This Doesn't Happen in the Movies (17 page)

At the same corner I had just occupied was a woman in a long tan overcoat and dark hat whose floppy brim obscured her face.  She looked left and right, waited for a white minivan to pass, then crossed the street and entered the restaurant.  I didn’t think she’d seen me.  And I hadn’t seen her face, but I'd bet my Navy Seal cap she was an X Woman.

I didn’t think it’d be long now.  I looked at my watch again.  Seven ten.  I squinted but couldn’t see anything beyond  people dining at the tables near the windows.  Watching them eat was making me hungry.  My stomach growled.  I reached in my pocket for a Snickers bar and unwrapped it as quietly as I could.  I was probably breaking every rule of undercover work, but I’d been so nervous I hadn’t eaten since this morning.  I needed the extra energy, I told myself.

I bit off half the candy bar and almost moaned, it tasted so good right then.  I was so engrossed in my candy bar that I almost missed the woman in the tan overcoat coming back across the street.  I swallowed hard and nearly gagged on peanuts, nougat, and chocolate.

I stopped chewing and held my breath until she passed by.  I took a hesitant step forward and looked to the right.  She was gone.  I looked back at the The Snake Pit.  Amanda had just come out the door and was walking hurriedly back toward the car.  I followed on the other side of the street, guiltily finishing the Snickers.  Once Amanda turned down the side street where Cal was parked, I started running.  She swirled around when she was about ten feet from the car, her face tight with fear, then relief when she recognized me.

“They want another meeting,” she said as we slid into the car.

“That was quick,” Cal said.  He’d left the car running and without delay he made a u-turn and we started back to Amanda’s house.

“They want another meeting?” I repeated.  “What for?”

Amanda arched her eyebrows at me.  “How should I know?  They want to meet again in two days.  I’m supposed to call from a pay phone tomorrow morning at eleven-thirty to receive instructions.  That’s exactly what she said:
receive instructions
.  How silly can they make this?”  Amanda’s voice dripped derision.

“What else did she say?”

“How did you know it was a woman?”

“The X
Women
?” Cal said,.

“The woman in the tan overcoat and hat,” I said.  “It was her, right?”

“Yes.  She sat down at the table, ordered a white wine spritzer, and told me that I’d complicated things.  They needed my help to straighten everything out.  I asked about Peter, and she said someone would explain everything to me at the next meeting.  She said not to talk to anyone, and that they’ll inform me tomorrow about where the next meeting will be.  Then she left.”

“Before she had her drink?” Cal asked.  “How rude.”

I punched his arm.  “Quit it.”  I focused on Amanda.  “That’s it?  Nothing else?”  She shook her head.  “What’s the point of all this?” she said angrily.  “Why not tell me now instead of dragging me through all this?”

“Onion skins,” Cal said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I explained about Cal’s analogy of putting layers between each person in the organization, so no one person knows too much about what the other members are doing.

“What did she look like?” I asked Amanda.

She bit her lower lip while she thought.  “A little tall, although she did have on heels.  She had brown hair, cut in a bob.  It didn’t look good on her, either.  And she needed more makeup.  Her face isn’t attractive enough to skimp on that.  No earrings either.”

I caught Cal rolling his eyes in the rear view mirror.

“Amanda?” I asked.

“Yes?”

“Do you have anything more than fashion observations?”

“I’m just trying to tell you what I saw,” she said.  “She wasn’t very attractive.”

“What color were her eyes?  Did she look like she had a gun or anything?  Did she talk with an accent or do anything that would give away where she was from?”

“Blue, no, and no.”

“So she was an ordinary woman, maybe a little tall, with brown hair.”

“And unattractive,” Cal added.

Amanda agreed.  “I don’t see how this is helping anything.”

I sat back, right on my impulse to say something sarcastic.  I pulled my cell phone out and dialed Willie’s number.  By now we were back on I-25.

“Who’re you calling?” Amanda asked. 

“Willie.  I need to tell her to head back to your house now.”

“Where is she?” Amanda asked.

I held up a hand for silence.  “Done,” I said into the phone.

“Half hour,” Willie said to me, then hung up.

I pocketed the cell phone.  “She’ll be there in a half hour.  She’ll let herself in and wait for us.  Her instructions are to turn the stereo back on again and wait in the kitchen.”

