Coping (2 page)

“Let’s do termite inspectors,” Gabe
says and stuffs the last bite of roast beef sandwich into his mouth.

Tarren shakes his head. “We had to
throw away your uniform. Too much blood.”

“Oh yeah.” Gabe leans back in the
passenger seat and takes a big swig from his can of Monster Energy.

I watch rain streak down the side
window. We’re back in Redmond, Washington, straight from Michigan. The next
name on our angel kill list is Graham Hendricks. He was the late Harold
Krugal’s lawyer. From what Gabe has been able to dig up on him, it seems he’s
fled like the others. Smart guy.

Short guy. The profile pics that
Gabe has shown us feature a squat man with incredibly hairy forearms. His eyes
are dark and beady. Maybe it’s because I know what he is now—and, of course,
being a lawyer in the first place wasn’t a great start—but I’m convinced that
there’s an ugly shadow in his eyes.

Now, we’re sitting in an Arby’s
parking lot two miles down the road from his luxury townhouse, while my
brothers discuss infiltration techniques. Since I have nothing to add to the
conversation, I watch the rain and try to ignore the pungent odor of Gabe’s
meal.

“Oh, I got it. Mormons,” Gabe says.

Tarren raises an eyebrow.

“No, let me go with this one. We
walk up to the porch, all happy and filled with Jesus and stuff. You knock,
I’ll pick the lock, and we go in. If anyone sees us, it’ll look completely
normal.”

“Except for the fact that they’ll
think someone actually let you inside,” I chime in from the backseat.

Tarren thinks this through
carefully. His eyes go far away, and I imagine his brain mapping every possible
scenario, churning out reports filled with ones and zeros. “There could be
trouble if the neighbors know that Hendricks isn’t around.”

Gabe takes another chug from his
can of Monster, and I can actually see the effect of the caffeine on his aura.
The flow of his energy increases, the colors brightening and pushing farther
out from his body.

“Life lesson Maya,” he turns around
in his seat.

“Oh goodie,” I say.

“No, this one is for real. The
majority of people are lazy fucks. They don’t want to stretch their necks out
or get involved in other people’s shit. Especially their neighbors, because no
one cares about their neighbors anymore.”

“Fair enough,” I shrug.

“Now, if someone sees a suspicious
ruffian, such as Tarren, kick down their neighbor’s door, they’d know a crime
was going on and feel obligated to call in the cops, right?”

“Right.”

“But if two clean cut Mormons show
up at their neighbor’s door and go in, you think anybody is going to call the
cops? Nah. Even if something doesn’t seem right—like maybe they know the
neighbor’s not supposed to be home or they didn’t see anyone answer the
door—there’s just enough believability that they can assume everything is on
the up and up. The last thing they want to do is make an effort for somebody
else, so we just have to give them a reason not to.”

“How very profound,” I say.

Gabe smiles. “As long as something
looks minimally plausible, the majority of people will just let it happen.”

“Mormons aren’t supposed to drink
caffeine,” I inform Gabe, as he motions to take another swig of his energy
drink.

“You’re kidding me. How do those
poor saps survive?”

“Good question…Faith?”

“Alright,” Tarren brings us back to
the present. “We’ll go with Mormons. We get in the house and search for
anything that tells us where Hendricks might have gone.”

“What about me?” I ask. “Can I
come?”

“Nope, there aren’t any female
Mormons,” Gabe says.

“Of course there are female Mormons
you ignoramus. They just…don’t do the door to door selling God thing.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“There’s a park on the corner of
the street. You can keep watch from there. Tell us if anyone’s coming,” Tarren
says. His energy, that muddy blue, is a solid, steady shield to his inner
thoughts.

Honestly, it isn’t much, but at
least I’ve graduated from waiting in the car, so I take it.

***

The rain is light but steady. I’m
wrapped in one of Gabe’s coats. It’s long on me and smells like him. There’s a
shaky phone number written in blue pen on the left cuff, which likely leads to
some pretty girl in a random corner of the country who has a particular
fondness for lots of alcohol and witty strangers.

