Trust Me, I'm Trouble Read online

  I change the clip and hand her the gun. She pulls the slide back to check the chamber. In one smooth movement, she aims and shoots the target dead center. She waits a breath and shoots another. Then another. The hole in the center of the target widens to an oval.

  “Control is everything,” she says. Her ice-blue eyes are set at serious, but then they always are. I’ve seen her laugh maybe three or four times in the eight months I’ve known her. Whatever demons she’s carrying must weigh as much as the cathedrals she has etched into her skin. And I know a thing or two about carrying demons.

  I see the moment her thoughts shift from guns to something else. I don’t know what they shift to, but her expression turns bleak. She’s about to say something when Steve bursts through the door, minus headphones and safety glasses. His gaze falls on us like he’s a smoke alarm and we’re on fire.

  “You’d better get out here,” he says.

  “Ooo, yikes—that’s going to take a while to buff out,” Murphy says as he joins me on the sidewalk. Not-Bessie is cooling her tires next to the curb rather than the parking lot to give the battered Chevelle its space.

  “Thanks for that, Murph. Perhaps you could rein in your exorbitant sensitivity when you talk to Dani.” Sarcasm is my superpower.

  “At least it’s fixable,” he says, surveying the shattered windows, dented fenders, and spray-painted hood. “Who did you piss off this time?”

  “It’s probably just a fluke.” I wave with a dismissiveness I don’t feel.

  “Just a fluke?” he says, eyebrows raised behind his just-this-side-of-hipster glasses. His latest haircut is even more rakish than the one Sam had him get when he orchestrated his geek-chic makeover. Bryn might be the true grifter here—her transformation of Murphy is more absolute than mine. “I thought you didn’t believe in coincidences.”

  I did tell him that, didn’t I? Con artist rule number 489: Keep your philosophies on life to yourself. Sadly, I suck at following this rule.

  “Besides,” he continues, “flukes don’t usually come with strange messages.”

  I look over at Dani’s poor Chevelle, its smashed windshield a radiating web of milky glass. Toothy shards litter the asphalt around the tires. And worse, the words NO GAME are spray-painted in red on the hood.

  NO GAME. I haven’t the faintest idea what it means, but my list of suspects is pretty short.

  “It’s not too late for Witness Protection,” Murphy says, though he’s only saying it to irk me. He knows I hate it when anyone brings it up.

  “This isn’t Petrov. If he had this kind of reach, he’d have gone for me directly.”

  “As someone who stands next to you a lot, that’s really comforting,” he says. My sarcasm appears to be rubbing off on him.

  “It’s not meant to be comforting. It’s pragmatic. This isn’t his style. Property damage? Petrov is a razor, not a baseball bat.”

  “Nice. You should say exactly that to Agent Ramirez when he asks you about it,” Murphy says, smirking.

  I play through that conversation with Mike in my head. “Yeah, not going to happen. It’s Dani’s car, so it’s not like the police are going to call him. And if the police don’t tell him, how’s he going to find out? He flew to New York this morning, and it’ll be fixed before he gets back, so…” I let Murphy fill in the you-better-not-say-anything blanks himself.

  “That’s one way of handling it, I guess,” he says, shaking his head at me.

  Dani and Steve, the gun-desk guy, are talking with a couple of police officers near the building’s entrance. The officers are taking notes, Steve is gesticulating with his long, scrawny arms, and Dani is quietly brooding. I see the lines of tension in her body. She’s a coiled spring about to pop through the leather upholstery.

  “I’d better get her out of here,” I say.

  As I approach the group, Dani’s eyes snap to mine. She looks like a caged animal. I imagine I looked much the same when I waltzed into the MCC to try to post bail for Sam after Mike arrested him at the dance last year.

  It’s not that we criminals are afraid of cops, exactly. I certainly didn’t hold back when I railed at Mike for betraying me and arresting my partner, despite being in the heart of FBI territory. But there’s something inherently wrong about being within spitting distance of someone who’s your polar opposite. It’s like it messes with the space-time continuum. If Sam were here, he’d use some bizarre hacker analogy about mutual exclusion programming. But Sam isn’t here, so I have to settle for imagining him saying it.

