by Harper Lin
I did, however, think the criminals who ran this outfit weren’t the ones who killed Archibald. They looked like pros to me. They wouldn’t kill him over a debt because then they’d never get their money, plus they wouldn’t have murdered him outside where they could have been spotted. Of course, they might have wanted to send a message, perhaps to strike fear into the heart of someone who owed them significantly more money, but they could have done that more safely simply by threatening the actual target.
No, the murder had been the work of an amateur, and I might very well be having lunch with the amateur in question.
Lunch ended all too soon, and the circle quickly broke up. Within minutes, everyone was staring at the screens again, lost in their little worlds of luck and hope. We gambled for a while longer, winning some and losing some but not regaining any of what we had already lost.
I hoped to get a chance to talk to the others again, but they remained at their own tables, encased in their own fantasies of easy wealth. It didn’t look like I was going to get any more done today, and glancing at my watch, I decided it was getting time for me to leave anyway.
“I have to be at my son’s house in an hour, and I need to swing by and feed the cat first,” I told my date. It came out sounding like I had a curfew.
“Oh, that’s too bad,” he said. He looked longingly at the screens and at his racing form, torn between staying here or being the gentleman and leaving with me. I’m happy to say his gentlemanly side won.
“Did you have a good time?” Octavian asked as he walked me out.
“Yes,” I said in all honesty.
“Great!” he said with a smile. “I was worried you might be turned off by losing.”
“Oh well, it was educational.”
Yes, very educational, but I still hadn’t learned all I wanted to know. I needed to go back after hours and take a look around when no one was there.
But what I didn’t know was that I had another mission to accomplish, and this one would be just as tricky.
Five
My son, Frederick, lived in an attractive New-England-style house in a good neighborhood in Cheerville. It stood at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac. Well, it would have been quiet if my grandson, Martin, wasn’t practicing his mountain bike moves in the front yard.
He’d scrounged some plywood from Frederick’s latest home-improvement project and propped them up on two tree stumps standing about twenty feet apart. He pedaled as fast as he could at one of the ramps, hit it with a loud bang, ricocheted off of it, wagging his front wheel in a way that was meant to look cool, thumped down on the grass, and pedaled for the other ramp, repeating the move with an even louder thump.
I could hear the noise from half a block away with the windows in my car rolled up. I couldn’t imagine what the neighbors were thinking.
They were probably thinking Frederick had sent my grandson out there to drive them all away. Frederick was the town’s leading real estate agent and made a tidy profit any time a house went up for sale.
I pulled into the driveway, honking to alert Martin just in case he decided to suddenly change direction and cross my path without looking. He responded by banking off a ramp, letting go of the handlebars, and waving with both hands. He barely gripped the handlebars in time to avoid crashing.
Thirteen-year-olds are immortal, you see. I often felt that if the CIA really wanted operatives who were fearless, they should hire teenagers.
Even though Martin saved himself from face-planting into the lawn, which was looking distinctly shredded from all his toing and froing, he didn’t regain enough control of his bike to hit the ramp correctly. Instead of hitting the center of the board where it was supported by the tree, he hit the edge. He barreled straight through it, the board whipping around like a door being slammed, crashing into his back wheel.
Martin, already wobbly from showing off for his grandmother, lost complete control of the bike and tumbled off, rolling to one side as the bike ploughed through a rose bush and lodged itself into my son’s white picket fence.
I emerged from my car, applauding. I suppose I should have felt guilty considering it was indirectly my fault he fell, but I relished the attention almost as much as he did. For the longest time, I’d been the boring old fart who could safely be ignored in favor of video games. Thanks to a newly discovered mutual love of reading, I’d become Grandma once more. It was like he was six again, except more gratifying because the affection wasn’t automatic.
Martin staggered to his feet, brushing his unruly blonde hair from his eyes. Nothing seemed broken or bleeding. Airplane pilots say any landing you walk away from is a good landing. I wondered if Martin would become an airline pilot. I’d develop a phobia of flying in that case.
“Did you bring Dandelion?” he asked as he walked over to his bike.
“No, she’d scratch my car’s upholstery to bits! She’s quite destructive for a kitten.”
“She’s not destructive,” Martin said, stomping through the rose bush and yanking the bike out from where its front tire was stuck between two boards of the fence. One of the boards came with it.
Martin looked at me ruefully. “Don’t tell Dad about that.”
“My lips are sealed. Try to fix it.”
He set the board against the fence and kicked it a couple of times. One of the nails sticking out of the board caught on another board and lodged in it. Despite it being at a forty-five-degree angle, Martin decided it looked convincing enough to fool his dad and got back on his bike, smashing more roses as he turned in a tight circle and cycled over to me.
“Finished the book yet?” he asked.
The book in question was Dragon’s Fire Book Four: Dragon’s Hoard, part of a young adult fantasy series Martin was devouring. It was nice to see him devour something other than burgers and his parents’ property value. I’d already read books one through three. Martin was on book six.
“I’m halfway through,” I told him. “They’ve just figured out how to cast a spell to move the rock in front of the cave.”