Despite the fact that my brothers
keep an armory in their trunk as well as a suitcase filled with various
uniforms, badges, IDs and other costumes, there was not a single umbrella to be
found. I huddle on a park bench and feel little spits of rain slide down the
back of my neck.

I have a phone up to my ear.
There’s no one on the other line, but I engage in a lengthy conversation
nonetheless as I glance down the street and watch my two very incongruent
Mormons make their way toward Graham Hendricks’s house.

The guy I’m having a fake
conversation with is Bill. I decide that I’m a high-and-mighty business woman,
and Bill is a terrified underling.

“Where are we on the Stiegal
project?” I demand.

Gabe and Tarren are both wearing
long-sleeved, white collared shirts, ties and black dress pants. Tarren wears
polished black shoes, but for some reason, Gabe’s were missing. He’s still in
his beat up sneakers, which he shrugged about good naturedly. Tarren, of
course, was none too happy. Then again, Tarren is not happy about anything.

Despite the fact that he and his
brother are just two guys—young guys—doing their best to take out an entire
unground race of über-humans on a shoestring budget, Tarren still expects
perfection. I think he’s got some kind of Mission Impossible/Delta Force ideal
going on in his head, which, surprise, surprise, we don’t really live up
to….ever, actually.

“I didn’t ask for excuses,” I say
to Bill and let the tone in my voice imply just how disgusted I am. “I want
this project completed on time. Whatever it takes. I’m paying you enough god
dammit!”

Tarren and Gabe are on the porch.
Tarren holds a copy of
The Book of Mormon
at
his side while he knocks on the door. Gabe, who is holding my hardback copy of
Madame Bovary
, leans down to peer into a little
side window next to the door. What he’s really doing is picking the lock.

In a moment, they slip inside and
close the door behind them.

“Run the financials by me,” I say
to Bill. I stand up and pace, taking a view of both cross streets. Cars roll
by, and each time, I turn my back to them. Though my hair has been cropped
short and dyed a deep shade of auburn, I’m still paranoid of being recognized.
My disappearance is still an open investigation, though I don’t think it got
much play on the West Coast.

Speaking of missing persons, my
pacing brings me over to a telephone pole where I recognize a familiar face.
Sunshine Bailey’s missing person flyer is protected from the rain by a clear
plastic covering. Beneath the dew of raindrops on the plastic, I can see her
warm smile.

I tug the flyer loose. I remember
clutching this exact same flyer a month ago when Gabe and I joined the search
effort at Marymoor Park. Except we weren’t looking for Sunshine. We were
looking for the angel who killed her. We found that angel, Amber Krugal.

Sunshine’s decomposing corpse was
finally discovered two weeks after she went missing. She wasn’t the only one
Amber killed. There was a cop the night I finally caught up with Amber, and a
priest the night before. I remember the priest well. I heard him dying and went
tearing through the park with some insane idea that I could save him. Of
course, he was dead by the time I got there, his skin the ice cold trademark of
an angel victim.

As I knelt over the body, I was
spotted by a boy. No, not a boy, but a young man with a long face,
tragically-hued aura and sleepy eyes. I fell madly in love with him for exactly
one second, because he wasn’t the angel coming back to kill me or Tarren
catching up to chew me out for abandoning my post.

Of course, my incipient love was
not returned. The guy took one look at me and the body and jumped to the
obvious conclusion.

I shake the memories away. An old,
red van trundles down the street. I watch with growing dismay as it makes a
lumbering turn into Hendricks’s driveway.

I unmute my Bluetooth headset.
“Intruder,” I hiss. “Repeat. Intruder.” Then I remember that this is not the
code word we agreed upon. “Poseidon,” I whisper lamely. “Red van. Just pulled
in.”

“We heard it,” Tarren whispers on
the other end of my Bluetooth. “How many?”

“Hold on.” I’ve been staring
blatantly at the van, and now I quickly turn my face away, peeking out from the
edge of my upturned collar.  An old, overweight Hispanic woman lowers herself
out of the van.

“One. Human,” I say. “I think she’s
a maid service.”

“Human,” Tarren says. “You sure?”

