Harry sat on the edge of the first desk in the second-floor
offices, ankles crossed and stretched out across the floor. Will was standing on her right in the pencil
skirt, hair rearranged, and makeup moved to a more professional version. On the left stood Jud in a brown suit to
contradict Harry’s grey, and the familiar lit cigar hanging from his jaw. The new addition to the client meeting line
up, James Harding, stood a little to Jud’s left in a blue suit, visibly choking
on Jud’s cigar smoke.
Between coughs, Jim glanced out through the window onto the
street, waiting for the sign of the client’s car. He didn’t know much about the vehicle or
about the clients themselves, but he could guess it would be something fancy
and something black. The clients that
Harry usually got would always be in something expensive. The car might be a bit old but at that point
he had learned they would just call it a ‘classic’. Bart looked down onto the street to see a gray
car rolling to a stop in front of their warehouse offices.
So, he was wrong on the count of it being black.
The silvery streak of gray was just as
pretentious.
“Harry, I think your clients are here.”
Harry looked back to him from the desk, the spines right
above her shirt collar flexing slightly, and Bart saw her head shake
slightly. It took only three seconds
before his boss was standing by his side, looking down to the people slowly
making their way out of the car. The two
women were humans in their 40s, dressed in furs and glittering ornaments with a
Zinnian bodyguard dressed in a simple black tuxedo.
“They’re not my clients.”
Bart looked down to the street one more time, studying the
people who were now opening the front door to the offices. He turned up to her with a questioning look
and asked, “No?”
A hand landed on his other shoulder followed by the cigar
smoke and Jud was now standing on Bart’s right. Did the man have absolutely no sense of how terrible the smell was? Or did one just lose a sense of that once
they inhaled smoke for so long that it stopped being a noticeable issue?
“They’re our clients, Bart. Harry was just being a bit dramatic about that part of the revelation.”
A slight curse was uttered to his left in a language Bart
recognized as a branch of Nera, home language of Nerot but most likely
something from Harry’s kingdom. To him,
the curse sounded like “son of a blasphemous hog”, but Bart didn’t know enough
about Nera slang to know if that was an actual curse.
“Hmm what was that, Harry?”
“It was nothing, Bart. Just a little bit
of dissatisfaction.”
“Okay but what did that curse mean? I’m
not too up on Nerot slang from five hundred years ago.”
He didn’t get an immediate reply. Harry turned about on her heel, walking back
across the room and going into her office, and coming back out with a small
leather book. Bart hoped that they
hadn’t already decided to hand him a pink slip and that this was not going to
be a round of brutal insults that he wouldn’t understand. To be fair in all of his worries, Bart didn’t
know Harry very well. And Bart was one
of the more senior detectives who had been around for all of her shit with Roth
and Morrow.
Harry’s hand brushed against the edge of his blue suit while
she said, “Oh, don’t worry, Bart.I’m
not going to hurt you or anything. This
is just a book of old, old Nera insults and slang terms, and the book was given
to me by one of my Bevean uncles.”
“Ah Bevea. That does make some sense for
what I thought I heard you say.”
She placed the book in his hand, carefully opening the
stained binding, moving the satiny bookmark out of the way of the text. Bart started scanning the pages, listening to
the elevator slowly rising in the building and knowing that their new clients
would be on the floor soon. The clicking
would turn into a slight screech at the last impact of the gears on the second
floor. This delay would give the group
just enough time to compose themselves in front of the desk once again in the
perfect advertisement pose.
If everyone had gotten to the offices earlier and managed to
arrange themselves in their position, they could have called one of the crime
photographers up to shoot a few pictures for their new advertisements. Instead, Bart had stumbled in slightly
hungover and watching Harry re-arrange the blinds for most likely the three
hundredth time. Bart hadn’t had that
much to drink at the actual party but once he talked to the older staff and
celebrated with them. And then went home
to be with his husband, enviably celebrating with Lorre and spending too many
hours soaking in a bubble filled bathtub. Lorre had insisted on adding an insane number of perfumed flowers to
float on the top and Bart had to keep from sneezing the entire time.
A booming voice at the door soon called out to their careful
composition, announcing, “Their lady ships Anne Harrell and Margaret Ripley.”
From the office view above the street, Bart had really
underestimated the amount of fur and jewelry the women were carrying about
their person. With just the amount of
money the pair of earrings that Ripley was wearing, Bart could have easily
bought a small home in the country side. He tried to avoid the more judgmental thoughts while studying their
appearance, knowing that it was the deep pockets of people like this that kept
the agency’s pro bono work afloat.
