Page 2 of Undercover
Right.
“Eh,” the clerk said, shrugging his broad shoulders. “We get weirder. This all for you?”
“Does he ever buy anything?” I asked desperately, ignoring the clear hint to pay and let him get back to work, since there wasn’t anyone behind me in line. Should I be asking all these questions about another customer? Was I about to be put into thewe get weirdercategory? Realistically, I’d probably already ended up there. “I mean, he looks at the books for a long time.”
“I asked him last week if I could help him find anything else, since he didn’t seem to like our selection, and he growled something at me about not having money to throw away and left.”
A little shiver went down my spine. Mmm, growling. God, there was something so wrong with me.
And…if I could think with my brain instead of my dick for a second, hang on. There was something even more wrong with someone who spent enough time in a bookstore to be mentally nicknamed by staff and customers alike not being able to afford to buy a book now and then.
“Hang on a minute,” I said, abandoning my book and magazines and trotting over to the true crime section. I’d been watching Hot Dude so creepily closely that I knew exactly which books he’d looked at, and I pulled all three out of the shelf, adding two more that looked interesting on impulse. I carried the stack back to the counter and dumped them down. “These ones too.”
The clerk eyed me suspiciously. “For you?”
“No, for him.” At the look on his face, I added hastily, “I’m not going to follow him or anything—you know, weird.” He raised one dark eyebrow in a way that said more than words could have. “Yeah, I know, okay, but I love books. Right? You see me in here all the time.” He nodded. “And it sucks to love books as much as that guy probably does but not be able to take them home. Besides,” I said, leaning on the counter a little and summoning some of the charm IknewI had, dammit, when I wasn’t feeling so insecure, “I want to support the coolest new queer-inclusive hotspot in town. A sale’s a sale. You don’t need to tell the guy who bought these for him. Just give them to him the next time he comes in, and tell him you have a rich, eccentric customer who buys books for random other customers sometimes.”
He hesitated, but I knew I had him. The books I’d picked out for Hot Dude were going to come out to close to a hundred bucks, and I didn’t think bookstores had such a high profit margin.
Finally he sighed, shook his head, and started to ring it all up. I mentally fist-pumped, but I kept my smile normal and friendly.
If I acted any crazier, he might change his mind.
Yeah, I’d definitely upgraded myself towe get weirder.
Alec
Fucking Burlington.
FuckingVermont.
I shouldered my way through the mob of chattering, grinning, fancy-coffee-drinking idiots streaming out of the nearest yoga studio, dodging for the millionth time to keep from getting smacked in the face by someone’s goddamn yoga mat.
Fucking yoga mats.
I’d never even seen a yoga mat, at least as far as I’d noticed, until Assistant Director Kyle handed me this case.
“We think they’re bringing it in rolled up in yoga mats,” he’d said—way too seriously, in my opinion, because who the hell could take drug smugglers who used yoga mats for their product seriously?
AD Kyle, that was who.
“You’ll need to keep a low profile,” he’d continued. “Stay undercover, be casual, check out the leads you have there.” He gestured at the manila folder he’d laid on his desk. “There are two yoga studios in Burlington we suspect of doubling as fronts for small-scale heroin sales. And we need to figure out how they’re getting the product across Lake Champlain. We know it’s coming in that way, but we can’t narrow it down. Once you get a better handle on it, you can decide what kind of team you need to back you up.”
And so I’d left Albany a few weeks before, packing mostly jeans, t-shirts, and a heap of boxers, the kind of clothes a seedy guy who might hang around drug dealers would wear, and regretfully leaving most of my Fed suits—and my will to live—at home.
I felt better in a suit, sort of like I imagined medieval knights might’ve felt in their armor. My suits wouldn’t stop a bullet, or even a sword, but they didn’t require a choice when I got dressed in the morning. And they marked me for what I was: a serious guy with a serious job, someone no one would try to make small talk with. Or hit on.
Okay, to be fair, maybe no one chatted with me or hit on me because I had a—serious and manly, obviously—version of resting bitch face. Resting pissed-off face. Whatever.
I headed for the bookstore several blocks from my cookie-cutter business hotel. I’d taken to stopping in whenever I had a few minutes free. They had a great true crime section, meaning that their selection included even more ridiculous absurdity than usual. Flipping through overblown, breathless, far-fetched accounts of kidnappings and murders and investigations the authors had nothing to do with was always good for a laugh.
Even funnier, not a single one of those books told its readers how much of law enforcement involved sitting around drinking shitty coffee and making endless phone calls to bureaucrats demanding some file or report for the umpteenth time.
Or liaising with detectives about staking out yoga studios.
Yeah, that’d really have them on the edges of their seats.
And my hotel room didn’t offer much by way of amusement to distract me from the possibly illegal yoga mats. Just my case files, a TV that I didn’t watch, and a comfortable king-sized bed to sleep in alone. A couple of framed prints, one of a sailboat on Lake Champlain and the other of Vermont’s fall foliage. A window with a view of a nice old church and a glimmer of the lake. A desk and a single chair.
