Agnes and the Hitman

by Jennifer Crusie

  She sighed. “Nothing.”

  Shane put his hand on the back of her head, pulled her to him, and kissed her, fighting his way to full consciousness, “You’re welcome. Can we talk about whatever that was in the morning?”

  “No,” Agnes said. “Forget it, it was dumb. Four Wheels didn’t send those guys to kill me, did he?”

  “No,” Shane said, letting his head fall back on the pillow.

  Agnes moved back to her own pillow. “Then it’s Brenda.”

  Shane yawned. “Or somebody else who thinks you’re sitting on five million and killing you is the way to get it, but since everybody knows we opened the shelter and there was no five mil, yeah, I think it’s Brenda.”

  “I’m going to sink her yacht.”

  “She can probably swim.”

  “I don’t care. She’s gone crazy. It was selfish and horrible to try to swindle me out of the house, but what she did today to Four Wheels, that was just insane. So I believe she’s trying to have me killed. And I’m glad you’re here to stop her. And I’m going to sink her yacht.”

  “You’re not a one-night stand.”

  Agnes caught her breath. “Just ignore that I said that.”

  “I don’t know what you are, but you are not a one-night stand.”

  His voice was so insistent that she went still, as if everything would go wrong if she moved.

  “I don’t know what the hell’s going on,” Shane said, sounding tired. “Four days ago, I knew exactly who I was and what I was doing. Tonight, all I know is that I want you.”

  “You’ve got me.” The words were out without her thinking, and she wouldn’t have taken them back if she could.

  “Not just tonight.”

  “I know,” Agnes said. “You’ve got me. I know you’re going to leave. Just come back when you can. Make Two Rivers home base. Don’t get killed. Come back to me.” She heard the need in her voice and felt ashamed for a minute. “If you can’t, just say so, don’t lie about it, but-”

  “I wouldn’t lie,” he said.

  “Of course you would,” Agnes said, annoyed. “You work for the government. You’d have to lie. Just tell me you can’t tell me or something. Don’t lie

  He rolled over on his side and slid his arm around her waist, and the weight of him there felt good, secure, pulling her in. “Agnes, I don’t know who lied to you in the past-”

  “Taylor, my two fiancés before Taylor-”

  “-but it wasn’t me.”

  “-and my father,” Agnes finished.

  “Your father,” Shane said. “That one’s new. Tell me you didn’t hit him with a frying pan.”

  “I was ten,” Agnes said. “He told me he and my mom were going to work for the Peace Corps for a couple of weeks, and then he dropped me off at boarding school.”

  “The Peace Corps for a couple of weeks?”

  “I was ten,” Agnes said. “He was my dad. I believed him. Sue me.”

  “And then he didn’t come back for a year?” Shane said.

  “He never came back. Fortunately, I had a court-appointed psychiatrist to explain the significance of that to me later.” She refused to meet his eyes. “Do not feel sorry for me. My dad loved me. He called me his baby girl. And then he took me to boarding school and that was the last time I trusted a man. Until Paul. Paul asked me to marry him in college. I was crazy in love with him. Lisa Livia didn’t like him, Maria cried whenever he came over to the apartment, but I was sure he was the one. Then I stopped by his apartment and caught him doing some other woman against the kitchen wall. So I picked up the frying pan on the stove and hit him with it. Broke his nose. You’d have thought that would have cured me, but no, I met Rick. Rick was terrific, smart as hell, an investigative reporter at the paper where I was doing lifestyles. He’s the one who talked the editor into giving me a column, and when some guy wrote in and said, ‘I like that cranky Agnes woman,’ he’s the one who told the editor to call the column ‘Cranky Agnes.’ He’s also the one who found out that my dad went to prison for securities fraud and died of a heart attack six months later. Well, he’d always been a fool for high-fat food, and the prison cooking wasn’t healthy, plus the stress, you know. It was inevitable.”

  Shane put his hand on her waist and she talked faster. “That was a bad day, the day Rick told me that. Then I came home a week later and found him doing my student intern on my kitchen table. So I picked up my cast-iron skillet and hit him on the back of the head. I don’t think I hit him because of my dad; I’m pretty sure it was for the bimbo intern.” She looked at Shane finally. “It’s like I’m standing to one side watching myself. The world goes red and there’s this screaming and I have to kill them. You wouldn’t know about that. You’re always calm when you kill them.”

