She nodded. “I’ve never dealt with this particular guy before, so I didn’t really know what to expect. My normal DG recommended him highly, though, and it would appear that, at least in terms of speed, he was right. We’ll see about quality when we get there.”

  Although Dan had driven to the airport, he tossed Nicole the keys as they navigated the short-term lot and found the Mercedes. She knew where they needed to go, he reasoned, and her driving would likely mean a quicker turnaround. They had quietly packed their own bags the night before, so he wanted to concentrate on relaxing, then getting a good night’s sleep before they returned to the airport the following morning for their own flight. Their itinerary was a good deal less user-friendly than had been J.J.’s, as their American Airlines flight left at just before 6:30 in the chilly a.m.

  Twenty minutes later, when they pulled into the parking lot of a small plaza and she parked near Super In & Out Cleaners, Dan felt his memory twitch as he saw that right next to the cleaners was Battery World. He recalled that he had been wanting to grab a new power cell for his laptop. “Do you need me to come with?” he asked as Nicole opened the car door.

  “No, I’ll handle this.”

  “Okay, then. I’m going to run in there and see if they have the right battery for my computer.”

  “If they don’t, then the guy in their commercials is a liar. He promises to carry batteries for things they stopped making when Wham was popular.”

  “I saw one once where he said, ‘When the Beatles were recording Sgt. Pepper.’”

  “Hmm. Not a super-bold claim. There were a lot fewer varieties in the mid-1960’s.”

  “True. Who’d have thought mentioning Wham would work better than mentioning the Beatles?”

  “Maybe George Michaels, God rest his Whammy soul.”

  “Maybe. See you in a few, weirdo,” Dan said as they reached the building and he entered the right-hand doorway while Nicole opened the one on the left.

  As Dan entered Battery World, he was amused to see the fellow from the TV commercials behind the glass display counter. The business had several locations in Denver, and Dan had assumed the guy in the commercial was probably the owner, but didn’t know if he actually worked any of the stores. After all, he still owned D-Soft but hadn’t visited the business’s headquarters since early last winter.

  Here was the portly man with the Charles Nelson Reilly glasses and the faded Lynyrd Skynyrd tee shirt was waiting, standing slightly bent forward with his hands palms down on the top of the glass counter. “How can I help you, citizen?” he asked in the same squirrelly voice he used in the ads.

  “I’ve got a laptop whose battery is giving up the ghost. If I unplug, it’s dead in a half-hour.”

  “They’ll do that. They’ll do that. You wouldn’t happen to know the model number, would you?”

  Dan pulled out his wallet and extracted a small piece of paper. “It’s a Toshiba. This is the number here,” he said, pushing it across the glass to him. The man turned the paper around and let out a low whistle.

  “Have you considered keeping the battery and replacing the computer around it?”

  Dan smiled. “Yeah, it’s kind of a dinosaur, but I love it.”

  The man was already on his own terminal looking up the model number Dan had given him. “Dinosaurs weren’t yet a twinkle in the Cosmos’ eye when this baby rolled off the line. It’s more like a trilobite.”

  In general, Dan was the sort of guy who’d laugh off an insult the first time. If it was followed up by a second volley, however, the smile might become strained. For some reason, that was not the case with this guy. His sense of humor, while a little acerbic, lined up nicely with Dan’s own. He was a little pissed at himself that as many times as he’d seen this fellow on TV, he’d never caught his name. Maybe he never said it?

  “I can’t argue with you… I’m sorry, but I don’t know your name.”

  “Neal,” the battery guy said, still scanning his screen.

  “I can’t argue with you, Neal. I’ve had it for a long time. But I did a lot of good work on it, and it still runs pretty well. I guess it’s nostalgia.”

  The man looked up, the florescent overhead lights reflecting off his thick glasses. “Okay. We’ll call it nostalgia.”

  This time, the friendly dig made Dan laugh out loud. “I like you, Neal. You don’t pull any punches.”

  Returning his attention to the monitor, Neal said, “Thanks. Everybody likes me. That’s how I stay in business. Go on TV and be my own brand of likeable. Between that and the fact that I have every battery made since…”

  “Since those ancient ones found in the sunken Phoenician trading boat?”

