Stella, Get Your Man

by Nancy Bartholomew

  The driver’s-side door was open and Tom was crouched behind it, a shotgun aimed directly in the path of the oncoming car.

  “Oh, shit. Hold on.”

  I floored the truck into reverse, laying tire across the pavement of the street as I blocked the Town Car’s retreat.

  “Get out.” I screamed. “Get inside the building.”

  The three of us piled out of the vehicle as Cauliflower Ear’s car headed back in our direction, doing 35 mph in reverse. I pulled out my Glock, used the hood of the truck for cover while Spike half dragged Nina across the sidewalk and into the police department.

  Tom and I had the street blocked. There was nowhere for the two goons to run, but they were armed and anything could happen.

  The Town Car stopped. There was a hasty consultation between Cauliflower and the short man, followed by the short guy losing his temper and lashing out at Cauliflower’s already mangled ear.

  Tom reached for a megaphone and spoke into it.

  “Get out of the car, now. Put your hands in the air where I can see them and get out slowly.”

  He looked around, turning the bullhorn in my direction, and then spoke into it again.

  “Jake, that you?”

  I smiled to myself and waved my gun at him over the hood of the car, knowing he couldn’t hear me and also knowing he’d assume I was Jake when he saw the gun.

  “I’m calling for backup,” he said.

  Like we needed backup.

  The Lincoln’s two front doors slowly opened. Cauliflower emerged from the driver’s side, hands in the air. On the other side, the short guy also emerged from the car, but I could see the bulge in the back of his suit coat and knew he had other plans.

  Cauliflower started to lie facedown in the street, but as I expected, the little man decided to run.

  “I got him,” I screamed, and took off, leaving Tom to cover Cauliflower.

  Behind us I heard the door to the P.D. slam open as the promised backup began arriving.

  For a short, beefy guy, the little man could run. He flew toward the courthouse, leaping a short fence as if it were a hurdle and continuing on. It took me almost fifty yards to catch up to him, and another five to bring him down.

  I hopped on his back and we went crashing to the ground. There was a loud grunt as he hit, the air whooshing from his lungs and leaving him breathless. I sat on him, the muzzle of my Glock flush with the back of his skull, and thought for a moment about revenge.

  Then the cop in me took over. I reached for the gun in his waistband and pulled it out, the adrenaline rush making my hands shake just slightly. I heard Tom issuing instructions, heard the sound of footsteps approaching and felt a slight twinge of regret that it was all over with so quickly. A deeper pain edged at my heart and for a moment I was almost breathless with the realization: I missed being a cop, missed it more than I’d ever realized.

  “Stella,” Tom cried. “I thought you were Jake.”

  He knelt by my side, pulled out his cuffs and was about to take over when I stopped him.

  “Please,” I said, meeting his eyes. “Allow me.”

  Without a word, Tom handed me his handcuffs and I snapped them onto the little man’s thick wrists. I hopped off his back, tugged my prisoner to his feet just as I’d done a thousand times before and turned to see the look of acknowledgment on Tom’s face.

  “Hard to leave the job, isn’t it?” he asked softly.

  I nodded, feeling tears clog my throat and making speech impossible.

  “I appreciate the assist,” he said. “Wanna tell me about it over a cup of joe?”

  I nodded again, this time embarrassed by the lone tear that escaped, snaking its way down my cheek. I brushed it away before the little guy could see it, but Tom didn’t miss a thing.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s get this dirtbag inside and go have lunch with Marti.”

  He didn’t wait for me to answer. He walked his prisoner toward the front door of the police department and handed him over to a young boy in a uniform. I figured the kid couldn’t have been out of high school, but he was wearing a gun and a badge and seemed to have a handle on his captive. All I knew was that for that one moment, I would’ve traded places with him and maybe never looked back.

  Spike and Nina rushed out of the building with Tom following behind them.

  “I called Jake,” Nina said. “He said to tell you not to mess up his truck and call him when you can.”

  “Don’t mess up my truck.” Typical Jakespeak for, “Be careful.”

