You and I, Me and You

  It was warm enough in the garage that we could no longer see our breath, which made me sad. When I was little, I thought cold breath hid words, like the word balloons in comic books. Even when I knew better (so, as of two years ago), I still liked to pretend.

  We stepped out of the elevator and saw that BOFFO was bustling with the usual suspects, both literally and figuratively. We were staffed 24/7 and the place was always humming.

  “Oh! Cadence! I thought…” The small dark-haired woman behind the receptionist desk paused as her jaws cracked wide in a yawn. She shook herself and finished. “… it was your day off?”

  I shrugged. “Got called in. And now we’ve got to see Michaela—is she in?” Foolish question. Michaela spent more time in the building than the ones who slept here did.

  “Oh yes. She’s…” Leah pointed vaguely and yawned again. She was part-time and allowed to work no more than four hours a day, and sometimes that was pushing it. At twenty-three, Leah was an administrative assistant and a somniphobe: terrified of sleep. Since she was perfectly healthy in all other ways, that was a problem, because her body needed to do something her mind was scared to death of.

  “It’s just that it happened at night, you know. When I sleep I see her killing them over and over,” she’d explained to me once from a restroom stall. Me, I like to pee without hearing about the grisly murders of drunken clowns, but that didn’t mean it was okay to be impolite. So I listened while wondering at what point it’d be acceptable to flush. “The severed clown noses … the way their shoes squeaked when they tried to run from the knife … the blood soaking their fake green hair…” So, during none of that. At no time in that conversation would flushing have been appropriate. I ended up waiting until she left.

  “You look awful, babe.” George sounded genuinely sympathetic, so I assumed I was losing my mind or my hearing (and I wouldn’t rule out both). He could be strangely understanding when he wanted, a good trick for a sociopath. “Hypnosis not working?”

  She shrugged her thin shoulders. Leah was spindly and short, with big dark eyes, a mop of curly dark hair, and pale skin: she could have sold matches on a street corner. She was wearing a button-down denim shirt two sizes too big, and dark blue leggings (casual Friday). She floated in the shirt; her legs were so thin that the leggings were baggy. “Oh, you know, good days and bad,” she mumbled, giving off “I don’t want to discuss it” vibes.

  George couldn’t read vibes any more than he could read Sumerian. “Look, hypnosis is a scam and doesn’t really work, and therapists who think it’s great are stupid, but it helped you before so you gotta let it help you again. You gotta. If you let it in once, you can do it again. You just tell yourself, ‘This is asinine and my therapist is a deluded asshole, but my subconscious needs to get on the stick’ and it’ll work again.”

  She nodded, then thanked him shyly and asked if any of us wanted lunch. Since we knew where we’d find our boss, there was no need to eat.

  “Why can’t you be that nice to me?” I complained as we trailed past cubicles toward the boss’s office.

  “Because being nice to you makes me feel like I’m swimming through puke.”

  “Or could you at least treat us all consistently? I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”

  “Through puke,” he said again. I’d be tempted to go into a snit and huffily stop talking to him for a few hours, except he’d probably hug me out of sheer relief. Why should I give him the satisfaction? No more inane chatter with his partner: that’ll teach him a hard lesson!

  Or not. But who cared?

  chapter fourteen

  On the way to Michaela’s kitchen, we ran into Emma Jan Thyme, a newbie who’d been with BOFFO less than a month. She seemed tense, and was avoiding looking at any one thing that might cast a reflection, however wavy and indistinct. I knew why she was doing the last, but not the first. Emma Jan had a monster living inside her head. She had to watch for it constantly.

  “Hey,” she said when she spotted us. “I’ve gotta see the boss. Something weird is going on.” Seeing our expressions, she clarified: “Okay, but something weird even for us.”

  “Uh-oh.” I was impressed, and scared. Emma Jan wouldn’t have said that lightly.

  “I don’t think you should talk unless you’re handing me a plate of mashed potatoes.”

  Emma Jan snorted. “George, I don’t think you should talk at all. Repeat after me: not everyone with a southern accent can cook comfort food on demand.”

