Real bad guys would expect someone like Cricket to go to the police. Real bad guys would have killed Cricket. Real bad guys didn't give a shit about people like Eddie Champagne, because a real bad guy would know a guy as sloppy and stupid as I was beginning to see Eddie was could never be someone like Dixon Woods. Dixon Woods wasn't stupid. Dixon Woods wasn't sloppy. Dixon Woods might be a bad guy, he might be a good guy, but what he wasn't was a fool.
Tomorrow, I'd see if I could work around that.
"Too bad," Fiona said. She'd set up a workstation in Cricket's garage and was now running a length of rubber tubing outside to a hose spigot. "Clamp this," she said when she returned and handed me one end of the tube and what looked like a jam jar. She moved around behind me, her hand sliding across my back, and stood beside me again, and started measuring out the sodium bisulfate. She worked delicately with the compound, cutting and sizing while I fixed together a series of tubes and ad hoc beakers, using mostly things we'd cleaned out of Cricket's cabinets and refrigerator.
The problem with using things like peanut butter and jelly jars instead of sanitized lab equipment is that you can never be sure what's been left behind. A little peanut oil can mean a lot of fire. And when you're making tear gas, a lot of fire is not, patently, a good thing.
"Careful," I said. Fiona was about to mix the sodium bisulfate with glycerin soap-not the perfect recipe for tear gas, but one that will do in a pinch, or when you can't find a craft store that has the purest stuff. Fortunately, Cricket had plenty of very good soap, and very good soap is what you need if you want to make tear gas in the garage of your mansion.
"Careful, yourself," Fiona said. "You should stand back. I'm going to heat this now."
I moved closer to her.
A weird thing happens between Fiona and me when we make weapons.
It's not sexual in the physical sense, but it certainly is mentally. There is a quality of excitement when you know you're working on something lethal with someone who understands what lethal really means. It's more than shared experience, of course, because if it were, I'd find Sam equally attractive. You spend your life feinting from things that can hurt you or you dive headlong, there is no middle ground, and so when you find someone who shares a chemical disposition toward immersion… and if she happens to casually roll against you in ways that make you think of the sex you imagined before you ever had sex… even when you're wearing gas masks, which, at the moment, we were… well, you keep them in your life, even if it's ultimately bad for your health.
"If we are both permanently disfigured," I said, "we'll still have each other."
"Enticing," Fiona said and then she mixed the sodium bisulfate and soap together without incident. We spent the next several minutes hip to hip, finger to finger, breath to breath (albeit in gas masks), capturing gas into rubber-stopped glass vials.
It was the best date I'd been on in a long, long time.
When we were done, we washed off using the hose on the side of the yard so we wouldn't bring any residual chemicals into the house. Even I couldn't disregard how bizarre things sometimes were between us.
"What are you smiling about?" Fi asked.
"This," I said. "You and me. Giving each other a hose shower after making tear gas."
"It's not the strangest thing."
"No," I said. "No, it's not."
"It could be a lot worse, Michael. You could be searching for women on the Internet."
"That would be worse." We hadn't heard from Eddie through Fiona's profile yet, but I had a feeling today would be the day. Call it intuition. Call it knowing that Eddie Champagne was about to have a cash-flow problem. Call it by any name you want, but what's great about bullies, even weak ones, is mat they are predictable, and, if you know what vou're doing, you can plan for things they don't even know they're about to think.
I turned off the hose and Fi and I toweled off using a few of Cricket's guest towels, which must have had an insanely high thread count, since even Fi sort of paused and rubbed it along her cheek.
"You could be in a situation like Cricket's," X said.
"Oh, that wouldn't be so bad," she said. "I could get used to this house. These towels. A Bentley or two. I might even take up badminton."
"A couple weeks in a place like this, you'd be robbing banks again."
"You don't know, Michael. I might really enjoy hitting the shuttlecock." I laughed. It felt pretty good. Of course, I'd have to give up meaningful moments like this with you."
"I don't know, Fi. You're right about that," I said, 'though I might be inclined to look you up online eventually, see if you were interested in former spies looking for a good home."
"It wouldn't be a good home," Fiona said. She was close to me now, as close as we'd been making the tear gas. "You'd be gone before I would be."
"Maybe."
"And there'd always be someone like Natalya for you to worry about."
"Who said I was worried?"
Fiona patted my chest and then left her hand there, her fingers pressing and releasing. "You're human, Michael, even if you swear you're not."
"Fi," I said.
"I know. I know. I saw the movie, too."
"Which one was that?"
"Bad man. Bad woman. Bad things happen and then the woman inevitably is left to pine away for her dark man. And then he comes back, someone smirks and it's a happy ending. Always so stupid. You'd think one day someone would call for a little authenticity. All the endings I've been part of have been unhappy, if you want the truth, if it involves bad men and bad women."
Fiona was smiling now, aware of her moment, probably thinking, Yeah, now I've got Michael ponder ing how mundane we've made these things. They even make movies about it…
"What is that, The Maltese Falcon?"
Smile still there, but a little angry now. These games we play, they're fun. They are. But at base, she's a woman, I'm a man and we're always about one reflex away from platonic going erotic. "The point is, Michael, I already know the why. It doesn't change things, because here we are."
"Don't tell me it was a Bond film. Those things make me crazy." Above us, a plane was making its descent into Miami, the airport only a few miles away from Fisher Island, but another world away in every other sense. The buzzing of the engine caught Fiona's attention, too, and for a moment we both just watched the plane as it banked slightly to the east to start its circle down. When it was gone from overhead, I looked down at Fiona. She was beautiful. Is beautiful. And yet. And yet. "You ever wonder, Fi, about what else is out there for you."
"I've told you before, Michael, I know what's out mere. It's not compelling."
"This is? Whatever we have here?"
"It's better."
"Maybe you'll die because it was better. That ever occur to you?"
"You wouldn't let that happen, now, would you, Michael?"
I wanted to kiss her. I really did.
"No, I suppose I wouldn't. Aren't you lucky. Did I tell you Natalya called you my pit bull?"
"Failed to mention that."
"I thought you'd like that," I said.
I had a really good sense Fiona wanted to kiss me, too. It was the way she was pressing herself into me, theway I was intimately aware of the word pelvis.
"She call me any other names?"
"Not that I recall," I said.
Things were moving at a pace I wasn't entirely comfortable with, but which were nonetheless acquiring their own velocity. I put a hand on Fiona's clavicle and gently pushed her backward. "You need to get out of here," I said. I checked my watch. It was four thirty. I wanted Fiona back at my mother's, just in a case any more Communists showed up. Sam and Nate needed to leave me and Cricket alone, at least for a little while.
"Of course I do," she said, that smile back again. She finally stepped away from me, though I could still feel her fingers on my chest, other parts of her on other parts of me. "That's what makes it compelling, Michael. You're the only man who can push a woman away even when you know it would be a good time."