  I take Dani’s arm and begin to slowly extract her from the group. “You got this, right, Steve?” I give him my most winsome smile.

  “Sure,” he says.

  “Wait, we’re not done with our questions,” says the female officer. She’s shorter than her partner, but not by much.

  I hand her my card. “I’m sorry, we need to be somewhere. But you can call me anytime, and I’ll be happy to answer any further questions.” I’m backing away, pushing Dani behind me. “I can’t tell you how much we appreciate everything you and the Des Plaines police force are doing for us. And rest assured we will continue to help in whatever way we can.”

  And before Officer Lady can get a word in edgewise, I’m shoving Dani into the front seat of the van. I climb over her, shutting the door behind me and strapping myself into the jump seat Murphy installed behind the driver’s seat.

  “Next stop, coffee,” Murphy says as he starts the engine.

  “Thanks, Murphy,” I say, inching over enough to put my hand on Dani’s arm. “Dani?”

  She’s staring out the window as we pass the Chevelle. I can’t help but feel like we’re leaving an injured friend behind in enemy territory. I’m sure Dani feels ten times worse.

  “I can fix it,” I say.

  She doesn’t answer.

  • • •

  St. Agatha’s in late May is an explosion of roses. I don’t know who the rose nut was who planted them all, but now the poor groundskeepers are forever pruning, deadheading, spraying, and staking. The ivy up the side of the administration building is bad enough, but the roses add a whole new level of angst. I mostly try to ignore them and how they smell like my mom.

  I open the door leading to the Brockman Room and pass the portraits of dead white men frowning knowingly at me as I climb the stairs. They don’t bother me anymore, though. We have an understanding. I keep playing Robin Hood, and they keep their judgment to a minimum.

  I trot up the carpeted stairs to the administration offices. I always feel a bolt of dread when my feet hit the second floor. Dean Porter’s office is up here, so it’s a conditioned response. But I’m not here to see the aggro dean of students today. Besides, at four in the afternoon, she’s usually out doing campus rounds.

  “Can I help you?” asks a freckled student assistant. A junior. Karla…something.

  “I want to apply for the New World Initiative summer internship program. It says online that I need to fill out the application through the Professional Development Office.”

  Karla taps something into her computer. “The application deadline for that was in February. Besides, both spots are taken. One of the students would have to bow out. Even then, you wouldn’t get in. There are two alternates selected, and both of them would have to pass. Plus, there’s no guarantee the program director would accept your application. The internship starts next week.”

  “May I ask who the accepted students and alternates are?”

  Karla gives me a suspicious look—I am Julep Dupree, after all—and then scrolls to the bottom of the screen. She reads me the names. I thank her for the information and walk out.

  Once in the hallway, I pull out my phone and scroll to a number in my contacts app. I press Send and wait for Kurt Peddleton to pick up.

  “Kurt, hi. It’s Julep. Remember that favor you owe me?” He answers in the affirmative, though reluctantly. I don’t know why everyone is so apprehensive about the favors I make them promise me when I do
a job for them. I’ve never asked for anything crazy. Well, except that one time. But it’s not like his eyebrows will never grow back. “Well, I need you to back out of the NWI summer internship program.” We go around about it a few times before he finally caves. They always cave eventually. They have to. I have too much dirt on them, and they know it. “You’re a gem, Kurt. Thanks.”

  Then I call Rajid Ahmed, one of the two alternates, and have an almost identical conversation with him. He finally agrees (after much whining), and we hang up.

  Sonja Warrick is another story, though. I don’t have anything on her, and I don’t know what leverage there is to use against her. So I call Bryn.

  “What is it this time?” she says when she picks up. Bryn likes me, I’m fairly sure, in spite of how I manipulated her into going with Murphy to the formal last year. In the end, she’s happy dating Murphy, so she mostly forgives me for duping her into saying yes. But on some level it still irritates her.

