Jack Be Nimble: Tyro Book 2 Page 15

  “Did you get a good look at him? Ever see him around the house before? Any sign he’d been in the—”

  “Irene, I love you,” Mercedes said. “Please don’t…be a cop right now. I already—you know I spent a good hour answering questions already.” She imagined an official document already existed somewhere in the system, cross-loaded from some portable computer. “Come have breakfast tomorrow and see for yourself. You can even check for prints.”

  “As dusty as you keep that house, I’d be surprised if I had to use powder.” The other woman was still seriously upset. “You should have called me.”

  “I was going to wait until morning. Tonight was your day off, and you stayed at Armsign way longer than I did. ‘Sides I thought you’d be really taking the night off, you know. Beating your husband with giant pink feathers, or whatever it is you married types do.” That got the expected laugh, but Irene’s voice still held a note of fear. Mercedes was touched. “I’m really glad you called.”

  Both women breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Hey, I’ve got to get out of town for a few days,” Mercedes said. “This has been too strange. I just need a change of scenery—not a vacation. I’m going to work.”

  “Another job came up?”

  “Just a quick one. Pictures of the Cuban inauguration the day after tomorrow.”

  Irene made disapproving sounds. “I don’t trust that part of the world. Can’t be as safe as everyone says it is. You be careful. Call me while you’re down there.”

  “Is Barry there?” Mercedes could tell someone else was on the line. Maybe she was on speaker phone, it was hard to tell. Irene’s tone carried a guarded note, as if she were weighing her words for an extra listener. Made sense. Irene had let it slip in passing that Barry worried about his wife’s choice of work. Barry was a real soft touch. Better to let him think the adventures of a photographer were limited to the occasional attempted groping at a celebrity wedding.

  *

  “Barry’s in the house,” said Irene, looking straight at Jack Flynn. “I’m out on the patio.”

  Her two visitors perched stock-still on the narrow concrete retaining wall that bordered her garden. Both men leaned forward, resting on their knees, intent on the phone between them. It struck her again how alike they looked. Down to the casual, easy mannerisms.

  Only Jack, however, reacted physically to the sound of Mercedes’ voice.

  “I’ll be over in the morning.” Irene didn’t know what else to say, and knew she sounded hollow. The police report would be online by now, and she could compare that to the story she’d just heard from the two men before her. “Hey Mercedes, whatever you do –” a number of feelings and thoughts, half-articulated, wanted to jump out of her, but Irene ended with, “Please don’t try to make me coffee.”

  Jack’s eyebrows shot up. A heartbeat later, a smile twitched across his face.

  “Pink and vertical, Irene.”

  “Pink and vertical, Merse.” Irene ended the call.

  Jack opened his mouth, but before he could speak, Irene stabbed a finger at him. “I swear, Jack, I swear. Barry was right about you. If I find out you’ve brought this to her, I mean it—”

  The accused spread his fingers, calm and quiet. “Hey, get in line, Irene. If I brought this to her door, I’ll kick my own ass first. You and I won’t go down this road. You know there’s no way I’d knowingly involve her. You’re mad right now, but think it through. Even when I lived in L.A., did I mention her once?”

  He was so confident, assured. What an ass. “We talked about her lots of times. You always wanted to know—”

  “Toria brought her up, not me. Every time.”

  Well, that was true. “But Jack, this crazy story. You were part of this thing in London? They’re calling it a terrorist attack. And the homicides in San Francisco?” She looked at his partner, Pete Dalton. If that was his real name. “How am I supposed to tie this all together? There’s too many pieces to track.”

  “We can tie it all together, but we need you to stay local on this one, Irene. You’ll get the whole report, but for now, focus on Mitch Fenn. There’s enough to tie Raines’ company in to the homicides at Armsign and up north. What I don’t get is, why Mercedes? Why now?” He stood. “Her father worked on some similar technology to the setup we found in London, but that can’t be all there is to it, can it?” Jack looked out at the garden and down the little hill toward the lights below.