  Neal looked up again, grinning like Stan Laurel, only with Oliver Hardy’s body. “Damn. I never thought of that one. That would play great in one of my commercials. Mind if I steal that from you?”

  “How about we trade it for my battery?” Dan asked.

  “Ooo. Shrewd. I likey. But listen, if that line works as well as I’m thinking it will, it will be worth a hell of a lot more than a fourteen-ninety-nine laptop cell. Wait. Gotta take fifteen percent off.”

  “You do? Why?”

  Neal grinned again. “The fuck do I know? Somebody’s birthday, maybe?”

  Dan realized Neal was having as much fun as he was.

  “You know what? You got a deal. Your stupidly obscure but nonetheless brilliant line for a…” Neal pointed to the screen with this left hand while jotting the number down on a small pad with his right. “… PA3817U-1BRS.”

  Dan chuckled. “Who the hell makes up part numbers?” he asked.

  Neal began to laugh as well. “I have asked that question a million times. I mean, does some guy just sit at a table with his hands folded until someone comes in and says, ‘I need a number for this part.’”

  Dan took up the idea. “‘It’s a part for a…’ the guy will start to say, but the prodigy at the table holds up his hand and says, ‘Don’t tell me! I don’t want to know! PA3817-Blah-blah-blah.’”

  “And the first guy writes it down and the guy at the table says, ‘Read it back to me, so I know you didn’t screw it up.’ And the other guy’s like, ‘PA3817-Blah-blah-blah…’”

  “‘And the dude says, ‘WRONG! Not enough blahs!’”

  By this point, the two men were laughing so hard that neither noticed the door open. Neal did see the beautiful woman approach the counter, however, and he tried to pull himself together. Dan turned and saw that it was Nicole and began laughing even harder.

  “Am I interrupting something?” she asked Dan.

  Neal let out an over-the-top gasp. “You know this dame? She lets you talk to her?”

  “Oh, Neal. She lets me do far more than that!”

  Nicole’s gasp was genuine. “Daniel! Inappropriate!” she said, punching his arm.

  Neal wasn’t done. “She touches you?”

  Dan, rubbing his damaged bicep, said, “That was a punch, Neal.”

  “Still counts.”

  “Hey, you’re the guy from the TV commercials!” Nicole said, regaining her composure.

  “Yup, and this guy who I’m hoping is your inappropriate grandfather maybe?” he said, pointing to Dan.

  “Dan is my husband,” she said, joining in the laughter.

  “Well, your husband, then, had a really great idea for a TV commercial, so he traded it to me for this battery,” Neal said pulling a box from a gray metal shelf.

  “Shrewd,” said Nicole.

  “That’s what I said.” Neal handed the box to Dan. “Why don’t you write down your name and number for me. Just in case your commercial wins a Clio.”

  Dan pulled a card from his wallet. “Here, you wouldn’t be able to read my handwriting.”

  “He’s not lying,” Nicole chimed in.

  “Okay then, Dan. I’m thinking we’re going to make so much money off this ad we’ll be able to open a franchise on Mars.”

  “No one lives on Mars, Neal,” Dan said, starting to laugh again.

  “Not yet!” Neal exclaimed triumphantly. “But when they get there… all their batteries are going to be dead from the long space voyage and not enough USB ports. We’ll make a killing.”

  Dan tapped his finger against his temple, which in the universal man sign language means, “I like the way you think!”

  Nicole reached across the counter and shook Neal’s hand. “Sir, I hope you laugh just as heartily for the rest of the day.”

  “Should I never laugh again I will still have filled my coffers.”

  “You should use that in a commercial too,” Dan said, holding the door open for Nicole.

  “I’m writing it down!” Neal shouted as it swung shut once more.

  Back in the car, Dan continued to chuckle for most of the ride. Nicole was quieter, more pensive. She suggested they grab a bite before returning home and they were more than halfway to the restaurant when Dan seemed to notice that Nicole seemed preoccupied.