  “What do we have on Sonja Warrick? Anything I can use?”

  Bryn sighs heavily. “I don’t know, Julep. She’s a nerd. She does all her own work. She keeps to herself. I can’t remember the last time I even talked to her.”

  “There has to be something. Does she like someone? Does she hate someone? Everyone has a secret.”

  “Ugh, that is so…you. Why don’t you just ask her for whatever it is you want? Maybe she’ll give it to you.”

  I frown at the phone. “I don’t understand the words that you are speaking.”

  “Oh, for— I don’t have time for this.” She hangs up on me.

  I pace back and forth, thinking. And then I get an idea. I call Murphy.

  “Hey, Murph, I need you to change Sonja Warrick’s bio grade to an F.”

  “Hello to you too,” he says, but I hear him tapping his keyboard in the background, so I don’t berate him for insubordination. “Why are we changing Sonja Warrick’s bio grade to an F?”

  “I need her disqualified from the NWI internship. The powers that be will figure out the grade ‘mistake’ in a week or two, but it’ll take them long enough to verify everything that she’ll be disqualified from accepting the internship until after it’s already started.”

  “You know, there’s a note here that she’s accepted an international internship in Mumbai for the summer.”

  “Oh,” I say, sheepishly. “You can change her bio grade back, then.” Bryn was right. I could have just asked.

  I hang up with Murphy and walk back into the Professional Development Office. Karla is on the phone.

  “All right. I’ll make a note of it. Thank you for calling,” she says, and hangs up. Then turning to me, she says dryly, “Apparently, one of the students backed out of that internship you were asking about. And then mysteriously, one of the alternates backed out as well. If the other alternate backs out—” She taps a few more times on the keyboard. “Actually, it looks like that alternate is out of the running as well. Interesting.”

  I smile innocently at her. She hands me an application and a pen.

  “Thank you,” I say, and fill out the form.

  When I hand her the completed form, she takes it with an arch expression. “You’ll still have to convince the program director you deserve special consideration.”

  “Who’s the program director?”

  “Dean Porter.”

  • • •

  Murphy enjoys a hearty guffaw at my expense later that night as we’re sitting in the Ballou office, regrouping. I lean against my desk and tap my fingers on the scratched wood, waiting for him to get his hilarity under control.

  “Why is that funny?” Lily asks, referring to my news that I have to get special permission from Dean Porter to get into the NWI program.

  “Julep and the dean are like orcs and elves.”

  Lily looks at Murphy blankly.

  “Meaning they loathe each other,” he explains. “There’s no way the dean is going to let Julep in.”

  “There’s a way. I just haven’t figured it out yet,” I say. Really, he should have more faith in me. I did get Bryn to say yes to his invitation to the formal, after all. If that’s not a miracle, I don’t know what is.

  “Well, while you’re chewing on that, I have something else for you. Which do you want first, the bad news or the slightly less bad news?” Murphy swivels his chair around to grab a couple of papers from his desk.

  I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Why is it never good news?”

  “Slightly less bad is slightly good,” Lily points out.

  “Thanks for the input, Lily,” I say. “Let’s go with the bad news first.”

  “I just wasted the greater part of two days—which I can never get back—following the paper trail for the New World Initiative. Every publicly available document confirms they’re legit. There’s not so much as a building code violation on these guys.”

  “There has to be something,” I say. “Even companies entirely on the up-and-up have a little dirt under their nails.”

  Murphy shakes his head. “I’ve checked property records, incorporation documents, court records, police reports. I even checked UCC lien records. No red flags. Not even yellow ones. And get this…”

  Murphy rolls his chair across the floor. He sets some papers on my desk, turning them to face me. A printout of the pristine Better Business Bureau reviews of the New World Initiative Corporation glares mockingly at me.

  “There are no complaints,” Murphy continues. “Not one.”

  “That’s…weird,” I say.

  “Because it means there’s nothing shady going on? Or because it means there is?” Lily asks.

