“You mean indisputable.”
Valeria just rolled her eyes. She was closer to my mom’s age than mine, bitter as an unripe lemon, a twice-divorced, slender Latina who’d come to the attention of Demelza’s buddies in black ops when she was working on her PhD study into enzymatic cleaners. Funding was apparently a problem, so a deal had been made, and after Dr. Valeria graduated, she’d taken a position with the Cleaners. Which didn’t sound like the most glamorous job in the world, but I’d seen how much she got paid, and it was plenty, plus they gave her a state-of-the-art lab to tinker in when she wasn’t busy fixing other people’s messes.
She’d shown up four hours after the doc, driving a cargo van with the name of a fake catering company on the side, one colleague riding shotgun and two more in the back. We needed to be careful about who was seen coming and going from the property. Thankfully, most of the seasonal workers had wrapped up for the winter, but there were six permanent employees rostered to work today, and two of them were still faffing around in the winery.
Teo had knocked on the back door ten minutes after the bitch bled out, but I’d heard him whistling as he walked along the terrace and shoved Nolan down behind the kitchen island. Of course, I couldn’t answer the door either, not with a cut across my face and arterial blood sprayed across my clothing, so I’d had to borrow Nolan’s phone and call the man, giggling as I pretended Nolan was upstairs running a bubble bath I wasn’t supposed to know about. When he asked where to put the delivery of barriques that had just arrived, I’d first had to ask what the hell a barrique was—a small barrel, apparently—and then I’d told him to stack everything in the winery and we’d deal with it later. Not tonight, because Nolan and I were hosting an impromptu dinner party, but tomorrow morning.
Smart thinking, huh?
The doctor was a regular, well aware of the shenanigans of the various point teams, so he’d parked close to the house and carried his medical kit in an extra-large cake box. After dosing Nolan with a little something-something and pronouncing Marielle-slash-Rayna “dead as a dodo,” he’d closed my cuts with medical glue and given me a tetanus shot. I wasn’t sure I needed the tetanus shot, and he seemed to enjoy it a little too much.
Veterinary medicine was technically beyond his remit, but he had ketamine on hand, so after a little cajoling, he’d looked up the correct dose for a dog Juno’s size and cleaned up the gash the scissors had left in her side. We’d had to shave a patch of her fur, but it was long enough and shaggy enough that the damage wasn’t obvious from a quick glance.
Jez and Barbie were on their way here too, somewhere in the skies above Nevada or possibly California. I’d only have to hold it together for another thirty minutes or so before I could go puke into the toilet. The sight of torn flesh was bad enough on a computer screen without having to experience it in person, and the smell… That metallic taste was stuck at the back of my throat, no matter how many mints I sucked on.
“Nolan’s an old friend,” I told Valeria. “Everything’s kind of fuzzy on account of I was being strangled, but I remember him running in, and I guess he just grabbed the first available weapon.”
“It’s a nice old paper knife,” Valeria’s colleague Henson said. He used to clean offices before he switched to a more lucrative career, and he’d told me the dead were much easier to work with than the living. “The handle looks like ivory. That right?”
“How should I know?”
“You want to keep it?”
“I guess it might have sentimental value. Could be an heirloom or something.”
“I’ll give it a deep clean.”
“This floor is going to be a nightmare,” Valeria bitched, as usual. “Next time your ‘friend’ decides to murder someone, try to have him do it on tile or linoleum.”
“It was hardly murder.” I pointed at my patchwork face. “Hello? Self-defence.”
“Whatever. It wasn’t a sanctioned op.”
“Well, I have to get some perks in return for saving the world and a bunch of politicians’ asses on a regular basis. I should go check on Nolan.”
The doc had offered to stay with him. I almost wished he hadn’t because he’d also helped himself to my box of macarons, and he was washing them down with Diet Coke like a man who’d lost his last taste bud. I left Valeria grouching about polished hardwood, but I’d only made it as far as the kitchen when I heard the sound of rotor blades. A helicopter appeared over the ridge, and it wasn’t long before it settled in the mown pasture beside the chicken house. The chickens scattered as usual, dumb birds. How long until they learned helos weren’t a threat?
Jez and Barbie jumped out of the back, leaving Storm to shut off the engines. Marcel had come along for the ride too. He’d stay away from the house because he hated blood as much as I did, but I had a feeling we’d need his help later, which was why I’d asked Jez to bring him. Barbie greeted me with a hug because she was one of those touchy-feely people when she wasn’t sitting in a sniper’s nest somewhere, and Jez made a “yikes” face.
“Damn, you’re a mess,” she said.
Barbie lifted my hair for a better look. “I did not have ‘Echo murders an interior designer’ on this month’s point team bingo card.”
“I did not murder an interior designer. Nolan accidentally nicked her carotid while she was trying to strangle me.”
“‘Accidentally.’” She used little finger quotes.
“Yes, accidentally.”
“To be fair, Nolan wouldn’t even kill a mouse when we lived together,” Jez told her. “He made us get those humane traps, and every time we caught a critter, he’d dump it in the forest a mile away so it could become bobcat prey.”
“I guess it’s the thought that counts.”
Remind me again why I invited them? “Look, the Marielle thing wasn’t his fault. He’s really cut up about it.”
Jez snorted. “From what I heard, he’s the only one who isn’t cut up.”
“Oh, ha-ha.”
