Outta the Bag (2 page)

Clive raised his eyebrows, which hurt his forehead scratches, so he stopped. “None of that is true.”

* * *

“Well, Little Pat, I guess it’s just—whoa.”

She was standing in front of him. Somehow she’d climbed (jumped?) from the hood, came around the side of the van, and took up position behind him without him hearing a thing.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said, “but you’re sort of terrifying.”

“Ha!”

“Okay.”

“Little Pat! Is safe! And I am, too, did you did you did you know? Yes!” Then, even weirder (twenty seconds earlier he would not have believed it was possible), “Little Pat doesn’t like geese, either. But it’s spring! Okay?” She grabbed his shirt and shook him. “Okay?”

“Yes! Okay, it’s spring.” It was August fifteenth. “Great. Here we both are, standing next to a van with a small cat imprisoned inside. We’re enjoying a lovely spring evening, just the two of us.” It was eleven forty-five in the morning.

“There are five of us! If you count Little Brat.”

“Sure. Well. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’d like to get the hell away from you now. It’s been…” Surreal? Disturbing? Weirdly erotic?

“Take this the wrong way,” she said, then seized him by the ears, yanked him forward, and laid a kiss on him he felt all the way down to his femurs. When she broke the kiss he had to lean against the van for a minute.

“Oh boy.” It wasn’t possible to conceal a raging hard-on in faded jeans, he discovered anew.

“You are seriously, totally, thoroughly hot. And crazy.”

“Bye, Little Better!” She kicked at the sliding door. “Die screaming, Little Pat! Yes indeed, stupid beast-cat! I don’t like you! And you don’t like me! So I won’t squish you with a hammer! Gotta go, gotta grow, gotta get gone before they come back.”

He was probably in shock, because he barely blinked “’They’ being the cops, I bet.”

“Ha! Sister-cops. Cops who are sisters. Sisters who want to be cops, and I don’t! Like! Quantico!” She got right up in his face and stared at him, eyeball to eyeball. “They know too many things there and I don’t want to want to want to…” She sucked in a deep breath. Clive braced himself, thankful he was leaning against the van. “I don’t want…to be…a good guy!

“Okay.” Quantico? As in, where they trained FBI agents? What had the blonde said earlier, when she was less crazy?

Home from school. Doctors wouldn’t let her have pets. Those two random facts actually made sense to him now, but he couldn’t help wondering: did the FBI drive the blonde crazy, or had she been that way to begin with? And—

“Aw, shit! Hey!” he hollered because, of course, the blonde was nowhere to be seen. A loon training to be an FBI agent who was as silent and spooky as Batman when she wasn’t turning somersaults in trees and kicking over ladders and freaking out over lost opportunities to administer meds to bewildered felines. “You never told me where Little Pat lives!”

A muted yowl from the back of his van was the answer.

* * *

“What’d you do?” Hi-my-name-is-Debbie asked.

“Little Pat had the address on his collar. I calmed him down with my lunch. Roast beef sandwich with cheese and Dijon dill mustard—“

“Yum,” Hi-my-name-is-Shelly commented.

“Barf,” Hi-my-name-is-Anne retorted. “Why would you ruin a perfectly good sandwich with dill mustard?”

“Anyway, her friend was there by the time I showed up. And the weird thing was, her friend didn’t think any one part of my story was weird.”

“Which is weird in itself,” Hi-my-name-is-Debbie said.

“Tell me.”

“For the last time: switch!”

Clive looked up, blinking. He’d been so focused on telling his story he’d failed to realize he had, at the end, been telling it to the entire room. The moderator was red-faced and twitchy.

“Oh,” he said, surprised. “Uh. Sorry. I guess—okay, sorry. I gotta go.”

At least four of the women jumped up and followed him out to the parking lot. When he finally got into his Better van, he had slips of paper sticking out of all his pockets, all with brand-new e-mail addys and cell phone numbers.

Bemused, he pulled one out at random. In a flowing, feminine script, he read, You need to show me how she kissed you. Call me! Shelly P., 651-231-7279.

Well, damn, he thought, starting his van. I kind of have to marry one of these gals. Just so we can tell people how we met.

Clive Better pulled out of the parking lot, ready to resume protecting the good people of Edina, Minnesota, from clogged drains and leaking pipes. And the occasional deranged blonde.

THE END

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