Chapter 27
My confident feelings all ebb away as soon as I’m alone in my apartment, incapable of sleep, three hot poodles shoving me
out of my own bed.
What if the calendar forging thing doesn’t work? What if I get on Merle’s list too? Is Benny okay? Benny is definitely not
okay. And it’s all my fault.
I called three different police stations (using an alias and disguising my voice, obviously), and every time, I got put on
hold indefinitely or left voicemails for cops who were on vacation for the next two weeks.
The Cook County sheriff’s online “inmate locator service” turned up nothing.
I desperately hope Tond got ahold of someone, but he’s got botulism on the brain, and I forgot to get his phone number, which
is like Detective 101. I doubt Rodney O’Malley has a video called Make Sure You Can Get Ahold of People. That’s just a given.
Every hour, I come up with worse scenarios of what is happening to Benny. By 3 a.m., I’m at full-on medieval torture.
Get a grip, I tell myself. Don’t be like Tond. But somehow, knowing I shouldn’t spiral isn’t actually keeping me from spiraling. What the hell, brain?
When I do finally doze off, I wake up thirty minutes before my alarm goes off, sweaty and confused from a nightmare about
Benny being tortured by the poodles, who were secretly cops this whole time? I lie in bed and try to analyze that for a while, and by the time my alarm goes off, I’m somehow both exhausted and jittery, which is a very bad combo for a crossing
guard.
I vaguely remember a post Hannah forwarded me once about how cold plunges are better than coffee, so I turn on a freezing cold shower,
hop in, scream so loud the dogs start howling, and then immediately stumble back out. They swarm my legs, leaving dog residue
all over me, so okay—I may not be clean or smell any better, but it’s true, I am awake and laser-focused.
I clamp a leash on each poodle and give myself a quick pep talk; I’ll do one hour of staying awake enough to keep kids alive,
a quick hop over to the alderman’s office to keep him from murdering Tond, and then—nap.
Classic morning routine.
I’m hustling down the sidewalk, trying to untangle my neon vest, walk the dogs, and clock in on my phone at the same time,
when I hear cheering and clapping coming from my corner.
I glance up and my steps get slower as my brain struggles to process what I’m seeing.
One Chicago Bears beach umbrella.
Two orange-and-blue-striped lawn chairs.
Three thousand percent of my recommended daily humiliation allowance.
“Mom? Dad? But . . . Why?”
My mom takes off her sunglasses and waves hugely, like I haven’t already seen her. “We wanted to support you at your new job!
Save those kids!”
“And we brought mimosas!” Dad reaches into a cooler I hadn’t noticed before and pulls out a travel cup that reads Baby’s Little Baby on it. He offers it to me. “Want one?”
“Honey, why do you have three dogs?” Mom asks.
“Fresh-squeezed orange juice!” Dad says, shaking the cup at me.
“They’re so fancy!” Mom says, reaching out to pet Louis, who is now yanking at my arm to get close to her.
“You can’t be on this lawn!” I squawk.
“Oh, it’s okay, sweetie,” Mom says, taking the leashes from my hand. The dogs, of course, sit politely next to her. “We checked
with the owner, Mr. Gonsalves, and he doesn’t mind at all; also did you know his niece is married to that boy you went to
preschool with—what was his name again?”
“Kevin,” Dad says, sipping mimosa from a straw.
“You remember Kevin from preschool, don’t you, Mo? I’m sure Mr. Gonsalves could tell him to come by and say hi.”
The cold plunge is no longer working.
I look up to see if maybe there’ll be a freak storm, during which I could be struck by lightning or maybe sucked up into a
tornado.
The absolutely cloudless blue sky mocks me.
“So how do you usually stand?” my dad asks, peeling himself from the chair and taking a weird squat-stance, holding his mimosa
cup like a stop sign. “Like this?”
Okay, I guess this is happening.
I pull on my neon vest, unable to care that it’s still tangled.
“You won’t even know we’re here,” my mom assures me, patting Louis, who I swear is giving me a smug smile.
The kids and parents start arriving, and I do my best to ignore my own parents. It gets harder when the mimosas take hold and they cheer each time I hold up the stop sign.
“Watch out!” cries a third grader as I step out in front of a car, refusing to hold up the sign. At this time, I prefer to
be flattened than humiliated.
The kid tugs on my sleeve. “Want me to help you across?” Then, as the sidewalks fill up and I rush from one intersection to
the other, my parents whip out Dad’s custom foam fingers that say Mo is #1 and wave them in the air. “You got this!” yells my dad.
“You’re so lucky to have supportive parents,” one of the PTA members says to me.
“I don’t know those people,” I say.