“You have this all planned out, don’t you?” Amanda said, reappraising me.

“It wasn’t easy.”  I thought back to the number of trips I took to the fire escape or the bathroom on the main floor of my building so I could call Willie or Cal on the cell phone.  And apparently no FBI types heard, because this was going off without a hitch.

“Here we are,” Cal interrupted us.  We were back on the same street where he’d picked us up.  Amanda and I got out.

“I’ll be back,” I said, in my best Arnold Schwarzenegger voice.  I shut the door and Amanda and I ran down the street, retracing our steps from earlier in the evening.  The moon was out now, casting everything in shadows.

A sudden beep pierced the quiet.  I stopped cold and Amanda plowed into me.

“Oh, no.  We’re dead,” she gasped, holding a hand up to her neck.

I heard my heart beating in my ears, and then the beep again.  I shook my head.  “It’s only my cell phone.”  I extracted it with shaky hands from my coat pocket before it could beep again.  “What?” I murmured into the phone.  A second passed before I thrust the phone at Amanda.  “It’s Willie.  She set off the burglar alarm!  Quick!  Tell her what to do.”

“Oh, is that all?”  Amanda took the phone from me, told Willie how to turn off the alarm, then handed it back to me.  “See?  No big deal.”

“Are you trying to sabotage this?” I nearly exploded.  “I damn near shit my pants.”

“Well, I did, if it makes you happy.”  She put her hands defiantly on her hips.

I got in her face.  “Why the hell did you set the burglar alarm in the first place?”

“If you didn’t want me to, you should’ve asked.  You were standing right by the back door with me.  And keep your voice down.”

“I had a few other things on my mind.”  And I did now too, like maybe I should take her out myself and save the X Women the trouble.  “Hurry up.”

In ten minutes, we were back in Amanda’s kitchen, a rock station blaring from the stereo in the living room.  Willie reluctantly gave back the fur coat and put on her Rockies cap.  I wrote on a pad for Amanda to call me on my cell the next day at noon.  Then Willie and I slipped out into the darkness, leaving Amanda to her vodka and her bathroom facilities.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“They left you in the middle of nowhere?” Cal said, thumping his bottle of beer angrily on the table.  We’d dropped Willie off in the alley behind her apartment and watched her sneak through her back yard and in the back door.  Once she signaled that everything was okay, Cal and I went for a beer at The Punch Bowl, a small bar near my place.  We fought the late-night crowd and found a table at the back.  Once seated, I told Cal about my adventures the previous night, the first chance I’d had to talk without fear of the X Women or the FBI listening in.  “I thought that kind of stuff only happened in the movies.”

“Yeah, so did I.”  I took a long sip on my beer.  I couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying.  I kept thinking about the rendezvous at the restaurant.  Amanda had the X Women worried.  They’d broken their own rules, meeting with her.  The X Women didn’t make contact after the wheels started into motion, that’s what Amanda and Maggie had both said.  More meetings exposed them to even greater risk.  But now they wanted another meeting.  I could see why Amanda was so scared.  The X Women meant to deal with her.  But how?  And what had happened to Peter?  Did his fate, whatever it was, somehow make her more of a liability, or less?

“Are you listening to me?”

“Sorry,” I said.  “This whole thing is a mess.  It doesn’t make sense.  And Peter’s probably dead.”

“Amanda doesn’t care about him.  You know that, don’t you?”

 I nodded slowly.  “The X Women probably want to kill her, too.  That worries me.”

“Even though she nearly ruined it for you tonight with that burglar alarm?” Cal asked.

“Amanda can help us figure out what happened to Peter.”

“How?”

“By getting closer to the X Women.  She goes to the meeting, where she asks what happened to him.”

“Maybe they just want to kill her,” Cal voiced my concern.  “Do you know how easy it would be for the X Women to kidnap her?  They can eliminate her so fast the FBI, or you, would never even know it.”

I finished my beer.  “I can’t let that happen.  She deserves jail, but not death.”

“You’re probably the only detective who’s ever helped the guilty person.”  Cal raised his beer bottle in a toast.

“Just like the movies.”  I signaled to the waitress and ordered another beer.  “Humphrey Bogart helped some pretty shaky heroines.”

“You’re not Bogie.”

