Page 3 of Undercover
I’d probably spent more time in bland hotel rooms like that one than in my own Albany apartment over the last three years, and I didn’t really care most of the time—one place to do paperwork and sleep alone was basically the same as the next. That morning it’d felt duller and emptier than usual. I’d gotten coffee and a blueberry muffin from the coffeeshop down the block from the hotel and spent a chunk of the day going through the BPD’s files on local drug dealers…and then I couldn’t take it anymore, especially since I’d been in fucking Burlington long enough that the girl behind the counter at the café recognized me and started pouring my coffee before I got to the front of the line.
Yep. Edge-of-your-seat stuff right there.
So I deserved a break, and Vino and Veritas was the only place within range of the hotel I could think of to go to, even though I’d been in there too often already, including the day before. Everything else had ‘artisanal’ somewhere in the window, or ‘craft’ in the store name. Ugh.
Vino and Veritas did have a lot of rainbows in the window, and a big neon sign with the name—thankfully not lit up during the day. But at least the bookstore half of it stayed quiet even when the marketplace along the street outside started to get busy.
Sure, customers went in and out pretty regularly. But they were soft-spoken customers, and they had the good taste to be buying books instead of possibly fentanyl-tainted yoga mats. Even the kids playing around in the children’s section didn’t bother me. Kids who liked books were maybe one of the three classes of human beings I could tolerate, right up there with old ladies who didn’t take anyone’s bullshit and coffeeshop employees who didn’t talk too much.
The guy behind the counter looked up as I came in, his mouth dropping open for a second, and an odd look on his face.
Hot, but not my type, and if I was his, still nope.
I tried to bypass the counter, making a circle and heading for the science fiction section this time, just for a change of pace, but a quick, “Excuse me!” forced me to turn around.
Well, shit. Maybe he wanted to get on my case about coming in all the time and not buying anything. A vague, fuzzy sense of guilt assailed me. And then I wondered if he meant to accuse me of shoplifting. That’d be ironic.
“Yeah?” I didn’t sound all that friendly, but then again, when did I sound friendly?
When had I stopped beingableto sound friendly? At some point growling at people had become a reflex, as automatic as avoiding them in the first place if I possibly could.
Shit. Maybe I should work on that.
“Um,” the guy said. “So this is kind of weird, but…” He trailed off, brushing his hand over the back of his head and shifting awkwardly.
The gesture showed off his bulging left bicep. Still not my type, but damn. Worth a look.
“Okay?”
“We get a lot of kind of odd people in here,” he said after a pause. “You know. Eccentric.”
Was he building up to telling me to get the hell out? I’d been called worse than eccentric, but I hated it when people beat around the bush.
“I can leave.”
I’d already turned back toward the door when he said, “No, no, not asking you to leave! Just, yeah. So another customer bought you some books.” He reached under the counter and pulled out a paper Vino and Veritas bag with a sticky note on it. He whisked the note off and tossed it into the trash can behind him, but not before I caught what it said: True Crime Guy.
I hid a wince. Yeah, I’d been in Burlington long enough to have not just a standing coffee order, but a fuckingnickname.
And someone had been watching me. I’d noticed several regulars checking me out, including a couple of women, a man in his late thirties who always came in with a little girl, and a twenty-something guy with crazy hair.
But this was different.
It sent a little frisson down my spine. Being watched might not be in most people’s comfort zones, but for an FBI agent on an active case it could mean a lot worse than that.
I stared down at the bag. “Who bought this stuff?” This stuff, I saw as the clerk pulled the books out, comprised five different hardbacks from the true crime section. Three of them I’d already flipped through, but the other two I hadn’t gotten to yet.
One of them was about El Chapo, and the other about Pablo Escobar.
And my hackles went up so high you could probably see them from space. Okay, so someone had…what, made me? Or…I couldn’t even think of a plausible alternative offhand. If I’d been seen watching one of the yoga studios, buying me books about drug kingpins seemed like the stupidest, weirdest possible way to let me know. Did someone think I’d been watching the yoga studios because I wanted to buy drugs? And they were, what, encouraging me?
Bursting into incredulous laughter felt like it might be a little socially incompetent, but I came close.
“I can’t tell you,” the clerk said, sounding a little strained. “I mean, he wanted to be anonymous.”
I bet he fucking did. If I did something that bizarre, I’d want to be anonymous too.
And I wished the clerk would stop touching the fucking books, because just to be on the safe side, I needed to get prints off of them.