  She rolled over away from him, feeling stupid. They’d had perfectly great bridge sex and then she’d gotten weird about the one-night-stand thing and now there Dr. Garvin was, in bed with them, along with her entire life’s history. Nicegoing, Agnes.

  She looked back. “I’m fine, really. But I should probably live alone.”

  Shane pulled her back, close against him.

  “What happened to your mother?” he said in her ear.

  “Oh, she kept writing me.” Agnes sighed and let herself relax against his warmth. “Telling me how wonderful the Peace Corps was and signing my dad’s name. Then six years later she showed up at school, telling me my dad had been killed by the native tribes, offering to take me home to mix her martinis for her. But by then, I was sixteen and I liked school and I was spending summers here with LL and Brenda, and I just wasn’t interested. And neither was she, really. She married again, to somebody with money. She’s where she should be; I’m where I should be.” Here, with you.

  Shane was quiet behind her, so quiet that she thought he’d gone back to sleep, and then he said, “I won’t lie. I won’t leave you. I don’t know what’s happening in the future. There’s a chance my job will change some, that I’ll have more of a desk job. Maybe more of a life.”

  A desk job. Agnes swallowed and rolled back over so she could look at him. “I could move.”

  “What?”

  “I could move. To wherever you have the desk job. I could “You’d leave Two Rivers?”

  “It’s just a house,” Agnes said. “I love it, it’s great, but it’s not Tara, for God’s sake, it’s just a house.” Home is with you. It was a terrible thought, the final betrayal, betraying herself.

  “No,” he said, and she flinched and thought, You moron, why did you leave yourself open like that?

  “Right, sorry,” she said. “That was-”

  “I’ll come here,” he said. “I’ll come back.”

  The whole world went still, and then she realized she wasn’t breathing and took a deep breath, tears stinging behind her eyes-Do not cry-and she said, “Oh,” and tried not to clutch at him. “That would be good. This would be a good place to come back to. A place to come home to. Whenever you could.” The tears were coming and she couldn’t stop them, so she tried not to breathe so he wouldn’t hear her crying in the dark.

  He nodded. “Can we have pancakes for breakfast tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” she said on a sob, and then she did wrap her arms around him and held on to him, tighter than she’d ever held on to anybody as he pulled the blanket up over them and smoothed back her hair and rocked her as she cried, and she thought, He’s coming back to me, he’s coming back, and gave up being smart and just loved him.

  friday

  cranky agnes column #12

  “Coke Would Like to Teach the World to Cook”

  Some people are critical of Coke, pointing out that when you drop a nail into a Coke, and leave it there for four days, the nail dissolves completely; imagine, they say, what that same Coke does to your stomach. Those who are fans of Coke Ham point out that when you pour Coke over a ham and bake it in a 300-degree oven for two and a half hours, the ham tastes delicious. But anybody who has put a na
il in a can of Coke and waited four days knows that it doesn’t dissolve at all. Why do people believe everything they hear? On the other hand, Coke Ham really is good. Better than that, it’s criminally easy.

  The next morning felt eerily calm to Shane, sitting at Agnes’s kitchen table in the sunshine with Rhett underneath it draped over his feet and Garth across from him, resplendent in a brand-new shirt and jeans, which he was endeavoring not to get maple syrup on. Shane’s life was crumbling at the edges, but in the middle was Agnes, making love and breakfast, wanting him to come home to her, and a big old dog, keeping his toes warm. Screw the edges, he thought, and poured himself a mug of coffee brewed from fresh ground beans as Agnes put his plate of pecan pancakes in front of him. Still he knew that it wouldn’t work in the long run. Casey Dean was out there, determined to kill somebody after the wedding, and somebody else was out there, determined to kill Agnes. Agnes’s coffee and pancakes were good, but they could only hold off reality for so long.

  “I have to go to work today,” he said, trying to prolong the illusion that it was a normal breakfast between two normal people who had just made love until they’d both collapsed and were now smiling at each other in a sunlit kitchen, giddy with mutual approval.

