Me, Myself and Why? (16 page)

It was like . . . ahmmm . . . how can I put this? It was like making yourself eat the baked potato before you could have the hot fudge sundae. When you were allergic to baked potatoes. And it hadn’t been washed before being wrapped in foil and plunked in the oven. And the oven would only heat up to room temperature.

As far as Shiro and I were concerned, it was simple discipline. I knew enough about myself (hurrah for years of psychotherapy) to understand I was
so
easily distracted; not so with Shiro the laser beam. And what was a simple disciplinary action for one sister was bamboo under the fingernails for Adrienne, who couldn’t analyze data unless she set it on fire first.

And speaking of analysis, that was enough of it for now. Enough stalling while pretending I wasn’t stalling. Time to get to work! Uh, analyzing. I scooped up about a thousand manila folders and stacked them (semi)neatly on the corner of my desk. I had now exposed a whopping nine by fourteen inches of bare space. Which I promptly filled with NNCP paperwork.

Cathie once walked into my bedroom and saw a small spot of exposed rug that was not covered in dirty clothes, clean clothes, magazines, books, bananas, strawberry body butter, teacups,
The Tudors
DVDs, a curl-ing iron, pot holders, or CDs. Her prompt reaction was to scream, “Oh my dear God, there’s
floor
!” and then frantically kick my gym clothes and soft billowy granny underpants onto the brazen empty space, filling it while she screeched like a storm siren. I’d laughed so hard I spilled my ginger ale all over myself.

And oh my, look at this. A couple of BOFFO detectives approached, summing me up with their long beaky noses and deep-set blue eyes. There were identical shiny spots on their suits, too, and they were both advertising their premature male pattern baldness by combing their hair sideways across the tops of their heads.

Honestly. Do guys
really
think that will fool us? “Whoa, hi there, John. Gosh, for a second there I thought you were going bald, but I see now that you have a full, lush head of hair. Which grows sideways from left to right in sticky strands. Have I ever been this sexually excited? I think not!”

And here they were, blocking the soothing glow banks of fluorescent lighting with their shiny suits. Just when I assumed my day couldn’t get any worse. Why did I always assume that? It was like daring the gods.

Slope-shouldered and unibrowed, Frick and Frack were veteran agents who had been partners so long they actually resembled each other, you know, like pet owners are supposed to resemble their pets. Seriously. George, Tina, and I agreed it was a little frightening. Not least because we weren’t sure which one was the pet.

“So,” Frick greeted me. “Who y’gonna be after lunch, Jones, that crazy chick or the karate bitch?” This was his idea of a warm, friendly hello, often accompanied by a greedy glance at my breasts via his peripheral vision.

“It’s already after lunch, Dennis,” I replied pleasantly. “And I’m me.”

“Yeah, but how come that wildcat Adrienne was here?” Frack stared at me while he blinked slowly. Like an owl. An aging, potbellied, balding, child-support-payment-dodging, passive-aggressive, Dairy Queen–addicted owl. To ramp up the ickiness factor, they stood in for each other, one asking questions the other one wanted answers for. Like a ventriloquist’s dummy. They were interchangeable!

“You’d have to ask her.” I felt perfectly safe saying this, because neither Frick nor Frack went near Adrienne if they could help it, the one sensible habit they had acquired over the years. And they’d never risk
asking
for her. “You know, the next time you see her.”

“So how come you’re catching fer ThreeFer?” I had been watching carefully, hoping I would finally be able to categorize them as separate entities. The one on the left had spoken this time. Yikes. I had met serial rapists who were more pleasant. “Cuz we thought you had that thing.” He turned to his partner. “You know. The thing.”

“The thing in Duluth,” Frick corrected.

Ah. Duluth. The “thing” was Internet fraud; you know, that spam e-mail from the mysterious Moroccan government official? Her name was Audrey Swenson, she was born in Superior, Wisconsin, she couldn’t
spell
Morocco much less be a national, and I’d made a vow to see her in a cell before hockey season started.

But of course, I didn’t work only her file; like everyone here, I juggled a full caseload and, like every government employee, prayed for our budget to keep up with our rent.

And why in the world were Frick and Frack so darned interested in my caseload? Had they lost a bet? Was this the warm-up to (oh please God no no
no
!) asking me out?

