Page 7 of The Pretenders of Copper County
I clenched my hands on the steering wheel.He’syour protectee, Sunday. The nephew of a criminal mastermind. Get it together.
“Sorry! Sorry. I’m sorry.” Chris—theprotectee—fluttered his hands, then dropped them to the seat and trapped them under his thighs. “One thing to know about me is that I tend to talk a lot when I’m nervous, and this whole situation is like…whoa. Unexpected, you know?”
“Yeah,” I gritted out. “I know.”
“But not unwelcome! I’m actually really excited that you, um, picked me up. It was perfect timing. Like fate, maybe, if you believe in that kind of thing.” He smiled warmly and adjusted his glasses. “I… oh! Hey, this is the lane for the highway. You might want to move over if?—”
“I know where I’m going,” I assured him.
“Oh.” He paused, considered, and nodded. “Okay.”
He went quiet for a moment, and the car rang with beautiful silence. But we hadn’t gotten more than two exits down the highway when his toes began tapping the floor mats, and he burst out, “Um, I figure you probably don’t want me calling you Mr. Sunday while we’re, uh… you know. So we should exchange first names. Unless you’d rather that I called you something else? Like… like…sir? Because I could do that.” His forehead puckered. “Probably.”
“Was there an actual question in there?” I demanded.
He sighed. “Who am I kidding? I could totallysiryou, if you really wanted me to. I’m an agreeable person by nature, and I’m, ah, pretty motivated here.” He laughed nervously, and his hands made a desperate bid for freedom, emerging to flit around some more as though the flapping powered some internal engine that forced his words out. “N-not that I’m making assumptions about what you might want! Gosh, no. We don’t know each other yet, and if you’re not ready toget that intimate, that would be fine.Better, even. For me. To take it slow. But… but… I think I’d feel more comfortable with this whole thing if I knew your first name.”
It took a minute for my brain to sift through the veritable haystack of speech and nervous gestures, and when I did, I looked at him in disbelief. “Hold up. No one told you my name? You know nothing about me at all?”
“Uh.” Another way-too-adorable frown. “N-no? Someone might have mentioned it, but…” He shook his head. “I think I’d have remembered.”
“God.” I stretched my neck from side to side, fighting annoyance at Janissey, at Margot, at the Division in general and this assignment in particular.
Standard operating procedure for a protective detail like this one involved a shit ton of briefings, often beginning weeks in advance. Briefings for the agents, briefings for the protectees, briefings about the situation that put the protectee in danger, and briefings about how we’d remove them from the threat. For all that the Division claimed that operating outside of the government’s alphabet soup bureaucracy gave us a unique flexibility other agencies didn’t have, I’d swear nothing got Janissey harder than a team Zoom where we could “deep dive” and “pivot” and “leverage our assets” and “circle back” to whatever or whoever needed circling.
The upside of this was that long before the protectee and I were in the same zip code, I usually had a huge-ass background file that included everything from their dental records to their Hinge profiles, and the protectee knew about me, too—at least the parts I needed them to know, like my qualifications and my freakingname.
But in the clusterfuck I was now assigned to, my protectee didn’t have a file. He didn’t have a legal addressin the Hollow. He didn’t even have a phone number on record. In fact, the only way I’d managed to find my protectee so quickly was thanks to a chance conversation with my little brother last night. Hawk had let slip that “Chris” who moved to town “a few months ago” was some kind of weapons expert and worked at the Bugle. This had led me to make a few inquiries of Ernie York, the town mayor and the Bugle’s owner, who confirmed that Chris was “short and wiry and strong as fuck” and “frankly, a little scary.” One look at a picture from the Bugle’s staff barbecue last summer on Ernie’s phone had shown me the very man from the driver’s license photo Janissey had sent over, and I was sure I had the right person.
I glanced at the passenger’s seat. So far, the guy seemed about as scary as Webb’s golden retriever puppy, but as the man himself had said—and it might have been the only sensible thing hehadsaid—we didn’t know each other. Beneath the cute-and-innocent schtick he seemed determined to cling to, he was still a Fromadgio. Still dangerous.
“Reed,” I said belatedly. “You should call me Reed.”
“Reed,” he repeated. Then again, like he was tasting the word on his tongue, “Reed. I like it. It’s not unusual, but not common either. If someone says, ‘Hey, Reed,’ I bet you know they mean you.” He sighed a little. “So… what’s your middle name?”
I glanced at him again. His act was solid, I’d give him that much. If I didn’t know better, I might think the man actually spoke every thought in his brain out loud.
“Reed is my middle name,” I admitted gruffly. “Nobody calls me by my first name.”
“Oh. That’s handy. I don’t have a middle name, which is too bad because I’d totally go by that. Chris is so common.” He pushed those ridiculous glasses up his nose. “So you’re the third Sunday, right? The one who’s an accountant for a Washington think tank?”
Annoyed as I was at this reminder that he knew my family, I still found myself laughing a bit at his joke as I took the exit for Route 91. “Yep. That’s me, alright.”
I’d invented the “think tank” job back when the Division recruited me after college, before I’d learned how impossible it was to keep the details straight when you tried to keep a secret like that for any length of time. These days, I didn’t spend much time with my family, which sucked on the one hand because I felt more disconnected from them as the years passed, but was also ideal since it kept the danger of my work life away from them and drastically reduced the number of lies I needed to keep track of.
They were so far from knowing who I really was or what I really did, my brother Porter actuallyjokedthat I was a “secret-agent super-spy” because he knew no one would believe it.
“Um, Reed?” Chris piped up, because two seconds of silence was apparently two seconds too long. “I don’t mean to be a nag, but how far are we going? Because this highway goes to Connecticut.” His laughter sounded forced. “Your place isn’t all the way in Connecticut, is it?”
“Of course not.” I flipped on my blinker. “It’s in Massachusetts.”
A glance at the rearview mirror showed a car with New Jersey plates following us off the exit. Had they been following us long?Damn it. I wasn’t sure.
“Massachusetts,” he repeated faintly. “Oh. Okay. Yeah. That’s…” He fumbled a tin from the pocket of his jeans and pushed it in my direction. “Uh… mint?”
“No.” The New Jersey car sped up, too, keeping pace, so I switched lanes, pulling around a lumber truck that washaving a hard time chugging up one of the hills south of town. I unceremoniously pushed the tin of mints away and pushed the gas pedal to the floor. “Fuckingfuck.”
“Fresh breath means you won’t use fresh language, Nonna used to say.” His voice had gone helium-high in the last two minutes. “N-not that I’m complaining about your language! Not at all. I use fresh language, too! All the… all the hecking time. And frankly, many of my nonna’s sayings weren’t entirely accurate. L-like, she said the louder you sneeze, the longer you’ll live. But there was this episode ofJohn Ruffianwhere John is in a ghost town and the bad guys are looking for him, and one loud sneeze would’ve given him away?—”