Martin’s eyes widened. “Then you’re coming to the best part. They go in and—”
“No spoilers!”
“Oh, right.”
We both laughed. I’m a “no spoilers” kind of girl. I don’t even watch previews of movies I know I’m going to see, or read the blurbs of the latest books from my favorite authors.
“But it’s good,” I said. “I’m enjoying it as much as the first three.”
Actually, I was enjoying being able to bond with my grandson. The books weren’t bad, though. They were simple adventure fare following three teenagers who had to rid the world of dragons while dealing with typical teen problems.
The little wizard boy struggled with a crippling shyness but felt comfortable with his two companions. The warrior boy’s family got killed in a dragon attack, and he was all alone in the world. He was the most undisciplined of the three and obviously needed a father figure, which he was slowly finding in the old sage who taught the adventurous trio dragon lore. The warrior girl, Skara, my favorite character, had to deal with the unwelcome attentions of a pervy uncle, who she put in his place time and again. He was the local lord, however, so Skara couldn’t get him locked up. But she did manage to thwart his evil plans and was slowly undermining his position. I sensed the uncle would get a splendid comeuppance before the series ended. Young adult books were certainly more serious now than the ones I was raised on.
The front door opened, and my son, Frederick, appeared. Frederick, as much as I loved him, was not a chip off the old block. The apple had fallen very far from the tree. Any number of clichés could be used to describe just how different he was from me and his father.
First off, he had never heard a shot fired in anger. Frederick didn’t even like war films or the violent video games Martin loved as much as his fantasy novels. He also didn’t take care of himself. Despite being barely into middle age, he was developing quite the belly. His idea of exercise
was taking clients around a home he was trying to sell.
He was a fine man, though, a warm spirit who loved his child so much that he pretended not to notice the broken fence.
Of course he noticed it immediately. It was his job to spot every detail of a piece of property, and the squashed rose bush and the crooked fence post weren’t exactly inconspicuous.
“Hi, Mom!” he called to me with a friendly wave, his voice somewhat strained as he gave the fence a sidelong glance. “Martin, come on in. It’s time for dinner.”
As his father turned back inside, Martin gave me a conspiratorial grin and a thumbs-up. He dumped his bike on the lawn and hurried inside. I followed him, chuckling and shaking my head. At times, I felt Frederick and Alicia were too soft on Martin. He got away with so much, and his room was a disaster area, but on the other hand, he was a sweet boy who got good grades and never got into any real trouble at school.
As I came inside, nearly tripping over Martin’s skateboard and wending my way around a pair of just-discarded sneakers, I smelled the rich aroma of my daughter-in-law’s famous lasagna. It wasn’t famous for being particularly delicious, not that I can judge anyone’s cooking, but because it was truly famous. It made it onto the front page of the Cheerville Gazette last year when she was making some and got so involved with a complex mathematical problem that she forgot she was cooking at all. A ringing smoke alarm, two fire trucks, and several hundred gallons of water later, she made it onto the front page under the banner headline Famed Local Physicist Creates Dark Matter in Oven. They even had a photo of what remained of the lasagna, and it did indeed look like the contents of a black hole.
Frederick had pulled his advertising from the paper for a month after that until he got an apology from both the editor and the reporter. Personally, I thought it was hilarious. The Cheerville Gazette was usually so boring.
I walked into the kitchen, both to check on the lasagna and to say hello to my daughter-in-law. Sadly, she was a rare sight around these parts. She was a noted particle physicist, working on some esoteric research project with the CERN reactor beneath the border of France and Switzerland. Half the time she was over there, and much of the rest of her time she was flying to various conferences. This year alone she’d been to the Imperial College in London, the European Southern Observatory in Chile, the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and so many stateside conferences that I’d lost track. Was it any wonder she sometimes forgot she had something in the oven? She was headed for a Nobel Prize or a heart attack. I wasn’t sure which. Perhaps both.
Alicia was a thin, preoccupied-looking woman with long blond hair and a pretty face. She was most certainly not the stereotypical nerdy scientist type. She dressed in the latest fashions when she cared to and was conversant in art and literature as well as physics, astronomy, and the kind of mathematics we mere mortals couldn’t ever hope to fathom.
When Frederick landed this prize catch, I knew James and I had raised him right. Many men couldn’t handle a successful woman who was more intelligent than they were. Not so with Frederick. He adored her. The only friction I detected in their marriage was that she traveled so much, and the only reason that bothered my son was it meant he didn’t get to spend as much time with her as he liked.
Alicia, with her usual businesslike manner, was already cutting the thankfully unburnt lasagna and heaping it in generous portions on four plates. I gave her a hug and started to help. I loved dinners here. No, the food wasn’t the best, but my cooking was no better, and it sure beat eating alone in front of the TV.
Once we settled down at the dinner table, Martin gave his father a nudge. Immediately an alarm bell went off in my head. I could tell a “go on, ask her” nudge when I saw one.
Frederick cleared his throat, stifled a belch, and said, “Um, Mom, you know how I have that big conference in the city for the next three nights?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, um, Alicia was going to take care of Martin, but—”
“I’ll be really good!” Martin said.