She hurries off.
I, meanwhile, zone out in the intersection for another second until a car honks. “Sorry, sorry,” I mutter as I head back to
the corner.
Not my best work. Certainly not #1 foam-finger-level work, but in my defense, no one has gotten flattened and no one has fallen
into the sinkhole, which is currently at least a foot wider than the metal plate covering it. I make a mental note to call
311 and ask for a second metal plate.
If I survive this shift, anyway.
I see the bulging duffel bag that suggests Mom and Dad have even more humiliating accessories just waiting to be deployed
in my final minutes, but then fate intervenes and actually does me a solid. “Look, Mo!” Mom cries. “Davey, pour another mimosa!”
“Roger that, sweetcheeks,” Dad slurs.
And oh my god—like Venus emerging from her clam or whatever, Hannah climbs out of a rideshare holding a cardboard tray with
two beautiful coffees.
I barely register the “sweetcheeks.”
“Need some caffeine?” Hannah asks.
Am I crying? I think I’m crying.
Hannah looks behind me, where my mom is now talking to Mr. Gonsalves through his front window about Kevin. “Why are your parents
here?” she whispers.
“I think I got cursed by a mummy and didn’t realize it,” I whisper back.
I reach for a coffee.
“So this coffee comes on one condition,” Hannah says. “That you get another coffee with me. Can we chat after your shift?”
I take a sip and I am alive all over again. Sorry, cold plunge freaks. Coffee wins over cold shower any day.
“Mmm,” I say. “This has a single pump of cinnamon syrup in it, doesn’t it? You are my hero.”
“So,” Hannah says. “Chat?”
Jean is now yanking as hard as possible on his leash to see if there’s food involved in our interaction. I let him sniff my
cup and he practically rolls his eyes before going back to snuffling at Dad’s cooler.
“You selling poodles now, Mr. Ellery?” Hannah calls.
Dad snorts. “Not scalable, too much overhead,” he says. “You know me, I keep my operations lean and mean.”
“They’re mine,” I say. Hannah’s eyes widen. “I mean, they aren’t real dogs, just temporary dogs. The dogs of a dead man, technically.”
“I’m sorry I asked,” Hannah says.
But that reminds me of my plan to make these dogs temporary. “Did you bring Eva’s green screen?” I ask.
“Oh. Right,” she says quietly. “I forgot.”
“Then I have a great idea,” I say. “I have to run an errand after my shift anyway, why don’t you swing by home and get it,
and text when you’re on your way back? Then I’m all yours. Promise.”
I hustle a few stragglers across the street, and my parents spend the last few minutes of my shift complimenting Hannah’s dress and asking about her new campaigns.
And look, I didn’t love it when they were waving foam fingers, but it’s hard not to notice how completely they’ve stopped caring about my job. It’s
so stupid, but I feel a little jealous, and Hannah is honestly being kind of rude, giving one-word answers and checking her
phone for her rideshare. Then the car shows up, Mom and Dad pack their things, I wave goodbye to everyone, and this long national
nightmare is over.
I run home with the dogs, throw on clean(ish) clothes, check my hair and pits, and grab Cran’s calendar. Time to earn that
11.5K and limit the body count in the neighborhood. And if I have to make out with Tasha to do that, well, that’s a price
I’m willing to pay.
My heart skips a beat. Easy.
I switch shirts a second time, to a black tee that shows off my clavicle. Then I think about Tasha running her lips along
my clavicle, and that makes me have to put on a little extra deodorant. I keep the dogs with me, because for whatever weird reason, they make me
feel more confident, like I have my own entourage. They don’t smell fabulous, but they’re still better than no entourage at
all.
It’s a sunny day, but it’s breezy and not too hot or humid. As we make our way down the sidewalk, I realize I’m actually feeling
optimistic about all this. Part of it might be the caffeine. And sure, I’ve made a couple missteps, some of them involving false arrest and imprisonment of an innocent man blah blah blah, but we all make mistakes. And I’m getting
closer to fixing all that and finding the truth.
When we arrive, I see Tasha through the big window, talking into the phone with a serious face, but she brightens when she sees me and waves me inside. I point at the dogs, and she nods enthusiastically, so the four of us amble in and wait for her to finish the call.
It’s still weird to me that the alderman’s office is this janky storefront with buzzy, unflattering fluorescent lights—just
one long room outfitted with those makeshift cubicle walls. It’s even weirder now that I know it’s all built on a house of
cards of bribes. A house of bribe cards? Tasha can help me workshop that. Maybe while I kiss the soft skin of her thigh.
Mo. You are here on business.
