A Date You Can't Refuse (7 page)

At 7:48 p.m. I parked at Costco, a big-box store on the corner of Canoga and Roscoe, in the Valley. Costco closed at eight-thirty on weeknights, so it was still hopping, but I had the northeast end of the parking lot all to myself. I turned off my headlights and left the engine running, playing the radio for company, then switched on the map light and picked up my sketchpad. The day's events had inspired a greeting card, as often happened with me. My cards were alternative, but this one was too alternative, a Happy Moving Day card that turned into condolences once you opened it. Maybe because the only place I wanted to move to was back to Simon's. It wasn't that I loved his penthouse in Westwood. I just loved him.

My stomach growled. I reached into my glove box for a protein bar, kept there for the homeless who panhandled on busy intersections. And for Simon. I hadn't eaten anything since Grusha's soup, before the lunchtime incident had put me off my feed. Should I just dismiss the possibility that someone had shot at Donatella? There was no evidence, only a quick succession of events: the alarm, the sharp cracking sound, and the reactions of a few shell-shocked people, which Alik had explained quite reasonably. But they, unlike me, had recovered and gone back to eating the soup.

If I didn't know the FBI was investigating these people, wouldn't I be able to let it go? Maybe. There was the ill-fated Chai, whose clothes I was wearing even now as I sat in my car. I wondered what clothes she'd been wearing during her last moments, as she sat in her car. Okay, I better rein in my imagination and act like a normal person, not one sent by the feds. A normal person abandoning her life overnight in order to spend three months doing some odd job that involved transporting foreign nationals to nightclubs and 7-Elevens while dressed like a dead girl. A normal person who—

My car door opened. As I was leaning against it, I began falling toward the Costco asphalt. A pair of strong hands grabbed my shoulders and steadied me.

“Lady,” a low-pitched voice said. “This is private property. No loitering.” The man holding my shoulders helped me out of the car, then retrieved my sketchpad.

I looked around. The closest humans were nearly a block away, moving bulk items from shopping carts to trunks. “And I suppose solicitation is frowned on too.
Ulf,”
I added, but my assailant was already climbing into my car, taking over the driver's seat. Then he pulled me in, onto his lap.

I looked into his face. It was a tough one, with a fair number of lines on it, all of which I was familiar with, some of which I'd put there. “Is this a carjacking?” I asked.

“No. Kidnapping,” he said and kissed me.

Ulf, aka Simon Alexander, was a very good kisser, which was fortunate, as kissing is one of the few physical activities possible in an old Acura Integra. It's a small car by L.A. standards. As I'm a tall woman by nearly any standard and Simon is five inches taller than that, practicing our skills of seduction in my car was a circus act. Not that that stopped us.

I spent a couple of minutes appeasing my body hunger, untucking his shirt so I could get my hands under it, then sliding my arms around him, touching skin, feeling the muscles of his back. It wasn't until a cramp set in and I felt him wince as I changed position that we got around to talking. Simon leaned back, brushed hair from my face, and studied me in the dim light. “You look tired. Jury duty still going on?”

“Nope.” I told him the details of the case without mentioning the name Milos.

“Good. Now that you've done your civic duty, can you stay up late tomorrow?”

“What's tomorrow?”

“I thought we'd meet at a hotel.”

I gasped. “And spend a whole night together?”

“And well into the morning. There are one or two things I want to do to you that require a mattress and room service.”

Damn. This was something I'd been dreaming of for weeks. But I doubted if “the team” would want me to disappear for twelve or fourteen hours my first day on the job. “Will you still be Ulf when you check in?” I asked, stalling for time.

“No. I'll be Daniel Lavosh.”

“That's not the batting order. What about
W
?” I was used to Simon changing names with each communication, progressing through the alphabet two letters at a time.

“Daniel Lavosh has a credit card and photo ID,” he said. “I'll check in and you'll come an hour later. I'll park in the hotel garage and leave the key card hidden under my car, the driver's side front tire.”

“Lucrezia's giving you the night off?” I asked.

“You don't give up, do you?”

Simon was working undercover, on a case that had occupied him for as long as I'd been in love with him. Or longer. I wasn't sure. All I knew was that it involved a woman named Lucrezia who was well coiffed and favored fur coats. At least, she'd favored them back in December, the two times I'd seen her. Since it was now May, there was a good chance she'd moved on to cloth coats. Or dispensed with clothes altogether. Simon wasn't saying and I didn't ask. Much. The prudent thing would've been to take a sabbatical from our relationship until the case was wrapped up, but Simon, although professional, was not always prudent. As for me, there were many things I'd do for my country, but abandoning this man to a woman in a French twist was not one of them.

“How's it going with Lucrezia, anyway?” I asked.

“Never mind Lucrezia,” he said. “How about it?”

So much for stalling. “There's a slight hitch. I may have a … thing.”

“What thing?” His voice was wary.

“A job thing.”

“You don't have a job.”

“I do too have a job. What do you mean?”

“I misspoke. I meant apart from your cards. Obviously.”

“Just because one is self-employed,” I said, “doesn't mean there are no professional commitments that require one's—”

“What? There's a greeting card convention? An interview with Hallmark?”

“I don't aspire to work for Hallmark.”

Simon's hand moved toward the map light, but I grabbed it and held on.

“Do you find my work Hallmarky?” I asked.

“No. You're the Vincent van Gogh of greeting cards. What's this job thing?”

“Simon, tell me something. All these security measures we do—the cryptic phone messages, the code names—are we hiding from the bad guys or the good guys?”

“Why are you asking?”

“I mean, I assume Lucrezia can't know about me, but now I wonder, are you keeping me from your boss—you know, the FBI—too?”

“And why do you wonder this now?”

