Yours, Mine, and Ours (8 page)

Behrman lived in one of the former, a faded yellow mobile home with tired white trimming. The dirty snow surrounding the walk was stained with the comings and goings of a small, depressed dog. We could see where the chain had been anchored through the snow and into the ground.

The chain led to a miniature black Lab, or an enormous dachshund. She twitched her eyebrows at us, rose from the nest she’d hollowed out in the snow, and approached, wagging her tail. She was thin, and cautiously friendly. There was a small round blob of white fur on top of her skull; the rest of her was black.

“Huh,” George said aloud. “A neglected dog on a chain outside a shithole. What are the odds?”

Emma Jan didn’t say anything. She just reached into her bowling ball–sized purse and pulled out a muffin. The muffin wasn’t wrapped, and it hadn’t broken in her purse. This was miraculous, given that she had a brush, a wallet, Chapstick (blech! couldn’t stand the taste … like eating a candle), a spare clip, Kleenex, sunglasses, and airplane peanuts. And that was what I just
glimpsed
when she’d opened it earlier.

She broke the muffin (blueberry) into pieces and offered them to the dog. It must have been hungry, but at first was too scared to come closer. But then it did, gently taking the muffin chunks while also flinching away like it was all a big, mean trick. Like the pain was coming … the dog just didn’t know when.

I could relate. I bet Emma Jan could, too.

Her lips were pressed together so tightly they almost disappeared, and she finally said something I didn’t think was bizarre: “Some people don’t deserve a dog.”

“You probably should have asked the owner,” I said, hating my inner (and outer) Goody Two-shoes, but compelled to blather about rules anyway. “It’s, uh, not cool to just walk up and do that.”

“Unusual death number forty-seven: Prince Popiel, Polans tribe. Ninth century. Eaten alive by mice. That’d be okay for the guy in there,” she told the dog, letting it lick the crumbs off her glove. “That’d be okay for the guy who thinks it’s fine to treat you like this.”

Her Southern accent got thicker when she was angry, I was alarmed to notice. Oh, dear. We did
not
need another rabid PETA member … the last one had been reassigned after a month in the field. He’d started shooting at cars that ran over squirrels.

It’s not that I didn’t feel bad for the dog. It’s that there were rules.

“Let’s get this show on the road,” George said with jarring cheer, trotting up the short sidewalk without even glancing at the dog. “Ladies first. Then Emma Jam.”

“Emma
Jan
.”

“Like it matters. Then you, Cadence. Come on,
ándale
already.”

He banged on the front door. “FBI! Secret Santa! FTD delivery! Avon calling Joseph Behrman,
come on down
!”

“Don’t have ta yell,” Mr. Behrman said, pulling open the front door. He looked like his intake photo: heavy, short, with shoulder-length dark blond hair. He was in a T-shirt and jeans; bare feet. He smelled like Marlboros and gravy. “Don’t worry about the dawg.” Really! He said it just like that: dawg. You could hear the W. “She won’t hurtcha.”

“Don’t worry, we’re federally sworn upholders of the law and are prepared to shoot her at any moment,” George promised. “Your PO let you know we were coming?”

Behrman sighed. Marlboros, gravy, and grape bubblegum; I stood corrected. “Yep. Talkin’ to the wrong guy but come in anyway.”

He stepped aside for George. George stepped aside for Emma Jan, who had given the dog a final pat and then joined us on the sagging porch. And that’s when the poop slammed into the rotary blades.

chapter twenty-one

When I thought
about it later, I realized I should have been tipped off at once. When I thought of George, “helpful” wasn’t the first word that came to mind. How many times in my life would I have to relearn the same damn lesson? Puppies caught on quicker than I—

chapter twenty-two

I had no
time to listen to more of Cadence’s woe-is-me catechism; New Girl was, as George would put it, “losing her shit.” I found that phrase revolting to contemplate yet had to acknowledge how apt it was.

The entire west wall of Behrman’s living room was a mirror. Tacky and smeared, and I had no idea when it had last been cleaned, but a mirror. And it was the first thing Agent Thyme saw when she walked past him into the room. Which would have been no problem at all, except Agent Thyme suffered from Mirrored-self Misidentification.

“Watch out!” Agent Thyme’s terrified shriek seemed as though it would shatter the mirror—which, depending on how large the shards, would have solved the problem, or exacerbated it. Her normally pleasing alto was climbing into a deafening upper register. “She’s going to try to kill you!”

Then she launched herself at the west wall.

I managed to get between her and the mirror, but she had gotten up such momentum my back slammed against the mirror. “Stop it,” I managed, trying not to wheeze. When Cadence got the body back, she would wonder why her kidneys were throbbing. And possibly why she was urinating blood. I would have to leave her a note …

Agent Thyme was a blur of clawing fingers and kicking feet. In the extremity of her terror, she’d forgotten even the simplest takedown moves. Not that they would have worked on a mirror. I think.

I was good, but I had my hands full. I was constrained as I could not kill or seriously injure her. She was constrained by nothing, since in her mind she was saving us from the evil double who lived in the mirror. Thus, every few seconds a fist would get past me and clip me on the ear, or my shins would take another knock. Was the woman wearing steel-tipped yet sensible flats?

Behrman was staring at us, openmouthed. My partner turned to him and said, “This is a thousand times more awesome than I ever could have hoped.”

“Agent Thyme, stop it—ouch—right now. Ouch! You are on the—argh!—list of people—ow—I do not want to hurt. Ow, you pointy-toed shrew! You are
not
on the—stop it!—list of people I
will
not hurt.”

“You have to let me kill her,” she panted. She seemed to suddenly remember she was armed, because her hand was a blur as it slapped her hip. Except it slapped my hand, which I’d just managed to slap over her gun. “She’ll kill us all if you don’t let me kill her.”