  Garth nodded, his mouth full of pancake.

  “Selling insurance,” Agnes said, going back to the grill for the bacon she had crisping there.

  The pancakes were golden, the butter he slathered on slid off the tops in fragrant melting rivers, and then Agnes reached across the counter and handed him the syrup pitcher Garth had left up there, and he absentmindedly watched her breasts move under her T-shirt as he took it.

  “Right, insurance,” Shane said, and poured the syrup, its scent reaching deep into his brain.

  Garth gave them both the fish eye and shoveled the last of his pancakes in.

  “To get that gold watch,” Agnes said.

  “Yep.” Shane cut into the pancakes and forked up a bite: light, tender, nutty, sweet, and buttery, just like Agnes. Home cooking.

  The phone rang and Agnes answered it. “Good morning, Reverend Miller. What is it this time?” She listened for a moment and then said, “What? No, she’s not pregnant. Jesus wept, man, are you insane? Do you know what Evie Keyes would do to you if she knew you were calling people and insinuating that her son is going around knocking up girls?” She listened again and then said, “Yes, that is exactly what you just implied, and I am shocked, just shocked that you’d spread gossip like that about a Keyes. And you a man of the cloth. What the world is coming to, I do not know. God must be listening to you right now and reaching for the bottle, that’s all I can say.” She hung up and said, “That man needs medication.”

  “They should just put it in the water here, medicate the whole damn town.” Shane said, but he said it without venom-Keyes was what it was and a lot of it was good, the breakfasts, for example-and took another forkful of pancake.

  Agnes filled a plate with bacon and came around the counter with it, as Garth got up to go. “I’m gonna go pick up that ground cover for the bare spots around the gazebo,” he said.

  “Let me give you money,” Agnes said, but Garth said, “Nah,” and went out the back door as she called after him, “You look really nice in that shirt,” and got a grin through the screen door in return. “Please don’t steal plants from people,” she yelled as he went down the path and he waved without turning around.

  “I wouldn’t ask any questions about the landscaping,” Shane said when Garth was out of earshot.

  Agnes nodded. “I’ll deal with that later. Listen, I know this has probably been screwing up your job, babysitting me and the wedding-”

  “No,” Shane said. “It’s part of my job. The wedding is my job.” He watched the warmth fade from her face and the wariness creep back in. “I didn’t know that when I came here. The Don set up a hit here, at the wedding. I’m here to take the hitman, named Casey Dean, out, to stop it.”

  Agnes drew a deep breath. “At the wedding.”

  The phone rang and she went to answer it. “Yes, Butch, you bastard,” she said, her eyes on Shane, “that was me who left you the message. I know who you are and I know the zoo where you work. If you don’t get Cerise and Hot Pink back there today, I am going to turn you in. I don’t care about your three children or your grandmother with the operation.” She listened for a minute and then she said, “No, two is not enough for a flock as you well know. You take them back today, Butch, or your ass is grass and I am a John Deere super-classic riding lawn mower with a V6 engine and a double cutting blade, do I make myself clear? Good.” She hung up and went back to the griddle and flipped the second batch of pancakes, perfect golden pancakes, while the coffeemaker brewed its second fresh-ground pot.

  “Is it a coincidence that all of this is happening at once?” she said. “That Brenda is using the wedding to take the house back, and that your hitman is using the wedding for his hit, and that somebody was in the vault for the first time in twenty-five years just this week?”

  Shane put his fork down. “I don’t know. I don’t like coincidences. But I don’t see how they connect, do you?”

  She frowned, thinking hard, and he just looked at her for a minute. Agnes. On his side. In her kitchen full of life.

  “Who does the Don want dead?” she asked.

  “Don’t know.”

  She smiled at him weakly. “I don’t suppose there’s a hope in hell that it’s Brenda?”

  He smiled back. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  The phone rang again and she answered it. “Kristy. Hi. I wondered what happened to you yesterday. Yeah, probably a smart thing to do, leave when Brenda starts killing people. No, she swears it was an accident. Right, tonight. Rehearsal dinner’s at six, bachelor and bachelorette parties right after that. Pictures at the beginning only, please. Right. Mother and father of the groom, mother and grandmother of the bride. No father of the bride. Yep. See you then.” She hung up and looked at Shane. “So. Life goes on. Unless you’re Four Wheels.”

