High-Caliber Concealer (30 page)

“Jane,” Nikki floundered for a moment,
finding herself unexpectedly touched by her friends matter-of-fact
acceptance of a dying dream. “I really appreciate your choice,
because we do need you, but there’s got to be a way to move ahead
with your career.”

Jane shrugged again. “Maybe. I just wish…”
Jane trailed off awkwardly.

“You wish what?”

“Well, when I took the field competency
course, I thought that maybe you guys would respect me more.”

“Respect you more? Jane, we respect
you!”

“Well, kind of. But kind of not. You guys
kind of treat me like the junior partner. And I know I’m the
youngest and I have the least field experience, but I thought once
I took the course that everyone would let me do more stuff.”

“I’m sorry,” said Nikki. “I didn’t know you
felt that way. I didn’t mean to make you feel like a junior
partner. Whatever it is I’ve said, I swear I was only teasing. I
really respect and rely on you.”

“It’s not just you. Ellen and Jenny do it,
too. And not to sound dorky, but sometimes words hurt. It’s hard to
defend my decision to stay where I’m at when you guys call me your
“idiot savant” or your “personal PC police” in public. I’ve had
offers to go be on other teams, you know.”

“I did not know that. Who offered you a
spot?” asked Nikki.

Jane got the angry tone in Nikki’s voice and
shifted her weight nervously. “It’s not a big deal. I like being
with you guys more than I worry about my career. Besides, it’s not
like I’m the only one. I see team leaders trying to scalp Ellen all
the time. That conference where you met Darla? I got done with my
hypnosis seminar early and I went over to Ellen’s Future of
Weaponry panel. The Head of East Coast division was leading the
panel and she practically offered Ellen whatever she wanted to
move.”

Nikki laughed. “Everyone wants Ellen. She
gets offers all the time. It’s because she looks the Carrie Mae
part and she’s quiet. They don’t know that if they actually did
manage to steal her they’d be getting a rebel and an
insurrectionist. Why do you think her kids are always so surprised
when she goes to visit? I guess that just leaves Jenny and me as
the wallflowers without any invitations to dance.”

Jane shrugged again. “I think they just
assume she’ll take over the team when you replace Mrs. M.”

“Yeah, like that’s going to happen. Anyway,
Jane, I’m really sorry I made you feel like you weren’t respected.
I do respect you and honestly, we couldn’t do without you.”

Jane’s bottom lip wobbled suspiciously, and
she blinked and looked away. “I know, it’s just nice to hear once
in awhile. Anyway, we’re going to Crazy Cooters? Should I return
Z’ev’s car? Should I ride with you? Follow you out there? Are we
calling the girls? What are we doing?”

Nikki wanted to hug her, but Jane didn’t
like to hug in moments of emotional distress, so she tried to
respect the boundary Jane was clearly drawing by clutching her bag
in front of her.

“Umm, follow me out there, I guess. I don’t
want to return Z’ev’s car yet. If we make him mobile, he’ll only go
poking around where I don’t need him. I texted Jenny. She and Ellen
will run interference with the family while we investigate because
I don’t think we need them. I think you and I can handle this
investigation ourselves right now.”

Jane beamed. “You’re the boss.” She headed
for the rental car, her bouncing ponytail declaring happiness with
each step.

Nikki waited until they were on the road
before dialing Mrs. Merrivel.

“Nikki, help, I’m being held prisoner. Bring
chocolate chip cookies soon,” said Mr. Merrivel.

Nikki laugh-snorted in surprise.

“Very funny!” yelled Mrs. Merrivel in the
background.

Mr. M chuckled, sounding pleased with
himself. “Hey, kiddo. How’s vacation going?”

“Umm, well, you know,” said Nikki.

“That good, huh? Do you need to keep all the
chocolate chip cookies for yourself?”

“Kind of, yeah. Actually, I really do need
to talk to Mrs. M.”

“Uh oh. That sounds like you may need to
move straight to the bag of chocolate chips. I’ll hand you over.
Hon, Nikki’s got a work thing.”’

“A work thing? I thought you were on
vacation?” Mrs. Merrivel picked up the phone. Nikki could tell that
she was smiling by the uplift in her voice.

“I’m on unpaid leave. Which is turning out
to be unpaid working.”

“Do you need back-up?”

