The End Game

In the process of acquiring said items, she has no problem punching you in the throat, setting fire to your home or giving you the impression that you are mere moments away from a level of physical pleasure you’ve only read about in the Kama Sutra.

All of which makes her the perfect person to extract information from those who might be unwilling under normal circumstances to give it up.

Male.

Female.

It doesn’t really matter.

So when she walked into the offices of the Star Class Association looking for Timothy Sherman and encountered an armed female security guard at the front desk, she wasn’t concerned in the least.

Women with guns were her comfort zone. Though, Fi couldn’t abide the fact that she looked to be one of those women who clearly took part in weight-lifting competitions. It was the shock of white blond hair, the rub on tan that made her glow orange (and smell a bit like wet cardboard) and the forearms that looked like a freeway interchange with all the raised intersecting veins. Fiona thought that you could be dangerous without sacrificing style and grace and sex appeal. Never mind the horror of a rub on tan, just generally.

“Can I help you?” the guard asked. Her voice was a little on the thick side, too.

“Yes,” Fi said. “I’m from Allied Car Rental and I’m afraid we have a very substantial problem. I need to see Mr. Sherman.”

“Okay,” she said. She looked down at the phone system, which struck Fiona as being a might too confusing for simple use. Didn’t anyone have an intercom anymore? She guessed that people with impressive looking phone exchanges at their front desks wanted to give off the impression that they fielded many, many calls. Odd, really. Power through the impression of vast communication and heavily veined women with guns at the front desk.

The office itself was fairly standard: a rounded off desk up front covered in trade magazines, including one, Fiona noted, that featured a photo of Gennaro Stefania on the cover. He was cute, but from what she’d learned, not much on the manly side of things. Oh, he could pilot a boat, but she doubted he could take a punch.

Men.

The shame of their sex was that so few lived up to billing.

Beyond the desk was a locked glass door-nothing special security-wise, Fiona saw, just a keyed lock. Nothing exciting happened in these offices, she imagined, and very little of value could possibly be inside apart from computers and phones and maybe a little petty cash. She could be in and out of the place in five minutes with everything of worth and no one would probably raise an eye, least of all the woman in front of her, who was now punching buttons almost at random.

Fi saw that a rather pained look was beginning to cast over the poor woman’s face. Maybe she was having some sort of anabolic issue.

“I’m not really the receptionist, so this phone is like Swahili,” the guard said. “I’m just here for extra security and the receptionist is at lunch.”

“Security?” Fi took a chance. “Because of that explosion the other day?”

The guard smiled and Fi saw that her teeth were insanely white. Nice teeth are important but this was absurd. It was like she had a mouth filled with piano keys. “Yes!” she said. “Omigod. Did you hear about that? It’s crazy, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Fi said. This security guard woman was really quite the woman of multitudes. She projected strength and body dysmorphic issues, but also seemed incredibly vapid. Very strange. “This whole boating industry can be very dangerous.”

The guard nodded her head, which was also a strange exercise, since she nodded and blinked excessively hard at the same time while keeping the smile burnished on her face. “This is my only day, but everyone at the agency was like, hey, you might get to break an arm, Gretchen! And so I thought, hey, when else do you get the chance to break an arm in a really nice building like this one? Mobsters and rappers and rich people. I could really meet someone neat, right?”

Fi didn’t really have a response to that. Chiefly because none of it made any sense to her. She had the impression that this was a woman used to people not listening to her closely and thus no one ever corrected her when she said absurd things. A shame, really. A little molding and Fi thought she could probably turn her into a fairly competent knee-breaker. But she’d need to get rid of that tan and that smile. It was all very off putting.

“Anywho,” the guard said. She poked around the phone some more. “I don’t know how to get Mr. Sherman on this thing. Do you know where his office is at?”

“Yes,” Fi said. She had a new opinion. Anyone who ended a sentence with the word “at” and managed to get the term “anywho” into a sentence was unmoldable at any cost. “If you’ll just open the door, of course.”