  “I’m standing here two minutes already and no potatoes!”

  She caught my glance and rolled her eyes. I liked Emma Jan, but I was adjusting to the fact that she was Shiro’s good friend and not mine. They hung out at the shooting range together, had lunch together … like that. It’s not that I was jealous

  (I was. I was jealous.)

  I just needed to adjust. Usually people who knew our secret were my friends and tolerated Shiro. I couldn’t remember the last time that had gone the other way.

  “Stop confusing me with Paula Deen,” she ordered George, and we laughed.

  Though they both had accents, the resemblance ended there. Emma Jan had a broad, lovely face and a severe, militarily-short haircut that was so stark it emphasized her prettiness. Her skin was a gorgeous brown with red undertones, and she was neatly dressed in a reddish-brown blouse and a navy pantsuit. She’d had the jacket tailored to hide the bulge from her sidearm.

  If you hadn’t seen her shoot, or witnessed one of her screaming breakdowns, you might confuse her with a prosperous bank manager. “And d’you want to hear my new unusual death?”

  “No,” I said at the exact moment George nodded. That was another thing. Emma Jan collected unusual deaths, and had even updated Wikipedia on a few. She and Shiro would spend hours debating them—Shiro was a harsh taskmistress regarding what was and wasn’t unusual.

  “It involves kayaks and swans,” she wheedled.

  “No,” I almost snapped, then felt bad. “Sorry. Weird day.”

  “That’s right, it’s Moving Day! What are you doing here?”

  Excellent question.

  “Hey, it could be worse. You could have had a day like Anthony Hensley.”

  “No.”

  “He drowned when his kayak—”

  “Don’t.” A headache had popped up out of nowhere. Our suicide killer, unusual deaths, confusion over whether we should have gone to the scene, Greer showing and having a middle-aged tantrum in front of half the CSI team, Dr. Gallo being at the scene and now maybe a suspect—dang it to heck, why couldn’t people just be nice? Was that so darn much to—

  chapter fifteen

  “Anthony Henley,” I said. “Kayak. Continue.”

  Emma Jan brightened. “Oh, good, you’re here.” She fell into step beside me. “Okay, Henley’s kayak was capsized by a swan. And the swan blocked him from getting to shore and he drowned!”

  It was not good of me to take pleasure in knowing that Emma Jan preferred me to Cadence. It was rare enough that anyone did, however, that I could not help it. (Very well: would not.) And the story was splendid. “That qualifies,” I decided. It was not always so simple; we’d argued for days over whether Arrachion of Phigalia’s suicide by wrestler qualified.

  “We’re on our way to see Michaela,” George told me.

  “Yes, I gathered, as we are walking to her office. If this was a silly overblown action film, her office would be on fire and we would be walking toward it in slow motion.”

  “That’s true,” George acknowledged. “And now you’re up to speed, Sag.”

  “How to express my gratitude? You are not always so helpful.”

  “See? See how hard my life is? If I’m not nice, I get hit. Then you’re all mystified when I’m not nice.”

  “I have never once been mystified by your choice to be unpleasant. And you may not call me Sag unless Dr. Gallo is within earshot.”

  “Done! I’m sort of amazed you haven’t caved in my skull alre
ady. So I’ll obey. You’re only Sag around Gallo, Sag.”

  “Be nice,” Emma Jan scolded both of us, then rapped on Michaela’s door.

  “Why?” George asked with honest puzzlement.

  A word about our supervisor, Agent in Charge Michaela Nelson. An older woman with years of experience in management and law enforcement, and with psychiatric woes, she was the stern maternal figure some of us longed for and several of us feared. As the AIC she had the largest office in the building, but she rarely used it. Her less official office was the kitchen, so that is where we went.

  “Come.”

  We came, and it would be a lie if I did not admit to trepidation. Michaela was one of the few people on the planet who intimidated me. Adrienne was too unstable to properly fear her, and Cadence had been known to be intimidated by chittering squirrels. I felt I was the only Jones sister who truly appreciated our supervisor’s qualities, good, bad, and, ah, unusual.

