Hurricane Force (A Miss Fortune Mystery Book 7) (13 page)

“He hasn’t slept in two days,” I said. “And everyone who gets a hangnail in this town calls to tell him about it.”

“He’s exhausted,” Ida Belle agreed. “And he’s still not fully recovered from the concussion. Then all this business with Celia, the election, the sheriff debacle, and now Max. It’s a lot to manage with a full night’s sleep and at top-notch health.”

“I hadn’t thought about all that,” Gertie said. “Now I feel a little guilty that he had to come out here, even though for once, it wasn’t really my fault.” She turned to look at me. “What were you doing out here anyway?”

“Harrison called,” I said, seeing no reason to lie about having a call with my partner. I simply wouldn’t give them all the details of the call. “I didn’t want to risk Ally overhearing, so I came outside. I was sitting on the picnic table and didn’t realize the tide was coming in until I stepped off and became a dry dock for the snake.”

“What did Harrison say?” Ida Belle asked.

I was about to answer when the back door opened and a flashlight hit us. “What the heck are you guys doing out here?” Ally asked. “Gertie, where are your clothes? Are you all wet? For Christ’s sake, get inside before you catch a cold.”

“Later,” I said.

Ida Belle nodded and we headed for the house.
 

I was happy for the interruption. It gave me a chance to formulate a reply. The more planned my answer was, the better I was able to let the lies slip off my tongue and have them sound legit. With average people, I could lie on the fly. I’d even managed some doozies with Carter, but then Carter didn’t know my true identity. With Ida Belle and Gertie, it was hard to get away with anything. For one, they were trained in the art of deception. For two, they knew who I really was. They would be expecting me to lie to them, and they’d be ready to jump on any twitch or blink that led them to believe I was hiding the truth.

I looked at my cell phone and checked the time. With all the excitement and the lack of air-conditioning, everyone would probably be up at the crack of dawn. That gave me a couple of hours to come up with a way to manage my own involvement in the investigation while keeping them out of it.
 

I hoped something came to me, because right now, I was drawing a blank.

###

I spent an hour tossing and turning while trying to come up with a good cover story for Ida Belle and Gertie, and finally dozed off close to dawn. I had just slipped into a solid sleep when the power came back on and everything in the house surged. The air-conditioning roared on, lights flashed, and alarms went on the blink, firing off all over the house.
 

I jumped out of bed and hit the ground standing, pistol in hand, then relaxed when I realized what had happened. Merlin had leaped straight up when I did and was currently perched on top of the lamp, glaring at me as though it was somehow my fault. A second later, the sound of breaking glass sounded down the hall. I crouched a bit and waited to hear what followed next before heading out. Ally stood frozen across the hall in her bedroom, her eyes wide.

“What the heck are you doing?” Ida Belle yelled. “You’re going to kill someone.”

“The noise startled me,” Gertie said. “It was an accident.”

“Why are you sleeping with throwing stars?”

“Turns out it was a better choice than my gun.”

“Good God.”

I headed out into the hallway, Ally trailing behind me. Ida Belle stood in the doorway of the bedroom Gertie was using, shaking her head in dismay. I peered into the bedroom and saw a hole in one of the windowpanes. Another item for the list. Walter was going to retire off my house repairs.
 

Gertie climbed out of bed and yanked the cord for the alarm clock out of the wall. “Why was this thing on in the first place?”

“I think there was a power surge,” I said. “Things are going off all over the house.”

Ida Belle put her fingers in her ears and nodded. “Let’s track them all down and turn them off before we go deaf.”

I headed downstairs with Ally, who went to work on the stove, while I went out on the porch and tried to figure out how to shut off the doorbell, which was ringing over and over and over again. I was just contemplating shooting it when Ida Belle walked up behind me with a crowbar and popped the entire thing off the wall.
 

“Thank God,” I said. “I was losing my mind. Is this normal?” I glanced around the neighborhood, but everything was quiet and no one else seemed to be running around in a panic.

Ida Belle shook her head. “I think lightning might have hit the house during the storm. No telling what got fried.”

“Crap. You mean fried completely—as in insurance claims and contractors taking over my space?”

“It’s possible. We’ll start checking everything. The AC seems to be okay. We should probably start in the kitchen.”

We headed to the kitchen where Gertie was inspecting the refrigerator. “Seems to be all right,” she said as we walked in the room.

Ally closed the door on the microwave. “The stove and oven are good, but the microwave is shot.”

“I meant to unplug it,” I said. “Guess I forgot.”

“At least it’s not built in,” Ida Belle said. “Easy enough to replace.”

“I hope so,” I said. “When Ally moves out, the microwave and the coffeepot are the only things that will see activity in this kitchen.”

“Coffee!” Gertie pulled the coffeepot away from the wall and heaved a sigh of relief. “You unplugged it. Thank God.” She started filling the pot.

Five minutes later, we were all sitting around the kitchen table, silently sipping on coffee and trying to get a focus for the rest of the day.

“You guys never did tell me what happened last night,” Ally said. “Why were you in the backyard? What happened to Gertie’s clothes? Why were you all wet?”

“I heard a noise and went to investigate,” I said, using the same explanation I’d given Carter. Then I told her about the snake and the plan to remove the snake and how it wasn’t quite the success we’d hoped for.

Ally started smiling shortly after I started the story, and by the time I got to Gertie falling off the picnic table, she was laughing. By the time I got to Carter spotlighting us all in the backyard, she was gasping for breath. “Oh my God,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. “The things the three of you get into. It’s like anything that can go wrong, does, but in such a dramatic way.”

“And how fortunate for us that Carter always seems to be around to see it,” I said.

“Not always,” Gertie said, “which is a good thing. He’d be in a bad mood
all
of the time if he had any idea how many other things we’ve done.”