“No, the girls flew in to help. Of course,
they were on the same flight as my mother. And then Z’ev arrived,
just in time for dinner at my grandma’s with my ex-boyfriend.”

“Ugh. John, pack up those chocolate chips
for air mail. Nikki needs sugar stat.”

Nikki laughed and she could hear Mr. M
laughing too. She wondered just how much this sabbatical was going
to be good for both the Merrivels.

“I do need sugar, but that’s not why I’m
calling. I’ve got a handle on the situation here, mostly. As much
as I have a handle on any work situation, anyway.”

“Then I won’t worry. What’s the reason for
the call then?”

“How come you didn’t tell me that you’d
talked to Jane about field work?”

“I talk to everyone who passes the field
competency course,” said Mrs. Merrivel. “I assumed you knew
that.”

“I do know that, but I mean, why did you
tell her that she couldn’t do field work unless she left the
team?”

“Because she can’t. Her primary role on the
team is technical support. She can assist with field work from time
to time, but the team needs a tech person.”

“But,” said Nikki and then trailed off.

“Am I wrong? Do you not need that
function?”

“No, we do, but, I mean, she really wants to
do field work.”

“Well, we discussed it and she said that
what she really wanted to do was stay with the team. I said she
could always change her mind.”

Nikki sighed. “Is the East Coast Director
trying to steal Ellen?”

“Everyone tries to steal Ellen,” said Mrs.
M. “They don’t realize that if we left Ellen undirected we’d have a
Canada situation every other week. Anyway, the one Susan has really
been after is Jenny.”

“What? Why?”

“Because she sees the success we’ve had with
your team. She’s read the profiles. She knows that you and Jenny
have a pretty similar skill set. She thinks that if she can woo
Jenny over, Jenny can start her own action team on the East Coast,
and that probably if she could get Jenny, she could also get Ellen.
Which really is a pretty good plan and would be good for Jenny’s
career. I’m very hopeful that, if we time it right, we can spin
Jenny off in that direction. She could end up being head of her own
division, which of course, would be good for all of us.”

“Why haven’t you talked about this
before?”

“Well, you’re not ready to move up,” said
Mrs. Merrivel matter of factly. “You’re not even thirty yet, which
I know makes The Council nervous. Give it a few more years and when
you’re ready for promotion this will all make a lot more
sense.”

“It makes sense now,” said Nikki. And it
did. All of it made sense. Mrs. Merrivel’s plans always did, but,
as usual, she was three steps ahead of Nikki. “But I like my life.
I don’t want to break up the team.”

“No one’s saying you have to,” said Mrs. M
soothingly. “This is for the future. Don’t think about it. Put it
on the back burner.”

“You could have told me about it
earlier.”

“Why? So you could tie yourself up in knots
over what might happen, on some unknown date, at some unknown time?
You do best when you’re dealing with the present.”

“You know I don’t want your job.”

“I do know. You don’t like it. It’s not
enough action and too much responsibility. But there may come a
time when it’s just going to be more convenient for you to have it,
than not have it.”

“That makes no sense,” said Nikki,
irritation coloring her tone. She hated it when Mrs. M Yoda’d
out.

“I know. Like I said, don’t worry about it.
This is for the future.”

“The problem is that the future has a way of
sneaking up on me.”

Mrs. Merrivel laughed. “It sneaks up on all
of us, dear. Now I can tell you’re driving, so you shouldn’t be
talking. I’ll hang up and let you concentrate. I’ll leave it to you
on whether or not you should call Darla about whatever it is you’re
involved in. Be safe.”

The line went dead and Nikki dropped the
phone in the passenger seat in disgust.

“How am I supposed to concentrate with
impending promotion hanging over my head?” she demanded of the
empty car. The invisible Val Robinson that resided in the passenger
seat pointed at her and laughed. And then because it was Val,
flipped the bird to a passing truck on jacked-up wheels.

She really didn’t want Mrs. M’s job. There
were too many moving pieces. The LA Branch was a sprawling mess
that encompassed the greater Los Angeles area and all its
municipalities. It had been leaderless for over two years. The
Council kept throwing people at it, but no one could seem to stick
in the job. And mostly that was because the LA Branch and the West
Coast division were run out of the same building. With Mrs.
Merrivel in the building, why would anyone bother to stop and ask a
branch leader anything? Mrs. Merrivel had been hinting for the last
year that Nikki might want the position. Nikki didn’t. A new LA
Branch leader, a smart one anyway, would relocate out of the fancy
office building to one of the company owned warehouses downtown,
out of Mrs. M’s sphere of influence. And then she would have to
start streamlining the reporting process, reorganize into teams and
retrain some of the old guard. It was a ridiculous amount of work.
And for what? So that eventually she could be considered for Mrs.
M’s job?