  She was, as we expected, standing behind the kitchen island, which was so large it was nearly a moat: a granite-topped moat. Michaela’s second office (first office, some would argue) was the size of a restaurant kitchen, with two large shiny refrigerators, immaculate tile floors, microwaves, lots of cabinets and storage space, a chest freezer, cookware, and every kitchen tool imaginable. Because a workplace staffed by heavily medicated and armed government employees should have an industrial kitchen bristling with sharp knives. This was proof of Michaela’s expertise, her deep-seated understanding of our psychiatric foibles, and how little any of us wished to cross her.

  Even before she spoke, I was uneasy. Not the usual unease when I was reminded how strong and sharp her Wüsthof knives were. Something was odd, and I could not at first see what it was. The food? No; Michaela was making ants on a log (as in, peanut butter on celery with raisins on top), and probably garlic bread after. She’d made fruit salad the day before, slicing bananas for an hour. She chopped phallic objects to allay stress. To the best of my knowledge, no one had ever asked her the obvious question.

  “Ah,” she said, not looking up from the bunches of celery she was chopping into four-inch spears. “Good. I have news for the entire division. And you three are, God help me, the most stable. So you get the news first, and you’re going to help me with the others.”

  You three. All right. She wasn’t talking about Cadence and Adrienne and me. I eyed Emma Jan and George, only to realize that they were eyeing me. Their expressions were mirrors of surprise and unease. Need I mention how we at BOFFO disliked change? They had to switch out the carpets after one of the fires, and several employees nearly had nervous breakdowns when they came in to find different carpeting. I will not even discuss a new staffer’s dreadful idea: Circus Day.

  Thwack! Thwack! Thwackthwack! Michaela’s blade was a blur; it almost looked like the celery was leaping into perfect four-inch spears. Then she scraped them into a large orange bowl, stepped to her left, and pulled out two three-foot loaves of French bread. She switched the cutting blade for a serrated bread knife and began to saw.

  “Can’t you ever make … I dunno, Rice Krispie bars or fudge or spaghetti or something?”

  Thud. Thud. She’d given up sawing and was slamming her knife through the bread so hard it was as if she were parting the Red Sea, if said sea had been held together with yeast and crumbs. “What the hell would I do with Rice Krispie bars? BOFFO has lost its funding.”

  “What wouldn’t you do with Rice— Wait. What?”

  “Lost.” Thud. “Funding.” Thud.

  We digested that in silence. And speaking of digesting, I went to the nearest cupboard, extracted a jar of peanut butter (chunky), found a butter knife, and began spreading peanut butter on the celery sticks. Cadence had had breakfast; I hadn’t eaten all day.

  “So … we’re all fired?” Emma Jan’s beautiful dark eyes were big as she tried to take in the news. Government employees enjoyed laughable salaries, outstanding health benefits, and (usually) job stability. Rare was the day when such employees came in on a random Friday to find their jobs had vanished overnight. “Effective when?”

  I knew Emma Jan had waited two years to get into BOFFO, had uprooted her life to move to Minnesota, and was finally settling into a government job that not only tolerated her psychiatric difficulties but worked with them. To find out with no fuss and no fanfare that it had all …

  “No one is fired.” Lips pressed so tightly together her mouth was a slash, Michaela had moved from bread to carrots. Whud-whud-whudwhudwhud! “I’ve got some people looking into a few things for me, chiefly the purchase of this building.”

  “We’ve lost funding so you’re gonna buy the building?” George was as bewildered as I’d ever seen him. “Oh. Sure. Makes sense.”

  “It doesn’t have to make sense to you, Pinkman. I’m just giving you information.” She looked up from the carrots she was destroying to glare at him. “Put the sarcasm in Park; I’m in no mood.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” This in a meek voice void of sarcasm. Why couldn’t I terrify him into submission as Michaela did so effortlessly? Truly, I could learn a lot from her—had learned a lot from her.