“Wait. What?” I asked, looking from one to the other. Then my eyes settled on Alicia.
The famous scientist shrugged. “I have to go back to CERN. There’s some mix-up with the isotopes I can’t solve from here. I’m so sorry.”
“Three nights!” I turned to Frederick. “But don’t you have to go tomorrow?”
My son looked suitably abashed. “I’m sorry. I can take him to school, but then I have to get on the train. This is really important. I’m sorry it’s such short notice.”
Some words I had said when I first moved here came back to haunt me. “I can take care of Martin anytime. Just ask. It’s no bother. It’s not like I have anything else to do.”
Yeah, except catch a murderer who liked slicing people’s necks open with hedge clippers.
How the heck was I supposed to do that with Martin around?
“I’ll put some lasagna in a Tupperware so you don’t have to cook dinner one of the nights,” Alicia said.
“And we can go out for burgers the other nights,” Martin added helpfully.
“You don’t mind, do you?” Frederick asked.
“Don’t worry. I won’t give you any trouble!” Martin promised.
“I don’t mind at all,” I lied. Of course I minded, and Martin, out of no malice of his own, would be heaps of trouble. But that wasn’t really what bothered me. Neither did the last-minute change of plans it entailed. What I minded was how the heck I was going to carry out a murder investigation while trying to take care of a thirteen-year-old cyclone.
Six
The strip mall looked deserted. It was well past midnight, and the Cheerville Social Club closed at ten. That was unusually early for a gambling den, but considering so many of its members were senior citizens, I guessed it didn’t get much business in the late hours, plus they probably didn’t want to attract any undue attention from the police by being the only place open in the strip mall late into the night.
I drove by slowly a couple of times and didn’t see any sign of life. No cars were in the parking lot or on the street nearby. Good. That meant the place wasn’t being used for any other activities after hours.
Unless these gangsters were good at hiding their vehicles or had dropped off a guard to stay overnight. I had to take care. I parked my car half a block away to be inconspicuous, but it still stood out on the empty street. I grimaced. There was no getting around it. In my younger years, I would have parked a mile away and walked. I couldn’t do that anymore and still be in good enough shape to deal with any potential trouble once I got to the target building.
I wished I had enough time to do a proper reconnaissance of this building. It was best to case the building at various times over the course of a night, but if Martin was staying with me tomorrow, I’d have to do all my sneaking around tonight or not at all. Plus, I’d never get to check out the casino’s evening crowd like I had intended to.
Of course, I had brought my gun, a 9mm automatic pistol in a locked carrying case as required by state law. Our state was pretty rigid about guns, and you could only pull it out on your own private property or at a firing range. I unlocked the case and tucked the pistol in my pocket. Now I was breaking the law, but sometimes you had to do that for the greater good. My fellow CIA operatives and I had done it so many times, it had almost become the agency motto.
With its comforting weight in the pocket of my sweater, the bulge hidden under my purse, I took a good look around to make sure I was alone and walked to the strip mall. A car passed but didn’t slow down. Most civilians don’t pay any attention to anything except what directly affects them. As long as a police car didn’t pass, I should be all right.
I was in luck and made it to the strip mall without anyone else spotting me. I made a circle around the mall to come at it from the back, passing out of the lit parking lot and storefronts into the relative darkness between the end of the building and a fence cutting it off from a patch of fores
t. I passed a dumpster, wrinkling my nose at the stench, and came around to the back.
I paused and peeked around the corner. There was a wide strip of pavement, bounded by a chain-link fence, with some parking spaces for employees and delivery vehicles. No cars back here, either, but I bet there were a couple of security cameras. Remaining in the shadows, I pulled a black balaclava out of my purse and put it on. To heighten the disguise, I’d changed into a baggy old sweater I never wore outside the house and a pair of sweat pants and sneakers. I looked ridiculous, I’ll admit, but I didn’t want to be identified. I planned on becoming a regular visitor to the Cheerville Social Club.
Taking a deep breath and squaring my shoulders, I walked directly to what I estimated to be the back door of the club. As I approached, I saw a security camera fixed above the door, plus a bulb in a bracket that shone a circle of light on the door. If someone was in there, they’d see me for sure, but there was no way to avoid that.
My luck held. No one popped out of the door to put some lead in me. I had even more luck than that. A sticker by the door announced what kind of alarm they had.
That was courteous of them. Announcing there was a burglar alarm was supposed to intimidate me, but it actually made me more confident. I reached into my purse, turned on my phone, brought up a certain classified document, scrolled down to the right entry, then set the phone aside and pulled out my lock pick set and reading glasses.
Yes, I’d reached the point in life where I needed my reading glasses to properly see the lock I was picking.
Opening the door was simplicity itself.
It was dark inside, except for the glowing panel of the security alarm on the wall just beyond the doorway. It was beeping softy, and a little red light flashed on and off. I had thirty seconds to punch in the right code, or the police would be informed. After checking my cell phone, I punched in the number. The beeping stopped, and the flashing red light turned into a steady green one.
