You and I, Me and You (19 page)

We just stood and stared at her. I'd seen her go through more emotional shifts in one hour than I had in two years. And I was plenty intimidated by her. Was she the kind of mom who protected her young or ate them?

“Well?”
Thwack!
“Get to work!”

We scrambled out the door, the habit of obedience long ingrained. Then we just sort of stood there and looked at each other.

“God help me. God help me.” George was shaking so hard I helped him lean against the wall. “The lies, the betrayal. The suddenly revealed family secrets, the never-suspected depth of feeling! She loves us!”

Um, some of us.
He was right, though. Yeah, she'd lied and tricked and deceived. And I was starting to thank God for it. I wasn't sure I could keep working for her, but I wasn't going to turn my back on her. At least not yet.

“I've never been so horny or terrified in my life. My life! My God, she was so MILF-y and hot and scary!”

“GILF-y,” I corrected. “She must be old enough for grandchildren.”

“Christ!” Then, unassisted by chemicals or a blow to the head, George Pinkman passed out cold. I tried in vain to keep his bulk from sliding off the wall but gave up at the last second so his limp weight wouldn't drag me to the carpet, too.

Pam Weinberg, Michaela's assistant, must have heard the thud, because she popped around the corner and stared at George's unconscious form. “Ohmigod,” she breathed. “You finally did it, Shiro. You killed him.”

“It's Cadence, and nuh-uh.”

“Oh.” She looked, and looked again. “Huh.” Resplendent in her usual uniform of flannel jammies and bunny slippers, she set down her files and bent over George. “What happened? Is he sick? Did you trank— No,
you
wouldn't do that.”

You'd be surprised, honey!
The week I/we were having, anything was possible. Now that I knew what I knew, I looked at seventeen-year-old Pam with fresh eyes. We didn't know how she ended up in, as I'd put it a few weeks ago when I still swam the sea of ignorance, “the FBI's very own cuckoo's nest.” We knew her home sitch was terrible. We knew the foster system either didn't notice she was in the BOFFO building at least a hundred hours a week (Pam liked sleeping in her office) or didn't give a tin shit.

Pam almost never left the office. Which suited her fine … and us, too. She also typed 140 words a minute, never had to be told something twice, kept Michaela's staggering schedule updated, knew who'd been naughty and who'd been nice, and needed only about four hours of sleep a night. In other words, she was the perfect palace guard. The fact that she wasn't yet a legal adult was the least important thing about her.

What did Michaela save you from?
I wondered.
Where would you be if she hadn't invited you into her lie?

“George? Hellooooo, Georgie! Wakey, wakey.”

“I wouldn't do that,” I advised. “You probably don't want to touch him right now.”

Knowing his perv tendencies, she jerked her little hand back like he'd grown lava hot. “What should I do?”

“Maybe poke him with a stick? Find a bucket, fill it with coffee, throw it on him? Just don't let your flesh touch his. Not right now. I'm doing you the favor of your life by giving you this advice.”

Pam narrowed her eyes at me. “You're in a weirdly good mood.”

“Yep.”

“Does that mean Michaela's mood is gonna improve? She's been a real—” I shook my head. Michaela was still chopping away in her other office and had, as Emma Jan put it, “ears like an eagle.”
Damn! That expensive kitchen makes a lot more sense now.
“Oh.” Pam gulped. “Thanks.” She grabbed her files and scurried back down the hall and around the corner.

 

chapter forty-seven

“Wow.” George was
looking around groggily. “I haven't passed out cold like that since I was a little ki—for a long time.”

“Well, you
were
fabulously aroused.”

“I know! It's no wonder I conked. All the blood from my head raced down to my dick, which is so huge it takes lots of filling up.”

“Oh, barf.” I was close to actually vomiting. It had been that kind of weekend.

“I'm lucky I didn't stroke out.” He sounded absurdly proud of the fact.

“‘Lucky' isn't the word springing to mind.”

And by the way, George, how often did you pass out when you were a little kid? And why? And did you leave anyone alive in the scorched earth of your childhood?

Never mind. One thing at a time.

