by Harper Lin
I do know how it goes. Every agency has limited funds, and they have to go after the big guys. The smaller operations pass under our radar.
“If he’s as smart as you say, he might suspect it’s a trap.”
Liz smiled. “Of course he will. That’s why we’ll make it a trap.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been thinking. How could they know I’d be at the lakeshore right at that moment? They knew I was getting married because there was an announcement in the newspaper. I should have my head examined for doing that.”
“You thought you were in civilian life again. It happens.”
“Yeah,” Liz said, a tone of bitterness coming into her voice. “I slipped up. And why shouldn’t I? I mustered out two years ago.”
She slumped, looking at her feet. I put a reassuring hand on her shoulder.
“The past has come back to take a bite at me too,” I told her. “More than once. But remember that you’re still part of a team, just like you were when you were on active duty.”
She nodded, standing a little straighter. I bet she was a wonder in the field.
“So I’m thinking they’ve bugged the Lakeview Park building,” she said. “The announcement in the newspaper said where we were going to get married. The building is open to the public most days, so it would be easy to plant a device. They overheard Fiona Younger talking about me coming over the other day, and they made a hasty plan to target me.”
“That makes sense. Yes, I think you have it. Oh my God, Liz! I just thought of something. The schedule in the hallway. It has your wedding listed with the date and time!”
Liz paled, her jaw dropping. “The fertilizer bomb. They’re going to detonate it at my wedding!”
“Not if we can help it.”
Liz looked me in the eye, nodded, and said, “Let’s get to work.”
We sped over to the wedding venue in my hot rod. I was really getting to like this thing. Pity I couldn’t afford to buy one. It would certainly impress the boys in my life. Yes, Octavian might have been in his seventies, but he was still a boy. Once a boy, always a boy. A trait about men I find equal parts irritating and endearing.
“So what’s the plan?” I asked.
“I’m sure they’re monitoring their bug at the Lakeview Park building. It’s easy enough to do with a simple ear pod linked to the receiver. They probably take turns wearing it day and night. We’ll go to the building, and I’ll talk about how I’m going to change venues so we’ll be safe from them. You know Woody Nook?”
“No.”
Liz smiled. “Great. Then I’ll have to give you directions.”
We roared into the parking lot and squealed to a stop with a burn of rubber on asphalt. Only a few cars were in the parking lot. An elderly woman getting out of her old Ford gave us a frown. Many of Cheerville’s citizens didn’t like any sort of ruckus. They wanted a boring, quiet town. If only.
Indeed, as we stepped out, she called over to us.
“We’re having the senior knitting class. Could you keep the noise down so we can concentrate, please?”
It’s amazing how the word “please” can, with the right tone, become a demand rather than a question.
“I’m terribly sorry. We’ll be sure to keep quiet,” I said, louder than necessary.
The woman glowered at us and stomped in. Liz and I exchanged mischievous glances. Having a younger partner was bringing me back to my rough-and-tumble youth. I had thought I’d mellowed with age. Now it appeared that the mellowness was only a veneer.
“I should get back in the Lamborghini and rev the engine,” I said.
“We have work to do.”
“Spoilsport.”
We entered the building, which in the middle of a weekday was given over to senior citizens and stay-at-home moms. The first room we passed had a sign saying Mommy and Baby Yoga. Curious what infants looked like doing yoga, I peeked through the door’s little window. Infant yoga turned out to be a circle of sleepy-eyed young women in tights sitting on yoga mats while pulling up their babies, stretching out their arms, and plopping them down again.
Playing with their kids, in other words. Well, if they wanted to sit in a circle together and call it yoga, I suppose it wasn’t much harm. Having been the mother of a baby myself, I knew how desperate I was for a bit of adult company.
We moved on, passing the knitting class. Through the open door we saw a circle of women, mostly older than me, all gossiping away like mad. Their snapping voices made a perfect counterpoint to the clicking of their knitting needles. I don’t know what they were all so angry about. They didn’t have a small child to take care of.
Or a murder to solve.
The woman who had snapped at us in the parking lot noticed us peering in and frowned.
I gave her a smile in return.
“Enjoy your class!” I shouted.
Everyone turned and gave identical frowns. Liz chuckled and elbowed me in the ribs, and we continued down the hall.
Silently she motioned toward the main room, the one where poor Fiona Younger had met her cakey end.
I nodded. If the bug was anywhere, it would be there.
And I had just the thing to search for it with.
A nonlinear junction detector is a handheld gadget that detects electronic devices. Bugs, for example. Perfect for police, private detectives, or senior citizens who have friends in mortal danger of being blown up.
It looks like a miniature metal detector like those crazy old men use to find pennies at beaches. My model could fold up and be stored in my purse. I used it regularly to scan my house for surveillance equipment.
We came to the room and found it empty. All the better.
“It’s a pity we’ll have to cancel,” Liz said, “I really liked this venue.”
“It does have a nice view,” I replied.
I paused to look at the room a moment. The picture window had been replaced, the carpet cleaned, and the police tape was long gone. It now looked like a mostly empty function room. I wondered if some infant yoga or senior’s knitting class had already been held here.
