The Whole Truth (The Supercharged Files Book 1) (20 page)

“Good point about downplaying
appearance. This place can get to you.” Ursula speared a tomato with her fork.
“I understand where he’s coming from.”

“You think he’d have the courtesy
to show his coworkers his real face,” Samantha said, because she was queen of
courtesy. Then she grinned. “And his real ass.”

“See, that’s what I’m talking
about.” Ursula waved her tomato. “The way everyone sexually objectifies
everyone else. It’s demeaning. Everyone has different preferences, you know? Everyone
likes people for different reasons.”

I squinted at Ursula, but she
wasn’t lying. Why did she like Samantha, if it wasn’t for Samantha’s pretty
face and big tits? Sam’s personality wasn’t much better than Beau’s.

“I didn’t say I’d sleep with him
now that he’s hot,” Samantha demurred. “I just want Cleo to tell us about
sleeping with him.”

“With a fade like that, he ought
to be in law enforcement or a PI agency. My son would hire him.” Lou finished
her last potato skin and stirred more sugar into her iced tea. “He’s wasted as
a management consultant. Is it true he can go invisible?”

How had they heard? I hadn’t told
anyone but John. Maybe it was semi-common knowledge I’d somehow missed. An easy
thing to do when my instructor, Mr. Fade, told me it wasn’t possible.

“I don’t know.” I took another
bite of my sandwich and stared at the layers as I chewed, wondering how I could
switch the conversation to how much we all loved our jobs and would never
betray YuriCorp.

“Well, the little stinker can’t
do it now and won’t be able to again. Makes you wonder what other things people
hide,” Lou said darkly. “Not everything shows up in the Registry.”

“He’s not a bad person,” I said.
When Lou started complaining about evil supras and our community’s lack of
supervision, I felt targeted and uneasy. “Underneath the hostility, he’s a
different man. I wouldn’t be with him otherwise.”

“Maybe not him, but somebody
else,” Lou insisted. “Suprasenses aren’t innocuous. Sam is a perfect example.
Kiddo, you know I love you, but you pushers grab people without blinking. Give
your powers to somebody without morals and—”

Samantha acted like she was going
to pet Lou’s arm. Lou smacked her hand, and Samantha laughed. “Come on, Lou,
let’s not get gloomy. Let’s just pry Cleo for details.”

Samantha was right—I’d rather lie
about Beau’s penis than discuss people with hidden suprasenses who might use
them to harm others. More than either of those things, I’d rather ask Samantha
what I’d come here to ask so I could reveal her for the traitor she was, which
depressed me more than I wanted to admit.

“We need police,” Lou insisted.

“Why, when we look after one
another?” Samantha smiled at her. “In fact, your lunch is on me today for
helping with that little situation. Between the two of us, I believe we fixed
it.”

“Situation?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Samantha said, but her
mask said,
He’ll never threaten Alex again
.

Somebody had threatened Alex and
never would again? That sounded menacing—especially if Alex and Samantha had
needed help with the situation.

“You don’t owe me anything. That
boy had it coming.” As she spoke, Lou studied both me and Sam, her gaze chilly.
Whatever she’d done to ensure the “boy” got what he deserved, she had no
regrets.

“What boy?” I hoped my former PI
friend wouldn’t wonder about my curiosity, but any revelations about Samantha
might help me when I questioned her.

“Never you mind.” Lou stripped
the meat off a barbecued rib. “But it’s things like that which prove my point.
We need law enforcement to handle our criminal element.”

After a loaded silence, Ursula
said, “Here’s what I want to know, Cleo. Has Beau ever gone invisible when
you’re trying to talk about the relationship?”

Lou and Samantha laughed. I
didn’t.

“Wouldn’t that be just like a
man?” Lou shifted gears effortlessly. I swallowed.

“What’s he look like naked?”
Samantha wiped each of her fingers on a napkin and eyed me like she wanted to
grab my arm and squeeze the information out of me. “How big is it?”

My ears, nose and cheeks burned.
I hadn’t wondered that myself. Ever. Not the first time I’d met him and not
since. “Why are you so obsessed with me getting laid?” I pointed one of my club
sandwich toothpicks at Samantha like a sword. “You know what I’m talking
about.”

Ursula raised an eyebrow and
glanced between Samantha and myself. “Do you like to think about Cleo having
sex, Sam?”