  Carpenter came in from the hall. “Good morning, all. Pancakes?”

  “Just in time,” Agnes said, and loaded a plate for him, adding enough bacon to feed a family of four.

  Shane nodded to him. “Any ideas on who could have broken into the shelter and put that frying pan and the money wrappers there?”

  Carpenter sat down and frowned at him over the plate Agnes put in front of him. “Good morning to you, too.” He picked up the warm maple syrup. “Have some respect for fine cooking.” He took the syrup and poured it over the cakes and breathed in the sweet maple perfume.

  Agnes got him a mug of coffee, looking worried, and Shane felt like hell for having unloaded the hit and the Don on her, but she had to know. Keeping her in the dark wasn’t fair, either. Although lately the dark was the place they were both happiest, so maybe that wasn’t such a bad plan after all.

  Carpenter cut into the pancakes and tasted them. “Marry me.”

  Hey, Shane thought, and it must have shown on his face because Carpenter grinned.

  Lisa Livia yawned in the doorway and said, “So this is what happens when I sleep late.”

  “Damn fine pancakes,” Carpenter said, and kept eating as she came into the kitchen, patting his back as she sat down.

  “You up for pancakes?” Agnes said, and Lisa Livia nodded and Shane watched Agnes serve up more food, round and warm and flushed, happy again, looking very pattable.

  Too many people in this kitchen.

  He was wondering what the chances were of luring her back upstairs, when his phone buzzed and he pulled it out. He glanced at the identifier, which indicated that it was a message from Wilson. He was surprised to see it was in plain text, not encrypted:

  dock. five minutes. bring carpenter.

  He looked up at his partner, who was wolfing down breakfast. “We have to meet the boss.”

  Carpenter nodded and spoke around pancake. “When and where?”

 
“Five minutes on the dock.” He watched Agnes, wondering how she felt about her dock being used for his business meetings. Probably not as upset as her wedding being used for his hit.

  Carpenter’s eyebrows were up a notch. “Let’s get moving, then.” He scooped up another forkful of pancake and got to his feet. “That was an elegant breakfast, Miss Agnes,” he said. “Simply wonderful,” he added, smiling at Lisa Livia.

  “Thank you,” Agnes said, and smiled back, but she watched Shane, worry in her eyes.

  Shane got to his feet, too, displacing Rhett, who snorted and then slept on. “That was my line,” he said to Carpenter. “The breakfast one. Except in the movie it was dinner.” He paused, realizing both Agnes and Lisa Livia were looking at him blankly now. Apparently they didn’t watch the classics, either. “Okay. Yeah. Great breakfast.” He tried a smile for Agnes, which didn’t really work. “Sorry.”

  “No,” Agnes said, catching his meaning, another good thing about her. “It’s good to know.” She drew a deep breath. “I sure am looking forward to Sunday.”

  “What happens Sunday?” Lisa Livia said.

  “With any luck, not a damn thing,” Agnes said, and when Lisa Livia still looked blank, she said, “The wedding will be over, the house will still be mine, we’ll all be alive, and Shane and Carpenter will have sold that life insurance policy.”

  “Life insurance policy?” Carpenter said.

  “To Casey Dean,” Shane said. “Who will have cashed it in.”

  “Ah,” Carpenter said, looking surprised at the security breach.

  “It was on a need-to-know basis,” Shane told him. “She needed to know.”

  “I guess she did,” Carpenter said, and Agnes smiled at him, a damn good smile this time.

  “I miss a lot when I sleep late,” Lisa Livia said, looking from one of them to the other.

  “Yeah,” Shane said, wishing for the first time in his life he could take the day off. He nodded to Carpenter. “Let’s go meet the boss.”

  He wasn’t supposed to tell me that, Agnes thought, watching Shane and Carpenter walk down the path to the dock. He broke rules to tell me that. That made it better, that she was special enough that he’d break rules for her. And he was coming back to her, too. Maybe this time, she thought. Maybe-