“Yeah, so how come?”

Less than fifty-five seconds into the conversation and they’d lost me. Funny how fifty-five seconds could seem like years and years and years. And years. “How come what?”

“How come you’re catching fer Threefer?”

“Oh!” Frack was staring down at a TS/SCI memo (boo! bad cube etiquette!), upon which I casually dropped a copy of the invitation to Tina’s housewarming. “Gee, I thought you knew.”

“If we knew, we wunt be askin’.”

“You wunt? All righty. Well, you see, we fearless government minions of the FBI have this pesky thing called ‘federal jurisdiction.’ And that means when there’s a crime like kidnapping or murder or counterfeiting or election fraud or oil spills or insurance fraud or art theft or gem theft, we are pledged to examine the clues and catch the bad guys, as is our sworn duty mandated by the attorney general of the United States and also mentioned in our union contract. These actions, which fall within our ‘jurisdiction,’ are known commonly as ‘fighting crime’ or ‘earning a living,’ during which—”

“Yeah, you’re as funny as a crotch.”

I rolled my eyes and sighed. “Crutch. Funny as a crutch.” You had to have at least a four-year college degree to join our illustrious ranks; I occasionally wondered how Frick and Frack had managed to fake the necessary paperwork. Surely the University of Nebraska hadn’t
really
released these two into the wild. “Well, gee whiz, fellas. This has been just superfun. But I have to—” Wash my hair. Go bowling. Clean my shotgun. Return the new Dolly Parton tell-all to Barnes and Noble. Hang myself. “—uh—I have to—”

“Cuz y’know, we c’n help you with it.”

It took every shred of concentrated effort, every drop of willpower I had ever possessed, to keep the horror-struck expression off my face. “Oh. Well. That is just so nice, fellas. But you—um—that is to say,
I
have to—well—” My sense of self-preservation grimly battled my incessant need to be polite to absolutely everyone, all the time. “It’s not that I’m not grateful, or need the help, it’s that—”

Michaela stomped down the aisle through our cubes, a kielbasa clutched in one fist, her suit jacket primly buttoned to just below her nipples. “You!” she snapped, green eyes bulging as her blood pressure climbed. “And you! Where are your expense reports, you useless boobs?”

“Heh.”

“She said boobs,” the other one added. They turned in scary unison—now they were rejects from Michael Flatley’s
Lord of the Dance
. They stepped in unison, shiny pant legs flashing in the fluorescents. Now they were
Terminator
bureaucrats—and marched off to wherever the heck it was they needed to go when they weren’t torturing me. I was so relieved I actually saw spots for a few seconds.

Chapter Forty-eight

Nope! That was George, my partner. He had changed ties. Again. The spots I had seen were actually a pattern of tiny green mice running through a vermilion field of bright yellow mousetraps.
This meant something!
I was sure of it. Dr. Nessman probably knew all about it.

“What did those two freaks want?” he said, throwing himself into his office chair. He shot past me and nearly collided with the printer, then kicked off the cube wall above it with his tastefully loafered feet. “God, I can’t stand those two.” He whizzed past me again, this time on the left. Keeping eye contact with George was sometimes akin to watching the ball in one of those old-timey pinball machine things. “Did you
see
their suits?”

“You’re, uh, aware of the irony, you calling them freaks and criticizing their clothing choices while at the same time—”

“Off my case, Blue’s Clues.” His nearly black hair fell into his eyes and he jerked his head back, raking his fingers through his long bangs. His nails gleamed with the latest no-polish manicure. If George ever felt stress about anything, it sure didn’t show on his hands.

“I don’t know what that means,” I admitted, beginning to paw through the paperwork again. I thought about my partner, and about Frick’s partner. “George? D’you ever wonder what you’d be doing if BOFFO didn’t need us?”

His eyes narrowed and his long nose twitched as if he smelled sour milk. “No.”

Of course not. This was Mr. Live for Today, after all. He would never—

“I don’t have to wonder,” he continued matter-of-factly. “I know. I’d be cooling my heels somewhere on death row, being a sadass jailhouse lawyer and filing my own appeals while locked up twenty-three hours a day and fielding marriage proposals from women I’d never met.”

Uh. Hmm. Okay. Also: he was probably right.