When she had filled in for Mrs. M while
she’d been in Turkey it had been a last minute scramble with the
understanding that the Council would replace her as soon as someone
was available. That had dragged into weeks as Mrs. M’s return was
complicated by Mr. M’s heart surgery. Nikki had hated every minute
of it. There were too many pieces in motion, too many players on
the board, too much politics, too much thinking about the future.
She didn’t want any of it. What she wanted was to stay with her
team, sleep in the same bed as her boyfriend for more than three
months of the year, and have her mom shut the hell up about pretty
much everything and just be supportive for once. Those were not big
goals. They were perfectly reasonable goals. Why did no one want
her to achieve those goals?

She bumped down the long driveway to Crazy
Cooter’s, past the looming cars and under the archway made of deer
antlers and bumpers, pulling to a stop outside a listing RV that
had mated with a pre-fab shed. Cooter was sitting outside on a lawn
chair, polishing a chrome hood ornament.

“That is the creepiest fucking thing I have
ever seen in my life,” said Jane pulling up and exiting the car.
“Who in the world builds a giant archway out of deer antlers and
bumpers?”

“I call it the Roadkill Memorial,” said
Cooter, squinting up at Jane from under his straw cowboy hat. “It’s
in memory of those deer ones gone by.”

“There is something wrong with you,” said
Jane.

“They don’t call me Crazy Cooter for
nothing,” he said, grinning and displaying a gapped smile, missing
the same amount of teeth as the average Canadian hockey player.

“Hi, Cooter,” said Nikki. “Do you remember
me?”

“Sure do. You’re Nikki Lanier. You and Donny
and the Tyrell kid used to jump out of refrigerators to try and
scare me.”

“It never worked,” said Nikki smiling.

“Well, let’s just say that three little kids
weren’t the scariest thing that ever popped out of a refrigerator
at me.”

“I don’t want to know the scariest thing, do
I?” asked Jane.

“Well, if you don’t like the Memorial
Archway then, no, probably not,” agreed Cooter. “Well, Nikki
Lanier, what can I do for you?”

“I’m here about Ylina,” said Nikki, and
Cooter stopped polishing for a moment.

“The sheriff was here earlier and I told him
I didn’t want to press charges and that he should get the hell off
my property,” said Cooter. “If you’re here to persuade me otherwise
you can go on and get too.”

Nikki and Jane exchanged looks. “Press
charges for what?”

“For robbing the till. But it was only a
couple of hundred bucks. She probably needed the money. She’s been
a real help the last couple of years, so I’m just going to think of
it as her bonus.”

“When was the sheriff here?” asked Jane.

“About an hour ago, why?” Cooter looked from
Jane to Nikki, looking worried.

“Um, well, did he say—what exactly did he
say?”

“He said he’d caught her with some cash and
wanted to look around to make sure she hadn’t taken anything
else.”

Nikki and Jane exchanged another look.

“And he didn’t say anything else about
Ylina?”

“What else was there to say? Look, I know
she’s illegal. If I press charges the sheriff can send her back to
Mexico. But she’s been here since she was seven. What’s she going
to do in Mexico? I told him I hadn’t noticed anything and that I
knew she’d been saving up money, so it was probably her cash. He
wanted to look around, but I told him to come back with a warrant.
I don’t hold with cops poking around.”

“The thing is,” said Nikki, then hesitated.
“The thing is, I went to see Ylina at the, uh, place she’s staying,
about three hours ago and uh, well, there’s no easy way to say
this, but she’s dead. She’d been killed.”

Cooter started to stand and then sat back
down, his face going white under his tan.

“That poor kid,” he said after a minute. “I
knew she was in trouble. I just knew it, but she wouldn’t say
anything. I should have made her tell me. I figured she’d come
around in her own time. That poor kid.” He fought back tears, and
after a moment he blew his nose into a grimy red handkerchief
pulled from the upper pocket of his overalls.