The Widow (Federal Hellions Book 1)

by Gray Gardner

  “Jane.”

  “I don’t, I swear!” she snapped, rolling her eyes.

  “Are you sure?” Darby asked, biting her lip and bouncing a little.

  “Ellie!” George growled. This was a conversation she did not want to pursue.

  “But, Jane, it’s okay if you do,” Burton stammered, looking helplessly at Darby. They weren’t trying to tease her. They really did just want to see her happy.

  George slammed her book next to the cash register and glanced back over her shoulder. “I really don’t. As far as I’m concerned he’s just another subject. Okay?”

  Burton and Darby shuffled behind George, knowing that her final word meant that it was really over. They were surprised, then, when they found her standing in the large entryway of the bookstore, staring with her mouth open and not even fighting to cover her pink cheeks with her hair like she normally did.

  “Jane?” Darby asked, frowning at her as she stood motionless. The sun was setting behind the buildings across the street and casting long shadows through the tall windows of the store front. George’s shadow stood motionless.

  Burton looked at the tables piled with books and then back at her friend. She knew she was in the middle of an assignment. Had she just been made or something? Was there someone there who would recognize her? She gave a nod at Darby and they both began preparing a plausible escape route.

  “Holy shit,” George muttered, dropping her bag and stepping forward. She approached the table stacked with the books with a yellow desert-like cover and couldn’t say anything else for a moment.

  “What’s up?” Burton warily asked, picking up her friend’s bag and noticing the large black and white picture behind the table. “Oh, Conrad Thomas! I loved his book. Hey, look! He’s having a book signing this afternoon.”

  “Jane’s checked out,” Darby frowned, waving her hand in front of Jane’s face.

  George stared at the eight foot black and white picture of Dr. Thomas, then slowly averted her eyes to the books on the table. It was called Medic, and it was about a young army medic in Iraq. Holy shit.

  “He’s an author?” she asked incredulously, more to herself than to anyone else. “How… how did I not know that?”

  “It’s Conrad Thomas,” Burton stated, eyeing her friend suspiciously. “What’s to know?”

  George finally turned and looked at them. She shook her head and blinked several times before she said, “That’s… that’s him.”

  “Who?” Darby asked, holding out her hands.

  “M-my professor.”

  “What, Conrad Thomas is your teacher?” Darby blurted, frowning.

  “Oh my God, you fell in love with Conrad Thomas?” Burton squealed, clapping her hands together.

  “I am not.” George lowered her voice and ushered her friends outside to the sidewalk. “I am not in love with him!”

  “Okay,” Burton and Darby said together, with a hint of mockery.

  George stared at them as they tried not to smile at her and act serious. How could she overlook something like this? Was she really so absorbed in ignoring him that she missed the fact that he was famous? Why did that giant black and white head shot make her heart flutter? Oh God, she was so pathetic.

  She finally threw her arms into the air in disgust. “Mother fucker!”

  “What are you going to do?” Darby asked, as George walked a few steps ahead of them in the afternoon sun. Her black heels clicked quickly as the girls tried to fall into step next to her.

  “I’m going to call my director and then I’m going to get drunk.”

  Nelson assured George that while Conrad Thomas was a famous author who took experiences from his own life and wrote best-sellers about them, he would never venture to write about a mysterious and mischievous girl at the school even though he appeared to be spending a substantial amount of time trying to keep her out of trouble and materializing everywhere she seemed to be.

  It was not a very convincing argument in George’s eyes. This would typically be a point where she would drop an investigation, but she was in pretty deep. In more ways than one.

  “There, see?” Burton grinned, sipping her beer in the dark bar as she texted with her husband and told him where they were. “You just have to ride this one out until you get your bad guy and then you won’t have to worry about him figuring you out anymore.”

  Darby nodded. “Ride being the operative verb in this scenario.”

  George sighed and exhaled as she drank her beer and wished that once, just once, something on this assignment wouldn’t turn into a total catastrophe. She pushed it to the back of her mind and tried to focus on the fun and on her friends’ husbands, who joined them eventually. The men had been a great, fun addition to her life, but her friends had been the real blessing.

  As stated, their introductions had been a total accident.

  Agent George had been undercover for two months near the Mall in the Washington Division, converging with certain dealers and trying to learn who their supplier was. She’d been on the trail of what she’d thought was a Southeast Asian cartel, but she was very wrong. That was how she’d ended up in Colombia a year later. They’d tracked the supplier down there and finally located the base of operations.

  Agent Elizabeth “Ellie” Darby was undercover at a local high school, dealing and trying to get her supplier to tell her who his supplier was. She never got that far. Things quickly unraveled when George began tailing her after watching a deal go down and then they happened to chance upon Agent Burton.

  Baylor Burton was deep undercover as a Russian child slave sold to people on the east coast who rented out underage kids for sex. She was shocked when she was left to meet the most recent clients in a downtown hotel and a US Senator and her husband showed up. If that wasn’t bad enough, the senator called their dealer, who happened to be their daughter’s friend, Ellie Darby. Agent George sleuthed behind Darby and prepared to make an arrest when, much to her surprise, Darby broke down the door to the hotel room where they discovered Burton yelling and waving around plastic explosives. The entire scene would have been confusing enough without the high-profile couple duct taped on the bed: a Senator and her husband.

