Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

I should probably invest in a new stereo system someday. Hell, I should probably buy a car with anti-lock brakes, eighteen airbags and all the other things most people care about. But that would require an effort beyond my actual desire to replace Betty.

Yeah, I named my truck. Betty was the name of my first girlfriend. Like this truck, she had a grating voice and a high maintenance personality. Despite girlfriend-Betty being easier on the eyes, I stayed with her for only six months. Pickup truck-Betty talks less. And doesn't complain when I turn her on. We've been together for going on five years now, and even though she's rough around the edges, she's just about the only thing in my life that makes any sense.

I glance in the rearview. The road behind me is as empty as the road ahead. I catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror and shake my head. I don't look like a DHS agent. DHS—Department of Homeland Security. Most of the people working for the DHS are straight-shooting, tight-ass suits. An inordinate percentage of the men have mustaches, like they're 70s porn stars or 1900s Englishmen ready to engage in some old fashioned fisticuffs.

Of course, I am sporting the beginning of a beard myself, but that's less of a style choice and more of a result of my ancient shaver, pilfered from my father when I moved out ten years ago, crapping out a week ago. I think it looks good, but if any of my superiors saw it, I'd probably get a good talking to. Proper dress. Appearances matter. That kind of stuff. It's a good thing my superiors don't give a rat's ass about me or my department. I don't think I've seen or heard from someone with a higher pay scale than mine in the last six months.

I adjust the maroon beanie cap covering my crew-cut brown hair. The tight-fitting knit hat has become a staple of my wardrobe, and it is a style choice, mostly because it disguises the fact that my hair is slowly retreating like soldiers from my muddy battlefield. I think it makes me look like The Edge, from U2, a band of the eighties, nineties, and today that I actually wouldn't mind hearing on the radio.

My smartphone—which is really a company phone—cuts through the silence, saying, "Turn right," in a far from sexy, yet feminine voice that is the closest thing I've had to a girlfriend in a year. Other than Betty, I mean. I spot the dirt road up ahead and turn onto the uneven surface. The road is covered in half buried stones the size of grapefruits and rows of hardened ridges formed by water, which, in combination with Betty's rigid suspension, bounces me around like I'm on a grocery-store horsey ride, having a seizure.

Twenty minutes and a headache later, I arrive at my destination. I pull the truck into the lone parking space, put it in park and kill the engine. The car door creaks as it opens, allowing the outside world to wash over me. Warm summer air chases away the chill of Betty's air conditioning, which works like a champ. The smell of pine and earth and, I think, water, fills my nose.

It's been too long.

Once upon a time, I'd been a real salt of the Earth type. I camped, fished, hunted, slept under the stars and smoked a doobie or two. It's been at least ten years of indoor and pot-free living since then. Thank God I'm not in drug enforcement. I'd be horrible at it, mostly because I think I'd let all of the potheads walk.

The small cabin is on loan to me from Ted Watson, one of two people I actually oversee. I'm supposed to hire two more team members out of whatever law enforcement branch I can entice them from, but I haven't really bothered. Seeing as how every case I have is like a bad episode of The X-Files, but without the actual monsters, aliens and government conspiracies, I just don't see the need to deal with more personalities.

Not that Ted is hard to deal with. He's kind of like a grown up version of Chunk, from The Goonies—chubby, funny and he occasionally breaks into a jiggly dance. He's also brilliant with computers and electronics. I'm pretty sure he got posted to my team because, like me, he doesn't exactly fit the company profile. Anne Cooper, on the other hand, does. Cooper, who I call Coop, mostly because it bothers her, is a straight-laced administrator who does things by the book, even though so little of our mandate is in any book not written by a fiction author, a lunatic or both.

They've been with me for three years now, manning the home front—a house perched atop Prospect Hill in Beverly, Massachusetts. From the top floor you can see the ocean and, on a clear day, Boston. It's a nice place to live and work, but it's not the great outdoors.

Believe it or not, I'm not on vacation. I'm working. Watson's family just happened to have a cabin in the area, and I felt like being nostalgic for a night before beginning my "investigation."