by DeLeon, Jana
“Thank God,” I said. “I was losing my mind. Is this normal?” I glanced around the neighborhood, but everything was quiet and no one else seemed to be running around in a panic.
Ida Belle shook her head. “I think lightning might have hit the house during the storm. No telling what got fried.”
“Crap. You mean fried completely—as in insurance claims and contractors taking over my space?”
“It’s possible. We’ll start checking everything. The AC seems to be okay. We should probably start in the kitchen.”
We headed to the kitchen where Gertie was inspecting the refrigerator. “Seems to be all right,” she said as we walked in the room.
Ally closed the door on the microwave. “The stove and oven are good, but the microwave is shot.”
“I meant to unplug it,” I said. “Guess I forgot.”
“At least it’s not built in,” Ida Belle said. “Easy enough to replace.”
“I hope so,” I said. “When Ally moves out, the microwave and the coffeepot are the only things that will see activity in this kitchen.”
“Coffee!” Gertie pulled the coffeepot away from the wall and heaved a sigh of relief. “You unplugged it. Thank God.” She started filling the pot.
Five minutes later, we were all sitting around the kitchen table, silently sipping on coffee and trying to get a focus for the rest of the day.
“You guys never did tell me what happened last night,” Ally said. “Why were you in the backyard? What happened to Gertie’s clothes? Why were you all wet?”
“I heard a noise and went to investigate,” I said, using the same explanation I’d given Carter. Then I told her about the snake and the plan to remove the snake and how it wasn’t quite the success we’d hoped for.
Ally started smiling shortly after I started the story, and by the time I got to Gertie falling off the picnic table, she was laughing. By the time I got to Carter spotlighting us all in the backyard, she was gasping for breath. “Oh my God,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. “The things the three of you get into. It’s like anything that can go wrong, does, but in such a dramatic way.”
“And how fortunate for us that Carter always seems to be around to see it,” I said.
“Not always,” Gertie said, “which is a good thing. He’d be in a bad mood all of the time if he had any idea how many other things we’ve done.”
“I think he has an idea,” Ida Belle said. “He just doesn’t have proof.”
“Well,” Ally said, and smiled at me, “your arrival in Sinful has certainly made my life more interesting.” She rose from the table. “Since the power’s back on, I ought to head down to the café and help Francine. Fingers crossed that all her equipment made it.”
“I’m crossing everything,” I said. “I need the café open and running at full steam.”
I waited until I heard Ally going up the stairs before I spoke again. “Okay, here’s the plan. Showers first—that will give Ally time to get dressed and leave. Then Gertie can whip us up some breakfast while I tell you about the call.”
Gertie jumped up from the table. “I’m all for that shower part. And an omelet and pancakes sound great after all that red meat.”
“If we’d have known the power was coming back on so soon,” Ida Belle said, “we would have left that meat in Gertie’s freezer. It probably would have been okay.”
“Why run the risk?” Gertie said as we headed out of the kitchen. “So we’ll eat hamburgers and meat loaf for a while. We’ve had worse.”
“True,” Ida Belle agree. “Like the year you decided to try tofu and ordered a truckload thinking it was a trunk load.”
I cringed and took the stairs two at a time.
“That was fairly awful,” Gertie agreed. “We couldn’t even give it away.” She stepped onto the landing and sighed. “I guess we don’t have to worry about anyone hogging the hot water. This will be speed showering.”
Crap. I’d forgotten about the hot water heater being electrical. It had been without power for a day and a half. No way the water would be warm anymore, and it would take hours to heat up again.
I grabbed a towel, stripped, and hopped into the shower. I heard Gertie yelp through the wall to the other bathroom. Despite the fact that the house was still warm, the water was brisk and I found myself wishing my hair was back to the one-inch style I usually sported rather than the long extensions that took a long time to wash and even longer to rinse.
I managed it all in five minutes or so and hopped out of the cold and into a warm fluffy towel. It took another five minutes to dress, get a comb through all the tangles in my hair, and put the entire mess up in a ponytail. Then I headed downstairs for the debriefing, my cover story in place and ready to go.
Gertie was already at the counter, cracking eggs into a bowl. Ida Belle had poured the last of the coffee and was starting another pot. I frowned. It was a sad, sad day when two seniors took less time in the bathroom than I did. I was really losing my edge. I sat down and added sweetener to my coffee, then decided what the hell and poured in some creamer and caramel.
Ida Belle took a seat across from me. “So…Harrison?”
“He and Morrow are working with the FBI in New Orleans. They had some intel on the buyer we suspected was working with Ahmad, a man named Conrad Jamison. The FBI was itching for enough information to take him down. With what we have, they should be able to start building a case.”
“That’s great,” Ida Belle said. “So what’s the plan for the takedown?”
“It’s not in place yet,” I said. “They want to do some recon of the properties owned by the buyer before they decide on a course of action.”
“What about Ahmad?”
“MIA, but his men are still in New Orleans.”
“And Harrison had no idea why the counterfeit money would be in Sinful?”
I shrugged. “The storm, maybe? It could have been on a boat ready for an exchange or maybe a plane. Either could have crashed given the weather.”