  Our supervisor had her own money; as she was single, she did not live in a double-income household. (As I now did, as the three of us did, I suddenly realized. Cadence’s baker had made it clear we need not worry about expenses beneath his roof. Our roof, is what I meant to say.) She did not buy her beautiful Donna Karan suits on a government wage; she had stocked most of the kitchen out of her own pocket.

  That was when I realized what was wrong, the thing making me uneasy that I could not identify: Michaela was in jeans and a clean but faded pale blue work shirt. And red tennis shoes, but then, she always wore them, even with her suits. It had always struck me as wise; she had been known to sprint toward suspects. And office fires. Admirable in a woman in her fifties. I could have found out her exact age, but I respected her privacy too much to indulge my curiosity.

  Michaela was lovely, with silver hair cut to just below her chin, green eyes (she and George both had striking green eyes, and she and George were both terrifying in their own way … perhaps I should do a study), and a trim, athletic body on a petite frame. Anyone can look good in a designer suit tailored to their exact measurements, but today I had discovered that Michaela could also pull off denim and chambray.

  I realized what I was doing. Reeling from her abrupt “lost funding” announcement, unnerved by the unceasing thud-thuds and whack-whacks, worried how Cadence and Adrienne would take the news (not to mention some of our more fragile colleagues), I was focusing on the change I could confront without feeling overwhelmed: Michaela’s nongovernment-office-employee wardrobe.

  I offered peanut butter on a celery stick to my colleagues; both declined. Ah! More for me. Protein and fiber, what George called “a revolting double threat.” My partner was not a fan of celery. While I munched, Emma Jan ventured to ask, “Why did we lose funding?”

  “Well, let’s see. Let me think. Let me look back into BOFFO’s brief yet distinguished past and see if I can ponder the details.” Michaela abandoned the carrots and went for the English cucumbers, longer and thinner than the standard American varieties, with thinner skin that did not need to be peeled. So, right to the chopping! “To start, we had a serial killer working for us for over a year.”

  George and I couldn’t look at each other. It was an excellent point and one we could not argue. The ThreeFer killer had been triplets. One of the triplets had worked at BOFFO. Pretty much everybody came off looking bad on that one.

  Emma Jan was kind enough (or new enough) to try to defend that, for which I silently blessed her. “That could have happened to anyone,” she began, but Michaela’s snort cut her off.

  “Possibly. But it’s especially bad when trained investigators don’t realize there’s an active serial killer in their midst. Or that he has two siblings as psychotically devoted to slaughter as he is. Was.”

  George was giving me his ple
ading, You’re smart; think of something! look, but I could only shrug. The ThreeFer killer would have been awful enough if one of them hadn’t worked for the FBI.

  “But everyone here has some kind of problem.” Dogged Emma Jan was still trying to defend her clinically insane colleagues to a rich white woman with a sharp knife. “Sure, it’s great to have a kleptomaniac and a schizophrenic in the mix, but sometimes you have to take the bad with the good.”

  “Exactly their point,” she replied dryly. “Thus, farewell funding.”

  “Anything sounds bad when you put it like that,” George muttered. I was not sure why he was annoyed; of all of us, he was the most easily employed somewhere else. His sociopathy held him back in several areas, but earning a living was not one of them. As Patton was a great wartime general, McCarthy a fervid Communist hunter, Dick Cheney a terrific document hider, and Henry VIII an efficient sacker of monasteries, so George Pinkman would be a wonderful salesman/enforcer/sex puppet/hit man. The world was made for people like my partner (as well as the gentlemen mentioned above).

  “I can’t— I don’t— What are we supposed to do?”

  “Working on it.” The terse sentence was nearly drowned out by renewed chopping.

  “The others are gonna freak,” George predicted (correctly, I suspected).

  “To put it mildly, which is why I’m telling you first. The Three Doltkateers. You’re going to help me help them with the transition.”

  Again, we traded glances, and, again, George said what we were thinking: “Michaela, if your plan is all about how the three of us are gonna ease a transition, any transition, for a bunch of neurotic, armed, medicated nutbags, it’s pretty much doomed to fail, and everyone in this kitchen is probably gonna die screaming.”