“It… I don't know, it occurred to me.”

Simon reached up with his other hand and the map light went on. His eyes, when he turned to me, were so ice blue they startled me. They always did. They were also bloodshot. “My God,” I said. “Talk about tired-looking. When was your last good night's sleep?”

“Let's stay with you,” he said. “What's going on, Wollie?”

“What do—”

“And don't say ‘What do you mean?’ You're flitting from subject to subject, a diversionary tactic that could work on someone who doesn't know you and love you, provided that person was also stupid, but I'm not that person, so let's cut to the chase.”

“Okay,” I said. “Here's the deal. I have a new job. And it starts tomorrow. So I can't meet you at the hotel, and I'm sick with disappointment over it.”

“What's the job?”

I turned off the map light. “I'm working for a company that does media training and I'll be working odd hours.”

“How odd?”

“Tomorrow there are clients arriving at the airport and I think I'm picking them up. A lot of my duties involve transportation. At any rate, I have to be available to them.”

“What hours?”

“I'm not sure, but I get the impression … twenty-four/seven.” I mumbled this.

He switched on the map light. There were those eyes again, blue, blue, blue, with laserlike intensity. “You're a chauffeur?”

“Among other things. Why?”

“Because you dislike driving, and you're not particularly good at it. What other things?”

“Showing them around L.A. Whatever. Playing cribbage with them in their off-hours. I'll find out more tomorrow.”

“Right after you learn cribbage. How did you find this job?”

“They more or less found me. It came about through jury duty in a circuitous way and the pay's good, and it's just temporary.”

“How temporary?”

“Three months.”

“Three months?”

“Okay, okay,” I said, cringing. “I'm not hard of hearing.”

“You're spending the summer babysitting a bunch of—what? Who are these people?”

“Simon, I don't know all the details, but I'm more than a glorified bus driver. These are international celebrities. It's a prestigious firm, I'm well-treated, it's not menial labor—”

“What's the name of this firm?”

I hesitated, then turned off the map light. “MediasRex.”

He switched the light back on. “What aren't you telling me?”

“I'm not—nothing. It's just that—see, I knew you wouldn't be crazy about—not that I blame you—the idea of seeing less of you than I already do depresses me, and—”

“I thought you wanted to focus on your art,” he said.
“And
your marketing efforts.”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“So why are you doing this? It's not a career move, it's a temp job.”

“I told you, it's—”

“—money. What are they paying?”

I looked out the window. “Five minutes ago that moon looked so romantic.”

“Salary?”

“Fifty grand. For three months. Not bad for a babysitter.”

That quieted him. I took advantage of this by turning off the map light one last time. Then I took his face in my hands and moved toward
it. When he showed no signs of resistance, I closed the gap, put my mouth on his, and switched to nonverbal communication. We'd been working on these skills a lot over the last six months and were getting good at it. I had to block out a vision of Alik Milos that jumped in uninvited, but Simon didn't seem to notice and I thought I was home free, until his mouth moved to my ear.

“I'm curious to know,” he said softly, “what else these people are paying for.”

I was too. But I kept that to myself.

W
hile not exactly a fight, the evening's tryst had been downgraded to a logistics discussion. We talked about the “where” and “how”—possible venues for our next rendezvous and the cryptic phone calls that would precede it—but not the “when.” Which was all I cared about. It was cold comfort that my schedule was now as unpredictable as his.

I did not tell Simon that my new job required me to live on campus, as it were, and in a section of Calabasas without cell phone reception. There was only so much wrath I could take in one night from a man with whom there would be no makeup sex in the near future. Makeup sex had seen Simon and me through some rough moments; now I'd have to find other coping mechanisms. Relationship self-help books, if there were any that gave advice on living with a secret agent. Perhaps there was a Significant Others of Spies support group, but I didn't know how that would work, everyone sitting around sharing only aliases and cover stories. Simon's had to do with the textiles business.

The good news was that Simon didn't suspect that I too was working for the FBI. Also, I'd kept the name Yuri Milos out of the conversation, although Simon would undoubtedly check up on MediasRex the minute he got to a computer.

It was in this cheerless frame of mind that I walked up the sidewalk at the Oakwood Garden Apartments. Of all my recent domiciles, this was the one I'd miss the least. Fredreeq and Joey would be popping champagne when they heard I was leaving; Joey felt that proximity to so many divorcés was psychologically unhealthy while Fredreeq was concerned with the spirit world. She claimed that the apartment complex, so near Forest Lawn cemetery, was in fact built on ancient Native American burial grounds, meaning at best it had bad feng shui and at worst was haunted. Tonight I believed her. It seemed the trees themselves were whispering my name.

“Wollie.”

That was no tree. I stopped, scared silly. It was late. And dark. The walkway was lined with lights, half of them burned out. A good place to get mugged.

But muggers didn't usually call one's name.

“What?” I said.

A man emerged from the shadows, and I took a step back. “It's me,” he said.

I peered at him. Bennett Graham. “Oh,” I said. “Hello. What are you doing here?”

“Let's take a walk,” he said.

“Let's go inside,” I said.

“I prefer the outdoors.”

I did not. While nearly summer, it was still chilly, and Chai's clothes were thin. But Bennett Graham was the boss. I would have to get into the habit of taking sweaters everywhere if this guy was going to keep popping up alfresco.

“Do you think my apartment's bugged?” I asked, moving along the pathway.

“Not necessarily. Let's just say I have a worst-case-scenario mind-set. You'll develop one too.”

“How delightful.”

We walked toward the pool, which was empty. Beyond the pool, the hot tub held three people who in turn held beer bottles.

“You met with Milos today,” Bennett Graham said, walking slowly around the pool. “How did that go?”