“One hundred percent.” I can see
the pale hedge of blue outlining the woman’s body even from this distance.
There are distinct threads of brown, like little flecks of rot, and she
breathes heavily as she clomps to the back of the van.

“We tranq her?” Gabe’s voice now.

“How much time you need?” Tarren
asks.

“I’m loading his hard drive now.
That’s really all I need. About thirty seconds.”

In the ensuing silence, I can
almost hear the churn of wheels and cogs in Tarren’s head. “No tranq if
possible,” he says. “If she wakes up and files a report, Hendricks could be
tipped off. Is everything clean on your end?”

“She’s getting supplies out of the
van,” I interrupt. “You got less than a minute.” I try to sound calm and
focused, which is damn hard for me but seems effortless for both my brothers.

“My rooms are clean,” Gabe says.
“There’s a back door in the kitchen.”

“Maya, meet us at the car. Be
discreet,” Tarren says.

“She’s walking toward the porch,” I
say. I roll up Sunshine’s missing person flyer, tuck it into my coat pocket and
then casually walk back toward the Murano. Or at least I try to be casual about
this. My knees feel liquid strong.

Out of the corner of my eye, I
watch the cleaning lady haul her buckets and vacuum onto the front porch, stick
her key in the door and then pause.

They
forgot to lock the door behind them
, I think. I stop to tie my shoe. In
the rain. Because people totally do that.

The cleaning lady looks around,
then goes inside. I hold my breath, wait for some crash or scream or other
alarm to rise.

Then I see the two non-Mormons slip
from behind Hendricks’s house and walk casually down the sidewalk, proper as
can be except for Gabe’s scuffed sneakers.

I make it to the Murano first and
get inside. When Gabe throws open the passenger door, his hair is beaded with
rain, and he’s got a little grin cocked right into the corner of his mouth.
This is his teasing expression.

“Intruder alert, intruder alert!”
he cries in a high-pitched voice laced with panic. This is supposed to be me,
“…oh wait, I mean Poseidon.”

“Shut up,” I growl at him.

Tarren swings into the driver’s
seat, leans back and drops
The Book of Mormon
onto the empty seat beside me.

“Tarren, guess who I am. Mayday!
Mayday! Danger Will Robinson! …I mean, Poseidon.”

“Gabe, I said stop it!” I yell. His
aura is all teasing greens now, growing brighter as he takes delight in my
anger.

“Lay off,” Tarren says to his
brother.

The smile falters on Gabe’s mouth,
and the greens abruptly wash out of his aura. He plays it off casually. “You
two are no fun at all.”

Tarren and I exchange an expression
in the rearview mirror. His eyes are such a pale shade of blue that they almost
seem translucent sometimes. I suppose I should feel grateful that he took my
side, but I don’t. Gabe’s jokes imply an acceptance and forgiveness of my
mistakes.

Tarren doesn’t forgive. Not ever.
In those hard-edged eyes of his, I see another tally lining up against me.

“You forgot to lock the front
door,” I say, and no one misses the peevish ring in my voice.

“Did we?” Gabe looks at his
brother. “Yeah, I guess we did.”

“We ran out of time,” Tarren says. 
He starts the SUV.

“Seatbelts,” Gabe calls out.

***

“Get anything?” Tarren’s arms are
crossed over his chest, and his chin juts out.

Just for kicks, I mimic his
aggressive posture, kicking out my hip extra sharp. I do a crappy impersonation
of his deep voice. “Come on Nancy Drew,” I bark. “We hit pay dirt or what?”

Gabe looks over his shoulder and
grins. “That’s a good one. She’s got you pegged Tarren.”

Tarren scowls…actually, he was
already scowling. He extra scowls. “I don’t sound like that.”

I smile at him and tip my head to the
side, all good fun. Tarren is allergic to fun. I think he would go into
anaphylactic shock if he accidentally walked into a party. Tarren just keeps on
scowling. My smile falters, and I slump onto the bed.

Gabe has chosen an especially
horrible motel room for us tonight. Little black beetles crawl through the shag
carpet, and I’ve already discovered a cigarette butt in the sheets of my bed.

