the nutritional equivalent of a big bag of lint.
Awful lot of caffeine and sugar on her list, Dixon reflected as he read his hastily jotted notes. Evidently Avery Nesbitt lived on nothing but carbohydrates. Which went a long way toward explaining why she stayed up all night, every night, the way she always did. And he found himself wondering what a woman could possibly have to do all night when she was home alone.
“Not playin’ Parcheesi, that’s for sure,” he muttered to himself.
And then he came to the last notation he’d made: Delivery tonight. That meant some guy would be bopping down the street very soon with a couple of big grocery sacks from the Eastern Star Earth-Friendly Market destined for Ms. Avery Nesbitt of apartment 7B.
Which gave Dixon an idea he really had no business entertaining.
He contacted Cowboy again, but this time it wasn’t to tell the man he was calling it a night. No, this time what Dixon told Cowboy was—
“I’m going in.”
“What?” the other man said.
“I’m going in,” he repeated.
“You’re coming in?” Cowboy asked. “It’s that boring?”
“Not coming in,” Dixon corrected him, “going in.”
“You mean going in as in…going in?”
Dixon smiled. “Yeah. I just a got a nice bit of intelligence and I want to follow up on it.”
“So you’re going in…where?”
Dixon rolled his eyes. Newbies. “To meet our girl,” he said.
“She-Wolf is back?” Cowboy asked, voicing the code name of Dixon’s regular partner and sounding very confused. “What’s she doing in New York? I thought she went home to Las Vegas to see her mother.”
“Not She-Wolf,” Dixon said. “Our other girl. Sorcerer’s contact.”
“Daisy Miller?”
“That’s the one.”
“But you can’t,” Cowboy said. “You don’t even know which apartment she’s in.”
“I do now. I told you. I just received some very nice intelligence. And it’s from an excellent source.” Himself. What better source could there be?
“Then you pass the intelligence along to me, Dixon,” Cowboy instructed. “And I figure out what to do with it. Assimilate, evaluate, articulate—that’s my job. And you don’t go in until I say it’s safe. Hell, you don’t go in, period, unless you’re the field agent.”
“But I am the field agent,” he reminded the other man, suddenly grateful for that anomaly.
“But you’re not supposed to be in the field,” Cowboy reminded him right back.
“Hey, I didn’t ask for this assignment,” Dixon said with all the mock innocence he could muster. “But you know how conscientious I am about doing my work the right way.”
“The hell you are. You’re as conscientious about that as I am.”
“And I want to make sure this job gets done right.”
“No, Dixon, you—”
“So I’m going in to make contact,” he told the other man finally. “I’ll let you know what happens when I get back.” He smiled to himself. No reason not to mess with the newbie a little. It was so much fun to hear them shriek. “If I come back alive, I mean.”
“What?” Cowboy shrieked.
“Wish me luck,” he said into the microphone before removing the headset altogether.
Not that that prevented him from hearing more shrieking.
“This is nuts, Dixon,” Cowboy told him. “Don’t go in there if it’s dangerous. You’re not even a field agent. You’re supposed to monitor the machines and analyze the data, like me. If anyone goes in to make contact, it should be She-Wolf. Wait for her before proceeding any further. She’ll be back in a couple of weeks. She’s the field agent. You don’t know what to do. You don’t know proper procedure.”
Oh, the hell he didn’t. He’d helped write the proper procedure. He’d been an OPUS agent when Cowboy was still fine-tuning his small motor skills.
“Dixon, I’m begging you,” Cowboy implored him. But he sounded resigned now. “You can’t go in. Please. You don’t have permission.”
Dixon chuckled as he flipped up the collar of his leather jacket and reached for the handle of the van’s side door.
No permission. Right. As if that had ever stopped him before.
CHAPTER TWO
AVERY WAS TOTALLY IMMERSED in creating the code to make her farewell gift to Andrew especially noxious when the doorbell rang and blew her concentration. When she glanced at the clock in the corner of her laptop computer screen, she saw that it was 4:08 a.m. Who on earth came calling at 4:08 in the morning? For that matter, who came calling at all? She hadn’t had any visitors to her apartment since…never. That was one of the things that happened when—cue the dramatic music in a minor key—debutantes go bad.
Then she remembered the groceries she’d ordered earlier. Duh. She really needed those tampons.
Saving the work she’d completed to her hard drive, Avery rose and made her way to the front door, switching on lights as she went, because she normally worked in the dark. She also launched herself into a full-body stretch, wondering how long she had been sitting still. It hadn’t been midnight yet when she’d started working, so more than four hours. Still, she’d gotten a lot done. In fact, she was doing a better job than she usually did for something like this, despite the fact that it had been years since she’d put one of these things together. Funny how productive you could be when someone pissed you off real bad.
Before opening the front door, she peeked through the peephole, frowning when the guy on the other side turned out to be neither Eddie, the usual night delivery guy, nor Mohammed, who from time to time made deliveries himself. Nor did the man out there look like someone who would make his living delivering groceries in the first place. No, thanks to his enormous size—although he was distorted by the fish-eye, he was clearly bigger than the average national monument—he seemed more like the kind of guy who would make his living as a longshoreman. Or a bouncer. Or a wrestler. Or a Mack truck.
Wow, just how bad was the economy, she wondered, if guys who looked like him were reduced to delivering groceries? Maybe she should start visiting CNN.com from time to time and see what was going on outside the walls of her apartment. Not that she really cared, quite frankly, but she was still a citizen of this state, even if she would have preferred to live in a different one. Like maybe the state of altered consciousness. Nice scenery there.
In spite of her misgivings about the delivery guy, Avery figured he must be legit because he was toting two brown grocery sacks with the Eastern Star Earth-Friendly Market logo on them.
