The Lavender List

by Meg Harrington

  She squeezes her tighter as though just her arms and this promise will keep them together.

  CHAPTER 23

  The conversation on the drive back to DC is… lively. Judith sits up front, preens, and talks to Laura about their one common interest unrelated to sex or espionage.

  Amelia, who’s in the back seat reading—probably moving onto Proust—looks up with a raised eyebrow. “King Solomon’s Mines? Really?”

  Laura will not blush over her love of the movie.

  Judith, being a fink, twists around in her seat to tell Amelia about how Laura just adores the movie. And the book. And the rest of that particular genre.

  “Even Tarzan?”

  “Especially Tarzan.”

  It’s absolutely cutting the way Judith says it, with the quick glances down at the spine of Amelia’s book.

  Laura isn’t an idiot. It’s very obvious that Judith’s attempting to piss all over her like her father’s hounds used to piss on the trees around the property. But she can’t just point that out. Judith operates on obfuscation and insinuation—just outright saying what one feels or thinks is the same as admitting weakness.

  So, she announces that she also likes pie. And brandy.

  Judith is flummoxed by the admission, but Amelia catches Laura’s eye in the rearview and winks.

  They all agree—without putting words to the sentiment—that there is one major person of interest in the plot to have Amelia murdered.

  Her ex, Congressman Chalmers.

  When they arrive outside his home in Georgetown, the pact of tacit agreement wobbles. Amelia feels she should go inside to help with the interrogation and blackmail. Laura disagrees, because while they’ve decided to do this together, she doesn’t exactly want her lover seeing her interrogate a man.

  It can be… uncomfortable.

  Judith vocally doesn’t care one way or the other.

  “It’ll be easier if you stay out here.”

  “What part of ‘let me help’ did you miss, Laura?”

  “Oh no, by all means. Come inside while I rough up your ex. Maybe, if we’re lucky, someone will get a picture and sell it to the papers. ‘Big Lesbian and her Gal Pal Beat Off Congressman.”

  “Please leave the headlines to the professionals,” Judith says.

  “Agreed,” Amelia says.

  “It’s smarter for you to stay in the car. Both for your physical safety—” Amelia starts to protest, but Laura doesn’t let her. “And for you career.”

  “So it’s safer for me? In the car? With the assassin?”

  “Whom I’ll kill if anything happens to you.”

  Judith nods. “It’s true, if nauseating.”

  “Is that supposed to convince me? Because Rosie the Russian Riveter here isn’t doing the trick.”

  She says her name plaintively. “Amelia.”

  Amelia relents. “Fine, I’ll stay in the car while you torture my ex.”

  “I’m not… I won’t torture him.” Laura tried to pass it off as a joke. “Just scare him a little.”

  Judith looked idly in the direction of Chalmers’s home. “He’ll probably need to change his underpants afterwards.”

  Amelia doesn’t look appalled by the idea. If anything she looks comfortable. Her gaze is warm with care, maybe—not concern. As if she might be perfectly okay with the dark and nasty parts of Laura.

  In Laura’s experience, the secret to a good interrogation is to minimize the physical pain inflicted, maximize the terror, and exploit the stupid. And lie.

  With Chalmers she does all four.

  “Got lousy locks on your windows,” she says, and the man jumps five feet in the air and throws his hand to his chest dramatically. Then he looks dumbly around the room because if Laura’s going to terrify a man into an admission of guilt, she makes sure the lights are off first.

  He goes for the switch on the wall, and Laura tsks. “This is much more cozy, don’t you think?”

  “Cozy would be you getting the hell out of my house.”

  “I’m absolutely for that. Unfortunately, I can’t leave until we have a little chat.”

  He sighs. “Someone sent you?”

  “No. I took it upon myself to come here.” She steps into a pool of light cast from a picture frame. The recognition is almost immediate for Chalmers.

  His confusion comes a little slower.

  She produces the list, stuck between two fingers. “Amelia made this. Your name’s on it.”

  “I’m not a communist…” He’s still woefully confused.

  She clarifies. “But you’d love to bugger a few.”

  Everything, right down to Amelia being in mortal peril, is almost worth it for the face he makes as he moves from confused to absolutely bewildered. “How—why—Amelia sent a housewife to threaten me?”

  “God, you’re slow. I came on my own, you idiot.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m on the list too, and I’m rather fond of its maker.”

  He sputters. “You’re queer.”

  “As a three-dollar bill. Now can we get to the part where you agree to the blackmail I’m about to demand or are you going to keep looking at me as if I’m the idiot?”

  Clearly, he prefers the staring and befuddlement, because he sags into a chair and rubs his head.

  “Blackmail? How—”

  She raises an eyebrow.

  “How is it even supposed to work? If you out the list you out yourself.”

  “This is a romantic gesture, Chalmers. Because I only out all of us if she’s hurt.”

  He blinks.

  “As in, I’ll have nothing to live for.”

  “What about Michel?”

