“There’s no way I can tell her I’m going to Mexico. She’ll flip her lid!”
“Here, gimme.”
Mimi plucked the phone out of my hand.
“Mimi! Stop!” I yelped and strained against my seatbelt to try and grab my phone back. Mimi leaned over to the window and answered it.
“Hello?” She held up her hand to shush me. I shushed, if only to get one of her hands back on the steering wheel.
“Hi Mrs. Quoyle. No, this is Mimi. One of Jessica’s roommates?”
I was dying inside, gripping my knees so that I wouldn’t be tempted to open the door and throw myself into traffic. My mom would kill me if she knew I was going on a trip and I hadn’t told her about it. Mimi grinned at me, driving with her fingernails tapping on the wheel.
“Yes, I understand. She’s very busy with her studies and she asked me to take her cell phone away so that she wouldn’t be distracted. If it’s an emergency, I can tell her—”
In the back, April and James were cracking up with stifled laughter. I glared back at them.
“No? Okay. Would you like me to tell her to call you back? She’s studying for the rest of the day, but she should be back from the library before midnight.”
April snorted, and James smacked her on the shoulder to shut her up.
“Great. Thanks, Mrs. Quoyle!”
Mimi hung up the phone and tossed it back into my lap.
“What did she say?” I said.
“She said that she’s very proud of you for avoiding distractions while you study,” Mimi said, a mock serious look on her face.
“You lied to her,” I said, staring down at the phone.
“Well, duh.”
“You… you lied to her.” I had to admit that I had never before considered lying to my mom.
“What did you want me to do, tell her we were going to Tijuana to slam down as many margaritas as we could?”
“I… no… but what if something happens? She’ll go crazy if she doesn’t know where I am!”
In the back, April was hooting laughter.
“Where you are?” Mimi said. “You’re in the library. You’re studying for your tests. Just like you wanted to be. Or did you want me to call her back and tell her you’re busy reading Tied up by the Rogue Duke?” She had an evil glint in her eye, and I didn’t doubt for a second she would do it.
“No! But—”
“Come on, Jess,” April said. “We’ll be back in a couple of days. You can call her tomorrow if you really want to.”
“Okay,” I said, sighing and staring down at my phone. It felt like I was doing something very, very wrong. But then again, that was supposed to be half the fun.
Right?
Chapter Three
Vale
I walked into the Los Angeles airport behind a young guy in a suit. He looked more nervous than Dan always looked when we talked about killing people. I wondered if Ten had told him about me.
The suit led me through the airport and past one of the security doors into a small office. There were two chairs and a dingy desk.
This is where Ten would meet me? Figures.
“Wait here,” the nervous guy said. He left me in the office and locked the door behind me.
“I hate waiting,” I said to nobody in particular. I took a few paces back and forth before the walls of the office grew boring. God, Ten was something else. Making me come here in the middle of brunch to wait for his sorry ass? This had better be a good mission.
I sat down in the chair and fished into my pocket. Half a joint left. I lit up just as I heard the door opening behind me. Ten walked in, grimacing at the cloud of smoke I blew toward the ceiling.
“Is that pot?” Ten asked.
“Might be.”
Ten sat behind the desk. He’d gotten stronger since the last time I’d seen him, and he’d cut his unruly mop of hair. Maybe he’d met a girl.
“Thanks for bringing that in here,” he said.
“No problem.”
“You know, some of us get randomly drug tested at our jobs.”
“Yeah, well, sorry you have a shitty job,” I said, taking another drag. The buzz was light. “You shouldn’t have made me wait.”
Ten frowned, as if deciding whether or not to go after me on this, and then decided it wasn’t worth it. He shoved a manila folder across the desk. I picked it up.
“This your new boyfriend?” I asked. The mug shot staring out at me from the file was decidedly one of the ugliest faces I’d ever seen. A bald Mexican dude, maybe forty years old, with a nasty scar running down the left side of his face and a thick black mustache like a bushy caterpillar across his upper lip.
“He’s your new boyfriend,” Ten said.