“I think he has an idea,” Ida Belle said. “He just doesn’t have proof.”

“Well,” Ally said, and smiled at me, “your arrival in Sinful has certainly made my life more interesting.” She rose from the table. “Since the power’s back on, I ought to head down to the café and help Francine. Fingers crossed that all her equipment made it.”

“I’m crossing everything,” I said. “I need the café open and running at full steam.”

I waited until I heard Ally going up the stairs before I spoke again. “Okay, here’s the plan. Showers first—that will give Ally time to get dressed and leave. Then Gertie can whip us up some breakfast while I tell you about the call.”

Gertie jumped up from the table. “I’m all for that shower part. And an omelet and pancakes sound great after all that red meat.”

“If we’d have known the power was coming back on so soon,” Ida Belle said, “we would have left that meat in Gertie’s freezer. It probably would have been okay.”

“Why run the risk?” Gertie said as we headed out of the kitchen. “So we’ll eat hamburgers and meat loaf for a while. We’ve had worse.”

“True,” Ida Belle agree. “Like the year you decided to try tofu and ordered a truckload thinking it was a trunk load.”

I cringed and took the stairs two at a time.

“That was fairly awful,” Gertie agreed. “We couldn’t even give it away.” She stepped onto the landing and sighed. “I guess we don’t have to worry about anyone hogging the hot water. This will be speed showering.”

Crap. I’d forgotten about the hot water heater being electrical. It had been without power for a day and a half. No way the water would be warm anymore, and it would take hours to heat up again.

I grabbed a towel, stripped, and hopped into the shower. I heard Gertie yelp through the wall to the other bathroom. Despite the fact that the house was still warm, the water was brisk and I found myself wishing my hair was back to the one-inch style I usually sported rather than the long extensions that took a long time to wash and even longer to rinse.

I managed it all in five minutes or so and hopped out of the cold and into a warm fluffy towel. It took another five minutes to dress, get a comb through all the tangles in my hair, and put the entire mess up in a ponytail. Then I headed downstairs for the debriefing, my cover story in place and ready to go.

Gertie was already at the counter, cracking eggs into a bowl. Ida Belle had poured the last of the coffee and was starting another pot. I frowned. It was a sad, sad day when two seniors took less time in the bathroom than I did. I was really losing my edge. I sat down and added sweetener to my coffee, then decided what the hell and poured in some creamer and caramel.
 

Ida Belle took a seat across from me. “So…Harrison?”

“He and Morrow are working with the FBI in New Orleans. They had some intel on the buyer we suspected was working with Ahmad, a man named Conrad Jamison. The FBI was itching for enough information to take him down. With what we have, they should be able to start building a case.”

“That’s great,” Ida Belle said. “So what’s the plan for the takedown?”

“It’s not in place yet,” I said. “They want to do some recon of the properties owned by the buyer before they decide on a course of action.”

“What about Ahmad?”

“MIA, but his men are still in New Orleans.”

“And Harrison had no idea why the counterfeit money would be in Sinful?”

I shrugged. “The storm, maybe? It could have been on a boat ready for an exchange or maybe a plane. Either could have crashed given the weather.”

Ida Belle frowned and glanced over at Gertie, who shook her head. “I told you,” Gertie said.

“Told her what?” I asked.

“That you would try to lie to us,” Gertie said, and sighed. “Look, we get it. You don’t want us getting hurt, and despite the fact that we’d like to believe that we’re still superwomen spies, even I know that I’m way past my prime.”

Ida Belle nodded. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t help. You don’t have to tell us anything about the trap, and we know we can’t be anywhere near it when it goes down, but as far as groundwork here goes, there’s no reason we can’t do what we’ve always done.”

“Meddle,” Gertie said.

“I think she’s already aware of that,” Ida Belle said.
 

My lips quivered and I finally had to smile. “Yeah, I got the memo.”

“You’re going to need our help,” Ida Belle said. “No one knows more about the people in Sinful than we do. And I know you don’t believe that money coincidentally blew into town in a storm.”

I blew out a breath. Everything Ida Belle said was true. I knew it would be an uphill battle to figure out the Sinful connection without inside help, and no one was more inside Sinful than Ida Belle and Gertie. But the professional side of me screamed no, and the friend side of me screamed no.
 

“We’re going to get into the middle of it anyway,” Gertie said. “You can either call the shots or hope we don’t get ourselves into trouble.”

“Okay,” I said. “I get that you want to help and yes, you’ve done some really good work before. But this is different. This time I’m performing in my role as a CIA agent, which means I’m directly responsible for you. More importantly, you’re my friends and if anything happened to you because of me, I’d never be able to live with myself.”

“We understand,” Gertie said. “We promise we’ll let you call all the shots. We won’t do anything that you haven’t approved, and we’ll report everything we find directly to you.”

Ida Belle nodded. “Look, we may just be two senior citizens to everyone else, but you know better. Let us do our job.”

I felt a lump form in my throat. It was the same thing I’d said to Harrison. Gertie and Ida Belle were older and lacked the specialty training I had, but at their core, they were soldiers. At their core, they wanted to make wrongs right. That desire didn’t leave just because you got older or slower or your vision got bad.
 

“I really didn’t want to do it without you,” I said.

They both smiled.
 

“Now you’re talking,” Gertie said. “So what do we do first?”

“I’m strictly assigned to groundwork here in Sinful for now. Director Morrow doesn’t want me anywhere near New Orleans. He doesn’t want the risk of exposure given that we have no reason to assume that Ahmad knows for certain that I’m in Louisiana.”

“Makes sense,” Ida Belle said. “Do you have any ideas on where to start?”

“Yeah. It may sound weird, but I’d like to start with Max.”