exactly what I intend to do.”
Pete looked over at Kurt. “This make any sense to you?”
Kurt opened the bag of pork rinds. “Women.”
“Sent by the devil,” Pete said.
“Suppose I wanted to blackmail Maislin,” Louisa said. “How would I go about it?”
Kurt slouched bonelessly against the counter. “You’d tell him you knew things he might not want spread around. Then you’d tell him how you need a job, and how you’re this great ‘team’ player.”
Pete dipped into the bag of pork rinds. “I’m holding you responsible,” he said to Kurt. “This was your dumb idea, and you’re encouraging her. Anything happens to her, and I’m coming after you.”
“Nothing’s gonna happen to her. If you’re that nervous, we’ll let her wear a wire.”
He pulled a cardboard box out from under his desk and set it on the table. He found a pair of scissors and a roll of surgical tape. He searched through the box and came up with a small piece of plastic with three wires attached.
“This is a flat-pack transmitter,” he told Louisa. “It’s two inches by one inch, weighs less than an ounce, and has an internal microphone.” He touched the slim two-inch wire protruding from the top end. “This is the antenna.”
He attached a six-volt, flat-pack battery to the two wires at the bottom of the transmitter. The battery was about an eighth of an inch thick and three inches square.
“The battery gets taped to your stomach, and the transmitter gets wedged into your cleavage. It’ll be invisible under your blouse.” He flipped a portable receiver to Pete. “You’ve worked with this stuff before?”
“Yeah,” Pete said. “I know how it goes.”
They didn’t say a word for the entire ride home, but Louisa thought she could hear Pete grinding his teeth in the dark. “It’s not good to hold in all that anger,” she finally said. “You’ll get a hernia.”
He parallel parked in front of the house. “I’m not sure it’s anger. I don’t know what it is. Frustration, maybe. Confusion.”
He wrenched the car door open. “Okay, so maybe some of it’s anger.” And a lot of it was wounded pride, but he didn’t want to admit to it out loud.
Louisa followed him up the cement stairs. “It isn’t going to work, you know.”
“The wire?”
“The relationship.”
“It was working fine until you got it into your head to play Junior G-man.”
It wasn’t working fine, she wanted to scream. They might as well be at opposite ends of the earth. The only things they really agreed on were sex positions. And to top it all off, there was Kurt.
Kurt was a strange person, living in a disgusting apartment. If that wasn’t bad enough, he was doing illegal things. He answered his door with a gun in his hand. And he was Pete’s friend! How could she reconcile this? Kurt was a slimeball.
She tapped in her security code and inserted her door key. Maybe Pete was a slimeball, too, she thought. Maybe he just hid it better because he had more money.
The following morning Louisa swung through the doors of the Hart Building, wondering what had gone wrong. She’d intended to be firm about not making love. She’d slept in her own bed, alone. She’d gone through all her familiar rituals alone…making her coffee, reading the paper. Then when it had come time for Pete to wire her for sound, she’d lost all resolve. He’d popped the top button on her blouse, and she’d gone into sexual hyperdrive.
She made a small disgusted sound and slid a glance in his direction. She suspected he’d seduced her as much out of sport as need. He was half a step behind her, with the receiver in his hand and his headset slung around his neck. He winked and smiled, and she felt like strangling him. He stopped to read a plaque on the wall when she turned into Maislin’s office.
She’d called ahead to make an appointment, and Stu Maislin was waiting for her. He was a large man with a face like a bulldog and a personality to match. He wore a nine-hundred-dollar suit and a seventy-dollar silk tie with a gravy stain two inches below the knot. He didn’t look friendly. He motioned her into his inner office and closed the door behind them.
“So,” Maislin said. “Let’s talk business.”
Louisa unbuttoned her coat and resisted the urge to feel for the transmitter. “I need a job.”
“Maybe I don’t have any job openings right now.”
“Maybe I should look for a job in the Attorney General’s office.”
“You