Nine
“I'm not Richie!” he insisted.
“Obviously. You just said your name was Alex.”
“No, you don't understand,” Eugenio whispered, glancing around to see if he could spot Gabby, but she was still missing in action.
“The man you call Richie doesn't work here anymore,” he said. “He disappeared last week. I just started this job on Monday.”
“There's no time for games,” said the man in the blue suit. “Show me the chicken leg.”
“What?”
“Move!” the man commanded, and stepped in front of Eugenio, jostling him back a step. The man leaned down and yanked open the top drawer of the file cabinet beneath the table.
“Fuck!” he whispered at seeing it empty, and slammed it shut again. When he straightened up and stared at Eugenio, his face was flushed and his eyes were full of rage.
“I don't know what you think you're doing, Richie or Non-Richie, but this is not the time. Commitments have been made and they will be kept. Tomorrow. Five thirty. Seven eleven. And you'd better have that chicken leg or you'll pay. I swear it. You'll pay hard.”
Before Eugenio could respond, the man rushed off and vanished quickly down the staircase. A rush of thoughts seized his mind. He should have snapped a photo of the guy. He should have tried to get his name. He should have yelled for help as loudly as he possibly could. He should have grabbed the guy and not let him get away. He should have tackled him and pinned him down. He should have slugged the little rat bastard in the face. But he hadn't done any of those things. Was it too late? Should he run after him now? Eugenio couldn't decide. He was paralyzed, and did nothing at all. Soon the only thought in his mind was “chicken leg?”
He turned the phone back on. With his luck that interlude was going to cost him commission and he didn't want that. It was back to the hard sell, and the best way to get the little blue man out of his head was to work the phone like crazy. And he did. Gabby would have been proud, if she hadn't been at that very moment tied up, gagged and locked in the small, hot closet in the storage room in the back of the Two Hoots biker bar.
She was having a pretty bad day, probably the worst since her ex-husband's last “visit”. Her tidy life was not so tidy now. Even though she had thoroughly vacuumed the apartment, scrubbed the kitchen floor, washed and dried all the dishes, folded and put away the laundry, and taken three showers, she still couldn't shake the sensation that somewhere, somehow, evidence remained detectable. Even now, uncomfortable as she was, the thing that bothered her most was the possibility of a DNA match.
She didn't even like Richie. Still, orders were orders, and commands from the Indivisible Front were paramount. At first she'd thought she couldn't do it. She saw herself as plain-looking and boring, the farthest thing from a secret-agent-seductress like she'd seen in the movies. She didn't look the part and she didn't feel the part, and Richie - Alejandro - was a decently handsome young man, tall and energetic who probably had no lack of girlfriends and had never looked twice at her before. How was she supposed to lure him back to her apartment and get him into a vulnerable position. How was she even going to break the ice? She had never even asked a guy out for a cup of coffee.
She had half-heartedly tried to worm her way out of the assignment, but her I.F. contact, a slim youngish red-head named Trudy, merely laughed at her and said,
“Just do what I tell you. It will be so easy, believe me.”
And it was. Trudy told her exactly what to wear, what to say, every detail, down to how and when to blink, clear her throat, and look away. Alejandro was ready and willing, vulnerable to the point of idiocy. It never even occurred to him that his own top-secret mission might be imperiled by this unexpected, illicit encounter with his previously nothing-but-obnoxiously-officious supervisor. He sat on her couch smiling vapidly, sipping in the tranquilizer from his wine glass, and blacking out even before the door opened and the rather husky “agents” let themselves in.
They had made Gabby leave the place while they did what they had to do, and when they let her back in after about twenty minutes, she couldn't shake the feeling that very bad things had happened in her home. There were no visible traces. As far as she knew, they had merely hoisted Richie over their shoulders and given him a ride home, but she figured that was probably not the likeliest scenario. She didn't know, and she didn't want to know, but she cleaned the apartment anyway, and cleaned it again, and every day since she'd been nervous and jumpy and looking over her shoulder and it didn't help that “Trudy” no longer answered her phone calls and no one else from the Front had contacted her either. The Front was so incredibly secretive that hardly anybody in it even knew what anybody else in it looked like. Trudy was the only one she'd ever met in person, and so she was alone and adrift in uncertainty, trying to keep the bad thoughts from her head by focusing on her job, just as Eugenio was doing at the very time she was reflecting on her fate from the floor of that overheated closet.