"Are you working, Hilly?" I asked my old colleague.
And is it me you're here for? I didn't ask out loud.
She rolled her eyes. "No, duh! I'm on vacation. I came here to see you!"
I looked around. "In a dark alley, by a dumpster, at night?"
She cocked her head to one side. "Too weird?"
Actually, it wasn't weird at all…for her. Hilly's favorite method of disposal was always dropping the deceased into a dumpster. Always. Well, except for this one time in Singapore when she had to schlep the body to Malaysia to dispose of it. Singapore is not big on public garbage. Hilly was just being polite.
I glanced into the dumpster, just in case. It was hard to tell because it was dark and full of garbage bags, any one of which could hold body parts. But maybe I was just being paranoid. Then again…
"Seriously," I repeated. "What are you doing here?"
She shrugged. "Seriously. I haven't used any vacation days in, like, ever. Human Resources was throwing around terms like 'before she's too far gone,' and 'apocalyptic psychological damage.' So, I decided to come and visit you."
I remembered how hard I'd been on Eddie earlier in the evening and forced myself to relax. In spite of her being Killy Hilly, I really liked her.
"Where are you staying?" I asked. There were only a couple of hotels in town, which ranged from Radisson to This-is-Where-You-Die (a somewhat sketchy motel just outside of town).
She paused, looking perplexed. "I just got here. I saw you and thought I'd surprise you!"
That's when I noticed the usual black SUV favored by spies, Feds, and Albanian figure skaters parked behind the dumpster.
"You can stay with us tonight." I took her arm. "Come on. You can meet my husband, Rex."
My easygoing husband was more than gracious once I told him about my colleague (I might've left out what she did for the CIA), and she followed us on the five-minute trip to our house. Everything in Who's There was five minutes away—the town council was considering that for a new community slogan to replace the somewhat creepy: Come for a visit and stay forever!
Hilly Vinton walked through the front door with one suitcase. She paused in the doorway and looked around carefully. Force of habit from a lifetime of being paranoid. Once we enticed her over the threshold, she oohed and ahhed about the place.
I had to give Rex all the credit for décor. It was something I wasn't good at. At my other house, my first foray into decorating was to turn Dora the Explorer bedsheets into living room drapes. I had those for a year before Kelly (my best friend and co-leader) made me take them down.
Philby ignored us, like she usually did. She was in the front window, staring at my house, tail twitching. She'd been doing this a lot lately. Last year we'd found live mice in Rex's house, so whenever she was at my house, she was in the window, staring at this place. I wondered for only a moment if I now had mice at my house. Either that or the cat was insane—and both were very plausible explanations.
Sitting in the living room, Hilly folded her legs under her and was the subject of interest by two cats (Philby had deemed her worthy of giving up surveillance) and one Scottish deerhound. She ruffled Leonard's fur but looked curiously at the two cats.
"Merry," she said. "Did you know one of your cats—"
"Looks like Hitler?" I nodded. "Yeah. Once you get to know her, you'll find out it suits her because she really is a dictator."
She shook her head. "No. I was going to say that one of your cats looks like Elvis."
She was talking about Martini—Philby the feline fuhrer's daughter who bore a resemblance to the King and who's main hobby was narcolepsy. The small cat climbed up into the assassin's lap and fell asleep in seconds, legs akimbo.
The animals seemed to like Hilly with one exception. Philby sat on the coffee table, glaring at our guest. A judgy animal on her best day, the fat cat usually didn't gel with folks immediately.
"So," Rex said with a smile. "Can I get anyone a glass of wine or a beer?"
I raised my hand, but Hilly cocked her head to one side again. "I'd prefer Ouzo. Do you have that?"
My husband shook his head. "Sorry. I can get a bottle tomorrow, though."
"Okay," my friend said. "How about a cup of coffee instead?"
Rex nodded and left for the kitchen.
"How long do you think you'll stay?" I asked.
She frowned, her gray eyes wrinkling in the corners. "I don't know. How long does one normally vacation for?"
I shrugged. "I'm not sure. A week, maybe?" I hadn't had a lot of experience with vacations, unless you counted camping trips with my troop. And even then, a week felt like a month, so maybe I wasn't the right person to ask.
She brightened. "A week it is, then! I'll check into a hotel tomorrow."
Rex appeared with her coffee, only to have Hilly ask where the guest room was. We led her upstairs, and she said good night, closing the door behind her.
"That was, um, unusual," Rex said a few minutes later as we got ready for bed.
"Yeah, Hilly marches to the beat of a different saxophone."
"Drummer," he corrected as he slid between the sheets.
I shook my head. "No, saxophone. She was, at one time, a concert musician."
My husband laughed. I loved making him laugh. But I wasn't kidding about the saxophone. She literally played Carnegie Hall. Twice.
