The Whole Truth (The Supercharged Files Book 1) (28 page)

“So you’re not playing ball anymore,”
I guessed. “What do you do for a living?”

“Track down cheating spouses and
bond skips.” He wound up and threw. The metallic clang of the softball on the
target resounded over the crowd’s clapping.

“Are you with Lampey PI?”

He accepted another softball.
“What’s it to you?”

“Just making conversation.” Just
fumbling for a way to confirm whether or not you dabble in corporate sabotage.

Clint glanced at Herman as if
anticipating another heckle. When Herman did nothing, Clint reared back for
another pitch.

The sixth time Samantha climbed
out of the water, audience appreciation—Herman notwithstanding—was sparse.
Several wandered toward the children’s area or buffet. However, Clint didn’t
look like he’d had his fill. Where the hell was Beau? It was past his turn for
the booth.

“Why don’t you stay down there,
Sam?” Clint said. “It’s where you do your best work.”

“You tell her,” Herman agreed.

For the first time in many
dunkings, Sam’s veneer slipped. “Come over here and shake my hand when you say
that.”

“Like you can push me, you
bitch,” he snapped back.

His power had to be akin to pushing
because Sam had mentioned they pair cancelled. However, pushing took on a
variety of formats. I withheld Clint’s next missile of revenge. “There are kids
here, dude. Watch what you say.”

“Don’t be ugly,” Jolene agreed.
“I thought Rachel was helping you work through that.”

“Fine, no profanity. Now give me
the balls.” Clint snatched the next softball out of my hand. The bucket at my
feet was nearly empty. Most of the balls were scattered around the dunking
booth.

Clint sent Samantha into the tank
once again.

I was in the middle of a crowd,
and Al was only a yelp away. He’d promised to listen for me. There was no
reason to be intimidated by Clint.

“What’s your problem?” I asked
him.

Clint stared at me for a minute
before his gaze shifted somewhere behind me.

“I don’t have a problem.
Everything is fan-damn-tastic. Can I help it if I like to play ball?” His mask
said,
Not fantastic. Hate what they’re making me do. Never should have
agreed.

What hateful task had Clint
agreed to? Garbage duty? “Are you stressed about your job? The economy is
pretty bad.”

“My job’s great.” His mask begged
to differ.
Hate my job. Bad, bad, bad.

Not everyone was cut out to be a
PI. From what Lou had described, it wasn’t a job I’d be looking into if I were
forced to quit YuriCorp in protest of the upcoming interviews.

“Clinton met my daughter Rachel
at the Lampey agency,” Jolene added. “Rachel helps out when they need an extra
set of hands, but as much as she’s been at the PI office lately, I think
there’s another reason.”

Clinton bent each arm across his
chest, pressing them closer to loosen up. This rotated his face away from me,
so I sidled in front of him, watching his mask.

“There’s no other reason, Mrs.
Lampey. We’re busy as hell,” he lied.
If the old bat catches on, we’ll have
to do her next.

Do the old bat? That sounded
ominous. And vulgar.

“I think it’s love,” Jolene said.
“A year is long enough to know if it’s love and move to the next phase. She
needs a ring for her birthday, Clinton.”

“Rachel and I are happy with the
way things are.”
I’m not happy, not with all this sneaking around.

Doing old bats? Sneaking around?
I caught myself stiffening and tried to relax.

 
“Now I want to toss some
balls,” he said.
Now
I want Sam back.

“We’re out of balls. Take your
money.” I offered him a wad of cash, hoping he’d go away so I could hunt him
down elsewhere and ask pointed questions. Clint had just been upgraded to the
top of my list. If I had a job as an evil, supra-burning spy, I’d hate it, too.

All things considered, I should probably
tap Al as back-up instead of Samantha.

“I don’t want the money, I want
the balls.”

Suddenly, Clint lurched forward,
and Jolene yanked me out of his way. Her plate tumbled to the ground beside the
pail.

“If you want the balls that bad,
take them.” I kicked him the bucket. “Jeez.”

Clint, who’d come to a stop with
his foot in Jolene’s potato salad, swiveled his head and narrowed his eyes.
“Rachel, is that you?”

Where did he think Rachel was?
Nobody was here but Clint and Jolene and...

Beau. He appeared beside Clint as
if from thin air. If I hadn’t been staring at that very spot, I would have
assumed Beau had wound his way through the crowd, but no, there had been nobody
there and then Beau had been there.