“Come on, are you saying I’m gay?
I don’t care about Cleo’s love life.” Samantha rolled her eyes, which looked
funny through her mask. “I have a boyfriend.”

Why was that a lie? Was her liaison
with Alex a different kind—the espionage kind?

I had to get her alone. The
owners of Merlin’s, sensitive to their patrons’ needs, had installed blankets
in the bathrooms. The female tendency to potty in packs was about to come in
handy.

“Samantha,” I said, “I just
remembered something about that thing Yuri was talking about and he wanted you
to give him a call. We should go call him.”

Lou tsked me. “This is not a
working lunch, it’s a gossip lunch.”

Ursula studied me from across the
table. “If you’re not comfortable discussing this, Cleo, we don’t have to.”

“Yes, we do,” Samantha protested.
“I’ve talked about Alex and Clint. It’s Cleo’s turn.”

“All right. The first time we...”
I paused and clapped my hand to my lower belly. “Gosh, I think I started my
period.” I jumped up, careful not to skid on the peanut shells, and motioned to
Samantha. “Can you bring me something in the ladies room?”

“Don’t you have the lost ark in
your purse? I can’t believe you don’t have a tampon.” Samantha sighed and
followed me. “Be right back.”

As soon as we got into Merlin’s
small bathroom, I checked the stalls. Empty. Samantha leaned against the sink.
I hovered by the door with my hand on it, ostensibly to keep people out but in
reality so I could yank it open and run if she came at me with judo hands.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

First I needed to ascertain my
safety. “Do you currently have any weapons in your possession?”

“Why, do you want to hurt
somebody?” she asked with a laugh. “Wait, you don’t mean me, do you? I just
want to know about Walker. The man is a cipher.”

“Do you have a gun or pepper
spray? Anything like that?”

“I left the Glock in my other
purse,” she said with no mask.

I took a big breath, held it, and
gusted out one quick sentence. “Are you leaking information out of YuriCorp?”

“What?” Her face reddened. When
she shook her head, her perfect hair caught on her lipstick. “I can’t believe
you’d ask that. Pop-Pop told you to trust me.”

“I know.” At least she hadn’t
punched me. “Do you have anything to do with the sabotage that happens to
YuriCorp employees?”

“No,” she said, in a low voice,
shoving her hair behind her ears. It made her look younger, like a teenager.

“Can you burn people out?
Increase their stress levels so much they freak?”

“No, and I’ve tried,” she said
with a clear, sullen face.

“Do you know anything about the
sabotage?”

“Nothing more than you do.”

I considered whether that was an
evasion and decided it wasn’t. “Could Alex be getting information from you
without you knowing it?”

“He can’t do that.”

“Does he have anything to do with
the sabotage?”

“Do you really think I’d sleep
with somebody and not test them?” She wriggled her fingers. “Alex is not
burning out YuriCorp’s employees.”

“What about when I first moved
here and he met us at Merlin’s? I got the distinct impression you’d told him
about me.”

“He already knew. I just told him
where he could find us.” She smiled tightly. “I figured having him talk about
Psytech in front of you would push you toward YuriCorp.”

Devious. Did Alex know she’d used
him instead of helped him? Great relationship they had there. “What was that
about Lou helping you with a threat to Alex? What did you do?”

“How do you... Right. The lie
sight.” She crossed her arms. “There was this guy who knew something about
Alex’s family and tried to blackmail Alex to get him a job at Psytech. Lou and
I just...removed that knowledge from his memories. The guy was a norm. A
nobody. Sometimes these situations crop up. We can’t let them blow the whistle
on us, Cleo.”

“Did it hurt him?” I asked.

“Of course not.” Her mask added,
Much
.

Lou and other erasers would play
a critical role if we were ever to establish an official system of supra checks
and balances, which clearly would need a branch that dealt with threats to our
secrecy. Lou hadn’t been at all perturbed that she’d erased the memories of
this anonymous person and hurt him, unless Samantha did the hurting part. How
either of them could hurt somebody with their powers, I had no idea, but they
also had the very human powers of kicking and punching and their disposal.

“One more thing.” I wet my lips.
“Is Alex your boyfriend?”