Ida Belle frowned and glanced over at Gertie, who shook her head. “I told you,” Gertie said.
“Told her what?” I asked.
“That you would try to lie to us,” Gertie said, and sighed. “Look, we get it. You don’t want us getting hurt, and despite the fact that we’d like to believe that we’re still superwomen spies, even I know that I’m way past my prime.”
Ida Belle nodded. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t help. You don’t have to tell us anything about the trap, and we know we can’t be anywhere near it when it goes down, but as far as groundwork here goes, there’s no reason we can’t do what we’ve always done.”
“Meddle,” Gertie said.
“I think she’s already aware of that,” Ida Belle said.
My lips quivered and I finally had to smile. “Yeah, I got the memo.”
“You’re going to need our help,” Ida Belle said. “No one knows more about the people in Sinful than we do. And I know you don’t believe that money coincidentally blew into town in a storm.”
I blew out a breath. Everything Ida Belle said was true. I knew it would be an uphill battle to figure out the Sinful connection without inside help, and no one was more inside Sinful than Ida Belle and Gertie. But the professional side of me screamed no, and the friend side of me screamed no.
“We’re going to get into the middle of it anyway,” Gertie said. “You can either call the shots or hope we don’t get ourselves into trouble.”
“Okay,” I said. “I get that you want to help and yes, you’ve done some really good work before. But this is different. This time I’m performing in my role as a CIA agent, which means I’m directly responsible for you. More importantly, you’re my friends and if anything happened to you because of me, I’d never be able to live with myself.”
“We understand,” Gertie said. “We promise we’ll let you call all the shots. We won’t do anything that you haven’t approved, and we’ll report everything we find directly
to you.”
Ida Belle nodded. “Look, we may just be two senior citizens to everyone else, but you know better. Let us do our job.”
I felt a lump form in my throat. It was the same thing I’d said to Harrison. Gertie and Ida Belle were older and lacked the specialty training I had, but at their core, they were soldiers. At their core, they wanted to make wrongs right. That desire didn’t leave just because you got older or slower or your vision got bad.
“I really didn’t want to do it without you,” I said.
They both smiled.
“Now you’re talking,” Gertie said. “So what do we do first?”
“I’m strictly assigned to groundwork here in Sinful for now. Director Morrow doesn’t want me anywhere near New Orleans. He doesn’t want the risk of exposure given that we have no reason to assume that Ahmad knows for certain that I’m in Louisiana.”
“Makes sense,” Ida Belle said. “Do you have any ideas on where to start?”
“Yeah. It may sound weird, but I’d like to start with Max.”
Gertie whirled around, her spatula in the air. “Max?”
Ida Belle’s eyes widened. “I have to admit, I didn’t see that one coming.”
I told them my thoughts about Max’s appearance and the strange feeling I had about him having hundreds on him. “I know it doesn’t sound like much. Hell, it doesn’t sound like anything at all, but I have this feeling.”
“Like you did about the money,” Ida Belle said.
I nodded.
“Then we check into Max,” Ida Belle said. She cocked her head to the side and studied me for several seconds. “You know, it’s interesting. With the other things we’ve gotten involved in, your instincts weren’t nearly as sharp, until that arms dealing fiasco. I figured it was because you were in a new place with people that weren’t what you normally dealt with. I think I was right.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because as soon as something happened that hit close to home for you, it’s like someone flipped a switch. Maybe you’ve gotten comfortable enough with your environment that your natural state is returning. But it’s interesting that something you’re connected to is what seemed to jump-start it in a big way. First the arms dealing and now the counterfeit money.”
“It’s a psychic connection,” Gertie said.
Normally, I’d dismiss something like what Gertie said as nonsense, but in this case, I wondered if she was right. I had gotten that tickle in my belly over the arms dealing, and even though the bad guys were all dead or arrested, I couldn’t help but feel that the whole story hadn’t been told. The money had definitely sent me on high alert. I’d known it was counterfeit long before Harrison verified it. Would have bet real money on it. Now, that same tickle in my belly was telling me that Max had been in this business up to his neck.
“Maybe not necessarily psychic,” I said, “but I agree that I have a strong connection to my work. This case has been my entire existence for two years. It makes sense to me that I might feel a ‘sameness,’ for lack of a better word, about things that are related.”
Ida Belle nodded. “Sameness is a good way to describe it. So where do we start with Max?”
“Electricity!” I jumped up from the table and grabbed my laptop off the kitchen counter. “I couldn’t look up the address on his fake driver’s license last night because we didn’t have power and my phone was a loss on Internet searches. Pray that the lightning didn’t fry my modem and that the Internet provider is up and running.”
I sat back down and opened the laptop. I smiled when I saw full bars for Internet service, then did a maps search for the address on the license. When the address came up, I shifted to satellite mode and zoomed in. Ida Belle moved around next to me and Gertie leaned over my shoulder.
“It’s the Warehouse District,” Ida Belle said.
“The Warehouse District?” I said. “Why would he live there?”
“People have been rehabbing those old buildings since before Katrina hit,” Gertie said. “A lot of areas are businesses on bottom, apartments on top.”