  “Is everything all right with the IDs? You haven’t said a word since we left the battery shop.”

  “The documents are fine. It wasn’t them. It was the guy. Came off as a bit of an overachiever.” She sighed. “It’s just me with new people. I’m so awkward.” Dan realized that, in this case, “awkward” meant “aggressively suspicious.”

  “Ah, never mind,” she said. “Besides, we each even have a Stratus Rewards Visa embossed with the name Sam and Diane Walker.”

  “Sam and Diane? Really? Like in Cheers?”

  Cole nodded. “Yeah. That’s another part of my funk. After all that Laverne and Shirley stuff in Romania. Are we locked in old sitcom purgatory or something?”

  “Well, you have to figure that there is more than one couple in the world composed of a Sam and a Diane, I guess,” Dan offered. Now that he was done laughing at the memories of the impromptu meeting with his new friend, he had tuned in to Nicole’s mood more fully. There was obviously something more bothering her than the fact that they were once again going into an assignment with a classic TV theme, or that she hadn’t known this documents guy for five years like she had the other. “You can tell me what’s really bothering you, you know. I don’t think you need to keep anything from me at this point. We got through what most people would consider pretty much a deal-breaker.”

  Cole turned and smiled at him. Such adorable naiveté! she thought. He still thinks he’s heard the worst of it.

  “I’m just a little on edge about going back to Carolina.”

  Dan knew something had happened to Nicole in her childhood that made memories of South Carolina a thing she didn’t like to dredge up. Early in their relationship, during the “I want to know everything about you” stage, Dan had pushed her a little once or twice to open up about it, and had found himself shut down with a firm “No, Dan. Just no.” As the years had gone by, he’d occasionally strayed too closely to the topic but had usually been met by silence. The times Nicole did answer, the response was still the same. “No, Dan. Just no.”

  So now, even though in his mind they had permanently breached the great unassailable wall of secrecy, the shadow of which he’d walked within for twenty years, he still realized this topic was not going to be discussed.

  “It’ll be okay. You’ll have Two-Gunz by your side!” he said in lieu of asking her any questions.

  “The better news is that, on the way home, we’re Nick and Jessica Custer,” she answered with the famous Nicole Porter/Mona Lisa smile.

  “Oh, come on!” Dan said, smacking his open palm against the car door’s armrest. “Is there some kind of Cleanup Crew unwritten law that all identities must be ripped from the pages of the TV guide?”

  Cole looked confused. “I thought we’d avoided that with the return personas. Who are Nick and Jessica?”

  “Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson? You don’t remember their absolutely horrible reality show that covered the entire fifteen minutes they were married?”

  “Oh yeah!” Nicole said with equal parts epiphany and revulsion. “The whole ‘Chicken of the Sea’ thing. I’m going to have to talk to the documents people about this.”

  “Exactly. And last name Custer? Not much better, baby. Let’s hope we don’t have to introduce ourselves to any Native Americans.”

  “Agreed. That would be kind of like showing up at Fenway Park wearing a tee shirt that says ‘Hello, my name is Bucky Dent.’ We’re probably good, though. There are still a half-dozen or so organized tribes in the state, but we’ll be Nick and Jessica only long enough to get out of town. And we’ll drive to Charleston for our return flight. We’re dealing with populations in the tens or at best hundreds of thousands, not millions like in Bucharest. You have to think in terms of probability.”

  “Probability?”

  “It’s basic math, Danny. You’re far more likely to be remembered in a city of sixty thousand than in a city of four million.”

  “Still seems pretty unlikely.”

  “It was pretty unlikely that the concierge at our hotel, out of all the hotels in Bucharest, would be in the pocket of the security chief for the man I was there to kill, but there you have it. Part of this game, babe, is anticipating all the angles. No one can ever think of everything that could go wrong, but you learn to plan for as many as possible and have your response in place, if only in your head.”

  After a nice meal, which turned out to be an early dinner with some drinks, Nicole headed for home. Although the talk at the restaurant had been light and inconsequential, when they returned to the car, Dan steered the conversation back to more serious issues.