  I think of Petrov’s pet senator, Tyler’s dad, who ended up in prison, but not before he paved the way for Petrov to wreak all sorts of havoc on a lot of innocent girls’ lives. If NWI has that kind of connection, that’s more power than I really want to pit myself against. Even if the blue fairy lies on the other side, even if Mrs. Antolini is another kind of innocent in need of my help, I don’t know that I can go through another Petrov.

  “What have you got, rookie?”

  “Not much,” Lily says. “Duke Salinger is the founder and CEO. Several articles mention his checkered past, but nothing I found spelled out what that past was. Almost every article was a glowing endorsement of NWI. The only detractors were crazy, tinfoil-hat-wearing types who live off the grid and write manifestos. And even they were luke-brimstone at best. The NWI is just—”

  “Too clean to be real,” I finish for her.

  A quiet moment passes as we all consider the implications of this.

  “Maybe we should just let this one go,” Murphy says at last.

  I skim through the Better Business review. None of them convinces me continuing this job is a good idea. “Maybe we should,” I say.

  “Why?” Lily asks. “You brought down an entire mob. What’s one little pyramid scheme compared to that?”

  I look up in surprise at the note of bitterness in her voice and catch a glimpse of pain before she manages to cover it up.

  “Sometimes a pyramid scheme is more than a pyramid scheme,” I answer before turning to Murphy. “What’s the slightly less bad news?”

  “I think I have a lead on your mom,” Murphy says.

  I nearly fall over. “What?”

  “It’s not a good lead.”

  “Murphy,” I say sharply. “What lead?”

  “Up till now, we’ve only been scratching the surface in our Internet search. There’s so much the search engines don’t index. So I started combing online databases—university libraries, media archives, that kind of thing—to see if I could find anything. And, well…”

  He grabs his laptop, clicks something, and turns the computer to show me a grainy scanned image of a newspaper article from February 2012. A picture of my mom dominates the left side of the column. Her name, Alessandra Nereza Moretti, is the caption. My heart climbs into my throat as I start at the top of the article.

 
Thirty-three-year-old Alessandra Moretti reported missing. Last seen at Deer Run Café on Mercator Dr. Reward for information leading to her recovery. Call 555-…

  I pull back in confusion, then scroll to the top of the page and down to the article again.

  “This can’t be right,” I say. “It’s a missing person report. It says she disappeared three years ago.”

  “I told you it wasn’t a good lead.”

  “I don’t understand.” It’s definitely her. Dark brown hair, blue eyes, the same smile I used to see in the mirror before everything went haywire last year. I may not have seen my mom in eight years, but I’d still recognize her in a picture. “Why wouldn’t I have heard about it? Who would have reported her missing if not me and my dad?”

  “I don’t know,” Murphy says. “It’s a local article from some nothing town in Alabama. A missing person is hardly national news. Still, it seems like they would have notified next of kin if they knew her name.”

  I pull out my phone and dial the number listed in the article, but all I get is a “This number is no longer in service” message.

  Then my stomach drops. “Wait. Did it say February of 2012?” I scan the newspaper header for confirmation.

  “I think so. Why?”

  My knees shudder, and I sink into my chair. “I would have been thirteen. And that’s about the time of year my dad took off and was gone for two weeks with no explanation.”

  Murphy goes quiet, digesting this. “Do you think he knows about it?”

  “I—I never asked him where he went or why. I just assumed it had to do with a job that had gone wrong. I thought he left to protect me. But now…It can’t be a coincidence.”

  Murphy shoots me a sympathetic look as he resumes control of the laptop. “Speaking of coincidences…,” he says, pulling up a web page he bookmarked.

  WELCOME TO THE ALL-NEW BAR63.

  “What is this?” I ask, the sixty-three pinging around in my head like an eight ball.

  “Maybe nothing,” he says. “But it might be worth checking out.”

  Located in the vibrant Rogers Park area, just steps away from the campus of Loyola University, the new Bar63 offers something for everyone…opened its doors in March. Talented bartender Victoria Febbi…live music every Thursday night…designed for sports enthusiasts, with more than twenty giant flat-screens…