Page 63 of Two is a Pattern

“I know.” Annie was genuinely sorry. She was disappointed to have to cut the trip short. “It’s a long drive, and Helen wants to get home to her kids. Now you can have real family time.”

“You are family,” Lori reassured her.

“You and me, maybe,” she said. “Me and Betty?”

Lori snorted. “Consider yourself lucky.”

Annie smiled. “Thank you for having me. Thank you for taking us in last minute.”

“Anytime,” Lori said. “Next time, we’ll come to you.”

Lori made them both travel mugs of coffee to go, telling them she’d get them back when she came to visit, then sent them on their way. She promised to pass along their goodbyes.

“What do you think they’ll ask you to do?” Helen asked after they had pulled away. There was little traffic on the freeway. Not surprising, given the hour, given it was the day after Thanksgiving.

“Hard to say,” Annie said. “Last time they had me translating tapes. The time before that, it was an interrogation that I helped exactly zero with. I honestly never feel like I help all that much. If they called me at the beginning of an investigation, if I could see everything happen in real time, then maybe I could be more useful. But I always come in at the end, after everything has already been screwed up, and they expect me to fix it.”

Helen scoffed. “Of course.”

“At best, I can tell them where they went wrong. Sometimes I get them confirmation of something they already expected. Or I might be the only one around who speaks Czech that day.”

“You speak Czech?”

“Some,” Annie said. “Anyway, if it looks like it’s going take forever, you should head home, and I can catch a flight or rent a car.”

“I’m not leaving you to the wolves!”

Annie chuckled, and Helen shot her a quizzical look.

To her own knowledge, Annie had killed five people, albeit indirectly. Dasha and little Yeva and the husband too, probably. He could still be alive somewhere, a prisoner of some civil war, but that was at least as bad as dying, if not worse. Wherever he was, two agents had died looking for him.

But five seemed low to Annie. She was smart enough to know that the information she extracted didn’t improve foreign infrastructure or provide school lunches to hungry children or medical aid to countries whose citizens were dying of malaria. No, the information she was good at retrieving caused people to die. Sometimes foreign people, sometimes disloyal Americans. Annie was never responsible for worrying about theconsequences, only the nuggets of truth that she panned out from the silt of lies.

Helen wouldn’t be leaving her to the wolves. Annie was the wolf.

* * *

It was a drug bust, a crack cocaine ring. The FBI had partnered with the DEA for the operation, and they called Annie in to triage the interrogations. Each high-level player in the ring had to be ranked and processed and interviewed to get the most useful information out of them. While agents were still rounding everyone up, Annie was in with the thug who’d flipped, getting a sense of who might actually have the information they needed to make an airtight case.

She had to pitch a fit about allowing Helen to stay with her. “She’s the LAPD officer in charge of making sure no one else gets slapped with an Internal Affairs audit,” Annie had said as Helen quickly dug her badge out of her purse. “If you’re working with the DEA and the locals, do you really think it’s going to hurt anything to have someone watching our backs too? Keeping everything aboveboard? You want some cop to punch a drug dealer in the face and then everyone gets to walk free because you didn’t let one out-of-jurisdiction officer cross your drawbridge?”

They had to wait nearly forty-five minutes while calls were made until they were finally given access to badges. While they waited, Helen leaned over to say, “I’m not exactly in charge—”

“Hush,” Annie said. “Close enough.”

“She’s your responsibility, Weaver,” the special agent warned with a scowl as they clipped on their badges. Annie was not threatened in the slightest.

In the elevator on the way up to the interrogation floor, Helen stared at her in awe. “You talk to these guys like…”

“Like I’m not a tiny girl?” Annie finished. “Yeah, I know. It goes a little better when I’m not wearing a pink sweater.”

“Does it?” Helen asked. She looked unconvinced.

Annie shrugged. “Nobody ever likes me, and it’s unrealistic to expect that they will. Once you let that go, everything else gets easier.”

Helen looked at her with admiration and something else. Something that made Annie’s spine tingle.

“I’m the first woman you’ve ever slept with, aren’t I?” Annie asked. The words seemed to fly out on their own, and she knew the answer before she even finished the question.

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