When I saw his face, grim and tense and pale, I had to work not to cry. He scanned the room and saw me.
Came toward me with long strides. Stopped when someone grabbed his arm to whisper something in his ear. Nodded to him, spoke a few words, came over and looked down. Then he knelt on the floor next to me, very close.
“You all right?” he said.
I nodded, not able to speak.
“Hurt?”
I shook my head.
“Don’t move.” He gestured to the woman with me, then stood and walked away.
A minute later another medical type with a first-aid kit came over and checked out my vital signs and asked me some questions. My answers seemed to satisfy him. I started to tell him to check on the cat, but the words came out funny. He covered me with a blanket, let me stay on the floor, walked away to say a few words to Simon, and left.
Simon seemed to be the Bing Wooster of this operation. I wondered why the area wasn’t being roped off as a crime scene, then thought that maybe no one but me knew a crime had been committed here, except the crime of me hitting Maizie with a meat mallet. I turned to the woman at my side. “There’s an earlobe here,” I said.
“A what?”
“An earlobe.” I stood. She touched my arm and started to ask me something, but I wrapped my blanket around myself and walked over to Simon, standing in the kitchen. He must’ve had eyes on the side of his head. He turned immediately.
“Yes? What is it?”
“There’s an earlobe around here somewhere. On the floor.”
“A what?”
“An earlobe. It belonged to Rico Rodriguez. The cat was playing with it. The rest of Rico is in Antelope Valley.”
Simon took a long look at me, then nodded. The news didn’t seem to surprise him, but I figured they train them not to look surprised. He put a hand around my upper arm, gently, but his hand was so big it surrounded my bicep like a bandage. “Wollie,” he said. “You need to-”
“Where’s Annika?”
“Not now.” As if to reinforce this, his cell phone rang. He listened, frowning, then addressed the room at large. “All right, we’ve got company. They’re early. Exiting the 405 at Valley Vista, taking surface streets. Let’s move.” He addressed the woman who’d been hovering and asked where her car was. Base camp, she told him. “Put her in mine,” he said, and fished keys out of his jacket. “Windows up.”
“We’ve got a problem.” It was a new agent, coming in from outside, leaving the door open. He came over to Simon, the urgency in his voice unrestrained. His manner was not deferential. “We picked up Dr. Kildare and Hazel at the Sportsman’s Lodge. He’s falling over himself to cooperate, but all he knows is she’s to stand outside the house, meet them at the gate. Car one is Lenin. He verifies it’s her, drives through, radios car two, that’s Stalin. He comes through, she closes the gate, walks them here to the lab. If she’s not at the gate, the deal’s off. She’s not alone, the deal’s off. Lenin doesn’t ID her, Stalin stays away, we shoot it out with him on the freeway all the way to Tijuana or Death Valley or wherever the hell he parked the getaway jet.”
Simon nodded. “That’s more than one problem. Hazel?”
“Nothing. Knows company’s coming. Betty Crocker’s been cooking all day.”
Simon nodded. “Female agents?”
“Dahl, San Diego, stuck on the 405 and she’s short. We’re working on a wig for Ellis.”
“Won’t make it in time. Passwords?”
“Husband doesn’t know. Surveillance says no, but we’re reviewing transcripts. It’s not something we were listening for. Right now I need you to look at the geography out front. If we can get him onto the block, Potemkin may have a shot from across the street.”
Simon looked toward the door, shaking his head. “Not unless we get them to roll down a window. Even then, it’s going to be a bad night in the neighborhood.”
“I don’t need a wig,” I said.
Both men turned to me. The room went quiet.
“No.” Simon didn’t even think about it.
But the agent with him thought about it. He looked at me with interest, then turned to Simon and said something I didn’t catch.
“I can do this,” I said to them. “I can. I’m like her.”
Simon shook his head. “Not enough. They’ve met her.”
“Tcheiko hasn’t.”
“No.”
“What are you going to do?” I said. “I knocked out Little Fish. There’s nobody else. I can get them to roll down the car window. I can be Betty Crocker for ten goddamn minutes.”
Simon looked at his watch. “You didn’t sign on for this.”
The other agent said, “Actually, she did sign on for this. This is Kermit, right? Use her.”
Simon’s cell phone rang. He spoke into it, held up a finger to us, then walked outside.
The other agent kept looking at me. “Think you can do this?” he said.
I felt the room around me holding its breath. “Yes,” I said.
He nodded. “Let’s go.”
The room came to life. Two women agents led me to a corner, helping me into clothes they must’ve found in the house, jeans that had to be Maizie’s and a white sweater. They talked calmly and encouragingly. Nothing fit exactly right; the jeans were too short, and the sweater sleeves, but it was all close enough. I smelled like her now, subtle and spicy. It was Annika’s scent too, the aromatherapy products. Sassafras oil, maybe.
One of the agents apologized, asked me to hold still, and then I heard scissors and saw my hair fall to the floor. Another put foundation on my face and handed me a lipstick and a mirror. Maizie’s makeup. Maizie’s haircut. On my way outside, I grabbed an apron from a peg.
Agents flanked me and we hurried down the path toward the house, the butter-yellow traditional American with white trim. The porch was lit up with the tiny icicle lights. We passed other people, one wearing a headset, others on cell phones, the agents on either side of me protective, as if I were the most important person in the world, which in their world, at this moment, I was. We walked faster and faster, toward the security gate, and it began to sink in, what I was doing. I pushed the thought aside. A man ahead of us opened the electronic gate.
The film was still shooting on Moon Canyon, a generator powering big lights that illuminated the street. Equipment trucks, trailers, and cars were everywhere, street, pavement, and grass, blocking one another. The crew milled around, a small army of cell phones and headsets. I had an impression of sailors on a ship, battening down hatches in preparation for a storm at sea. “Crossing Valley Vista,” an agent said into a radio. “Kermit in place.”
Simon stood by a tree, near the koi pond. He wore a headset too, head bowed in concentration, listening. He looked up and stared at me, his face hard. As when we’d first met.
“No,” he said to his headset. “If there’s a password and you can’t come up with it, we pull her out.” He signaled to an agent near me. “Kill half the lights.”