Generation of Liars (30 page)

“I’ll make note of that.” I could
hear Skip scribbling the information down frantically on the other end of the
line.

“I expect to hear from you when you
find something worthwhile on Heather.”

I thought I heard Motley’s office
door creak open. I dropped the phone and slid down from the stool. I stepped
out of the kitchen and padded down the airy marble hallway towards Motley’s
office. From the hallway, I saw that the door was open a crack. The
reverberation of Motley’s voice throughout the hallway made it obvious that he
was still talking to someone. As I crept to the door, I rationalized that it
wasn’t eavesdropping if the door was cracked. A paid liar’s situational ethics
are dodgy.

My ear was plastered to the door. I
was hearing Motley agree along to something. He was being quite enthusiastic to
whatever was being said on the other end of the line as he hummed out
affirmative growls. “I’m glad to hear that the president is so open to the
negotiation.” His voice seemed to muffle after that, and I strained my ear
against the door just in time to hear him say in a confirming voice, “As I
said, Mr. Secretary, I will happily turn over the disk, for full exoneration
and remission of my prison sentence.” There was another pause while the person
on the other end got in some words. “And I will have full immunity, correct?
And a new Social Security number, of course?”

My dry lips opened and my jaw
dropped into a horrified silent scream. I cupped my hand to my mouth to stop
the awful hiss from escaping. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Motley was
negotiating handing over the dynamite stick in exchange for a clean slate.

On the other side of the door,
Motley finished up his phone call and pushed back his chair from his desk. I
didn’t want him to find me standing outside his door, so I shakily placed one
foot in front of the other and scampered down the hallway as fast as I could
without making a sound. I stumbled into the first room I could duck into, which
was the sunroom that hooked off of the main foyer. I folded myself onto a
lemon-yellow fainting couch. I tracked the sound of Motley’s footsteps coasting
down the hall towards me and braced myself when I heard him approaching just
beyond the archway.

“Alice.” He was watching me from
the archway. He was peeling an orange and he popped one of the slivers into his
mouth. Act casual, I told myself. Don’t claw. Don’t bite. Don’t scream. “I thought
I heard you out here.”

“Yes?” I forced a smile as my teeth
grinded inside my mouth.

 He was popping another orange
sliver into his mouth and staring down at my legs, draped over the velveteen
surface of the couch. “Are you enjoying the sun?”

“I am.”

“Well, you can enjoy it all you
want. I’m going to be leaving, and from the looks of it, I might be traveling
for a while. I insist that you stay in my house while I’m gone.”

“Stay here? At your house?”

“Enjoy yourself. Relax. Take plenty
of swims in the pool and get some rest here in the sun.”

I feigned a delighted smile as I
made the realization that he was probably never coming back. Once he turned
over the dynamite stick to the U.S. Government in exchange for total immunity
for whatever prison-worthy crime he committed in his past life, he would start
a new life. He wouldn’t have to run anymore, and he most certainly wouldn’t
need me anymore. He was starting a new life, and I was someone who knew all
about
this
life. That pushed me kicking and screaming into the liability
column, big red X’s and all. I knew the reason he was inviting me to stay in
his house was so he could save time looking for me when he sent Moonboots
McCaffery or Xerxes O’Brien to waste me. I was as good as dead already. What about
Rabbit? Did he know? Could I trust him enough to tell him? Or was his name the
one signed at the bottom of my death warrant?

I was worried I had gone too long
without speaking. I brightened my face. “Wow, Motley, thank you for your
generosity. I would love to stay here for a few days. Where are you traveling
to?”

“Stateside.” He was tonguing gunk
from the orange out between his teeth and it made him all the viler in my eyes.
“I got a real sucker congressman who’s bargaining to pay me the farm in
exchange for not blowing his cover with what his real Social Security number
reveals.”

“That sounds like a brilliant
plan.” I gave him that approving, doting smile a young girl gives to inflate
the ego of a middle-aged man just before she drops the hacksaw on his neck. I
read about the girl who invented the smile once in Sunday school, eons ago; her
name was Judith.