Unless he’d wound his way through
the crowd and I hadn’t noticed. He was pretty short.

“Thanks for the donation,” he
said to Clint. He adjusted a pair of dark sunglasses. “You’re done now.”

“Not hardly.” Clint righted the
bucket. “Honey, you’re gonna have to round up some more.”

“I’ll get them. Clinton, pick up
that trash.” Jolene trotted to the dunking booth, foot-swiping balls toward us
like she was practicing soccer goals. Most of them rolled right up to the
bucket.

“Thanks so much,” Samantha said
to Jolene. “Give the psycho more things to throw.”

“Give the boy some balls,” Herman
yelled. Not for the first time.

Beau caught one of the balls with
his foot and flipped it into his hands like a hacky sack.

“I’ll take that,” Clint said
after he tossed Jolene’s plate in the garbage. “Number eight.”

Instead of handing it over, Beau
dropped the ball into the pail. I expected Clint to protest, but he didn’t.

“You’re late,” I said to Beau,
astoundingly relieved to see him. “Everything okay?”

“I’m just in time.” He eyed the
milling onlookers. “You really want me to do this.”

“Did you think I was kidding?
This was part of our agreement,” I reminded him. He’d run tests to his heart’s
content, and I hadn’t balked. It had been easier than expected for harmony of a
sort to reign when Beau wasn’t being an ass and I wasn’t hiding my true nature.

He turned to Clint, his eyes
concealed by the shades. “Is Rachel here?”

“Far as I know,” Clint said. “Why
do you ask?”

“I haven’t seen her lately,” he
lied. “She was one of my students years ago, and I wondered how she was doing.”

Rachel worked downtown, mostly
from home, didn’t visit Jolene at headquarters because of the downtownie ban.
Normally Beau would have no reason to see Rachel, but apparently he had anyway.
When I opened my mouth to ask, Beau’s foot brushed mine and I realized he
wanted me to do something. Probably shut up.

While I found Beau’s question
odd, Clint didn’t. He answered without the hesitation he’d had in all his
questions to me. It was possible Beau was fading him some. “She’s been busy.
She took the week off to help Lou.”

“Jolene,” Beau said, indicating
his lab partner, “said you went to Florida with the Lampeys a couple weeks ago.
Did you drive through Alabama or Georgia? It’s shorter through Alabama. I can
make it in six hours, tops.”

“Yeah, we went through Alabama,”
Clint lied. So what if they’d gone through Georgia?

“We need to get you suited up,” I
told Beau with a tiny headshake, in case he wanted to know about Clint’s
honesty.

“I am ready.” A brief smile
flashed across Beau’s face. “Do you want me to make money or disperse the
crowd?”

“It’s for puppies and kittens,” I
said in response to his latest odd question. He was in a mood today, that was
for sure. I pointed at my placard. “Make money.”

He blew out a breath. “Damn. All
right.”

With a slow pace that showed no
fear of madman Clint and his killer aim, Beau crossed the firing line and began
stripping off his shirt.

Oh, man. He’d been hiding all
that under his clothes?

What Beau lacked in social
graces, he more than made up for in muscles and smooth brown skin. The
temperature, already steamy, rose ten degrees as he tossed his shirt over his
shoulder like some kind of sexy cologne ad. When he motioned Samantha out of
the cage, she practically fell scrambling down the ladder because she wasn’t watching
her hands and feet.

She was watching our
magnificently half-naked coworker.

Beau wore low-slung swim trunks,
and his hair, instead of dull, ratted up dreads, shone blue-black in the hot
afternoon sun. Without doing anything beyond taking off his shirt, he radiated
a confidence and sex appeal that was almost tangible. He was careful to
sidestep Samantha when she reached for his gleaming chest.

My jaw dropped, and I practically
had to shut it with my hand. How could anyone be fooled by mere chameleon
powers into thinking this man was a nonentity?

A low hum of gossip rose behind
me, and even Jolene stopped pelting balls in my direction to ogle Beau as he
climbed into the dunking booth. His muscles bunched and released under his
mouthwatering skin. He took his time swinging into the cage before he lowered
himself to the seat, his sunglasses still on his face.

He reached to each side and laced
his fingers into the cage mesh in a gesture that caused sighs to ripple across
select onlookers in a stadium wave of appreciation.

