” said Nikki, trying the opinion on for size. Girls just didn’t go around telling boys that for the last three months Friday night had been Girls’ Fight Night at the dorm. It would seem unfeminine. Maybe if she explained about the facials . . .

  THAILAND VIII

  I Predict a Riot

  “So we were standing here, with a guard standing in front and one just behind.” He leaned forward, pulling their water glasses into formation to demonstrate. “And he says to the border guard, ‘If I wanted to smuggle drugs in, do you really think I would leave it in my bag?’”

  Nikki covered her eyes with one hand, laughing from under it.

  “I know,” Z’ev said, reaching up and pulling her hand down. “I thought we were destined for the rubber hose room. Let that be a lesson, college roommates are not to be trusted.” His hand was warm, and Nikki felt a tingle run up her arm as his thumb caressed over her knuckle.

  “Then he says, ‘No, I’d put it in the dog food, like the couple in front of us did.’ And then they went out, and twenty minutes later they came back and we were free to go. I don’t think I’ve been closer to a body cavity search in my life.” Nikki laughed again. “Man, that kid was nervy. Crazy, of course, but nerves of steel.”

  “Crazy sounds about accurate,” agreed Nikki, deciding that whoever invented holding hands was a genius. The longer dinner had gone on, the more she became convinced that Z’ev was exactly what he said he was—a lawyer with an odd heritage that worked against him, being employed by some rather suspicious characters. He’d clearly left some things out earlier, but people got themselves in hard-to-explain situations. She was living proof. But his every response matched his body language, and all the tells that she’d been trained to watch for simply reinforced the words that came out of his mouth. He was being honest and he liked her. She’d never thought about using her Carrie Mae–instilled skills to assist in dating, but she was finding them helpful. She knew he liked her, and she was just about to do something impetuous, like lean in and kiss him, when his phone rang.