“Yes.” She masked again, and I
frowned. “Okay, fine. We agreed to see other people, but we keep fucking each
other. I guess I don’t consider that a boyfriend.” Her lips tightened. “It’s
not optimal. Whatever. Don’t judge me.”

“I’m not.”

“You just asked if I was
betraying my own grandfather.” Her eyes filled with tears. “How is that not
judging me?”

Ohmigod, I made her cry! Now
would be a great time to run. “It’s my job to ask.”

I stared at Samantha and she
stared back. “I thought we were friends,” she finally said, her voice wobbly.

Even when she didn’t push me,
Samantha was the one I always ended up spending time with. The one I was really
myself with. I guess I was the same for her. Supra powers made for strange
bedfellows.

Scratch that terminology. No
bedfellows here.

“We are friends,” I assured her,
surprised at the truth in it. She grabbed a paper towel and dabbed at her
mascara. It wasn’t the first time I’d made someone cry with my pointed
observations, but I’d never expected Samantha to be one of them. “I’ve asked
everybody but you, Al, John and Yuri. I had to know. Yuri told me I had two
weeks before you and I have to do the interviews.”

“We should probably have done
them a long time ago.” She slipped a compact from her purse and dabbed her
cheeks and eyelids, unperturbed by the notion of invading everyone’s privacy.

“But everyone will hate us. Doesn’t
that upset you?”

“I’m not thrilled, but if it
works, I’m all for it.” Her mask was so light it wasn’t worth mentioning.

“I won’t be much good—as much
good—when everyone knows about me. I can’t imagine a worse way for them to find
out.”

“I can.” She swiped her nose.
“Are you going to ask Al and John if they’re traitors?”

“I’m going to ask all four of
you.”

She turned to me, the evidence
that she’d shed a tear due to that mean Cleopatra Giancarlo completely erased.
“It’s not Pop-Pop.”

“I have to find out for myself.”
Stranger things had happened than owners trying to ruin their own companies
while pinning the blame on someone else.

“Wish I could be a fly on the
wall for that,” she said. “But I don’t have that ability. I hear your boyfriend
does.”

“He’s not...” A thought occurred
to me. “Don’t tell John about Beau, okay? Let me tell him.” I had no idea if
he’d even care.

“Of course,” she lied.

“Samantha, come on. I don’t want
him to be mad.”

“All right, all right.” This time
she wasn't lying. She sucked on her bottom lip. “He won’t be mad. Maybe
disappointed in you for hooking up with Walker. How many times have you
professed to hate Beau? Two thousand? Three thousand?”

Her not-boyfriend wanted to sleep
with other people, and she was dissing my not-boyfriend? “Beau’s got hidden
depths.” She smirked, so I added, “And he’s freakin’ hot.”

“He is that.” She nodded in
agreement with my profundity. “I still don’t get why he’d hide it. Why don’t
you ask him?”

“I might.” I had a pretty good
idea why he’d run the fade.

“Just don’t ask right after you
screw. How long does it last?”

“Jeez, that’s personal.” I had no
idea how long Beau could last, and I didn’t want to dwell on it.

“I keep forgetting, you haven’t
been around supras long. Since it happens to all of us, we do discuss it.”

“Bodily functions happen to all
of us, and we don’t discuss those in intimate detail.”

“Yeah, but going to the bathroom
doesn’t make us—”

I put my hands on my ears. “La,
la, la! Not listening!”

When I finished behaving like a
prude, we stood there another long moment before I said, “We should go back to
the table.” Ursula and Lou, with varying degrees of interest, awaited the
sordid details about Beau Walker in bed.

“I feel like we connected today.”
Samantha held open her arms. “Hug?”

I started forward, noticed her
shadowed face, and opened the door of the bathroom. “I’m not a moron. You don’t
get to push the information out of me.”

“Instinct.” She smiled at me
through her mask. “Can’t help myself.”

“Why are we friends?” I asked as
we exited the bathroom.

“Because nobody understands you
like I do, Cleo.”

If only I understood her half as
well as she seemed to understand me.

~ * ~

I didn’t know whether to be
relieved or disappointed it wasn’t Samantha. Relieved because I didn’t have to
break Yuri’s heart. Disappointed because I had to ask the others. Of Yuri, John
and Al, I didn’t know which I dreaded more. The rest of the day passed in a
blur as I considered and reconsidered various ways to approach them.