  She whips a vase off his mantle and throws it toward his legs. He quickly draws them out of the way with a yelp.

  It’s very satisfying.

  “Good Lord. I honestly don’t understand how you were elected to office. Can you at least acknowledge the present threat to your career and reputation?”

  “I acknowledge the threat, but you forget, I know where you live too. I know your husband. And now I know your secret.” He’s so damned smug she wants to slap him. “You want to threaten me, girly, you better come with more than gumption and a list of fags.”

  He’s right of course. Her reputation in most of DC is entirely related to her hostess abilities. Not her ability to kill a man six different ways with a fork. As far as he’s concerned, he’s being blackmailed by Lucy Ricardo.

  She needs to prove herself.

  So she saunters over, tips his chair onto its back, and straddles him. Lucy would never.

  He tries to get her off, but between the gun pressed to the underside of his chin and the firm grip her legs have around his chest, he isn’t so successful.

  “You’re confused, and that’s understandable. So a little background on me, Congressman.” She digs the sight of her pistol into his flesh. “In the war, I was responsible for the death of thousands of Nazi soldiers, and I personally killed over a hundred, many with my bare hands. Since the war, I’ve continued to put those skills to use as an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency and—and this part is very important Congressman—if a single hair is out of place on Amelia Wright’s head, I will use those skills and my considerable resources to annihilate you and everyone you’ve bothered to ever care about.” She lists them, because she’s done her homework and would like him to know that too. “First it will be your cousin in Michigan. Then that roommate in law school that can’t talk to you without blushing. After that, it’ll be your dear father, you know the one you’ve been estranged from on account of your ‘persuasions.’ They’ll be finished, one way or another, and if you’re stupid enough to come for me directly?” She lean
s so close she can see the little black hairs on his nose. “I will see it coming, because you don’t spend three years embedded in a war zone without being very good at identifying threats.”

  She pulls back the firing hammer on her gun. It’s a particularly dangerous game. Semi-automatic pistols aren’t meant to have their hammers cocked. The pressure required to pull the trigger drops to almost nothing. If Laura sneezes or Chalmers fidgets, he’s dead.

  It’s the first time the two of them are on the same page.

  “When,” he swallows, and his stubble scrapes against the barrel. “When does this agreement start?”

  “What?”

  “I just want to know when your threat goes into effect.”

  “Now. It starts now.”

  “Then,” he starts to smile, but it’s the nervous smile of a very dead man, “we might have a problem.”

  Excellent. She plays dumb. “How? You don’t know where Amelia is?”

  “No, but I wasn’t looking for her to begin with. I pay other people to do that.”

  “Who?”

  “You’ve probably got a better idea than I do.”

  She does?

  “They’re from your agency.”

  She knocks him unconscious.

  Her agency.

  The CIA doesn’t do ops in the US.

  Okay, unofficially, they do ops in the US. Laura’s done countless. But they would never be part of something so high profile. Unless they are as worried about the leak as Chalmers.

  Which makes a little sense. Espionage tends to be popular work for people of hers and Chalmers’s persuasion. It’s all the lies. The queer ones learn how to lie faster than the normal ones.

  But if there’s an op, a secret op to ferret Amelia out by using Chalmers as bait, then they’ve had eyes on his home all night, maybe all weekend. Which means they saw her sneak in and didn’t stop her.

  Laura’s done exactly what the CIA needed her to do. Deliver Amelia right into their hands.

  She takes the stairs two at a time.

  She has time.

  They won’t kill Amelia outside of Chalmers’s home. They can’t.

  She crashes through the front door and bears witness to the end of a melee right there in the street.

  There’s a big dent in the rear driver’s side door of her car from where a man was thrown into it head first. He’s out for the count on the ground.

  Judith, hat and coat still on, is huddled against the wheel well with a bloodied tire iron and another man by her side.

  And Amelia—Laura watches a second car screech away.

  Amelia’s gone.

  She’d scream, but she hasn’t the time.

  The gun in her hand is light as air, grip snug against her palm. She aims at the top of Judith’s head.

  It’s as if she is walking on air. There’s a vague buzz in her every step and a whine in her ear.

  Amelia’s gone.

  “You had one job,” she says. “You failed.”

  The head shakes as if Judith disagrees. She leans back against the car, and her head thumps against the metal.

  And it isn’t Judith lying against the car. The coat’s too big; the hat’s tilted wrong, and the hair’s too dark.

  “She had me change outfits when you went in,” Amelia says. “Wanted me to be safe.”

  “They kidnapped the wrong woman?” She’s supposed to be delighted, but honestly she’s just confused.

  Amelia nods. “Now come on. We got to go save the jackass.”

  The rescue involves a high speed chase. Amelia sails through traffic and pushes their car to its theoretical limits, while Laura hangs out the passenger window to take pot shots at the other car’s rear window.

  It’s not very effective. The men who have Judith aren’t going to blink about a little small arms fire. A machine gun or a high-powered rifle would be much more useful.