“Piece o’ cake,” Gabe says as data
readouts sprawl on his laptop. Sir Hopsalot, originally my dinner, currently
Gabe’s beloved pet rabbit, lies passively across my brother’s lap. Gabe’s hands
fly across his keyboard, and occasionally he’ll pause and scratch the rabbit
behind one of its long, floppy gray ears.

“This guy Hendricks, he’s
definitely on the run. Wiped his desktop clean. Least he thought so.”

“But you found something,” Tarren
says. He stands next to Gabe peering over at the screen of Gabe’s laptop. I sit
cross-legged on my bed and try really hard not to stare at their glowing auras.
My hands do that thing where they start to radiate heat—this is a precursor to
the skin peeling back, bulbs lifting out—so I tuck them into my lap. The song
grows louder.

“Of course I found something.” Gabe
looks up at his brother. “Nancy Drew don’t give up that easily, right Maya?”

“Right,” I chime in.

“What did you find?” Tarren is all
business. Always business, and I wonder why Gabe doesn’t just give up with him.

“He just bought a place in
Poughkeepsie, New York. We’re talking total boonies. Isolated.”

“A good place to hide out,” Tarren
says.

“Yeah, if you’re dumb as shit and
think just moving your C drive to the recycle bin magically deletes all your
files,” Gabe says with clear disgust. “This guy’s a lawyer. You’d think he’d
know a thing or two about disappearing incriminating evidence.”

I fall back onto the bed, even
though the comforter smells like old man sweat. New York. Conveniently located
on the opposite side of the country. It’ll take us over two days to get there.
Two days stuck in the car with their auras, with this never-ceasing hunger,
with all my ghosts to keep me company.

“Tell me again why planes aren’t an
option?” I say.

“TSA don’t take kindly to
unregistered weapons in checked luggage,” Gabe says. “Besides, if we were on a
plane, we’d never get to rock out to my boss music.”

Gabe is referring to his Angel
Hunting Soundtracks 1 – 15. I groan.

“When did Hendricks delete his
files,” Tarren says.

“Over three weeks ago.”

Tarren glances out the window,
measuring the fading light. Most of the time I have no idea what goes on inside
Tarren’s head, but when it comes to a choice between resting or the mission, he
is utterly predictable.

“I don’t like him having such a big
lead,” Tarren says.

Gabe knows where this is headed.
His hand moves up to rake through his hair, then he remembers that he’s wearing
his lucky hat. His hand drops. “We’ve been non-stop for a week, Tarren. Let’s
stay put for the night, get some sleep, and then we’ll be fresh to plow
straight through the country tomorrow.”

Tarren is physically exhausted like
the rest of us. Though he’s holding in his emotions as usual, I notice a slight
shift of color rolling through the dark-tinged waves of his aura.

One of the few other areas where
Tarren is never a mystery is when it comes to Gabe. If it were just Tarren, he
wouldn’t stop. He’d get in that car and drive two days straight to New York,
both hands gripping the wheel in a vise of death. But for Gabe he’ll pause. For
Gabe he’ll pretend to rest.

Tarren nods. “First thing tomorrow,
we leave.”

Gabe lets out his breath. “Cool.”

“Find out whatever else you can,”
Tarren says to his brother. “And get some rest. Both of you.” His eyes sweep to
me, and I hold steady against his sharp gaze. He really, really doesn’t like
leaving me alone with Gabe, but ever since Redmond, this has been the unspoken
motel arrangement.

“You rest too Tarren,” Gabe says.
“Like really, taking off shoes, lying in bed, closing eyes, the whole shebang.”
His aura shimmers with pale shades of lilac. I’ve learned what these colors
mean.
Care. Love.

Tarren doesn’t need to read auras
to hear the undertones in Gabe’s voice. He just nods once and leaves. Gabe
watches him go. For a moment the outward jovial mask falls off his face, and I
see harsh lines creasing his features, that happy mouth tight with concern.

Then it’s gone, and Gabe looks at
me with his usual trickster grin. “I think that went well.”