Two Lies and a Spy (11 page)

Except it is.

And I have to figure out what to do.

Charlie’s eyes are wide and stricken. I squeeze his hand to reassure him.

“How did you find us?” I demand of Mitch.

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“You must want to go to jail for kidnapping.”

He scoffs. “Not gonna happen, sweetheart. This is Agency business.”

Mitch has locked the doors, so jumping out of the car isn’t an option. We don’t have a gun to put to his head, unfortunately. And we’re not filthy rich enough to bribe him.

“Last time I checked, the Agency has to operate
under U.S. law, Mitch.”

“We’re covered on this,” he assures me.

Well, isn’t that interesting.

I take stock of the vehicle. The cab is an older model that doesn’t have a partition separating the front and back seats. This makes Mitch more vulnerable than he thinks he is.

However, I don’t have Mace in Rita’s bag. I don’t have a stun gun.

What do I have?

A small can of hairspray. A set of house keys. And . . . I think fast. And Charlie’s backpack.

“You sure about that?” I ask, as I slide the little can of spray out of my purse. I pass it to Charlie and touch my index and middle finger to my eyes. Then I mouth,
One, two, three.

“Yeah, as a matter of fact, I am, Karina.” Mitch’s tone is loathsome and condescending. We pull up at a light. There’s no car next to us. No car behind us. Nobody to see.

One
, I mouth at Charlie.

Two. Three!

Charlie pops over the front seat and depresses the nozzle on the hairspray, hosing Mitch right in the eyes.

“Goddamn it!” he screams.

I loop the strap of Charlie’s backpack over Mitch’s head before he can get his hands off the wheel and up to his face. Then I twist the whole pack and pull it tight so that I have Mitch garroted.

I twist the pack again and wedge the straps under the headrest for extra strength, as Mitch cusses, flails, and tries alternately to wipe his eyes, grab me, or get his fingers under the strap around his neck. But I’ve made sure he can’t.

“Drive, Mitch,” I say in a sweet voice. “Open your eyes, put your hands on the wheel and drive us where I tell you to go.”

He gags and claws again at the strap around his throat. “I can’t see!”

“Do it!” I order. I pull a bottle of water out of Rita’s purse, twist off the cap and dash some in his eyes. “The light is green. Go.”

“And if I don’t?” he challenges, even though he can barely speak.

Maybe I’ll just ram my house keys through your jugular.”

“You’re bluffing.”

“No, Mitch, I’m not,” I lie. “You’re really starting to piss me off, and you don’t want to piss off a sociopath like me.”

A car has driven up behind us, and it honks.

“Drive, asshole!” I shriek into his ear.

So Mitch drives.

As a tiny reward, I loosen my grip on the strap enough to let him have a few molecules of oxygen.

I direct him to the McDonald’s where I changed disguises last night. I make him park. And then I knock him out manually at two pressure points on his throat.
He won’t be out long, but it’ll be long enough for us to get away.

I make sure that Mitch’s collar is turned up so that nobody can see that he’s tied by the throat to the headrest. I adjust his hat to a jaunty angle.

Charlie cleans his stuff out of the backpack, we dump it into my purse, and we get out of the car—to all appearances calm and cool.

Nobody waiting in the drive-through line notices that I’m shaking like Jell-O in an earthquake or that my badly lipsticked smile is pasted on.

We walk into the McDonald’s. The ladies’ room is occupied, so we go into the men’s and lock the door. I have to ask Charlie to dial Kale’s cell phone number because my hands are trembling so much, and when he hands the phone to me, my voice comes out in a squeak.

“Mighty Mouse? That you?”

“Kale. This is an emergency. Come pick Charlie and me up behind the Pep Boys at the corner of . . .” I give him quick directions. My brother and I exit the men’s room and walk out the other side of the McDonald’s. We walk a block over to the Pep Boys and hide behind a vending machine, praying that Mitch will stay unconscious or at least tethered until long after Kale picks us up.

We’re an hour late by the time we get to Luke’s house. Charlie and I have been riding flat on the floor of Kale’s car with a couple of jackets thrown over us. It’s filthy and smells like fried fish. Kale has a thing for Long John Silver’s.

Despite the crick in my neck and the less-than-comfortable conditions, I’m thankful for Kale’s friendship and our freedom.