  Thankfully, Amelia’s behind the wheel. She can drive a damn car, and she wields the whole thing the way Babe Ruth used to wield a bat.

  She darts between cars and ducks the few times the other car takes a shot at them. She doesn’t talk. She’s got incredible focus as she maneuvers a few tons of steel at high speed.

  But she does smile.

  A grin that lights up the whole car.

  “This could be us,” that smile says.

  Every day.

  Dodging bullets, using cars like knives, and saving the world and the girl.

  It could be the two of them.

  No hiding a whole chunk of their lives. No resignation and bitterness.

  Just adventure. Together.

  The other car slows, red rear lights fill the car with a macabre glow.

  Laura wants to shout something like watch out, because there’s only one reason they’d try to come up beside them. A reason Amelia would never consider. She’s not a killer. She’d never slow the car down to come up beside the pursuit vehicle just to…

  Shoot the driver in the head.

  Laura screams Amelia’s name. Reaches for her.

  It happens too fast to do anything else.

  The report of gunfire in so small a place booms.

  Too damn fast.

  Amelia jerks the wheel.

  Glass shatters.

  Their car crunches into the other. Metal shrieks as it’s pried apart by the force.

  Then.

  Silence.

  There’s noise—she’s sure of it—but in her head it hums like static on the radio.

  Her head throbs, and when she looks around dazedly with blurred vision, she sees Judith in the other car, dislocating one man’s shoulder and the other man’s jaw. Finishing Laura’s job for her.

  “Did we get ’em,” Amelia rasps.

  “We helped. Looks as if—looks as if Judith is doing the actual getting.”

  “Great,” Amelia says, but it comes out as a gurgle.

  It’s a very specific wheeze emanating from Amelia. It’s dark in the car—too dark to see properly, but Laura doesn’t need to.

  Because she knows that wheeze. Has heard it before. When a blade draws across a throat to part vital elements of a life, blood and air mix. It’s that wheeze.

  There’s glass everywhere.

  The bullet missed its mark. But the crash. The glass…

  She undoes her belt, fingers slippery with blood, and kneels beside Amelia. She presses her hand over the gash where blood wells up along Amelia’s neck. She tells her it’s okay, even though she doesn’t believe it.

  She begs her to hold on in the same breath that she tells Judith to run for help.

  She begs her to stay. To live. To not leave her.

  Amelia tries with all her might to obey.

  And she lives, but Laura sits by her bedside and stares at the blood crusted under her own fingernails. The blame buries her, crowds around her until she cannot breathe.

  It tempers the joy she should feel when Amelia finally opens her eyes and ruins the happiness when Amelia says, “Hey.” It’s reedy and raspy, and it means that Amelia is alive.

  She kisses her hand, but nothing more. They’re in a hospital, and people are eager to catch a sight of the actress nearly killed in a car accident. They crowd in the halls, offering an unintended layer of protection from anyone still seeking to murder her.

  “You’ll be happy to know,” Laura’s surprised by how rusty her own voice sounds, “that the inquiry has been dropped.”

  Amelia raises an eyebrow, and it stretches the streak of stitches across her neck and up her cheek.

  “The press has painted you as an innocent, browbeat by Congress. They, and the public at large, are foaming at the mouth over the near
loss of their little darling.”

  Amelia smirks.

  “The list has been destroyed.” Long, deep breaths Laura. “So, you are safe.”

  “You mean most of me. My best side’s gonna look like shit on camera now.”

  It’s a joke. Or meant to sound like one, but it makes Laura hunch over in her chair and hold her hand to her mouth.

  Because, while she’s been assured the scars will fade and Amelia will have a career again, she nearly didn’t. The reminder of that near failure will be sketched into her skin forever.

  And it’s Laura’s fault.

  Amelia’s hand, an IV jutting sharply out of it, curls around her wrist and gently pulls it away from her face. “It’s okay Laura. I’m…I’ll be okay.”

  Laura sighs and stands tall. Away from the bed. Just out of reach. Far enough away that Amelia would have to work to touch her with anything more than her leg. Amelia’s face keeps threatening to pull into a frown, but being the Oscar-winning actress she is, she schools it into a mask instead.

  One Laura can’t bear to look at.

  She stares at her nails. Something dark keeps finding its way underneath. “When you first refused to talk to me, I told myself it was because you were angry, and I thought, given time, it would all resolve itself.”

  She’s not looking at Amelia, but she can picture the cocky little smirk. “It kind of did.”

  “And you nearly died, Amelia. You weren’t just keeping me at arm’s length because you were mad, but because you were brave enough to admit what I couldn’t.”

  Amelia shakes her head. Opens her mouth to speak.

  Laura holds her hand up. Not so high as to be an abrupt silencing gesture, but high enough to show Amelia she needs to continue to speak.

  She has to.

  It’s just like plucking stitches, she tells herself. Quick and clean, and it will be over in no time.