Tina Harris bumped Clint aside
and held out her wallet. “I want some balls.”

“I’m not done.” Clint pinched the
bridge of his nose and focused on Samantha, who stood under the white gazebo
scrubbing herself with a beach towel. In her wet one piece with her hair
springing every direction, she looked about fifteen. Fifteen and precociously
well-endowed. “Hell, keep the money. My arm hurts.”

“What in the world is Beauregard
doing?” Jolene asked.

“Who cares as long as he does it
without his shirt?” Tina fondled a softball and stared.

“He’s turned it off, the little
playboy,” Jolene said. “Dang. We’ll never get a break.”

“Fresh blood!” Herman exclaimed.
“Who’s on first?”

Clint, no longer interested in
watery revenge, stalked to Samantha for a more hands-on variety. I slipped the
placard around Jolene’s neck and handed her the money apron. “Alex Berkley is
supposed to show up to be dunked in two hours. Yuri’s wife said she’d spell
you. There’s a chair if it gets slow.” I pointed at a folded lawn chair leaning
against the gazebo. “I should warn you, Herman’s been here the whole time.”

“Uncle Herman’s a sweet old man,”
Jolene said, confirming my suspicion she was not of this world. Nobody human or
supra would call Herman sweet unless she meant “sweet” in the “eats a lot of
pie” sense.

Beau half-rose from the dunking
booth’s seat and called to me. “Hold on, where are you going?”

“Buffet. Have fun storming the
castle.” I waved and headed for the gazebo. I needed to update my Harriet the
Spy notebook, alert Samantha her ex had fallen under suspicion, and get Clint
to an isolated location for some probing questions.

Samantha and Clint seemed to have
fired the first sally without me.

“I’m not discussing this here,
Clint.” Her voice pitched low, Samantha wrapped a towel around herself toga
style. She glanced at Herman, but he was busy knocking the small piñata hanging
from the gazebo rafters with his cane.

She was right. We should all go
discuss it somewhere else, somewhere with a blanket so supra ears couldn’t hear
us. Perhaps the bathrooms in the video barn were set up for privacy. Or maybe
we could slip into the farmhouse. Sam was obviously in need of a wash-up. I
just needed to avoid Lou so she couldn’t dispatch me to the corn maze.

“Hi, guys,” I said brightly. “I’m
going to get lunch. Samantha, I know you’re hungry after all that swimming.”

“Starving. But I—”

I mugged at Samantha behind
Clint’s back. “Clint, would you care to join us? I’d love to hear more about
your baseball career. I’m Cleopatra Giancarlo. It’s nice to meet you.”

“I already ate.” Clint petted
Samantha’s upper arm. Was he trying to use his supra powers on her? “Sammie,
you know we’re right for each other. If it’s about the job, I can quit.” A lie
glossed his face and faded, quicker than I could catch it.

Herman lowered his cane. “You
can’t quit the agency until your contract’s up, boy.”

“Clint, I’m with somebody else
now.” Samantha plucked his hand off her arm. “You are not sucking me into this
conversation.”

“You mean Alex Berkley?” Clint
laughed. “Lies, cheats, steals. All those Psytech bastards are the same. He’ll
get what’s coming to him soon enough.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I
asked, because Samantha looked like she was going to ignore the testosterone.
If he intended to have Alex beaten by thugs, who was I to interfere?

“Butt out,” he said, instead of
answering my question.

Herman piped up behind me. “I
want some pie. Crust and fruit. Cleo, you’re not busy anymore. Get it for me.”

Either bossiness ran in the
family or Herman felt my being his chauffer translated to my being his
handmaiden. I glared over my shoulder at him. “How much pie have you had
today?”

“Not enough.” His face masked
with dishonesty. Glutton.

“I haven’t had any.” Samantha
slipped a pair of terrycloth capris over her bathing suit and slid her feet
into flip flops. “I need to change and wash off the smell of dunking booth.”

“There are bathrooms in the video
barn,” I suggested. She did smell faintly metallic. “Pit stop before the
buffet?”

“Sure.”

I tried to slyly gesture toward
Clint in a way Sam could see but nobody else could. Yuri and Al hadn’t given me
any last-minute lessons about spy hand signals. “Clint, I bet you’re hungry
again.”

“He has better things to do.”
Samantha flip-flopped down the gazebo steps. “Come on, Cleo.”