“And you’d be locked in a rubber room somewhere, being polite to the orderlies when Shiro wasn’t busting heads and Adrienne wasn’t eating the stuffing out of the rubber walls.”

Also probably right. “Ooookay.”

“Come on. It’s nothing you don’t know. The only good thing about BOFFO needing people like us is that it makes me feel better that I need BOFFO.”

I eyed my abrasive unpleasant handsome homicidal partner and tried to keep the expression of surprise off my face. It wasn’t like George to show deep understanding—about anything.

“Don’t look so baffled, Cadence. Tell me it wasn’t the luckiest day of your life when Michaela recruited you right out of the MIMH.”

“It was a lucky day,” I admitted. It had also been years ago, but it still seemed surreal.

An older woman, serene and powerful, with eyes the color of leaves and running shoes that were blindingly white, waiting for me when I finished my session with the shrink du jour. An older woman showing me federal identification and explaining that there was a branch of the FBI that could use my special skills.

And not a new branch, either. The FBI had been started in 1908 under President Teddy Roosevelt, with a whopping thirty-four agents.

BOFFO had been started in 1910, with four.

We’ve always been there. To protect, and serve, and go crazy: that was our mission, our pleasure, and, occasionally, our burden. The government always needed people who didn’t look at the world the way “norms” did. The government always needed people to use. And use up.

I had, at the time, assumed Michaela was crazier than I was. Which still might be true, if Shiro ever told me why she was so obsessed with cutlery. But Michaela had made a believer out of me. All three of us. And so I’d been serving the public at the pleasure of the federal government, with all the head shrinking I could stand thrown in for free. It was like winning a lottery that rewarded insanity with a high-risk occupation and firearm training.

“I still don’t know how Michaela finds us. Found us,” George was saying. “I nearly shit myself when she bailed me out of lockup in St. Paul that time. Fast-forward nine months, I’m wearing suits to work and fending off Secret Santa drawings, my partner’s a multiple personality, my boss is obsessed with chopping vegetables, and my shrink makes me take the MMPI every nine months.”

“Oooh, yuck.” The MMPI was a nightmare quiz with hundreds of T/F questions. I could actually feel my will to live draining away whenever I had to sit down to the cursed thing.

“Why the dumb questions, anyway? You thinking about quitting? Being a crazy civilian again, instead of a crazy government employee?”

“Nooooo. I just wonder . . . sometimes . . . what it’s all for. And why we keep doing it.”

“Yeah, you would.” He shrugged. “You think too much.”

And you don’t think at all, my sociopathic friend.

“Are we going to lunch? We’re going. Are we gonna have lunch? Let’s have lunch.”

“Well, no.”

“Then what the hell am I doing here?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea in the world.”

George chewed on his lips like an angry horse for a few seconds, then glanced back in the direction of Frick and Frack’s departure. “So what’d they want?”

“I don’t know, but it was a little strange.”

He snorted.

“Even for them,” I clarified, “or us. They were awfully interested in my caseload.”

“Your caseload or our caseload?”

“ThreeFer Killer.”

His eyes went narrow and squinty, and I realized anew that he and Michaela both had the purest green eyes I’d ever seen. Not hazel, not brown-gold. Green.
Green
green. It was rare. Also, in another thousand years it would be nonexistent—everybody’d have the same skin color and eye color. I considered telling George what his descendants would miss out on . . . and then I realized he’d probably never have any. Sociopaths made disastrous spouses and even worse parents. The world—the galaxy—would be a safer place if George never reproduced.

I mentally shook myself like a puppy leaving a pond. “I have some paperwork to go through.”

“I care,” my insane partner snapped.

I blinked. Even for George, this was a little—oh. Oh! How stupid. How could I have forgotten?

Well. It had been a busy day.

“You look fine,” I said as nicely as I could.

His scowl deepened. His forehead was actually laddered with angry frown wrinkles. His eyes gleamed at me like a pissed-off wolf’s.

“And that’s a—a—a
lovely
tie,” I added, trying not to look at the awful thing.

He brightened and stroked it. “You think so?”

“Just, um, gorgeous. Really very absolutely extremely beautiful.”

George was thirty today. He found aging quite stressful. His vanity was matched only by his hideous neckties.