Page 17 of Baby One Last Time
That I hadn’t seen coming. I leaned against the doorjamb. “Yes and no. My mom celebrates all the winter holidays, so if I see her sometime between November and February, we consider it a win.”
“All of them?” She furrowed her brow. “How many are there?”
“Well, she starts at Thanksgiving.” I began ticking them off on my fingers. “Hanukkah, winter solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, New Year’s—both eve and day...” I shook my head. “Between ten and twelve in total. She’s a traveling nurse and she’s always had a tough work schedule, so I think she thought by celebrating so many, I’d never feel deserted if she wasn’t there on any particular holiday.”
“That’s nice,” Mai said. “She sounds like good people. Just you and your mom, then?”
Geez, she was a nosy Nancy. But team building, I reminded myself. Might as well tell her everything now, not drag out this bonding bullshit over days or weeks. “Yep. Don’t worry, I don’t have daddy issues. Just never had a dad. When my mom was thirty, she hadn’t met ‘the one,’ so she found him at a sperm bank.” I pointed to my hair. “She picked blond and hella smart. At least one of the two carried over. She’s a great mom, and I was happier than most kids I knew with two parents. And my mom’s sister, my Aunt Anita, lived with us for a long time.”
She’d moved in after I’d disobeyed my mom when I was ten and started cooking dinner before she got home from work. A three-alarm blaze and half-destroyed apartment building later, my mom called Aunt Anita for backup. I didn’t share that little tidbit with Mai. Derek, my mom, and my aunt were the only ones who knew about my firebug past.
“What about your family?” It wasn’t just to be polite. I was interested in what led a tall, muscular, kick-ass young woman into life as a military assassin. Then again, maybe I’d just answered my own question.
“Great family,” she said with military precision. “We’re all used to holiday deployments, so we celebrate whenever we can be together. Dad’s a retired naval captain, now teaching at the Naval Academy. Mom’s a college professor at American U. Linguistics. I have two younger brothers. One’s a Marine, hoping to follow in my footsteps. The other one’s in college.” She frowned. “Wants to be an investment banker. I’m not sure where we went wrong with him. I still like him, though.”
I grinned. “It always a shame when family members show no interest in killing bad guys.”
“Isn’t that the truth.” She smiled. “This was good. It’s important to know who’s going to have your back when you’re pinned down by enemy snipers.” She turned and opened her door. “I’ll see you at PT in the morning.”
“Uh-uh. Not so fast.” I pointed to the remainder of the blue drink she held. “Don’t think I missed the fact that you didn’t drink to our truce.”
She sighed. “I was hoping you were too drunk to notice that.” She made the newbie mistake of smelling it first. She screwed up her nose, but took a big gulp. “Jesus,” she wheezed. “It’s good we’re on the same team, because it’s going to take both of us to save the world from Jensen’s shitty bartending.”
She disappeared into her room, stumbling a bit, and closed her door. I was about to do the same when a movement at the end of the hall caught my eye. Derek stepped around a corner and leaned against the wall twenty feet away from me. I waited for him to say something, but he stayed silent and held his ground as well as my gaze. I wasn’t going to outlast him in a staring contest, but I was hellbent at scoring at least one point against him.
I broke the gaze, turned on my heel, and slammed my door shut. I waited to hear his footsteps, his knock, his voice outside my door. A minute ticked by, then another.
Dead silence.
I punched the door and stomped off to bed, knowing I wouldn’t sleep, and worse, that he’d won another battle in our undeclared war.
Chapter 5
Three days later,after many long hours of team training during which I learned my sorry ass was in much worse shape than I’d thought, and late nights making a contest out of seeing who could dispose of Jensen’s experimental cocktails in the most creative way, the real work began. And the Reindeer Team—yes, it appeared we were stuck with the name—wasn’t alone.
As I sat in a black, unmarked van with TJ, Bond, Alder, and Jensen, dressed in a sparkly red mini-skirt and matching crop top with thigh-high silver boots—not my personal choice of clubbing attire, I assure you—I considered the fact that this was much more scrutiny than I’d ever seen for a job. X and Derek were monitoring it from the HEAT building. I only knew that because TJ had announced it to the team. No word from ex-partner himself. In fact, I hadn’t even laid eyes on him since the short-lived stare-down in HEAT’s third-floor hallway. Not that it mattered. In fact, it was for the best. Probably.
Penn and Sparks were parked behind us in a white Rolls Royce with tinted windows—an important component of our play—with some yukkity-yuk in the logistics chain of command whom I hadn’t known existed before tonight. All of us had been warned we’d be required to provide full and in-depth after-action reports, over and above our normal paperwork, within twenty-four hours of completion.
Something didn’t add up. While tonight’s event was part of a bigger mission, it was still small potatoes. We were tasked with taking out a low-level gangster who owned two LA night clubs and was trying to claw his way up the criminal ladder by running errands for the laundress of dirty Russian oligarchs. Not that I’d met any clean ones, but maybe that was because my line of work tended to expose me to the seamy underbelly of humanity. Or maybe they all really were assholes.
With or without the microscope, we had a job to do. Doppler had been a very naughty boy, and Santa was bringing him something much worse than coal this year. As Santa’s helpers, the Reindeer Team was preparing a nice, long stretch of time for him at an off-the-books government location.
“I’m in position.” Mai’s voice fed directly into all our ears through the tiny comms units that fit almost imperceptibly into our ear canals. Bad guys, especially the handsy ones, tended to get too up-close-and-personal for us to wear an obvious earpiece.
“Okay, everyone, hold your positions,” TJ said. “Lee, anyone enters that alley before it’s time to join Kessler in the back room, you drop them.”
“Roger that,” Mai answered.
“Alder, Jensen, what’s your estimate on how long it will take to unlock the back door when Kessler and the key card get in range?”
TJ referred to the tiny key card tucked into a pocket at my waistband. The IT crew would work their magic so when it was time to incapacitate our quarry, it would be the two of us against the three of them.
“A couple of minutes,” Alder answered.
“Challenge accepted,” Jensen said. “I’m trying for one.”
While Alder was a straight-up computer nerd who’d studied at RPI and wrote equations for how to build 3-D fractals for fun, Jensen was a white-hat hacker, possibly only on our side because HEAT paid him so well. Luckily for me, the two of them together were the shit. Given the chance, I would have walked through the front door arm in arm with my trusted ex-partner as backup. But I didn’t have him or that gig anymore, so trusting IT to virtually pick the lock of Doppler’s back door for Mai would have to do.