Poor Fiona Younger. Her senseless death had been erased so quickly.
She deserved justice.
“At least I can get a refund,” Liz went on. “They were very understanding considering the circumstances.”
“We’ll get them,” I replied.
Liz and I spoke in our normal voices. It’s tempting when speaking with the intent of being overheard to project your voice, or be overly emphatic like a nervous actor on stage for the first time. Professionals resisted that impulse, and Liz, I had come to learn, was as much a professional as I am.
“The police are on it,” Liz said. “Chief Grimal looks like he’s capable, and he told me he has every available officer on the case.”
It took all my professionalism not to laugh out loud.
“They’ll get those two guys,” I managed to say in a normal voice.
As we spoke, I pulled the nonlinear junction detector out of my purse, switched it on silent, and began to scan the room.
“So this is what I wanted to show you,” Liz said. “Woody Nook is roughly the same size as this room, so we can set up much like we planned to set up here. We’ll have the food table right in the middle here, with the cake taking up the center spot. The DJ is still willing to come, so we’ll put him over here.”
“Won’t we have to keep the music down if we’re outside?”
“Not a problem. North Cheerville Park is pretty spacious. But yeah, we won’t be able to play any of Rick’s hard rock.”
“Fine by me,” I replied.
My device flashed a couple of times as I swept it slowly around the room, first for a motion detector used as part of the security system at night, and again for the temperature control system. I moved to another part of the room.
“Now the seating will be a bit of a problem. I guess we’ll have to find somewhere to rent some folding chairs.”<
br />
“I’ll look up where to do that,” I said, continuing my scan.
“I guess I’ll have to keep the thumb drive with me even through the wedding. Until Grimal catches them, I can’t let it out of my sight.”
Clever. Tempt them with something juicy.
“I can guard it if you want,” I said.
“No. You’re taking enough of a risk as it is. Another problem is the photographer,” Liz said. “He worked with poor Fiona a lot and heard what happened. Now he’s cancelled. Says he scared.”
“I have a cousin who can do it,” I said as I walked slowly along one wall, scanning it.
“Is he professional?” Liz asked.
“Not really. He’s good, though. I’ll show you some pictures. He took some wonderful shots in Kenya last year.”
We were getting really good at improvisation.
“We’re still getting those tanks, at least,” Liz said. “Megaton Army Surplus isn’t scared of anything.”
“Maybe we can load them with live ammo. They can act as security.”
“We won’t need it. I won’t even tell the guests about Woody Nook until that morning.”
“Good idea.”
I stopped. The scanner was flashing. In front of me was a light fixture, a bowl of frosted glass over a light bulb.
Liz spotted it, gave me a look, and strolled to a far corner to fetch a chair.
“Hopefully they’ll have caught those guys by then. If not, they’ll have no idea where the wedding is taking pace.”
She came back with the chair and set it down, masking her movements by saying, “Woody Nook is on the park map. I’ll get a bunch of them to give out to guests so they don’t get lost.”
Liz stood on the chair, looked in, and gave me a grim nod.
“I can go with you if you want to take a look at it,” I said.
“That would be great. I’m still too scared to use my car. They must know about it.”
“And you think I’m not?”
Liz let out a reasonably believable laugh. “We look silly going around in that pickup!”
Clever girl. Makes it sound like we borrowed a vehicle from a friend. Of course, she didn’t say “your brother’s pickup” or “your neighbor’s pickup”. Too obvious. We would both already know who we borrowed it from and wouldn’t need to say so. She really was a pro.
And now those two thugs will be on the lookout for two ladies in a pickup instead of a Lambo with tinted windows.
“Look,” I said. “I’m getting tired. We’ve been running around all day, and I’m still shaken by those people breaking in. Can we go up there tomorrow?”
Liz gave me an appreciative look. We needed to give Crazy Andy a chance to get into town.
“Oh, all right,” Liz said, sounding convincingly annoyed. “But can we go early?”
“How about I pick you up at ten?” I suggested.
“Ten it is, then.”
We stared at each other. We had just made an appointment with death.
THIRTEEN
On most missions, waiting is the worst part. Your adrenaline is up, and you can find no release. You know you’ll head into danger at a certain time, and the hands on the clock seem to freeze, teasing you with an endless, sleep-depriving wait.
You learn to deal with it, but you never get used to it, and you never like it.
We had nothing to do until the next morning, and we had to keep ourselves scarce in the meantime. So we hid out in the Assignation Inn, Liz flipping through a novel, me reading the paper while plunking an endless series of coins into the Magic Fingers. Its vibration and steady buzzing relaxed me, at least a little.
We spoke little, each wrapped up in our own thoughts.
Early in the evening, my phone let out a rumble like it had suddenly transformed itself into a miniature volcano. I opened it to find the BOOM app telling me I had a video call from Martin.
Not a simple call. Teenagers don’t ever seem to call unless there’s video involved.
The video showed a cloud of ICBMs coming right at me. I touched them to answer.