I collapsed backwards on the
fainting couch and let my hair dangle all around my face like a starburst.
 My eyes fluttered something whimsical. “When do you leave?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

I noted to myself that I had
exactly twenty-four hours or less to pry the dynamite stick from Motley’s
hands, dead or alive. “We should have dinner tonight,” I announced. “A victory
dinner. Before you set off for so long a time. We never had a proper
celebration for finding the dynamite stick.”

“A celebration is a fine idea. What
do you have in mind, Alice?”  

I fluttered up from the couch and
twirled around him like I was an idyllic prom queen planning my court. “Somewhere
downtown, somewhere fancy. We deserve to unwind after all the work we did.” I
lifted my hands up to his neck and began arranging his collar straight and
stared into his glass-blue eyes. “And to celebrate all the good things coming
to us in the future.”

“That would be fine,” he said,
reading my eyes from so close a distance. “I’ll call Rabbit and tell him to
meet us here. Nine sound okay?”

“Rabbit?” I resentfully repeated.
“Do you really think he needs to accompany us?”

“Of course. He is part of our team.”

“Fine. Just make sure you tell him
we’re going somewhere nice and to dress decent. A World of Warcraft T-shirt is
not exactly proper attire for a Parisian social club.”

Motley laughed and finally released
his eyes from mine. “I’ll make a note of it, Alice. I’ll be in my office if you
need me.” He treaded back to his office and closed the door again. I waited a
moment and then got up and followed so I could press my ear to the door and
hear what was going on inside.

“Alice.” A voice startled me from
behind. I spun around and saw Cleopatra. She was wearing her black wetsuit like
she had just returned from a journey on her boat, and her body was bare of all
things except for the tight suit, spiked heels, and the key tied around her neck
by a velvet string. “What were you doing just now?” she wanted to know.

“Me? I was just going to tell
Motley something regarding our dinner plans tonight, but I realized he was on
the phone, so I was fixing to leave.”

I attempted to slink by her, but
she callously put her leg out and cut me off at the shin with the weight of her
studded black high heel shoe. I tripped forward, steadying myself just in time
to avoid collapsing.

“You weren’t being nosey, were you,
Alice?” She pressed her finger, tipped with a lengthy manicured nail, to my
chin.

“Of course not.” I slid my chin
free from the painful dig of her nail. 

Her eyes went dull, like those of a
cat bored with torturing a common mouse, and she gave me a smug look before
disappearing into Motley’s office.

Chapter Twenty-seven: The Preparation

I
LEFT
MOTLEY’S house and went back to my apartment. The entire walk and train ride
consisted of anxiety and distraction. Paris blurred by me like an Impressionist
rollerball of dizzying colors and jackhammer sounds. When I got inside, my
dame-ish neighbor from across the hall was peering out from a crack in her
door. She was sipping from a porcelain oriental tea cup with painted dragons.
It reminded me of the cups my mentor, David Xad, often used to serve me his
richly-steeped black tea. I thought of him and wondered what he would think of
me at this moment? Cold shakes. Wet eyes. Fear coiled like snakes inside my
stomach. The exact opposite of the confident girl he had trained me to be on
top of the Tokyo Sky Tree. The exact opposite of our smooth motto,
Kitto
Katsu
. When I got inside my apartment I went straight to my bed and
collapsed into a series of heavy sobs.

I picked up my phone and called the
hospital and asked for Ben.

“This better be an emergency,
Alice.” He still hadn’t lightened up from his aggravation about my surprise
visit that afternoon. 

“I just wanted to let you know that
something has sprung up and I’m not coming to your place tonight.”

“Is this about what happened today
at the hospital? I told you my relationship with that woman you saw me with is
strictly professional.”

“No, Ben, it’s not about that.”

“I’m having a hard time figuring
you out. Listen, you still have the address to my apartment, so stop by and see
me whenever you’re ready to have a grown up relationship. Goodbye, Alice.”