"You worked with her?" he asked.
"Um, yes?"
"Merry?" He gave me that arch look that said he knew I was holding something back.
I blew out a breath. "She's an assassin for the CIA."
He frowned. "I thought the CIA doesn't assassinate people?"
I shook my head. "We don't. And we don't have assassins. That would be illegal."
"But you just said she…"
"Ah. I can see how that might seem confusing. Hilly isn't an assassin," I corrected. "But she really is."
My husband looked at me for a moment. "You certainly cleared that up. I'm not so sure having a killer under our roof is such a good idea."
I rolled my eyes. "She's an assassin, not a killer. It's her job. And it's only for one night, I promise."
"An assassin is a killer," Rex corrected.
I shook my head. "The CIA doesn't have assassins. I keep having to tell you that. Think of her as a problem solver. Does that help?"
He reached for the lamp. "As long as we are not the problem she has to solve." Rex turned off the light. "And just for tonight, right?"
"Right!" I agreed.
While my husband slept beside me, I thought about Hilly. She was a friend. Even saved my life once. And it would be fun to hang out with a colleague who was someone other than Riley, my former handler who'd set up shop as a private investigator here in town.
Hilly and I could talk shop. I couldn't do that with very many people. And I decided I wasn't going to put her in a hotel. She could stay at my house across the street. With that decision made, I drifted off to sleep.
* * *
Rex had to leave for work first thing in the morning, and Hilly didn't come down until after he'd left.
"I like your pajamas," I said.
She smiled. "I like yours."
Turned out we were both wearing Dora the Explorer jammies.
"I think secretly," Hilly said in a stage whisper, "Dora is a spy. That monkey, Boots, is her handler."
My head kind of exploded. I'd always had the same thought, thus leading to the bedsheet curtains. Kelly was right about making me take them down and replace them with something boring. In espionage, you had to blend in, be invisible. Which was hard to do with such awesome drapes.
"I think you should stay at my house instead of a hotel," I said in a rush of words as I pulled back the curtain and pointed at the little ranch house directly across from us. "It's fully furnished, so you should be comfortable there."
"I love it!" Hilly clapped her hands at my offer. "I'll be just across the street, and we can do stuff together!" Then she cocked her head to one side. "What are you supposed to do on vacation?"
"Well…you see the sights, I think." I tried to think of what those sights in Who's There were. "We have an awesome zoo. And we can go to Des Moines."
There wasn't much else unless I took her to all the places where people had died around me…or because of me. That might fill up a week. Then again, wasn't vacation where you did stuff other than work? I'd have to rethink that.
Hilly looked serious. "Do they have any red wolves? I'm kind of afraid of red wolves."
I stared at her. "I've seen you take on five giant men, armed only with a pumice stone and a Slip 'N Slide! How is it you are afraid of wolves, red ones in particular?"
She shrugged. "I don't know. I just woke up one day and thought red wolves are scary!"
"Well." I buttered some toast. "You're in for a treat, because I just happen to be friends with a red wolf, and I'll introduce you two."
If that seemed like a strange statement, she didn't say so.
As we ate, the animals stared at our food. Philby was drooling at the other end of the table because of the heaping plate of bacon I'd made. I wasn't much of a cook but had recently added bacon to my repertoire. And to celebrate, we now ate it every day. Eggs were next on the agenda, and someday I might go so far as to attempt waffles, but it was probably a good idea for me to take things slow.
We got dressed, and I took her over to my house. The animals were sad because I didn't take them with me, something I did a lot. Philby would rotate between stalking the basement for mice that weren't there and staring at the other house like she wanted to be there instead. Martini would fall asleep on top of the fridge or, in one scary incident, inside the oven. Leonard liked sleeping on my bed since Rex didn't allow that at our house.
"I like this place!" Hilly said as she walked into the living room.
My little ranch house was perfect, and I was having a hard time parting with it, something that perplexed my husband. I showed her around and insisted she take the guest room, a room that was ten times better than my room. A few years back, I kind of shot up the place. Kelly took me shopping for all new furniture, and now, compared to my IKEA bedroom, I thought of the guest room as the palace at Versailles.
She put her suitcase on the bed and began to unpack. It was weird to see my friend do that. Assassins have to pack quickly and travel light. Suitcases couldn't keep up with the stresses of the job because it's almost impossible to run away from a Chechen with an Uzi while dragging a rolling case. I say "almost" because on one occasion, the man from Chechnya was also hauling a suitcase and his Uzi jammed.
Or if you had back-to-back assignments, like Hilly did once when she had to take out a target on the southernmost tip of Argentina on a Friday morning, one in Northern Finland at lunchtime, and then end the day with a clean kill in Qatar. The wheels literally fell off her carry-on at the end of that day. And if you think it's easy finding a quality replacement suitcase in Qatar, you'd be wrong.