  He’s exhausted, Irene thought. “Stay and find out,” she offered. “Come with me tomorrow and ask her yourself.”

  That got a reaction. “No, no way. I used her husband to cover my tracks at Fenn’s; if I’m around it will upset things. And I’m getting on a plane in a few hours for Havana.”

  “You’re running security for the oath-of-office ceremony?”

  Jack’s face filled his hands. “Helping out a bit. Look, this is important, Irene. Will you help?”

  Irene considered. “Will you be around in case a grand jury subpoenas you to testify against Raines?”

  He nodded, as if he’d already considered the possibility. “Same conditions as before. Absolute public anonymity, the records are sealed for 99 years, and I get to come and go in the manner I see fit.” For his exhaustion, Jack was bouncing on the balls of his feet. Whatever adrenaline spike kept him awake, he was apparently still riding it. Mercedes, maybe? “Besides, I’ll be back in L.A. later this month, probably have to shoot a pick-up scene or a motion capture as early as next week. I’ll be low-key, but I’ll be around.”

  “Along with your…?” she gestured at Pete.

  Who smiled. “Stuntman, that’s right.”

  “Will you ever see her? If I can’t say anything, is she ever going to know about any of this?”

  Jack looked directly at her, then away. “One of the reasons I let you know about our little group in the first place. You’re the buffer between what I do and anything that might involve Mercedes.”

  Irene sniffed. “So I’m a beard. Part of Jack’s secret identity. And here I thought the team needed a decent forensic pathologist.” But that was the key to Jack’s visit tonight, she realized. Jack bounded through the world, focused on the grand goal or whatever oddball mission he pursued at the moment, staying alive in dangerous places, covering his tracks when necessary. Irene would have helped the mission without tonight’s visit, or this confessional.

  The timing was off, though. He was headlong into something big, that was certain. Jack didn’t really need to come here tonight unless – unless he wanted to make sure Mercedes was safe.

  She watched him breathe deeply, stretch. There was a dash of dried blood near his collar, which she pointed out. “That’s great.” He rubbed at it, and shook his head. “If she could only see me now,” he began, carelessly.

  Irene had noticed the blood earlier, within seconds of meeting the two men at the door. Jack fished a clean shirt from his duffel bag, then froze when Irene placed the palm of her hand, thoughtfully, against his cheek. “If she could only see you now,” she murmured.

  It was an intimate gesture, and it achieved the expected result. Jack instantly slowed down.

  He leaned into her hand, his expression unreadable. “Why did she marry him?”

  “Why do you think, dumbass?”

  He peeled out of his shirt and dropped it at her feet. “We were just kids—”

  “—you were gone. You were a guy writing letters from the far-off fantasy land, out-and-about doing God knew what.”

  “She made me promise to stay away. I tried to find her afterward.”

  Irene allowed herself a breath. What was the best way to put this? “You weren’t real, Jack.” She pinched the air. “You were this close to fantasy.”

  “The man in the moon.”

  Pete spoke, startling them both. “She couldn’t control you, Jack. Young guy, no money, no security for her.”

  Jack hesitated, then frowned with irritation. “No. Stop reading your own biograp
hy in the story of my life, Pete.”

  “She does remind me of someone.”

  Jack firmly closed his mouth, then changed his mind. “If you live long enough, everyone you meet reminds you of someone.” He made as if to put on his fresh shirt, and Irene stopped him.

  “You’re setting off all kinds of alarms.” She smiled at his expression. “At the airport. After all you’ve been through tonight you’re probably carrying enough gunshot residue on your skin to set off every alarm in the airport.”

  He grinned. “I’m not worried. Every airport in California is run by the Filipino mafia. I can play the Victoria card.”

  “Even so. You need a shower; wash your hair twice to get all the GSR out. Use the hallway bathroom.” She looked up at her bedroom window. The light was still on.

  Jack followed her gaze. “Barry still think I’m a bad influence?”

  Her husband was a fairly reasonable man, as far as all things were concerned which didn’t relate in some way to Jack Flynn. “He’s a great judge of character. And he’s not going to like it when I give you a pair of his pants. Towel’s under the sink.”