  George pulled her Glock 17 and started screaming at her, and Darby, confused and already in the room, turned her weapon on her. Burton was screaming at them both to call her director and verify that she was a federal agent. It took about thirty minutes for everyone to place their calls and for everything to come out, but the three girls soon realized that they were all federal agents and their paths had crossed for a reason.

  A US Senator was trying to buy child sex slaves and subdue them with illicit controlled substances. Maybe she was even the mastermind behind the whole operation.

  “I say we kill ’em both,” Darby had suggested, fixing her hair in the mirror after she’d calmed down. They certainly couldn’t be let go, especially since she was undercover at their daughter’s school. If she’d had a title at her black ops agency, it would have been simply Assassin.

  No one knew her title, though, because they weren’t allowed to talk about her black ops agency.

  “You just can’t kill a United States Senator!” George argued, leaning in and trying not to let the prisoners hear as the three agents congregated by the door and had an impromptu meeting. They had to be sensible, here.

  Burton looked torn. “I don’t know. They know too much.”

  “Can’t you spooks erase memories?” George asked, holding out her hands.

  “Actually, yes.” Burton nodded, shifting the dress she was wearing around.

  “They’ll just buy more kids and more drugs,” Darby sighed, looking over her shoulder at the scared pair, tied up on the end of the bed in their designer suits. She scratched her head with her Berretta for dramatic effect. She loved the fright she could see in evil people’s eyes.

  “We could make them think we’re going to kill them.” George nodded, as they all eyed the two terrified assailant
s. “I mean, they saw those explosives, right?”

  “Yeah, but I wouldn’t know how to get a charge through the wires and make it look convincing.” Burton shrugged, showing them the detonator she was holding. “It was all for show, really. Scared straight, and all that. I literally got those fake explosives out of the back of a van on the street.”

  “Let me see that,” Darby said, taking the little black device. “It’s a dead man’s switch. We could make them think they have to hold it indefinitely and then we could leave. They could potentially be sweating this out for hours.”

  “What’s a dead man’s switch?” Burton asked, as George looked nervously at the famous politician, crying her eyes out with a huge gag in her mouth. It could take hours to get those black streaks of mascara off of her face. She turned back to the other two agents.

  “If they let go of the little red button, then boom,” George sighed, looking at the device. It was a favorite torment of the Southeast Asian gangs.

  “Yup,” Darby nodded, taking her finger off of the little red button to show it to Burton.

  The entire room suddenly blew to pieces.

  The force of the blast gushed around the corner and down the hallway and sent all three girls crashing through the door and out into the red carpeted hall of the hotel in a hot burst of smoke and sound. They all lay on the floor momentarily, slightly dazed, then quickly looked at each other in their mangled dog pile.

  “Oh fuck,” Burton said, pushing up to her feet and stumbling back into the room, pieces of dry wall in her brownish red hair.

  Darby and George groaned as they stood and quickly followed. The ringing in their ears made it hard to hear, but hearing anything was the least of their problems. The senator and her husband were now evenly dispersed all over the ceiling, walls, and floor. Oh fuck.

  “How the hell am I going to get any information out of them now!” Burton hollered, holding her arms out at the other two agents after taking in the destruction.

  The hole where the windows used to be sucked the smoke and dust out of the room, but the girls still swung their arms and coughed, trying to assess their situation.

  “We need to go,” George said, waving her hand in front of her face and coughing. “We can’t risk blowing our covers.”

  “How am I going to explain this to the bastards who are coming here to take me back to my prison?” Burton asked, rubbing her eyes as dust hovered. “There are thirty other kids there that I need to save and three mother fuckers who I need to bust.”

  “You’re going to have to meet them downstairs and try your best to explain that there was a fire alarm and everyone had to evacuate,” George stated, pushing both girls out into the hallway with other guests who were heeding the fire alarm.

  “I have go to get back to that school.” Darby casually sighed, sticking a piece of gum in her mouth as they walked down the hall. They scurried down the stairs and paused in the lobby as people pushed all around them, trying desperately to get out. “I don’t know how this happened or how we all ran into each other, but I guess I’ll see you two soon.”

  “Maybe,” Burton nodded, looking worried as she assessed her situation.

  “Hopefully not in prison,” George mumbled, sounding hopeless. There was a dead senator, after all.

  They did meet again. There was a hearing a month later at the federal building where George worked, and all three set up their defenses strategically and effectively. They also had good defenders backing them up. Agent George had Director Nelson, who everyone had nicknamed Katrina the Drug Czarina because she was a total ball buster when it came to her work. Darby had her husband, a senior agent for an organization that wasn’t even allowed to reveal its name during the hearing, but apparently her director and the head of the Department of National Defense showed up to represent her, so she was safe. Burton had her husband, a retired Army Captain and also an agent in the CIA, as well as Martin Austin, Director of Central Intelligence and coincidentally a former President of the United States, in her corner, so all three girls were exonerated in the death of Senator Lilly Ford.