  I smiled, looked behind them to see Tom standing in the doorway and called, “We’ll meet you up there, okay?”

  Tom threw up his hand. “Won’t be more than a few minutes.”

  Taking a statement in a diner was certainly not standard police procedure, even in a town as slow and small as Surfside Isle, but I knew why Tom was making the exception. It was his way of acknowledging a fellow officer, even if I wasn’t on the job anymore. It was his way of acknowledging my grief, by letting me talk to him about his two new prisoners just the way he’d talk to another detective. It was damn nice of him.

  We climbed back into the truck and I turned the cumbersome vehicle back around and headed for Marti’s.

  Spike sat next to me, content to ride silently for a moment before asking in her quiet, steady voice, “You all right?”

  I nodded. “Fine. Really. It was no big deal.”

  “All in a day’s work, huh?” she murmured.

  I looked at her, saw she’d read me, and nodded. “Yep.”

  She reached over and covered my free hand with one of her own, squeezing briefly before letting go.

  “I know just how you feel,” she said softly. And I was sure she did.

  When we reached the diner, Marti met us at the door, menus in hand, grinning.

  “Tom called,” she said. “Told me he was meeting some pretty women for lunch. If I’d ’a known it was you, I wouldn’t have stuck those thumbtacks on the seats.”

  She ushered us to a secluded booth and announced, “The special today is beef tips over rice. I highly recommend it.”

  “I’m not having lunch,” Nina said, her chin tilted a bit defiantly.

  “No?” Marti asked, no longer surprised by anything Nina said.

  “Nope. I’m going to start with dessert. The way my day’s gone, I figure I should eat dessert first, in case something happens and I don’t get time for the good stuff.” Nina frowned at us. “You know,” she said. “There are no guarantees in life. It could all go poof! in an instant.”

  Marti nodded. “Well, in that case, coconut cake is the specialty of the day, and—”

  “I highly recommend it!” we all shouted, laughing along with her.

  “Does this mean you’re all having cake?” Marti asked.

  We nodded in unison.

  “All right then,” Marti said. “I’ll have to join you. Be right back. Coffee?”

  Another choral nod from the three of us and Marti disappeared into the kitchen.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” Nina cried, and reached deep into her purse. “I found the most amazing things.”

  As we watched, Nina pulled a sheaf of copy paper from her purse, carefully unfolded it and slid one of the papers around to face my side of the table.

  “See? There’s your information. Tells you everything you need to know.”

  I pulled the paper closer and studied it. It was a small, one-column-wide article entitled, Local Man Earns Ph.D.

  “It was buried in the ‘Hometown Spotlight’ section,” Nina explained. “I almost missed it.”

  I scanned the article and learned that Doug Hirshfield had gone from earning his B.S. in physics at Yale to Columbia, where he’d managed to earn his Ph.D. in biomechanical engineering in 1992.

  “Then what happened to him?”

  Nina slid the second piece of copy paper toward me. A small box revealed that Doug Hirshfield, of Quantico, Virginia, had attended the fiftieth w
edding party held in his parents’ honor in 1993.

  Nina’s smile disappeared as she added, “But I don’t know where he is now. Nobody knows. I asked all of my friends at the library, but nobody had any idea. They said he never did anything but study as a kid, so they figured he was off working for some university or something.”

  I looked at the articles again. Quantico, Virginia, was the home of the FBI, wasn’t it? What were the odds one of our top-secret agencies had need of the services of a biomechanical engineer? Quite good I thought.

  “Don’t worry about it, honey,” Spike said. “Stella got the address from the nursing home.”

  Nina’s eyes widened. “Fred’s mom was feeling better?”

  Spike and I shook our heads and smiled.

  “No.” Nina breathed, turning to Spike. “Oh, baby, I am totally impressed. You broke the law to help my cousin? Oh, that is like, such a turn-on.”

  Spike’s cheeks colored and I couldn’t stop a giggle from escaping.

