“Sorry I’m not any more help right now. She’s been keeping alone. Working herself into a frenzy about this dinner thing coming up.”
“That means she’s close to bending. You have to stay as vigilant as ever.”
Matts looked for some sort of confirmation from Alvin before continuing, but the personal chef was not sure how many times he could say he was sorry. The agent continued, despite Alvin’s immutable expression.
“What else have you observed? Not much, I know, but I’m asking in the way of all moments of contact. Whatever observable behavior. Who she’s talking to more than others. Any additional, peculiar changes in behavior. Anything.”
Alvin thought hard. He wanted to be helpful, but he mostly wanted to be around to keep cooking.
He could do that from prison. In fact, if the prison crime drams were any indication, he would have had the best challenge of producing something out of virtually nothing. Or mush. But he would have been terrible at being forced to play favorites with some inmate bullies who wanted more of the good stuff.
“She does eat more on her own.”
“Like, you don’t have to hand-feed her?”
“Like, she won’t eat the food I take hours to prepare and cook. Although her bodyguards want to induct me into a hall of fame. They end up eating most of it.”
“What else?”
“Earlier today, she nearly ordered my head on a silver platter when—”
“You didn’t want to lead with that?”
“I just messed up a snack request. She’s a lot more on edge about her nibbles right now. But I didn’t think it was need-to-know.”
“You’re working as a CI on a deep, federal operation. Everything is need-to-know.”
“Well, there are probably one in five customers who would walk out of my restaurant, had I owned and cooked for one, swearing my food was the worst. It’s the Yelp effect. People tend to lead with their impulses when it comes to food. But you wanted me to scrape the bottom of the barrel. So here we are.”
“Go on.”
“In a strange fit, she just about cleaned out the pantry, and had her goons put the snacks in her study.”
Matts all but went catatonic upon hearing the little tidbit.
“This is good. She’s starting to rely on only herself. She’s stressing and it might force a desperate move that could expose her. Try to find out what she’s up to in there. If you can.”
Was he serious? The agent was getting quite desperate himself. And he would not admit it in his CI’s company, but it sounded like Matts was pretty fine with Coco’s bust being at Alvin’s expense.
“I’ll try enough, before you visit me in a box.”
“At least you’ll be making duck confits for Jesus.”
Crickets.
Matts cleared his throat.
“I’ll talk to you in a day or two. We have to keep close in our communication because we are too near something big to maintain the usual radio silence. Teflon.”
Then the federal agent broke off into an alleyway. They were walking through the downtown Burbank promenade. Early enough to not appear to be up to something. And quiet enough for no one to care.
But it was Friday. That meant Alvin was the new boss, of his weekend. It was time to unwind by being a critique of his own domain. With Coco Puffs, granola, and freeze-dried strawberries.
The next day was a blur. Ever since he started his job with Coco, and Matts cornered him into recruitment not long after that, Alvin’s dreams were the strangest and most bizarre they had ever been in all of his twenty-eight years of living. They made him go online with an enhanced sense he never thought of while sleeping.
He could taste food in his dreams. It was dull, and he always ended up eating when he was running away from danger, but he was fascinated with how he ended up eating what he did.
Take last night for instance. After he got home from talking with Matts, there were a couple subconscious things that took place. Usual dream things, but the most vivid portion occurred right before Alvin woke up.
The cook was running from a handful of suited thugs, not unlike Coco’s henchmen, in some industrial, factory place. There was nothing but machine steam and red railings as the immediate setting.
Alvin could not hear his footsteps, but he could hear the bad guys gaining. Their footfalls became heavier and louder against the metal floor, the closer they got.
As the frantic cook descended some steps, there was a pile of Pizza Hut pizza just sitting there, in a corner of the landing. He could not prove it was Pizza Hut, but in his dream, he just knew.
More than anything else in his entire life, whatever he threw a fit for as a child, or whatever he would want more than his very soul, Alvin remembered desiring nothing more than to eat the pile of slices of pizza. There was no thought as to why there were bare, separated, out-of-box slices of pizza placed in a heap on a presumably dirty surface – but as the bad guys’ footsteps got agonizingly close, as Alvin could see the angry faces connected to the charging bodies, he dove into the mountain of pie.
The pizza was wonderful. It was what he needed, but the food tasted incomplete. Faint, like eating something hours before, and belching it up for a strong reminder of the meal, but the sensation of was fast to dissipate.
Alvin could also eat much faster in his dreams. He downed slice after slice, tasting different parts of the pizza here and there. One slice was a teeny bit of marinara and crust. Others had more crust and cheese to them, but never anything altogether.
The men were mere feet from him. So he swam deeper into the large mound for better cover.
Maybe the whole-tasting slice of pizza was in the depths of the Italian hill he was too eager to call