But like, theoretically, why couldn’t I be here for pleasure too? Maybe mixing business and pleasure is actually a great idea, like an Arnold Palmer or bacon on a donut. Or salty ice cream.
Now I’m horny and hungry.
I meander toward the cubicles, trying to look casual and distinctly not DTF, at least not immediately. I’m also checking to make sure Merle isn’t around. There’s a nameplate on the closed office
door in back, announcing Alderman Carey, but I figure it’s good investigative protocol to check the cubicles too.
Rodney O’Malley would be proud.
I’ve barely gotten past Tasha’s desk when I get a text from Hannah asking if I’m home yet.
Crap. Spent too long on costume changes and haven’t even begun detectiving yet.
I text her the address of the office and tell her to come here, figuring that this way, she can meet Tasha, too, which obviously
she will love.
I’ve barely put my phone back in my pocket when mop-dog Charlie comes limping through the cubicles at a precariously high
speed, making a beeline for the poodles, who start jumping and spinning.
And because they are all basically chaos muppets, one of the dogs hip-checks me into a flimsy cubicle wall, which topples over, and then acts like a huge domino and takes all the other walls down with floor-rattling
thumps.
I cringe and freeze in place, as though no one is going to notice.
Spoiler: Everyone notices.
That includes (1) Tasha, who’s spun around in her chair and got her hand over her mouth, trying not to laugh into the phone,
(2–5) the dogs, who are delighted and chase one another through the ruins like mighty, fuzzy conquerors, and (6–7) at the
back of the room, two people leaning over some documents on a table. They’re frozen, heads up, gawking at me in surprise.
I recognize one of them—it’s the little old lady from the funeral with the bratwurst in her purse . . . Leslie? Does she live
in the neighborhood? Small world. The other one I don’t recognize. She’s younger, wearing a beige pantsuit, and she shoots
me a severe look of disapproval before turning back to her paperwork.
“Sorry, don’t mind me,” I whisper and start pulling up the closest cubicle wall, but there’s nothing to attach it to, so I
just kinda stand there holding it up, trying to look casual.
Once Tasha ends her call, she joins me in setting the walls back to their original positions. “Felt like remodeling the office,
huh?”
“What can I say, I had a vision.”
“Is your face normally that red?”
“Sunburn,” I say. “Very recent.”
“Well, don’t sweat this.” She lowers her voice. “My dedicated colleagues back there aren’t currently saving Chicago or, even
you know, working. They’re collecting evidence to dispute some fancy dog show’s decision that Charlie can’t compete.”
“I don’t know, that sounds like exactly what an alderman’s office should be doing.”
“Oh totally.” She laughs quietly. “We’re at the bleeding edge of government work.”
Bleeding edge indeed.
“What’s a dog show even like?” I whisper, trying to picture it as we lift another cubicle panel together. “Like a beauty contest?
Do they all have talents? Because Charlie probably kills with his impression of a pile of rope.”
Tasha shakes her head. “I’ve never been. But I think if he had his druthers, Charlie would love to retire. The old guy’s got
gas, hearing problems, arthritis—”
I laugh. Tasha doesn’t.
“Oh, sorry,” I say. “But you did just use the word ‘druthers.’ Should I be sympathetic? Do dogs actually get arthritis?”
“The fancier they are, the fancier their problems. And Charlie is a very fancy dog,” Tasha adds with a shrug, and then she
glances at her phone. “In fact, it’s almost time for his shot, if you want a free lesson from Val. We’re on the bleeding edge
of dog arthritis treatment too, lucky us.”
I shudder. “Thanks, but I don’t really do needles. Keep the outside on the outside and the inside on the inside, I always
say.”
“That’s a reasonable policy. And policy is my specialty.”
She’s doing that irresistible government flirting again. Why is it so hot? I step a little closer to her. “I’d say you have a couple of specialties.”
“Tasha?” calls a deep voice, and I jump.
“Jumpy much?” she teases. “That’s just Merle.”
“He’s here?” I’m instantly covered in goose bumps.
“Don’t leave yet, I’ll be right back,” she says as she walks away. “I’m going to see what he wants.”
It’s all I can do to not pull her back toward me, to keep her here, and safe. Because I have a pretty good idea of what he
wants. And what he’s willing to do to get it.
While Tasha disappears into Merle’s office in back, I go over to her desk, where all four dogs are cuddled up like nothing bad has ever happened. I find a spray bottle sitting next to her bedraggled plant and give myself a spritz right in the face, since I’m all out of coffee.
I’m here to find proof that Merle’s a murderer. I didn’t plan on him being here while I did it. But that’s not going to stop
me.
Flirting time is officially over.