  “Oh, wait. There’s this, too,” Nina added. “Look.”

  Nina slid one last piece of paper in my direction. The article was entitled, Local Author Celebrates Another Bestseller, but it wasn’t the article that caught my attention. Beneath the text was a photograph with the caption “Fred and Tonya May at Korean Embassy Dinner.” I studied the picture, noting the couple standing beside the Korean dignitary. They were dressed for a black-tie affair, with Fred in a tux and his wife in a strapless, sequined gown.

  I picked up the paper and held it closer to the light from the outside window, seeing now what had excited Nina. The woman in the photograph had long blond hair, but there was no mistaking her identity. Mia Lange, our phantom client, stood smiling out at me from her place beside her deceased husband.

  “Holy shit.”

  Nina nodded, beaming as Spike took the paper from my hands and looked for herself.

  “Mia Lange?” she breathed.

  “The one and only.” Nina grinned. “Before they separated.”

  I gaped at her, openmouthed. “Separated?”

  Nina enjoyed her triumph of knowledge. “Yep. Divorce was final two weeks before he died. Here.”

  She slid one final piece of paper across the table. It held the one-line newspaper listing of Fred’s divorce from Tonya.

  I sat back against the seat and saw Tom enter the diner. Marti met him, tray in hand, and nodded toward our booth.

  “We’re going to have to make this the shortest lunch in the history of humankind,” I said, stuffing the papers in my purse. “I can’t wait to show this to Jake.”

  “What about Tom? Should we tell him?” Spike asked, her voice pitched low so he wouldn’t overhear.

  I shrugged. “I’d rather talk to Jake first. Something tells me we might not have all the pieces of the puzzle.”

  My head was spinning with all the possibilities. Mia Lange was really Tonya May, Fred’s wife, and Doug Hirshfield was her brother-in-law and not her brother. So why would Tonya May be unable to locate her former brother-in-law? And since she wasn’t looking for a kidney for her ailing sister, why was she looking for Doug?

  I felt my stomach tighten and it was all I could do to wait for Tom to reach the booth and slide in beside me. I felt as if somewhere a clock was ticking and if we didn’t reach it in time, horrible things might happen. I knew this feeling was irrational, that I had no basis in fact to support this, but felt panic growing inside myself anyway. Something was wrong, bad wrong, I just knew it, but there was nothing I could do.

  Instead, I needed to sit patiently, hear what Tom had to say and answer his questions. Everything would fall into place eventually, investigations always did. You worked the clues a step at a time and in the end, patience paid off. It was just hard to see that now.

  The real names of Joey Smack’s enforcers were unimportant. The fact that they had rap sheets long enough to paper an entire neighborhood merely meant that Joey was taking his current gripe seriously enough to send his very best. However, since they seemed to have been frequently arrested, their skill was somewhat in question. How good could you be if you were continuously arrested?

  Tom took their arrests seriously, as I would have had I been in his place, but to me, it was just another snag in an already crazy investigation. I was so anxious to reach Jake I barely heard what Tom had to say about Cauliflower Ear and the little man.

  Spike, Nina and I wiggled and squirmed our way through lunch, and when we were at last free to go, we had to fight to keep from running out the door of the diner.

  “This is going to blow Jake’s mind!” Nina said as we drove down the street to the beach house.

  “What in the world?” I cried, spotting the house. “Look! What is that?”

  Ahead of us, parked in the center of the driveway, was a black sedan with government plates and dark, tinted windows.

  Chapter 13

  The three of us climbed down out of the truck and circled the black Ford. Spike met my eyes with a concerned frown.

  “Things just get stranger and stranger,” she muttered.

  “Might as well go see what’s up,” I said. “We won’t find out by standing around out here.”

  Nina was already heading for the front door. She looked especially Ninaesque today. Her blond spiky hair was frozen into stiff spears that stood out at angles all over her head. She wore pink platform sandals that laced up her ankles, and in a nod to the frigid temperature, she had added purple-and-gray striped socks. She wore a fairly conservative suit, for Nina; tight black leather miniskirt and matching black biker jacket, complete with an emblem on the back proclaiming her to be a member of the Triad Leather Club. The outfit was a recent acquisition from the local thrift store.