I forced a smile.  “No kidding.”

We talked for a while longer and then Cal took me home.

“You want me to drive back down the alley?” Cal asked as we turned near my neighborhood.

I started to nod my head.  “No, wait.  Drop me off in front.”

Cal turned his head.  “They’ll know you ditched them.”

“I know.  Serves them right for watching us.”

Cal turned down my street and pulled in front of my building, his headlights illuminating the FBI vehicle right in front of us.  I got out of Cal’s car and walked around the front.  Agent White’s eyes widened in surprise.  I waved at him.  He glowered back at me as he pulled out a cell phone.  I turned and grinned at Cal, who laughed as he drove off.  Tapping the hood of the sedan, I said, “Better luck next time.”  White yelled something at me as I climbed up the side stairs, but it didn’t bother me.  I crawled into bed and was asleep within ten minutes.

*****

At twenty minutes to twelve the next day, I took a walk into downtown Denver, presumably to visit the bank.  What I really needed was a noisy, crowded place where I could take Amanda’s call, someplace where it would be difficult for the feds to listen in.

One of the benefits of living in Colorado is the rapid temperature changes.  On any day, the weather can swing from freezing cold to sunny skies and soothing warmth.  This was such a day, and I walked in the spring-like weather, enjoying the bright blue skies and temperatures in the upper 50's.  People lucky enough to have Friday off left their coats and gloves behind as they strolled toward restaurants on the Sixteenth Street Mall for lunch.  Birds chirped from bare branches.  And now, two FBI agents tailed me.

Agent White, who seemed exceedingly unhappy when I greeted him, stayed in his car, crawling down the streets behind me.  His new partner, a tall, emaciated-looking fellow, kept pace with me, leaving about thirty feet between us as we walked.  At least if I got mugged I would have a witness or two, although I doubt Agent White or his partner would bother to help me.

At noon, I was standing in the lobby of Wells Fargo at 17th and Curtis, filling out a withdrawal slip, when my cell phone rang.  As I answered it, I glanced out the smoky glass windows onto 17th.  The black sedan was parked on the street, just outside the entrance to the building.  My walking companion stood outside the bank entrance, watching me through the glass doors.

“It’s me,” Amanda said.  “The message came through.”

“What’s the next move?”  I turned to face the teller windows, leaning away from the doors where the skinny agent watched me.

“I’m supposed to meet them at P.F. Chang's at Park Meadows Mall.  Monday night at seven.”

“Them?  There’s more than one?”

“That’s what they said.”

“They?  Who did you talk to?”

“It was a distorted voice, the same as before.  I don’t know if it was a him, her, or them, okay?”

She knew how to try a person’s patience.  “What happens then?” I asked.

“It,” she said caustically, “didn’t say.  I’m to ask for the reservation for M-O-R-T-E.”  She spelled it for me.

“Interesting,” I said.  I used the reflection in my sunglasses to keep an eye on the doors.  So far, the skinny guy didn’t seem overly interested in what I was doing. 

“What do I do?”

“Meet them.”

“Reed,” Amanda said.  “What are you going to do?”

I stared at the deposit slip, my mind as blank as the balance on the paper.  “Sit tight.  I’ll work out a plan and call you when I’ve got something.”

“When?” she persisted.

“Give me twenty-four hours.  I’ll call you on your cell phone.”  I hung up and stood at the little table with the deposit and withdrawal forms, feeling I’d been deposited, right in a pile of shit.  I didn’t know much about the X Women, but this was weird.

To keep up pretenses, I finished filling out the form, visited a teller and withdrew some cash.  As I walked out of the bank I passed the gaunt agent who now leaned against the marble wall across from the entrance.  I winked at him.  He raised one eyebrow at me and waited until I was out on Seventeenth before he followed.

I basked in the sunshine as I strolled back home, pretending that there weren’t two feds tracking my every move.  I ate a turkey sandwich, and went to the garage for the 4-Runner.  I spent the remainder of the day scoping out P.F. Chang's at Park Meadows Mall.

Park Meadows is one of Denver’s ritzier shopping malls, a sprawling complex of buildings and restaurants at the junction of I-25 and C-470.  P.F. Chang's restaurant, a trendy place serving westernized Chinese food, is situated on the east side of the mall, between two other restaurants.