George rubbed his eyes and leaned back in the passenger seat. I could relate to his confusion. I'd lost time, too, and I wasn't sure why. Not much—six minutes. But I had no idea what Shiro or Adrienne had done, or why they had snatched that precise block of minutes to do it.

I was just glad it wasn't longer, because my partner and I had work, and our marching orders. I'd helped him walk to my car and we were off to the races again. I should have been exhausted, but I felt strangely energized. I hadn't had such an exciting weekend since … well, the weekend we started at BOFFO, now that I thought about it. We'd been thrown together as partners, nailed a serial rapist, and finished the weekend bruised and wishing the other were dead. Ah, memories.

“So it wasn't just the most intense erotic experience of my life when I was fully clothed?”

I had to laugh. We'd both sat through the same unbelievable meeting and come away with polar opposite impressions. I couldn't recall being less aroused. Ever in my life. Nope. Not once.

“Thanks for the ride, especially if you're bringing me to an ATM so you can give me loads of cash, but where are we going again?”

“Well, if you've recovered from your swoon—”

“Hey! I blacked out! That's what studly manly guys do, right? Black out? Oh, and our official version of the story is that Shiro bushwhacked me in a moment of extreme sexual frustration.”

I said the only thing that could distract George Pinkman from the thought of a woman knocking him unconscious in a sexual frenzy. “I thought you'd want to go arrest Sussudio.”

He sat bolt upright so suddenly his seat belt locked. “What? Gaak!” He clawed at it and I resisted the urge to slam on the breaks and finish the throttle. “We're going there? Who is it?”

The good news: before I'd gone on my Blizzard run, Emma Jan, George, Max, and I had made some real progress. The cross-matching had slammed to a temporary halt during the Ladies of the Black Crisis, but once Paul was lying down in a cool dark room with some top-flight sedation running through his veins, I picked it back up. Part of it was being able to look at everything with fresh eyes, but an even bigger part was Shiro never stopped thinking, no matter who was driving the bus.

I'm so quick to complain about the unpleasantness of being a multiple, it's only fair to mention the great part. And one of the great parts was … well, you know when you're trying hard to think of something or remember a name or a song lyric? And after a bit you give up consciously trying to remember and think about other stuff? And the whole time you're building a cabin or scrubbing a toilet or taking a nap, your subconscious has been chipping away and … ding! The next thing you know, the thing you tried to remember is right at the forefront of your brain, blinking and glowing like a Vegas hotel marquee.

That's what being a multiple is like: while Shiro and I were switching seats in Michaela's office, while Shiro was doing whatever-it-was for six minutes, we were all thinking.

And like that, I knew who it was.

“It's boring,” I warned him. The thunderous realization of the villain's identity or finding out the serial killer was someone you knew all along

(“The calls are coming from inside the house!”)

was almost always movie fiction.

“The same name popped up in Max's T-group and Rita McNamm's texts.”

“He didn't delete her texts?” George asked, shocked. We'd seen our share of dumbass bad guys, but that was an admittedly extreme example.

“Nope. And Carrie Cyrus lived less than an hour from his house.”

“Oh.” George thought about it. “He's retarded. Or he wants to be caught.”

“Don't say ‘retarded,'” I scolded. “It's not just mean, it's inaccurate. And maybe, yes. About wanting to be caught, I mean. The thing is, nobody else's name pops up three times. So if he's not our guy, this—”

George was still flipping through paperwork. “Ian Zimmerman.”

“Right. If he's not Sussudio, he might know him or her or them.”

George gave me a narrow glance, and I smiled. “Don't worry. I'm not Shiro. Well, I am, because I think the walls are coming down, but I'm still mostly Cadence. Prob'ly.”

“Fine time for
that
to happen.”

“Sorry,” I said with genuine sympathy. George's weekend hadn't been any too fun, either.

It was wrong, but Paul's deadly mistake, the devastating meeting with Michaela, and George's fainting spell had prodded me into pulling my thumb out of the butt of my love life, so to speak.

(Ugh!)