I peeled myself off the bed and
went to the kitchen to pick up the plastic bag I had dumped on the kitchen
table after thundering through the front door. After leaving Motley’s, I had
stopped at the drugstore for hair dye. The color I chose was Sun-Kissed
Switchblade, and it was a shade of platinum blond. I brought the bag into the
bathroom and set the hair dye on the counter and turned on the sink. Washing
the pink out of my hair left every towel I owned speckled with odd pink
Rorschach patterns.

When I was done, I walked into my
bedroom with a towel wrapped around my wet hair and I pulled through the
hangers in my closet searching for the perfect dress. My hands were shaking and
my heart was racing and I had trouble focusing on anything other than the fact
Motley was in the process of double-crossing me. I plopped down on my bed and
decided that while I waited for the color to set into my hair, I would call
Skip and let him know he was right about what he had said in the bar’s bathroom
about the government trading immunity to whoever could fork over the dynamite
stick.

“Skip, here.” A train horn honked
somewhere in the distance.

“Skip, it’s Alice,” I said, furling
my legs under my body as I snugged into my bed, seeking some kind of lost
comfort inside the thread count.

“Let me guess? You’re calling to
collect on the information I promised you?”

“If you have it. But more
importantly, I wanted to let you know that the stuff you said in that bathroom
last night was right. The government did make an offer to someone, and that
someone was my boss.”

“And he accepted the offer?”

“Yes, and doing so meant spiking
the last nail into my coffin.”

“What do you mean?”

“Now that he’s made the deal, I’m
useless to him. Worse than useless, actually. I’m a liability.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re
saying?”

“He is planning to eliminate me,
Skip. That’s why I have to destroy him first.”

“You’re going to double cross your
boss and attempt to take him down? That’s a big deal for such a small girl.”

“Tell me about it. So, since
tonight is going to be risky for me, maybe you should tell me any information
you dug up about Heather now, in case you don’t hear from me again.”

“Wow, Alice, you really think
there’s a chance he’s going to
off
you?”

“The situation is hopeless.”

“You know, that sounds nothing like
the girl who bullied me in that rank bathroom last night.”

“I suppose I have lost a little bit
of my edge.”

“I mean, the girl I met, she wasn’t
the type that goes down without a fight. She was the type to go down in a blaze
of freaking glory, and confetti, and pyrotechnics. We’re talking a Friday night
at Madison Square Garden kind of blowout. If she really thought it was the end,
that girl, she would be plotting to go out with a bang loud enough to rock
China.”

I stiffened up against the soft
tide of my down comforter and lumpy pillows covering the bed. “You’re right. I
guess I’ve let myself get so hopeless over the situation that my sense of power
has gotten a bit anemic.”

“Well, with due regard, this is a
pretty heavy situation.”

“It feels pretty heavy.” My eyes
wandered to the night table, where the piece of paper which contained my secret
was folded. “Listen, I have to backtrack to my original thought. What did you
dig up about Heather?”

“Right, the infamous Heather
Gilmore. Well, not as infamous as you led me to believe.”

“What do you mean?”

“You told me I was going to be
uncovering blood and intrigue.”

I sprang up, my knees kicking my
pillow so that it tottered to the ground. “You mean you didn’t?”

“No, not in the least. Just some
mundane local headlines. The only Heather Gilmore I could find made the local
paper a couple times this year when one of her rug rats won a toddler spelling
bee.”

“Rug rats?”

“As in, children.”

“No, that can’t be the person I’m
looking for. The person I’m looking for would have made the news for a very
different reason. Plus, there’s no way she would have children. Did you find anything
else?”

“Yeah, a couple other tidbits, but
they are mostly spelling bee related.”

“Were any of the points you pulled
up related to a death?”

“No, Alice, no mention of a death.”

I sunk my head back onto my pillow.
“Then it must be a different person named Heather Gilmore. The Heather Gilmore
I’m looking for is definitely dead.”

“What I’ve got here, it’s mostly
suburban housewife news. The Heather Gilmore I’m pulling up has a boring enough
life, that between you and me, she might as well be dead. Are you sure you
don’t want to hear the rest? Like I said, its local stuff, mostly.”