“Okay.” I opened a new tab and did a search on the address. “It’s an art gallery.”
“Max always did fancy himself an artist,” Ida Belle said.
I slumped back in my chair. “Any chance he actually made it and that’s where his money came from all these years?”
“I don’t think so,” Ida Belle said. “I’m no art critic, but I never saw anything remotely original in his work.”
“Wishful thinking, maybe,” Gertie said and slid omelets onto the table. “Or perhaps he works there.” She took a seat and reached for the salt and pepper. “I’ll cook the pancakes after we finish this round.”
Ida Belle moved back to her chair and stabbed the omelet with her fork. “I can’t imagine Max having the manners or class required to work at an art gallery.”
I tapped my fingers on the laptop, then closed it and reached for my plate.
“I know that look,” Ida Belle said, “and the answer is no. You cannot go to New Orleans and check out that art gallery. Harrison told you to stay put, remember?”
“He told me to look for the Sinful connection,” I said.
“He meant in Sinful,” Ida Belle said.
“Yes, but he didn’t say I couldn’t follow the connection,” I argued. “Not specifically.” At least, Harrison hadn’t said it. Morrow was a different story.
Ida Belle sighed. “You are as stubborn as they come. If Max is connected to someone buying from Ahmad, then the place may be watched.”
“The FBI only has one address, and Harrison didn’t say anything about it being an art gallery. He said it was a newspaper or something of the sort. If Jamison owns this gallery, it’s buried so well that the FBI hasn’t uncovered it yet.”
I left out the part where Harrison told me Jamison had crews in charge of his separate business ventures. If Max was wrapped up in this, one of them could own the art gallery building or even the art gallery, but his living there was in no way proof that they did.
“For all we know,” Gertie said, “Max is renting an upstairs apartment and he picked that location because he liked the idea of pretending he was one of the artists who’d painted work for sale in the shop. It sounds exactly like something he’d do. He always had grandiose ideas.”
“But married Celia,” I said.
“Celia had that inheritance, though, and Max liked what money could buy him,” Ida Belle said. “He probably never imagined being married to her would be so difficult. Men tend to underestimate women in most areas.”
“True.”
Ida Belle lowered her fork. “Gertie is right, though. Living above an art gallery is just the sort of thing Max would have done.”
Gertie nodded. “He’s probably got some of those awful landscapes he used to paint upstairs, pretending he’s the next big undiscovered thing.”
The suggestion made total sense. From everything I’d seen of Max, he’d certainly seemed full of himself, and if he fancied himself an artist, then living above an art gallery was another way to feed his self-delusion. Besides, we hadn’t even established that Max was the Sinful connection, so the entire discussion could be a moot point.
“So if I had a disguise,” I said, “there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to get in and out without anyone being the wiser.”
“The only disguises you’ve worn while you were here were the kind that made you blend at the Swamp Bar,” Ida Belle said. “That same outfit will get you arrested for prostitution in the Warehouse District.”
“I was thinking something more nondescript,” I said. “Like a UPS uniform.”
“Oh!” Gertie’s eyes widened. “That’s a really good idea. People don’t even look at deliverymen…or women.”
“And how do you plan on getting a UPS uniform?” Ida Belle asked. “I don’t think they hand them out just because someone asks.”
“It’s a tan shirt and trousers or shorts. Sur
ely one of you has something we could make work. I can draw their logo on white material and Gertie can sew it on. It doesn’t have to pass inspection at UPS. It just has to be close enough that people don’t look twice.”
“Ida Belle had a safari outfit last Halloween,” Gertie said. “That would work.”
Ida Belle frowned. “I don’t know…it just seems like a big risk.”
“Trust me,” I said. “If I can sorta pull off librarian-ex-beauty-queen, UPS delivery girl is a cakewalk.”
Finally Ida Belle nodded. “I suppose it’s worth a shot, but that’s assuming you’ll be able to get in at all. With Max’s death being a murder, Carter might have asked the New Orleans police to seal off the apartment.”
“Let’s hope he hasn’t gotten that far, or didn’t deem it necessary,” I said.
“Hmmm.” Ida Belle narrowed her eyes at me. “If we get there, and police tape is across that door, we’re turning around and coming back home.”
“Of course,” I said as soon as I made sure my ankles were crossed.
“I mean it,” Ida Belle said. “No risk taking. Not on this one.”
I nodded and looked across the table at Gertie, who winked.
Game on.
Chapter Ten
Three hours later, we were crammed in Gertie’s car and headed for New Orleans. Ida Belle’s safari outfit had worked perfectly. I’d nailed the freehand of the logo. Unless someone got too close for comfort, no one was going to look twice at me. I even had a small box with a UPS label on it from Gertie. That woman kept everything. Tennis shoes and sunglasses completed the look.
I’d told Carter we were making a trip to New Orleans for supplies rather than waiting to order them and asked if we could pick him up anything. He suggested a new toilet would be nice, and since Gertie had been the source of the restroom problems down at the sheriff’s department, I told him we’d see what we could do.
We stopped at the hardware store on the way. No one wanted to admit that we were getting the supplies first because things might go wrong and we’d have to make a getaway, but we all knew that was the reason.