“How did this app end up on my phone? I never installed it,” I demanded when Martin’s avatar appeared, buzz-cut and square jawed and armed heavily enough to take out an entire terror cell singlehanded.
“Hi, Grandma!” the shirtless and impossibly muscled Martin answered in a voice five octaves lower than Darth Vader’s. “I installed it for you because you don’t know how.”
“I’m perfectly computer literate, thank you very much.”
Martin’s avatar laughed. It sounded like an avalanche. “Who should we fight right now? Terrorists, Nazis, or zombies?”
“While I’m always partial to terrorists, I’m on my phone right now. The controls are too fiddly, and I might end up shooting you instead of the bad guys.”
“Oh, are you out?” An adult would ask if this was a bad time, but Martin, being fourteen and my grandson, assumed that any time would be a good time to talk to me.
He was right, of course. Hearing his voice, even masked behind a Herculean avatar, gave me a sense of normalcy I desperately needed. It felt even more relaxing than the Magic Fingers.
Not that I would give that up. I plunked in another coin.
“Yes, I’m with a friend,” I said.
My mind raced to think of a good cover story in case he asked where I was and what I was doing. He didn’t. Why would that be of the least interest?
“That’s cool. Well, if you can’t play on that crappy old phone—”
“Language.”
“—then you can watch me.”
Remember what I said about adults being the perpetual audience?
The screen changed to an African jungle. Monkeys swung from vines. Tropical birds darted beneath the canopy. Radicalized locals popped out of the thick underbrush, AK-47s blasting. Martin started mowing them down.
“So is Grandpa Octavian coming to the wedding?” he asked between shots.
I blinked. “You told Octavian about the wedding?”
“Yeah, I told him a week ago when you told me.”
So he knew about the wedding all this time and didn’t let on just so I wouldn’t feel pressured to invite him? That man understood me so well.
But of course he would. He was a widower just like I was a widow. He knew me asking him to something like that would hurt.
But perhaps it would heal as much as it would hurt.
“I haven’t decided yet,” I admitted.
“Why not? You said this Liz person is letting you bring two guests. If you bring me, then you can’t bring both Mom and Dad. So you should bring Grandpa Octavian.”
The faultless logic of a teenager who had never experienced real suffering. Bless him.
When you’ve traveled as much as I have, you see a lot of suffering, and you see a lot of kids who are adults before their time. Twelve-year-olds breaking rocks by the side of dusty highways. Eight-year-olds left home alone to take care of three younger siblings because both parents have to work fifteen-hour shifts at some Dickensian factory. Street kids of all ages who have no parents at all and have to scavenge and beg and steal just to keep themselves half a meal away from starvation.
Those people may have been young, but they were not children. You could see it in their eyes. They understood loss. They knew death.
Martin did not.
That innocence was what people like me fought to protect. The chance for kids to be kids in a safe and loving environment. The chance for adults to carve out a bit of happiness for themselves. While I knew it didn’t always work out that way even in the First World, it did more often than it didn’t, and considering the amount of chaos and evil in the world, I counted that as a victory.
And a minor miracle.
So why didn’t I ask Octavian? Assuming I didn’t die tomorrow, assuming Liz and I caught the bad guys and the wedding went ahead as planned, why shouldn’t Martin go to his first wedding with his surrogate grandpa? And why sh
ouldn’t I enjoy Octavian’s company?
James wasn’t stopping me. He had urged me, time and time again, to continue with my life if anything ever happened to him.
“You should invite Grandpa Octavian,” Martin said again. He’d killed seventeen terrorists and blown up two armored vehicles, and I hadn’t even replied to him.
“I will, Martin.”
As soon as I said it, I felt better, like a persistent ache had eased. I smiled and put another coin in the Magic Fingers.
“Cool. It will be fun. He says weddings always have lots of food and cake and stuff. What’s that buzzing noise?”
“Nothing, Martin. I need to go now.”
“To call Grandpa Octavian?”
“Yes.”
“Like you’re going to call him right now?”
“Yes, Martin.”
“Cool, bye.”
He hung up midbattle.
That was how anxious he was for “Grandpa Octavian” to come along.
And that was when I realized where all this was headed. I had been worried about getting too close to Octavian, worried about getting hurt by loss again, and had been blind to the fact that he had already become an integral part of my life. Indeed, he had, in a way, already become family. Martin seemed to be the only one to have noticed that.
Liz had been quiet through all this even though with the high volume BOOM was always set at, it meant she had heard every word.
I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. She was pretending to read. There are subtle physical clues that show if someone is pretending to do something or actually doing something. Her eyes scanned the lines of the book without actually focusing. Dead giveaway.
Putting another coin in the Magic Fingers so it wouldn’t cut out while I spoke to my boyfriend, I lay back on the bed and called him.
He picked up on the first ring.
“Hey, pretty lady!”
“Hi, Octavian.”
“Still busy with your friend?”
“You could say that, yes.”
“I took your advice, and I’m cooking up a vegetarian vindaloo that will blow Martin’s socks off.”
“That’s great. Just don’t make him sick.”