  She sat down as Jack unlaced his shoes.

  “Move faster, Jack,” said Pete.

  The second man still hadn’t moved or changed position, and Irene realized where he and Jack differed, physically. While Jack always seemed to be in careless motion even while at rest, the other man carried a stillness about him. His posture was youthful, but conserved, almost like that of a very, very old person who’s gradually lost the excess momentum of youth. She wasn’t accustomed to studying the stance of the living, but Irene couldn’t shake the idea that the quiet man wore a mask of one kind or another.

  The night was cool; he seemed not to notice. “So,” she said, thrusting her hands deep into the pockets of her sweater and crossing her feet at the ankles.

  “What shall we talk about while Jack’s making himself presentable?” asked Pete.

  Over his shoulder, Jack spoke. “She’s always liked ghost stories.” He vanished into the house.

  Irene grinned despite herself. The other man watched her, curiously. Lord, he looked like Jack, with the garden at his back and the lights low and the moon gone.

  “She was the photographer at Armsign, wasn’t she? The woman you called.”

  “Yes. It’s a long story.”

  Pete nodded. “Most of the good ones are. Jack told me about her when we roomed together in college.”

  Now that was a bit of news. “I thought Alonzo was his roommate. And aren’t you a bit young to have been at college with Jack?”

  “He’s a ridiculously slow student.” He waited while she laughed politely, and added, “I’m not as young as I look. And Alonzo went to the Naval Academy.”

  “Ah, right. Well.” She found a ball of lint in her pocket. “So, do you really know any good ghost stories?”

  Pete considered that. “I’ll trade you one for one. But first, I’ve just got to know: does ‘pink and vertical’ mean what I think it does?”

  She laughed again. He was easy to talk to. Would make a good police officer in real life, too—she could just imagine him deposing a witness. Irene didn’t consider herself weak-willed, but with Jack gone the force of the other man’s personality was palpable.“Irene,” he asked, his tone a bit more serious. “I know you grew up with the two of them, but –” he shrugged. “You’re not really on the team, but you act like you are. Why go to all these lengths?”

  “Why do you?”

  He smiled. “If you’d ever had anyone ask you the Golden Questions, you’d know why. I’ve noticed when people outside the team help, it seems to come from a sense of owing something to him, to Jack, personally.”

  She almost said, Well then, that would be personal, wouldn’t it? But she didn’t, for some reason. Force of his personality, late hour, whatever.

  Now it was her turn to shrug. “Well, sure. There is one thing, but it definitely doesn’t mean what you think.” She chewed on her lower lip. “Jack taught me how to kiss.”

  Stan & Ollie

  Funny, Irene didn’t ask if the intruder was Bryce. Mercedes yawned. She’d probably jump to that conclusion tomorrow. Mercedes yawned again, and shook her head. Two nights of no sleep can’t be good for you, she told herself.

  She made another patrol through all the rooms and checked the alarm again. The old Easton baseball bat never left her side. Mercedes went to the thermostat and raised the heat, then headed for the front door, to check the locks again, and stopped. Go to bed.

  For the first time since buying the house, she engaged the lock on the master bedroom door. Remembered the realtor’s pitch for the solid barrier: “For when Mom and Dad need some child-free playtime!” Mercedes wished that was her particular set of problems.

  She pulled the drapes completely shut and closed the door to the bathroom. Set the baseball bat down with conscious effort next to her palm-sized glass globe of the world, and thought about the gun.

  Seriously, this lack of sleep is doing a number on you, Mercedes. Still…the handgun was in a small, locked case at the back of her bottom-most drawer. She tossed it, along with a handful of swimsuits and socks, onto her bed. Swore at herself for no good reason, and returned the box to its place in the bottom drawer.

  The socks and everything else followed the gun, and Mercedes found herself holding the bottom half of her black bikini. She’d never worn it much, and the elastic was still good. Aunt Sylvia knew quality.