“Enough.” I let go of her with the hand not restraining the gun, took the punch to the face (oh, to be an octopus right now), and gripped her jugular until her eyes rolled up and she plopped to the floor.

I stepped away from her, breathing hard. She did not look it at all, but was stronger and faster than I had anticipated. She had put up an excellent fight.

The clapping caught my attention. George and Behrman were applauding and (this was the sick/annoying thing) doing so with genuine approval.

“Wonderful, Shiro,” George said. “Really. Just great.”

“That was awesome,” Behrman added. “What just happened?”

George grinned. “My girl-on-girl desires were almost satisfied and everything. Whew—is anyone besides me feeling flushed? I can’t thank you enough.”

I rubbed my lower back. “Prepare for a Splenda enema, pig.”

chapter twenty-three

Much later, after
the fight and interrogating Behrman to be sure he was not the one we sought (though it would have been a pleasure to arrest him for any crime), I cornered George in the men’s room back at the office.

“Finally, you appreciate the awesomeness of my dick,” he said, urinating proudly. “So, did you just want to do it right here, or should we get a motel room? Or should we stay here? It’s pretty gross in here, I dunno…”

“Stop it.”

“In my mind,” he said, twirling a finger near his left ear, “we do it in the mail room right next to the big copy machine, the one that starts to shake after it’s been running for an hour…”

“Do not point that thing at me,” I ordered. “And if you do not stop, they will write
books
about what I do to your body before I let you die.”

George shrugged. “You followed me into a
bathroom
, Shiro. What did you think I was going to do?”

He had stymied me, the rat bastard, but I would never let him know it. “Behave, for ten seconds. Now. Since Agent Thyme is, ah, being debriefed by our lovely-and-efficient supervisor, I have an opportunity to ask you to explain.”

“Explain…?” Zip. Flush. Stretch. Yawn. “What’m I supposed to explain?”

“Do
not
pretend to be an idiot.”

“Who’s pretending?” he asked with honest bewilderment.

“Are you claiming zero knowledge of Behrman’s living arrangements? Knowing BOFFO’s, uh, occasional idiosyncrasies…”

“Occasional idiosyncrasies!” he said, delighted. “That’s excellent, Shiro. I’m putting that one on my Facebook page.”

“You will not. Are you telling me there was not anything to indicate the presence of a gigantic mirror when we least needed it?”

“Sure there was.” George shrugged. “Got a description of his whole living situation from his parole officer.” I nodded; that was standard. Parolees had to prove they had a home and a job, and were not murdering anyone in their spare time, or committing mail fraud. “Wanted to see what would happen.”

“What?” Why did I not foresee this?

“She’s the New Girl, I’ve never worked with her, she might have to save my gorgeous ass someday, I’ve never seen mirrored-self misidentification before, I wanted to see her in the field—are you getting all this? I wanted to see what would happen. Did you get how she pretty much cowered in the car on the way over? Wouldn’t look in the rearview? Didn’t you wonder what would have happened if she had?”

“No,” I said, “because I read her file. It would have been something to be devoutly avoided. Not wondered about.”

“Not for me. I wanted to see what would happen.” He shrugged again. “So I did. Worked great. Besides, I knew you’d save the day.”

“Would you like to see what will happen
now
?”

“Not really.”

Though I was tempted to shove his sinuses into his brain, I restrained myself. Why hadn’t
I
checked out the same paperwork he did? Too busy looking at the big picture for JBJ instead of the individual pieces of paper. In hindsight, it was all quite clear. The trouble was, it should have been clear before it even happened. I was smarter than this. Cadence was even smarter than this. My shame was deep.

chapter twenty-four

After he washed,
I followed him back to our desks. Thyme was still in Michaela’s office, and though I did not envy her (having sat in that chair myself many times) I made a mental note to put in a positive word.

Thyme had a silly problem but I admired her in spite of it. She had truly thought an evil doppelgänger was hiding in the mirror to kill her and anyone with her. So she had acted at once … to help us. Many wouldn’t. My sister wouldn’t. (My
other
sister would have tried to liberate the Mirror People.)

Now here she came, head down, watching the carpet all the way up to our desk. “I’m so sorry,” she told the carpet.

“Why, what’d you do to it?” George anxiously scanned the carpet. “Is there Splenda on it? If you put fuckin’ Splenda on this shitty government carpet, I will
not
be responsible for wherever I end up dumping your body.”

“Take a tranquilizer, George. Agent Thyme is apologizing to us.”

“More to
you
.” Thyme looked up. Her dark eyes were red-rimmed, her cheeks puffy. She’d been terrified, then humiliated. I had no idea if telling her we saw that sort of thing all the time with newbies would comfort her, or upset her further. There was always an adjustment period—except when there was not, and the newbie ended up being institutionalized or, worse, fired. George had not been my first BOFFO partner. “I can’t apologize enough.”

“That’s true,” George said. “You can’t. I’m still traumatized by the whole thing.” He let out a fake sob. “Oh, Agent Thyme. Hold me.”

“Are you
trying
to goad me into beating you to death? Shush your flapping tongue.” I turned to Thyme. “No harm done. We have seen worse.” Much, much worse. Of course, we had also seen better. Much, much better.

She sniffed and smiled. “Ohhhh boy, I like you, Shiro. It’s … it’s still Shiro, right?”

“Of course it is. Can’t you tell by her grim, humorless manner and the way she pretends she’s not dead inside?”

“I dislike you,” I told him, “so much.”

Thyme sniffed again, then scrubbed her face with the backs of her hands. The act was reminiscent of what a child would do, and it did something odd to the middle of my chest. Uncharacteristically, I wanted to hug her and explain that it would be all right. Which was illogical, and possibly untrue.