Anne Harrell stood at just five feet but wore high heels to
elevate her position to match with her (presumed) wife’s own height. The human’s black hair hung in braided
sections, wrapped in twining gold and hanging against the open back of the
dress. Bart could see all of her dark
skin reaching down to her waist, and then slightly beyond when the fur around
her hips shifted position. The front of
the dress was equally revealing but this time by the sheerness of the material
instead of the lack of it.
Her companion, Margaret Ripley, wore a more modest attire of
a light orange cotton dress, quite the contrast to her partner’s black
silk. Bart had rarely seen that much of
a woman and had never really cared to do so. Margaret wore her blond hair in careful braids that wrapped high around
her head, gathering in a makeshift crown with rose clips. This is where the modesty of the moment
stopped, and he came face to face with the fur coats hanging across their arms. He couldn’t tell the legality of the furs at
the current moment, shuffling the thought away to later in the case where the
agency might need the leverage.
Harrell was the one to first step forward and her hand went
directly into Harry’s while saying, “Ms. Bivens, I spoke to you on the phone
briefly about the situation my wife and I are in. I did not realize that you would have your
entire executive team present for the matters of the case, we are paying you
for our privacy.”
We are paying you for
our privacy.
The phrase clicked around suspiciously in Bart’s head and he
was quickly wondering what the actual case was. The matters that Harry had just barely revealed in the hours of the
early morning pertained to the Lucreskis. These women did not look like they would be a part of that, not through
judgement of their appearance or skills or intelligence. They just didn’t look to be the type and the
vibe they gave off rubbed Bart in the wrong way, but for clearly different
reasons.
Harry had made no answer to Harrell as of yet but Jud had
quickly stepped into the line of fire, stopping briefly to extinguish his cigar
in the nearby ash tray.
“And what exactly is the case that you care so much
about? I have not yet received the
details of the matter from my partner but I did take a glance at the check you
wrote us yesterday.” Jud stepped closer
to Harrell, a questioning glint across his eyes as he asked, “I do wonder what
piece of your life you feel a need to keep just so private that you’re willing
to pay ten thousand units just to meet with us.”
The wife, Ripley, spoke up quickly to say, “We’ve heard all about your
reputation in the circles we travel and we thought that you might need some
incentive to listen to our story.”
Ten thousand units.
The money was nothing to people like this.
Bart’s eyes kept glancing over the jewelry that the women
were wearing and his opinion was quickly shifting. He was started to get stuck on the fact of
how much money they must possess if they put down that much of a retainer. Roth and Morrow was a fairly prestigious
company, but it was no longer Roth and Morrow in control. There had been no change in the names above
the door but there had been a very obvious change in the management.
It was a total of a tense thirty seconds before Harry raised
herself up with a noticeable sigh, legs uncrossed and a lit cigarette soon
finding its way into her hand. Harry
stood before the menacing Ms. Harrell to say, “Giving me such a complaint about
bringing aboard my most trusted staff creates quite a few questions for me as
well.”
A ring of smoke was blown out into the room.
“Do you have something against the fact that I brought my
business partners into such a business matter? Perhaps you forget Ms. Harrell that with your initial payment of ten
thousand and the promise of what you would pay me for completing the task, your
act engaged the entire agency to be at your disposal.”
“If I had asked for the entire agency, then we would have walked in the front
door without making an explicit appointment.”
Bart saw a slight wink that was thrown Jud’s way but he
caught it with his third eye. Harry was
making a bit of trouble for all of the promise that came with these clients and
he could see the tension rising in Jud’s shoulder blades. This time he was fully expecting the cigar to
be relit and moved quickly to the other side of the desk to stand beside Will,
keeping his jacket partially open to display his shoulder holster to the
clients’ bodyguard.
“Perhaps my team and I should take you two into our
conference room to discuss the matters that you informed me of, if you are so
worried about talking publicly.”
“You have us here in this so uncomfortable social situation, but we will go
ahead and make sure of the details on the floor.”
The tensions further rose in the room during the silence
while Will and Bart arranged chairs for the two clients. Harry maintained a steady eye contact with
Ms. Harrell while Jud kept watch over Ripley. It was such an easy scenario for everything to go so badly, but Bart
kept his cool while taking the coat from Ripley. This slight contact of his fingers with the
fur revealed it was a higher quality animal than expected. And that the fur was of such a color that it
was probably from some endangered beast of a far-off planetary nation.
This was not speaking well at all.
Points: 33593
Reviews: 557
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