  I watched her ascending the steps and thought of the unsuspecting government agent inside and smiled. This would be interesting. And then I remembered Jake’s phone message to his government friend, the one he’d called Baby, and wondered if the mystery woman had taken it upon herself to deliver her information on our client in person.

  Nina’s body shielded me from our guests. I heard voices as we stepped into the living room, but couldn’t see anything until Nina abruptly moved out of the way and left me face-to-face with Jake’s friend “Baby.”

  Baby was the kind of woman who makes other women want to resign from their gender. You look at her and think, why bother? She was tall, maybe five-eight, with long, straight black hair and ice-blue eyes. Her complexion was flawless. She didn’t wear makeup, she didn’t need to. Her eyelashes were indecently long. Her nose was straight, perfectly shaped and pointed, like an arrow, to full, kissable lips. She even smiled.

  She wore her standard-issue government suit as if it had been custom cut to fit her sleek, flawless body. Even the bulge of her gun beneath the suit jacket somehow managed to look like a come-on. Long, muscled legs, the bearing of an athlete—it was all there in one perfect package. I wanted to hate her, but why bother?

  “Stella,” Jake said, “this is Sheila Martin.”

  I shook her hand, felt the strength of her grip, and felt my heart plummet about twelve thousand feet. Surely Jake was in love with her. What man in his right mind wouldn’t be?

  “And this is Barry Kincaid,” he said, his tone hardening just enough for me to pick up the warning in it.

  Barry Kincaid was invisible next to Sheila Martin. He was tall, handsome, clean-cut and a mere two-dimensional object next to his dazzling companion. He was the type of agent you send in to do surveillance, while Sheila was a Mata Hari seductress.

  Jake took the lead. “Stella is my partner in the agency,” he said as we all sat down. “I think she should hear this.”

  Barry Kincaid cleared his throat softly, looked at Spike and Nina, and seemed about to say something, but Jake interrupted.

  “They’re also investigators with the agency. They need to be here, as well.” Jake’s tone said end of discussion.

  Sheila looked at Jake and smiled. When he smiled ba
ck, I saw their history as clear as if they’d shown me the video. When she turned and smiled at me, it was a business smile, the kind that doesn’t extend to friendship but wouldn’t preclude it, either. Nicely neutral.

  “Jake called earlier and asked about Douglas Hirshfield. When I called him back and he told me a little bit more about your investigation, I figured we might need to come up and talk.”

  I nodded, waiting for the shoe to drop.

  “We believe your client is a person of interest to this agency,” she said.

  “A person of interest,” Spike said. “That means she’s under investigation?”

  Good old Spike, never show your hand. Good girl. Spike wasn’t telling what we knew, merely setting Sheila up to give us more than she probably intended.

  “It’s no big deal,” Barry Kincaid interjected. “We just think…”

  His voice trailed off as Sheila looked at him.

  “We just think it would be better if you dropped the investigation. I know you wouldn’t want to compromise a possible matter of national security.”

  Her smile was so smooth. You almost couldn’t help wanting to please her.

  “What about Doug Hirshfield?” I asked. “Wasn’t that why you called her, Jake? I mean, how did you realize Mia Lange was an object of interest to your agency if she’s using an assumed name?”

  I saw the corners of Spike’s mouth twitch. Score one for our team, I thought.

  Barry tried to field the question. “It’s one of her aliases,” he said. “We recognized it.”

  Hmm. One of her aliases, eh?

  “So you were looking for her?” I asked.

  Sheila laid one restraining hand on Barry’s knee, but it was too late. “No, we knew where she was, we just don’t want her—”

  “You don’t want her to find Doug Hirshfield?” I finished for him. “Why not?”

  Sheila looked at Jake, as though maybe he was supposed to rein me in, but Jake was looking at me, a puzzled expression on his face.