  They were deemed the Three Red Headed Feds by some, but to most of the other agents they were the Federal Hellions and had been friends ever since. No one really knew who they were unless they were all together, but when they did meet they tried to do so discreetly. Their friendship was important. In their line of work, friends weren’t exactly in abundance.

  Burton brushed a dark red wisp of hair behind her ear as the lights came on around the bar’s deck and the temperature dropped a little.

  “Hey,” she began, sipping her beer. “I wanted to bounce something your way.”

  “Can’t talk about work,” Darby interrupted, which was something she said so often that the other two could quote her every time they met. Yes, she was part of a black ops sector, she didn’t exist, she was invisible.

  “It’s not about work,” Burton and George said in unison, having said it so often.

  Darby widened her eyes and exhaled as she waited for Burton to continue.

  “What if,” Burton began, eyeing George, “what if we started meeting up once a month with the guys, too?”

  “Ryan would love that,” Darby grinned. “He’s always asking what in the hell we do when we meet up. I think he thinks we go on super-secret missions or something get up to no good—that sort of thing.”

  George exhaled a stream of smoke and set her cigarette on the ashtray. She knew this day was coming. Burton and Darby were happily married, and she very much enjoyed their husbands. She’d wondered when they’d finally ask.

  “Of course,” she smiled, sipping her beer. “There’s no question about it. Next month, we’ll all meet and do something fun together.”

  Burton finished her beer in one gulp and loudly set it on the table. “Great. There’s more.”

  Darby motioned for the waiter to bring another round as George took another drag. She knew about this next part, too. It was inevitable.

  Burton continued. “Pete and I were thinking, that, well, since you’re so cute, and his friend Max is so cute…”

  “For the love of God.” George grinned, stamping out her cigarette and trying to look flattered, even though she was annoyed. “Do not set me up on another date.”

  Darby looked guiltily into the bottom of her beer bottle. She’d once tried to set George up with her friend Harkins, and the entire evening was just one catastrophe after another. Like ex-girlfriends showing up, weapons drawn, police called—catastrophes.

  “But this one’s different,” Burton began, trying to find an amiable way to explain why this date would be better than the last.

  “I don’t like doing it,” George sighed, rubbing her eyes. “I mean, I appreciate it and everything, but I’m just too shy to have fun with a total stranger.”

  “That’s fine,” Darby said, kicking Burton under the table. “You don’t have to bring a date to have fun with us.”

  “But you aren’t as shy as you think,” Burton continued, thanking the waiter and waiting for him to leave.

  “All right.” George nodded, holding up her beer. “If you get me drunk enough and we play Rock Star again, I’ll make out with—what was his name?”

  Darby and Burton looked at each other. Then they shook their heads back at her.

  “Mr. Curly Head Levi Jeans,” George laughed. “Find me a ‘Mr. Curly Head Levi Jeans’ again and I’ll triple date with you losers and get up in front of everyone and try and sing and have fun.”

  “Done!” Darby chirped, clinking her beer with the others.

  “You better watch out.” Burton beamed.

  “I’ve already been practicing songs with artists varying from Janet Jackson to 2 Live Crew,” George smirked. “Bring it, junior.”

  “You’re like two minutes older than me.”

  “But so much wiser.”

  “We’ll see,” Darby and Burton answered in unison, smirking in their clandestine operational kind of way.
<
br />   George smiled as the husbands came and sat down. Ryan Peterson had been deep undercover with Ellie Darby and they had hit it off from the beginning. They both worked in the same agency that they couldn’t disclose and they were so damn cute together. Pete Connor had met Baylor Burton in the army and had practically swept her off her feet after only a few days. They knew each other so well that they could finish each other’s thoughts.

  Ryan and Pete were good guys and George really did love to hang out with them. She didn’t mean to act jealous around them—if she ever did. She really was just that. Jealous.

  They were always pleasant and seemed to really care about George, so she never minded when they joined their little group. It would be a nice addition anyway, and would definitely take her friends’ focus off of her and her nonexistent love life.

  And fucking Conrad Thomas.

  The day had been long, what with a dozen meetings and a three-hour book signing, but nine pm rolled around and the store closed, and Conrad Thomas was treated to a dinner at a trendy new restaurant run by a hot new chef. Partners, editors, agents, and a few favorites from the elite party circuit made the group large enough to take up the front section of the small shotgun restaurant. There were smiles, old stories, new ideas. A large aquarium, apparently stocked with their dinner, separated the guests from the street.

  “Tell me about your new book,” the woman sitting next to him asked in a sultry voice. The other people at the table were engaged in several different conversations.

  “Still working on it,” he replied, as he watched her cross her legs towards him, her skirt falling back a few inches, revealing her long legs.

  “Can I be in it?” she asked, smiling. “I’d make a great character. Sweet, smart, trying to get ahead in a man’s world.”

  “What do you do?” Conrad asked, sipping his wine. He could use anything at this point, and she looked pretty interesting.

  “Party planning,” she said, taking her martini down in one swig.

  “Oh.” He nodded, holding out his hand. “I’ll…consider it, then. Uh, what kind of books do you like to read?”