  Warm furnace air washed over her then, from the floor vent under the mirror, and Mercedes caught herself in the mirror, swimsuit in hand. Flecks of gathered light, caught and released in the inner angles of the glass globe, scattered around her, and Mercedes found her thoughts leading back to Forge, and her recent trip with Irene. Now, that had been some world-class sleep.

  But the tracks of perfect memory are a many-grooved path to the past, and for an instant she slipped back, just a few steps further.

  *

  Forge, Idaho

  When she was seventeen

  August in Forge was hot. Barely ten o’clock in the morning, and already enough heat gathered in her room to smother. Mercedes took a quick look over the items in her duffel bag as she straightened the top of her bikini: jeans, t-shirt, towel, lotion, antiperspirant, sunglasses. That was about all she’d need.

  She surveyed herself in the full-length mirror, shifted her weight and bounced experimentally. The bikini Sylvia had given her seemed to do the trick; at least everything stayed in place. Mercedes turned sideways. According to the bathroom scale, she’d gained a couple pounds over the past few weeks; she couldn’t see where it had gone.

  She checked her bag once more. “Once upon a time, Mercedes learned to waterski,” she said, donning shorts and a man’s tank top.

  They were Jack’s. She lifted it to her nose and caught herself grinning in the mirror. She’d accumulated quite a collection of his clothes; her closet held as many of his nicer shirts and things as what she’d brought from home.

  Downstairs on the table lay a note from her grandparents wishing her luck, and a fifty-dollar bill. “For party food. Fill the tank with what’s left over,” it read. Max’s LeBaron waited for her in the carport.

  Heat pooled, thick and oily, under the shadows on the north side of the house. Mercedes drummed her fingers against the leather steering wheel, hesitated a moment, then dropped the convertible into gear. She was not afraid of learning to waterski. It was merely the latest in a series of fresh, wacko experiences she’d found thrust into her life since she’d entered the eclectic orbit of Jack Flynn.

  Mercedes had never met anyone who could absorb and accept life as quickly as Jack. He read more books in a few days than she read in a month–habit, he said. Ideas, art, language, comics. It had taken her a week to convince herself he hadn’t taken instruction in Italian. Though his vocabulary was still very small, his grasp of the fundamentals of speech were at least as good as hers. Their accents
sounded unnervingly alike.

  Jack was a quick study, and very patient with himself. She watched as he learned–stumbling at first, but then with unsettling speed—the sign language alphabet only a day before he began teaching a deaf student at the pool.

  He seemed to enjoy everything he did, or was it that he only chose to do things he knew he enjoyed? For all his prodigious memory, Jack lived in the present.

  The sunlight spangled the LeBaron’s polished hood, swirled and eddied as she drove through the undecided shadows of overhanging trees. The fat, lazy buzz of cicadas was overly loud in the dead, flat heat.

  Mercedes turned the radio on, scanning to a rhythm-and-blues station.

  All through the balance of summer, as the mountain valleys turned muggy and sopping with heat, Jack and Mercedes were together nearly every day. She hadn’t let herself tan in years; not since she was a chubby little girl who could safely go topless. The past few summers spent caring for her mother simply hadn’t allowed it. Even before her parents’ illnesses, gymnastics kept her indoors, far from a pool like the one she took her cousins to daily. Much to her surprise, her skin could still tolerate the sun. The last week of June melted away into July, and under the midsummer sun Mercedes browned into dusky honey.

  And the heat! Northern California’s Mediterranean breezes hadn’t prepared her for the scorching force that clobbered Forge. The town was aptly named, after all.

  She thought about her dad at least an hour straight every day. Though she managed to restrain herself (as per his orders) to calling home every other day, a weird guilty feeling stuck to Mercedes. Why should she be on vacation?

  Sometimes the phone was picked up by a neighbor, or one of her Mom’s brothers, or another friend of her family come to visit and care for her father. Most often Sylvia answered the phone, and the two of them chatted all their news to each other, heedless of the clock. Sylvia was always direct with Mercedes concerning her father’s current medical situation and the latest tests from the hospital.