Bite Marks

sorry for your loss!” he cried. He threw a dramatic gesture toward the hold of the plane, where six frowning pallbearers were taking a casket from the hands of the jet’s flight crew. But it wasn’t just any old deathbox. Some company with a sense of style but zero restraint had built this sucker to resemble a golf bag. An umbrella, a black towel, and even a couple of irons had been tacked to the side, while the heads of the rest of the clubs jutted from the coffin’s end.

I glared down at Cole, so pissed I wouldn’t have been surprised if smoke had poofed from my nostrils.

Control your temper, Jaz, I told myself. You know what happens when you lose it.

I’d love to see you lose it. I frowned as I pushed the unwelcome voice to the back of my brain and said,

“Cole, you shouldn’t have.”

He rose to his feet and dusted off his pants. The moment I reached his side he snaked an arm around my shoulders. “We all know how difficult this must be for you.” He put a hand to his chest. “As your former boyfriend—”

“We were never—!”

“—I realized it was on me to make sure your dead boyfriend arrived in Australia in the style to which he has—uh, had—become accustomed.”

Cole pulled me toward the casket with Bergman, Cassandra, and the sad-band following as he crooked his finger at the hearse I’d asked him to order. Except I hadn’t told him to request a white Mercedes stretch with enough room for an NBA player and all his devastated relatives.

It pulled up beside us, its driver stepping out and promptly disappearing. At first I thought he’d fallen.

Jack, also interested in his welfare, raced over to check him out. When the dog didn’t immediately surface, I leaned over to get a better view. Then I grabbed Cole’s arm and squeezed.

“If that’s a gnome whose crotch Jack is nosing, I’m going to tie your hair in a bun and sell you to the pirates who operate off this coast. I hear they’re always looking for fresh young girlfriends.” Our boss, Pete, wanted to brief us personally on the details of this assignment, but we both already knew it involved gnomes attacking the Canberra Deep Space Complex, one of NASA’s three eyes to the cosmos. Not every gnome wanted to stomp Canberra’s eye to jelly. Just the Ufranites, a fanatical sect that’d transformed half their farmers to soldiers in less than a decade.

Cole sighed. “Would you chill? I know Ruvin’s got the long forehead and chin of a gnome, but look at him! He’s over three and a half feet tall, there’s no tail in sight, and if his nose was blue you’d have seen it from inside the plane. He’s a seinji.”

Okay, seinji I could deal with. They were distant relatives of gnomes. But nearly all of them had, like Vayl, found a way to live among humans. To blend. “Still—”

He leaned his chin on my shoulder. “I checked him out. He’s fine. Plus—and this is the part that’s going to make you add at least twenty bucks to my Christmas gift—Ruvin’s an independent contractor.”

“He doesn’t work for the funeral home full-time?”

“Nope. Only when they have to double or triple up. Or when guys like me request him”—he paused for dramatic effect—“because his next pickup is the Odeam Digital Security team.”

“Really?” So Cole knew what Pete had told me and Vayl. That our target worked for the most trusted software security company in America.

He nodded. “I planted one of Bergman’s new bugs on Ruvin. If we’re lucky we’ll know our target’s name before the Odeam team has left the airport.” He beamed at me. Like I was supposed to forgive him for conning Vayl into traveling to Australia via golf bag.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “You do understand the whole team is suspect, right? We may have to take them all out before this is over.”

Cole swallowed. Nodded.

I checked my watch. Three thirty p.m. We might just have time. If we hurried.

“Let’s get him loaded,” I said.

Cole squeezed my shoulder. “But then you’ll miss the best part.” I wrapped my arm around his waist so I could jerk him close enough to whisper in his ear, “You’re about to lose your best part.”

“Hey, this event is costing somebody a lot of money. You might as well enjoy it.” He grinned down at me, his bright blue eyes daring me to loosen up and have some fun.

“This is not necessary.”

Cole popped a huge green bubble in my face. “Picking up a casket-rider and the woman you’re about to fall out of love with is boring. Arranging a funeral procession with a displaced band from the French Quarter and a quartet of professional mourners is one for the diary. You do keep a diary, don’t you, Jaz?”

“No! And don’t call me that. I’m here as Lucille Robinson, remember?” Cole frowned. “But if you’re Lucille, who am I?”

“Hell if I know. As I recall, your last text said you didn’t like the name they’d picked for you and had demanded a new one.”

“Damn straight! The CIA has no imagination, you know.”

I’d have told him to pipe down, but between the band’s latest number and the wails of the four women who’d emerged from the backseat of the hearse to drape themselves and a blanket of flowers over the casket’s tee-time accessories, I could barely hear his whispers.

“Sure,” I agreed, mainly because I thought I’d seen the coffin wobble. Had one of the pallbearers stumbled, or… I checked my watch again. Holy crap, we were cutting this close!

“Do you want to know my new name?” Cole asked as we led Cassandra and Bergman toward the country club