Luke’s parents have gone to a charity benefit, so we have a couple of hours to change and go over our plans for “storming” Langley.

Kale pulls into the circular driveway to let Charlie and me out of the car. He’s going to park a couple of blocks away and walk back.

We ring the doorbell, and Lacey appears to let us in. Her hair is teased to awesome proportions, her white oxford shirt unbuttoned invitingly and tied tightly at
the waist. Then there’s the skirt—if it can still be called that. It’s more like a small napkin, the pleats gasping for decency.

Her lips are shiny and her eyes are avid, dying for adventure. “You’re late,” she says. “Everyone else has been here for over an hour.”

“Yeah, well.” I don’t tell her about our little problem with being kidnapped. “You look . . . incredible. And I’m going to need your help.”

“Well, duh,” she retorts, scanning me up and down.

We follow her inside and up the stairs.

Rita and Evan are hanging out in Luke’s room, already in uniform. Luke is tying his tie. Rita’s researching something on her iPad.

“Look who’s fashionably late,” she says. “What took you guys so long?”

Evan raises his eyebrows as he takes in the rumpled state of my suit and the carpet fibers from Kale’s car stuck all over my black pantyhose. “Did you
roll
here?”

Only Luke notices that my knees are trembling and that my hands aren’t quite steady. “Kari? What happened?” He leaves the ends of his tie dangling and walks over to me. He puts his hands on my shoulders and looks down into my face. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“No,” Charlie states baldly.

Luke steers me gently toward his bed, and I sit down. Everyone stares at me.

“We got kidnapped,” Charlie announces. “Cab-napped,
to be exact.”

I briefly summarize what happened.

Rita cheers.

Evan guffaws. “Bollocks,” he says. “Good story, though . . .”

Luke is still staring at me with his mouth slightly open. “You strangled the guy with the straps of Charlie’s backpack?”

“One strap,” I correct him. I glare at Evan. “It’s
not
bollocks.”

“Did you get his wallet?” Lacey wants to know.

“Did you really just ask me that?”

“Yeah. Because he might have had an ID card to get into Langley.” She puts her hands on her hips and shakes her head. “You’re hopeless.” She checks her watch. “And we need to get you dressed, so come with me.”

I tell Charlie to change into his Madison uniform, and then follow Lacey down the hall to her room.

First she outfits me in one of her own Kennedy uniforms—plaid skirt, white shirt, knee socks. Then she tells me once again to sit my “skinny ass” down on her vanity stool. This time I follow orders and put myself into the pink claws of Satanic Barbie.

Lacey turns my stool to face her. She frowns at me, drums an index finger on her lip, and walks around me, evaluating her raw material. I feel
very
raw under her scrutiny. Pretty much like a package of pork, three days past its sell-by date.

“We’ll start with the hair,” she says. “We can’t change
the Kennedy uniform much, but . . . wait.” She smirks and gets a small, square goose-down pillow from her bed. “We
can
change your body. Stand up and undo the waistband of your skirt.”

“Uh. Why do I have to be fat?”

“Because we have to make you look different,” she says reasonably.

I follow orders. She untucks my borrowed white uniform shirt and stuffs the pillow up under it. Somehow she manages to button the waistband of the pleated plaid skirt around everything, then stands back to look.

“Beautiful,” she says.

I try to turn so that I can see too.

“Nope. No peeking until I’m done.”

Next, Lacey does horrible things to my hair. She squirts it with stuff, teases it, and clips it back from either side of my face with two barrettes—a style that even I know hasn’t been popular since . . . when? The year I was born?

Is she trying deliberately to make me look fat and dorky around her brother?

Probably.

Lacey pulls up her desk chair for the makeup job. For some reason this involves crumpling up a tiny piece of paper and sticking it under one of those small circular Band-Aids, right in the middle of my forehead, but just off center.

“Lacey—”

“Shhhh. Quiet. Don’t speak in the presence of genius,” she says. She applies a thick foundation to my face—not
a shade that matches my skin—and works it in especially over the round Band-Aid. She adds powder and then more foundation.

She adds a final layer of powder to my forehead and then, of all things, dabs a tiny amount of lip gloss up there, rubbing it around the edges of the Band-Aid. What is this sick Susie-Q doing to me?

I try not to squirm as she breaks out the brow liner and eye pencils next and makes strange additions over my eyes.