I've always suspected that the CIA's travel department was made up of sadists. After all, three of them were dominatrices (I knew this because two wore their leathers to work and the other always carried a riding crop and insisted you call her My Overlord) and one was an out-of-the-closet psychopath named Orville who collected human teeth (the good news was you could get an upgrade to first class if you brought him two molars or a canine.)
"Rex seems nice," Hilly said as she took her shampoo to the bathroom. "And marrying a cop is a great cover."
"Rex isn't cover. He's legitimately my husband."
She stared at me. "Wow. You, like, love him and everything?"
I nodded. "I do."
Hilly sat on the edge of the bed. "I don't think I'll ever get married. I don't have a very good opinion of men."
I tossed a pillow at her. "That's because the only men you have ever known have been targets or have tried to kill you."
She returned the throw with such speed and gusto that the pillow knocked me to the floor. "I've never really looked at it that way." Hilly cocked her head to one side. She was starting to resemble a cockatoo. "Maybe I'll meet someone here…on my vacation."
The men I knew in Who's There shared a police lineup in my mind, making it tough to find the right candidate. After ruling out a couple of farmers who liked animals more than people, my nice but shy dentist who whispered everything, and a few guys I went to high school with for whom the mullet should be declared the state haircut, I came up empty.
"But you still work in Virginia," I said. "Having a boyfriend here would be tough."
"Yeah, but I'm almost never at Langley." She jumped to her feet. "Oh well. It was a nice idea while it lasted."
I laughed. "You're so decisive."
"In my line of work, I have to be." Hilly put her hands on her hips. "Sometimes you only have a split second to act when things go wrong."
I knew she was right. Riley had told me stories he'd heard about her. Hilly was great at snap decisions. One time her target appeared right there in the open, on a busy street in Kenya. She had only a moment to hit the gas and run him down. Twice.
"This is going to be fun!" I said.
My cell went off. It was Riley texting to ask me to stop by. I said my good-byes, gave her a key, and told her to go ahead and settle in.
* * *
"What's up?" I asked as I walked into the little office in the strip mall. "Hey, Claire," I said to the knockout blonde receptionist, who responded with a silent nod. It was the most conversation I'd gotten out of her in weeks.
Riley Andrews, my former handler, had retired early and set up shop in Who's There, Iowa, to be a private investigator. He was always trying to get me to come and work for him. Was that why he'd called me? If it was, he'd better be prepared for disappointment. Few women ever said no to the handsome ex-spy with the perpetually golden skin, wavy blond surfer hair, and dazzlingly white teeth. Which was why I always relished the opportunity to do so.
Riley didn't look up from his computer monitor. "Over here," he said.
I joined him. The man and I had been partners for almost a decade, and we'd even dated for like, a minute. Riley was a true lady-killer…in pretty much every sense of the word. Well, not since he'd gone legit. I mean, if he was seducing and killing women in the middle of Iowa, I'd hear about it.
"I found something," he said as I walked over and stood behind him.
"Is this from here?" A grainy black and white screen outside Marlowe's, one of the two grocery stores in town, showed the back of a woman with long, light-colored hair. "Lana?" I gasped. "She's here! I knew it!"
A long time ago I'd turned Lana, a Russian spy, to our side. Years later, she tried to kill me. And more recently she'd escaped from a high-security penitentiary. I was the only one who believed she was in Iowa, and in the last six months, I'd had some strange pseudo run-ins with her.
"I think so," Riley said. "It's hard to tell, but look at what she's carrying."
I leaned in. "That's what makes you think she's here? Because she's carrying a purse?"
Riley shook his head. "Not that. Look at her other hand."
I leaned in closer. "Oh, wow. Yeah, that's her alright."
In Lana's hand was a large photo of me. It wasn't very good. I'd been at a Girl Scout rally and had a little too much cotton candy, resulting in a huge disturbing smile and wide eyes. It was not my favorite photo, but the girls in my troop had put up 11x17" copies all over town a few months ago. I thought I'd taken them down, but apparently I'd missed one.
This was good news—proof of what I'd suspected for a long time. Lana was lurking around Who's There, and this proved that I hadn't been imagining things every time I thought I'd seen her. To be honest, even though Lana probably wanted to kill me, it was a relief seeing her in the image.
"Come on!" I shouted. "Let's go nail her!"
But Riley didn't get up. "Wrath, that footage is from yesterday."
I slumped into a chair. "At least she's here." I brightened. "And guess who else is here? Someone who can help!"
Riley's brows furrowed. "Who?"
"Hilly!"
His jaw dropped, and he looked around nervously. "Hilly Vinton? Is here?"
