chapter sixty-one

Monday afternoon I walked into Michaela’s office (the one without the knives or the food processor powerful enough to make a steel-wool smoothie) and announced, “I’m ready to listen to your apology.”

She looked up and glared. “You don’t return my calls anymore, Jones? You stroll in after lunch? This might be a fake FBI office, but it’s still an office, I’m still your supervisor, and you’ll still behave like an employee unless you want to know what it feels like when I put my foot up your ass.”

“Okay, gross. And inappropriate.”

“Mmmm.” She rubbed her eyes, which, I realized, were bloodshot. “Correct. I shall overlook your flippancy and you will overlook my vexed retort.”

“Have you been swimming?” It wasn’t just her eyes. She looked exhausted, but she was back in one of her gorgeous, understated designer suits (in power periwinkle) and, of course, the de rigueur sneakers. “Like, constantly?”

“Do I look like I’ve got time to go for a leisurely paddle in the nearest chlorine patch, Jones? I’ve got work to do. Perhaps you’ve heard of it: work. The thing people do so their bosses don’t boot them into the unemployment line.”

“Back off. We caught Zimmerman.”

“Ah. Yes.” She pulled off her reading glasses—when had she gotten those?—and glared. “About that. You may have been selfish enough to decide that finding you’d been deceived warranted taking risks with your personal safety, but that is pure selfishness I shall not tol—”

“Why do you have all that extra work?” I asked, desperate to change the subject and cover my blunder. The one thing I shouldn’t have brought up! Argh! “Are you still trying to find funding?”

“Of course not. You must know.”

“If you’d said that to me five days ago, I’d have believed you. I don’t ‘must know’ anything about you or BOFFO anymore.”

“Mmmm. Well. Sometime this morning, someone had a courier drop off a check for five million dollars, payable to BOFFO, cut from a business checking account for Aunt Jane Enterprises, Inc.”

Good thing I’d taken the chair across from her, or I would have fallen on my ass. Even though I’d dumped Aunt Jane—or Aunt Jane had dumped me—he knew I loved working here and felt bad because he’d been dumped—or because he’d dumped me—and he’s staying in Minnesota with his sister and they both came up with a way to keep me out of motels and Aunt Jane came up with a way to help Michaela and it was just—just—

“This has given me breathing room,” Michaela told me, ignoring my confused gape (or she was so used to it she no longer saw it). “I suppose it was my cue to protest ‘No, no, I cannot let you do this; my pride compels me to find a way to make this work with no outside help’ but ha! Never. BOFFO’s continued existence is far more important than my pride.”

“So you’re staying in business?”

“As long as I can. Five million is wonderful, but it’s also finite. Breathing room, as I said. I shall look into various investment options and come up with every way I can to stretch it. Meanwhile, though I understand why you would leave us, I…” She rubbed her eyes again. “I would deeply regret … I would not wish … I would worry and … damn it.” She snatched at a Kleenex and blew her nose, then wiped her eyes. “Hay fever,” she added with a glare hot enough to singe my face.

“Yep,” I agreed. Sure. Hay fever. “I hear it’s really bad this Christmas. Like hay fever tends to be. At Christmastime.”

“Of course it’s your decision,” she said, calming. “You know my wishes in this.” She smiled. “And a year ago that would have been enough to ensure you remained with us. But lately I see you’ve been pleasing yourself, and that’s inconvenient for me. But nice to see all the same.”

I didn’t say anything and she bent back to her paperwork. Someone who cared, someone who wasn’t a real mom but looked out for some people like a mom, would be glad to see a child grow up, no matter how much a pain in the ass it was for them personally.

“I’ve also used the time to make arrangements for Lori Dahl’s children.”

“Whose?”

“Prostitute number three, courtesy of my scarily brilliant and very dangerous son.”

“Oh.” Color me guilty; I’d been so caught up in my own woes I hadn’t bothered to find out the poor woman’s name. Then: “She had children?”

“Of course.” Michaela had several forms spread out on her desk: trusts, checking account statements, a copy of Aunt Jane’s check, some forms from Fidelity,

(for all your fake FBI agency retirement needs!)

a few forms from Minnesota Social Services. “They’ll live with their maternal grandmother up in Chaska, but I’m setting up trusts for them, and they’ve been assigned a courtroom advocate to keep an eye on their affairs until they come of age.”

“But she was hooking.”

“Yes.”

“If she had kids, how could she do that?” I knew I was naive, but I had a hard time understanding how Michaela could be so matter-of-fact about it. I wasn’t judging Ms. Dahl, but I was confused. In my mind, motherhood and apple pie went together better than motherhood and prostitution.

Michaela must have read my confusion, because she put down her pen and pinned me with her green glare. “It was how she knew she could make money quickly and more-or-less reliably. Mothers will do all sorts of illegal, dangerous, stupid, asinine, risky, foolish, idiotic, death-defying, insane, rash, ill-advised, reckless, imprudent stunts for love of their children.”

I tried not to quail. “Okay.”

“Speaking of asinine and risky and idiotic, explain to me again the logic behind just the two of you running off to arrest Ian Zimmerman.”

“It was George’s idea,” I whined.

“Pinkman!” she bawled. “Get your amoral butt in here!” She looked around her cluttered desktop for a moment. “This office needs more knives. When your doltish partner joins us, you can both explain why you risked your unworthy necks going after a proven killer. And ‘Golly, finding out BOFFO wasn’t real shook our confidence so we felt we had something to prove’ will result in me having both of you shot.”

There was a timid rap at the door and George peeked in, then crept to the chair opposite me, looking everywhere but Michaela’s face. (So my boobs, my butt, my boobs, Michaela’s paperwork, my boobs.)

“Do you dolts have any idea how inconvenient it would be if you were seriously hurt or stabbed or otherwise mangled? The paperwork alone is mind-boggling.” She cut George off as his mouth opened. “Even though we are not a government agency, you are still my employees and there is still an obscene amount of paperwork involved! Now, you start with, ‘Jeepers, Michaela, we sure as heckfire didn’t give one thought to how much trouble you’d have concentrating on the Fidelity online trading accounts because you were worried about us’ and you can finish with ‘Because God watches over children and dumbasses, we lived to tell the tale but won’t be so stupidly foolish again and if we are, we encourage you to knife us in our throats in our sleep.’”

Later, a shaken George and I recovered at Cinnabon, sucking down two buns with extra frosting apiece and lots of milk. We discussed our impressions of the thirty minutes that flew by like thirty hours.

“Mostly I felt intimidated,” I volunteered, unaware of the frosting on my nose that George was too shaken or cruel to bring to my attention. “But also really looked-after. Patrick gave her five mil, but that didn’t stop her from yelling at me for … for however long we were trapped in there.”

“It was a really long time,” George said, rocking back and forth in a sort of seated fetal position.

“For all she knows, Patrick and I are still dating, but she didn’t act like she had to be nice in the hopes of getting more out of him later. That’s what sticks out in my mind.” The incredible wonderful thing that stuck out in my mind was that the money didn’t matter to her more than my safety. Shiro might be on the right track. Maybe I’d start collecting mother figures.

“For me, it’s the terror,” George said, shaking like a junkie needing a fix. Which we sort of were, what with the pastry and sugar and butter jones. “It’s all about the terror. And the extreme arousal. I’m pretty sure she wants me.”

“George…”

“No, hear me out.”