to take on a grander scale. Something maybe a “consultant” might have had some input on.
“Will you be torturing him for information?” Fi said.
“No,” I said. “Knowing Barry, I think he’s probably torturing himself as it is.”
“Too bad,” she said. “It’s been so long since I’ve been given the opportunity to interrogate anyone. One of my rarely utilized skill sets.”
That gave me an idea. “Sam,” I said, “I want you to take Fiona down to Honrado, point out where our scarred friend works and then let Fiona interrogate her.”
“Abduct and interrogate?” Fi said, ever hopeful.
“Use your best judgment,” I said, which was probably a mistake.
9
Not much really annoyed Fiona. Oh, there were the little things-men who didn’t open doors anymore, bullets jamming in expensive automatic weapons, undercooked fish-but by and large she thought that the best way to live was to be mildly cynical, but not actually to the point that every small injustice became an issue. Dealing with Michael had made her aware that even the stupid things men did-and they did plenty-could be mitigated by occasional acts of nobility.
Chivalry didn’t excuse stupidity, of course, but it went a long way toward reminding Fiona that at base, men were just slightly above chimps in terms of their emotional development, and thus needed to be rewarded when they did something vaguely human.
Even Sam needed positive reinforcement periodically, which is why she told him, as they sat parked next to each other across from the Honrado campus, waiting for the woman with scars on her neck and face to depart for lunch, that though she was unsure of what she was about to do, she was certain she didn’t need him wasting any more of his precious time on her. She’d be fine. He should go off and do whatever it was he did when he wasn’t tracking down leads or shooting guns or drinking beer poolside or, well, whatever.
“Fiona,” Sam said, “Michael told me to make sure that if anything went down, you had backup.”
“What could possibly happen between me and some girl?” Fi said. “You think some girl is going to cause me a problem, Sam?”
“Well, no, no, clearly,” Sam said, “but, uh, I guess what I’m saying is that maybe I should stick around in case, uh…” Sam didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. The problem with Sam and Michael was that they believed her when she said she wanted to shoot everyone and blow up everything. Six or seven percent of the time, she didn’t mean it literally. But she’d been placed in so many situations recently that could have been solved with a well- placed explosive charge that it just seemed so silly that now everyone was so into diplomacy.
“I promise not to hurt her,” Fiona said.
“I didn’t say you would,” Sam said.
“And I promise not to put her into any kind of cage or underground fortress.”
Sam hemmed and hawed for a bit and then finally started his engine. “You remember who the target is?”
“The woman is cut like a spiral ham, as I recall,” Fiona said. “I can’t imagine there will be another one quite like her.”
Sam eventually drove off, and Fiona was finally able to relax. If it was up to her, she’d be sitting poolside and negotiating a gun deal for some Peruvian revolutionaries-something she’d had to cancel from her itinerary for the week when this new job came up, and which, upon reflection, seemed like a fairly good idea. She’d never liked doing business with Peruvians. They always had such inferiority complexes. Now, that was annoying. Besides, what could be more exciting than viewing the world through a pair of high-powered binoculars while waiting for some girl to come walking out of a building?
It took another twenty minutes, but eventually Fiona spotted her mark. She focused the binoculars on her to make sure, but Fiona could tell just by how the girl carried herself that she was the one. If you live inside a pressure cooker, you’re bound to have some outward signs. In the girl’s case, it was the way she immediately exhaled when she walked out of the building. Not just a release of breath, because that would be impossible to see, but one of those full-body experiences favored by sixteen-year-old girls in front of their parents. She then looked both ways, like she was crossing the street, though she was just standing in the middle of a grassy expanse, and then trudged with her head down toward Fourteenth Street.
Fiona wondered what Junior had on the girl, because she didn’t seem like the perfect corporate spy. Too much angst, for one thing, though Fiona supposed that angst was most likely the default emotion for many of the tough kids who end up in Father Eduardo’s care-you can only pretend to be bad for so long.
It didn’t matter to Fiona what the girl had done in the past, only what she was doing now. That was another way to keep from getting annoyed: focus on the present. Fi got out of her car and walked a safe distance away from the girl. Fi was maybe fifty yards behind her, which was fine, since both were walking at a normal pace down a straight road. The girl had reason to believe she was being followed-clearly, her nerves told her this much-but didn’t have any reason to believe she was being followed by an Irish woman wearing a Betsey Johnson dress and still smelling of suntan lotion.
At the corner, the girl ducked into a beauty shop. Perfect. Fiona liked beauty shops for all of the promises they offered-blemishes hidden, sexier lips, new hair colors-none of which seemed to materialize in quite the manner you’d expect once you got the products home.
Fi lingered in front of the store for a moment and pretended to talk on her cell phone. Inside, she could see that the girl was regarding a long wall of lotions and creams. She’d set her purse down at her feet, a sure sign that she was in for a long haul and, more importantly, comfortable in her surroundings.
The store wasn’t one of those well-lit chains staffed by matching women in matching black outfits and matching attitudes. Fiona hated those places. The women who worked in those places truly were annoying. You can’t have airs and work retail. It simply wasn’t allowed. No, Fiona could tell even from the street that this was a small business, the kind built out of someone’s savings, low rents in a neighborhood that wasn’t exactly considered prime property and stock aimed at the very people who lived and worked in walking distance. There were also two hair stations in the back that, Fiona assumed, were staffed by women who regularly dyed people’s hair a color they’d regret sometime later in life.
She pushed open the doors and was immediately overwhelmed by the smell of hairspray, enough that she began to cough almost immediately, which made the girl look up with a frown.
A good opening. Fiona continued to cough until the girl had to say something.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine,” Fiona said. “Just swallowed wrong.”
“Oh, I hate that. Makes me feel stupid.”
“Me, too,” Fiona said. “Like, what, I can’t even swallow right?” The girl laughed. Pleasant. Just two girls talking about saliva.
Fiona realized she had an avenue and had to keep it up. It was so silly sometimes, the lengths we have to go to get information from people, Fiona thought. Bugs, breaking and entering, torture… sometimes just talking to a person can yield so much more than any covert operation. Now, granted, it wasn’t as if Fiona intended to portray herself as precisely who she was, but it was her intention on this day to be as normal as possible, because Fiona believed most people responded to normal.
“What are you looking for?” Fiona asked.
“I don’t really know,” the girl said. “My skin, you know, it gets so scaly sometimes. Around these scars on my neck especially.”
Fiona pulled a bottle of Neutrogena off the shelf. “I use this,” she said, and handed it to her. “It keeps me feeling silky smooth.”
“Oh, that’s too expensive for me,” the girl said. “And I can’t have anything with too much scent in it. I’m allergic.”
It was odd how much the girl was willing to divulge of herself to a complete stranger in a beauty supply store, but, invariably, that was what people holding on to other big secrets ended up being like. Every alcoholic or