Oh right. Riley didn't like her. How could I have forgotten that?
"She's taking her first vacation ever," I added. "And she decided to visit me!"
Riley shook his head slowly. "And you don't find that suspicious? Come on, Merry! You know better than that!"
"Hilly saved my life once, are you forgetting?"
He threw his arms into the air. "From a car bomb that she set!"
I rolled my eyes. "That was never proven."
"Has it occurred to you," Riley asked, "that she might be here to do a job?"
"You have never liked her, Riley. I don't know why I'm even listening to you."
Of all the women in the CIA, Hilly was the only one who didn't fall for my former handler's charms…present company included. It always bugged him that she wasn't interested.
"Hilly Vinton never took one day off. Not one, in all of her years with the Agency," he pressed, ignoring my comment. "So why take one now?"
"Look." I pointed at him. "She's a friend, and she came to visit. You can't go through your life not trusting people."
He nodded vigorously. "You can when that friend is more lethal than anthrax."
Claire looked up from her computer as if interested in this conversation.
Riley pulled me back a few feet and lowered his voice. "Don't you think it's also coincidental that Hilly's here and now we have a legit Lana sighting?"
I shrugged him off. "Maybe. But I've been telling you that Lana's here for months now, and you've never believed it."
"She could be here to kill Lana," he said.
I thought about that for a second. If it was true, yay! And it made me sad to think she wasn't here to hang out with me.
"That would imply that the CIA knows Lana is here," I said. "And that proves I've been right all this time!"
Riley interrupted my victory dance, which included the Electric Boogaloo, the Chicken Dance, and something called the Bangladesh Sweatshop Polka.
"If Lana is here, she's here for one reason—to kill you."
I couldn't argue with that. It had been on my mind ever since she'd escaped from prison and was seen here. "She'll have to come into the open to do that. And I'll be ready for her."
Riley was known to go off the rails every rare now and then, but it was unusual. It was nice to know he cared. And Svetlana Babikova was an extremely dangerous spy who hated me.
"So," I said. "What are we going to do about her?"
He sighed. "Give me a day or two to pull some strings and see what I can find out. And I also want to know why Hilly is here. I'll let you know what I find out."
"Fine, you do what you think you need to." I headed for the door. "Bye, Claire."
The gorgeous secretary didn't even look up.
As I drove back to my old house, I thought about what Riley had said. He was wrong, of course, about the car bomb. Hilly had been tailing an arms dealer in Colombia at the same time I'd been undercover with Carlos the Armadillo. One day, as I'd just climbed into my car, this brunette amazon I'd never seen before came racing up to me, tore open the door, threw me out of the car, and dragged me away. The vehicle exploded a few seconds later.
Hilly had given me the secret handshake, and I'd responded with the correlating passwords, which confirmed we were playing for the same team. We've been friends ever since. The spy had told me she'd seen me before at Langley. She'd said the guy she had been tailing had mistaken my car for another and set the bomb. Hilly had waited to see what would happen, but when she spotted me, she changed her mind.
Hilly did get that guy. Killed him with a book to the throat and threw him in a dumpster. The police didn't even investigate. Apparently that kind of thing is very common down there.
While she was here, I should have her show my Girl Scout troop a couple of techniques. Especially Betty. She'd love the book thing. I wasn't sure Betty read, but she might start if she thought she could wield it as a weapon, which seemed like a win.
I pulled into my old driveway and shut off the car. Hilly's SUV was still parked there.
I wasn't worried about her. She was just here to see what a normal life was like. Considering that she grew up in Toledo, that was completely understandable.
It was a nice, bright sunny day, and the temperature was fairly mild for June. The girls were out of school, and we had a meeting coming up. It would be the perfect time to introduce Hilly. Like a sort of career day…with an assassin (who is, of course, not an assassin). I wished they'd had that when I was a kid. How cool would it have been to learn about picking locks with a bobby pin or making bombs out of Pixy Stix and Kool-Aid?
After inserting the key into the lock, I reminded myself that I had a guest who probably wanted some modicum of privacy, so I knocked. There was no answer. Was she sleeping? In the shower? I knocked again and called out her name, but again, there was no response.
Very quietly I let myself into the house. She wasn't in the living room or kitchen, and the shower wasn't running. As I walked down the hallway, I kept away from the creakier floorboards. If she was asleep, I didn't want to wake her.
The door to the guest room was slightly open, and I could see her curled up in bed, out cold. Huh. She'd just slept through the night. Then again, this was her vacation. Maybe that's what assassins did on their time off. Taking out targets can be exhausting.
Very carefully, I shut her door and walked back through the house. I was just checking the fridge to see if I needed to make a grocery run for my guest, when through the kitchen window I spotted something in the backyard.
It looked like a body. The dead kind.
Dammit.