I continue to sit there, and she scares me next with a liver-colored lipstick that I wouldn’t put on the wrong end of a dog.

“Oh yeah,” Lacey says, nodding as she steps back and evaluates me. “Now, for the grand finale.” She fishes around in her closet and comes out with the most horrific, beat-up, unisex camping shoes I’ve ever seen. “Put those on.”

“Do I have to?”

“Yes.”

I do. I stand up.

She laughs and laughs. Then she laughs some more.

I turn slowly to face her mirror and gape. I am a potbellied pygmy with scary, 1970s hair that looks like a grown-out bad perm. I have a giant, pulsing zit on my forehead. It’s red, infected, and shiny with oil. My eyebrows are thick as caterpillars, and they almost meet over my nose.

I have dark circles under my eyes, my mouth looks like
a dab of liverwurst, and fine, penciled “hairs” adorn my upper lip.

Lacey is still howling as Rita walks into the room. She takes one look at me and blanches.

“
Why
did you let her do that to you?”

I’m still fixated, appalled, on the Frisbee-size “zit” in the middle of my forehead. “I wasn’t exactly aware—wasn’t facing the mirror.”

“Did I invite Rita in here?” Lacey demands, after gasping for breath.

We ignore her.

“Get out!” she says, popping a piece of bubble gum into her mouth.

“Well, one thing is for sure,” Rita says. “Not even your own mother will recognize you.”

“Thank God.” I’m starting to realize that, though I look like a complete troll, the disguise is a brilliant one. Lacey may be a bitch, but she’s talented.

“You’re going to scare Charlie.”

“Probably.”

“Are you people deaf?” Lacey calls. “You are invited to get the hell out of my room, now.”

“Thanks, Lace. You’ve done wonders. We’re leaving.”

She blows a bubble and pops it. “Yep. I should charge for my work.”

I already owe her two hundred dollars. Isn’t that enough?

A last glance into her mirror makes me wince. I so do not want Luke to see me looking like this. . . .

But I don’t have a choice. As I step out of Lacey’s room, he steps out of his.

Luke scans me from head to toe and just blinks. “Holy cow,” he says. “Is that you, Kari?”

I make a strangled noise in the affirmative.

He blinks again. “
Damn
.”

“What can I say?” I ask dryly. Inside, I’m dying a slow death that he’s witnessing this. I will never live it down.

But at this point I may as well make the best of it—and hope it helps get me into Langley unnoticed. “Your sister’s a magician.”

He shakes his head. “That doesn’t make her a nice person.” He, too, is fixated on the zit. He grimaces. “How’d she do that?”

I shrug.

He’s still unable to tear his horrified gaze from it when Evan and Kale—who arrived and dressed in a uniform of Luke’s during my transformation—come out of his room. They, too, gawk at me.

“Christ! What a horror show.” Evan peers at the zit.

“I’m going to start charging admission,” I say.

Kale looks away, then can’t help himself. He glances again.

“I’m sure you’re going to tell me that my pimple isn’t that big,” I say conversationally.

“Are you joking?” Evan asks. “It’s the size of a pie.”

Rita snorts. “Big as a circus ring.”

“More like an asteroid,” says Kale.

“You people are great for a girl’s self-esteem,” I tell
them.

Charlie emerges from Luke’s room to check me out too. He claps a hand over his mouth and giggles uncontrollably. Wow. There’s no loyalty in this world, is there?

I will think about getting revenge on Lacey some other day. Right now I want to find my mother. “Can we go now?”

“Sure thing,” Luke says.

“Charlie?” I query. “Rita? You guys have all the equipment for dealing with the security cameras, right?”

“Check.” Rita smiles with satisfaction. “I have a gadget you’re going to love.”

“What kind of gadget?” Evan asks with suspicion. “Is it legal?”

“Yes and no,” Rita says. “Depending on how you use it.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” he says. He folds his arms over his chest. “In fact, I still think you’re all crazy to even attempt this Langley escapade. I’m not at all sure I’m going with you—”

“You’re pussing out, Brit Boy?” Rita jibes. “Don’t have the stomach for it?”

Evan’s expression is hard to read. He’s half irritated . . . but again, I see a trace of amusement. Maybe it’s just his English “superiority” to us Yanks.