  “This is the first time you’ve talked about work since we got back. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

  Cole smiled at him again. She knew he was still fishing in his most wonderful passive/aggressive way for the answer to the question he hadn’t asked, but was dangling in the atmosphere nonetheless. Still, she loved that he didn’t just blurt out “For Christ’s sake, what happened to you in South Carolina?” Subtlety was another important part of the craft and he knew when to use it.

  “It’s good, Dan. It’s all good.”

  She turned onto Cook Street then, shortly after, into their driveway. She pushed the garage door opener and pulled the Mercedes into its spot.

  “Not going to leave the car in the fresh air?”

  “Shorter distance for you to have to carry our luggage.”

  “Covering all the angles once again.”

  “Once again!” Nicole said as she walked into the hallway that led from the garage to the family room. Halfway down, she came to a dead stop. Dan, who hadn’t been paying attention, bumped into her, but she didn’t move. Instead, she was pointing to the floor.

  “What’s wrong?” Dan asked, looking to the area she indicated.

  “That’s J.J.’s hat,” she said, still pointing at the simple knit black hat that Dan called her “hipster hat.”

  “Hmm, she must have forgotten it.”

  “Dan, she was wearing it.”

  “Cole. How could she have worn it? It’s right there!”

  Nicole pulled out her phone and showed Dan a selfie she’d taken with J.J. just before she went through security. The hat was clearly evident.

  “Maybe she has more than one?”

  “Nope. That’s her favorite hat. It’s even got the little white ‘J’ embroidered on it. See?” She pointed to the picture on the phone, then to the hat. Dan bent to pick it up, but Cole grabbed his arm. “Don’t touch it. Not yet.”

  “Nicole. What are you going on about? This can’t be the hat in the picture because we saw her leave with it on her head.”

  She didn’t really hear him. She was replaying everything from the moment they arrived at the airport until the moment they left. She’d ended up being fairly certain that the fellow in the lounge, though doubtless a puke, was no one they had to worry about. But then she remembered the fellow who had bumped into her as he was trying to remove his shoes. Old, doughy, bespectacled… the last person on earth anyone would ever view as a threat. Which was why he was perfect for the job. Now she forced her mind to replay the sparse crowd in the Sky Club. Using training that she’d long ago pushed herself to perfect, she pulled up each face at each table. Yes. Yes, she was positive the man had been there as well. She cursed herself for not making the connection when he’d bumped her. Had that been intentional? Some sort of joke at her expense?

  “She’s been kidnapped, Dan. And this is here to let us know.”

  “Cole! Jesus Christ! I get that you’re covering the angles. But you go from misplaced hat to kidnapping that fast?”

  She ignored him and closed the photo on her phone, then dialed a number. After a moment, Dan heard her say, “Darlene, we have a problem.”

  5

  Catching Sight of a Doughy Rat

  Dan had only been to the Mason’s farm one time, but he knew the drive took nearly an hour. Thus he was startled when the doorbell’s distinctive four-tone chime sounded a mere twenty minutes after Nicole had placed the call to Darlene.

  “Wow. Did you guys fly?” he asked upon opening the front door and seeing her and Wally standing with grim expressions on the brickwork stoop of the entry. Dan offered Wally his hand.

  “We came close a couple of times,” Wally said, brushing aside Dan’s handshake and wrapping him instead in one of his patented bear hugs. Nicole, who had been holding it together fairly well as she waited for her friends to arrive, now broke down and melted into Darlene’s arms, sobbing.

  “Easy, girl,” the older woman said. “We’re a long way from despair at this point, and you know damn well that losing your shit now is not going to help J.J.”

  As Wally released Dan, he moved alongside him, putting his arm around Dan’s shoulder. Together, they watched as Darlene quickly coached Cole back from sobs to whimpers to a deep sigh… and then to her poker face, albeit with a little bit of makeup running down it.

  “Alright. That’s out of your system,” she said, handing Nicole a tissue. Let’s get to work. But before we do, Dan, I should tell you that I’m very impressed with the work you did in Romania, and the fact that you seem to be pretty well in control now.”

 

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