As analogies went, that one sucked, which wasn't to say it was inaccurate. But if someone as brilliant as Paul could set up a woman to be murdered and never understand why that wasn't helpful, I wasn't going to keep playing should-I-or-shouldn't-I with Patrick. He deserved better, and so did I.

In ten minutes my worldview had changed forever. Things in my past had to be looked at again, because what I thought had happened had perhaps never happened. Meeting Michaela, finding out my split into Shiro and Adrienne was a result of my mother murdering my father before my eyes, thinking finding a man who wanted me would solve problems rooted in childhood, joining up with BOFFO … all of it was true and none of it was true.

Nothing could be taken for granted. In a world where everything changed in a blink, it was no time to settle and no time to watch and wait and hope situations resolved themselves.

I wasn't a cop, I wasn't a crook, I wasn't a freak, I wasn't an ordinary woman. I wasn't a daughter and I was no longer an employee—maybe. (I was still puzzling that one over.)

But I
was
a woman who was capable of love and passion and who did not need to grab someone back just because they grabbed first. I didn't want someone to fix me, I didn't want to bake cookies and visit my doctor and passively hope to become a whole person while cashing baker's paychecks. I didn't want to start every phone conversation with “Sorry, but…,” and I didn't want to apologize for how I lived and where I worked and what I did. My choices were unconventional and some were brilliant and many were idiotic, but they were mine. Time to own them.

More: it was time to give up the suit. It wasn't even the boyfriend I was giving up (though Patrick would disagree). It was the suit of armor I had jammed him in.
Say, I've got an idealized version of the man I'll be with due to a turbulent childhood—that's the phrase of the week: turbulent childhood—and whether it fits you or not I'm just gonna make you wear it, okay? Okay. Thanks again for uprooting your life!

Maybe that's why I was in inappropriately high spirits. It was possible Sussudio would get the drop on me. Shit, why not? I was a mental patient who wasn't even a real FBI agent! There was
every
chance he or she or they would get the drop on me. If I was dead I wouldn't have to worry about the look on Patrick's face when I broke him two days after we moved in together. (Broke
up with
him is what I meant. Yes.)

“This could be it for us, George,” I warned him. “We're just gonna roll up on this guy. It's dumb, even for us.”

“Are you trying to seduce me?”

“No, not ever. How many times do we have to talk about this? Every time you wonder if I'm trying to seduce you, the answer is no, not ever. Also, because I'm still freaking over Michaela's Arvin/Jack reveal, I didn't tell her where we were going. She's not an FBI supervisor, right? Right. Why should we tell her even one thing? Right? Right.” Was I rebelling against Shiro's mother figure? Yep. Was it a stupid-ass time to do it? Yep. Weirder: even knowing what I was doing and why, and knowing it was insane, wasn't making me change my mind.

“I like where you're going with this. Talk more about how you being a clichéd dumb bitch movie heroine might lead to me getting stomped to death by a guy who hates it when suicides won't commit.”

“Well, if you liked that, you'll love this: there's every chance he'll kill us. He'll conk us over the head with a lamp or something equally hackneyed, then drag our limp bodies to the garage, start his car, and wait for us to succumb. The good news is, we won't feel the headaches, dizziness, convulsions, respiratory arrest, or death. The bad news is, we're dead. The other good news is, since we're dead, every single one of our problems is over, for us at least. Also, we'll leave great-looking corpses.” It was true! And it wasn't just vanity; hemoglobin binds to CO way more than it binds to oxygen, and the chemical reaction left corpses with flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes. (The things I learned reading Stephen King and being a fake FBI agent.)

“That all sounds pretty great. We'd better pray he doesn't have a hybrid.”

“I didn't even think about that,” I said, appalled. “What if he does? How will he murder us and make it look like a suicide?”

“He's probably got lots of stuff in-house for just that purpose,” George soothed. “He'll hold a gun on us and force me to suffocate you or make you drown me, or he'll make us some Drano smoothies.”

“Okay, that's good. But why do you even care? For me it's about not having to deal with my love life or Michaela's lies or my entire career being made up or wishing I'd had some protein for dinner and not a Blizzard. But you like life.”