“I have a feeling that if I shot her,” Ida Belle said, “she’d just pop right back up for round two.”
“She does have a rather inhuman quality about her,” I said. “Especially when it comes to living with embarrassment. She seems to have no limits to what she’ll endure to try to get one up on you.”
Gertie shook her head. “I don’t think she owns a pair of underwear the entire town hasn’t seen.”
“The town’s seen a few pairs of yours as well,” Ida Belle pointed out.
“Yes, but mine aren’t as big,” Gertie said, “and they’re always trendy.”
“Can we skip any more talk about underwear?” Ida Belle asked. “Especially the big kind on Celia’s butt? This is only my first cup of coffee and it doesn’t even have alcohol in it.”
I nodded. “It does seem rather cruel to continue down that train of thought this early.”
“Fine by me,” Gertie said. “So what are we going to do?”
“About which problem?” I asked.
“All of them,” Gertie said. “It’s not like we can ignore any of them. None are going away. I know Carter said he’d handle the ATF, so I guess we can push that one to the end of the list for now, but Celia and the car thieves are both major problems. So, what are we going to do?”
I tapped the side of my coffee mug and stared out the kitchen window at the shed. I wasn’t worried about the ATF agents. Not because they couldn’t cause problems but because there was nothing I could do about it if they did. I had to hope that threats from Carter and the embarrassment of being outwitted by a woman would be enough to get them to leave town and forget they had ever talked to Celia Arceneaux, but sometimes when men felt played, they doubled down instead of doing the smart thing and walking away.
So one of the things I needed to do when I could be assured of the free time for a conversation was to send Harrison an email and ask him to call me. There was no way I could explain the situation in our email code. Not in a way he’d understand. We had burner phones to use only for emergency contact, and the threat of a federal agency investigating me definitely constituted an emergency. Plus, a call would give me a chance to talk to Harrison firsthand about the lead they were working to locate Ahmad.
Celia was definitely a problem, but without a way to predict the things crazy, obsessed people did, I wasn’t sure what could be done about her. At least not at this moment. The car thieves, on the other hand, were something I could work with. Ever since I’d done that flying kick into the ATF agent the night before, the wheels had been spinning. In fact, I’d thought of little else the entire night. And now, staring at the shed in the light of day, I knew what we had to do.
“I have an idea,” I said.
“I like the sound of that,” Ida Belle said.
“You might not when you hear the idea,” I said. “That whole thing with the ATF last night got me to thinking. We need to find the Seal brothers, but nobody seems to know how to locate them. So I was thinking maybe we get them to come to us.”
Ida Belle straightened in her chair. “Set a trap with the SUV?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We’d have to bring it back to Sinful, though. I don’t care how foolish the Seal brothers are, they can’t possibly be dumb enough to break into a storage facility owned by the Heberts.”
“We broke into a storage facility owned by the Heberts,” Gertie pointed out.
“That was different,” I said. “We were breaking in to look at evidence the Feds stored there, and there’s no love lost between Big and Little and the Feds. Besides, they like us.”
“They find us amusing,” Gertie said. “I’m still not sure they like us.”
I shrugged. “Works out for us either way.”
“Fortune’s right,” Ida Belle said. “It’s the quickest way to get this over with. Use the SUV to draw them out and trap them.”
“But how will bringing the SUV here make a difference?” Gertie asked. “We’ve been waiting on them to show up and they haven’t. They don’t know the SUV is at the storage facility, so if they were coming, wouldn’t they have done so already?”
“I’ve thought about that,” I said, “and the reality is, we don’t know what they know. They could have already checked Ida Belle’s garage. She doesn’t have an alarm on it, and her back door is easy enough to jimmy. I’m always pulling the Jeep in and out of my garage so anyone watching would know it’s the only vehicle that even fits inside with all that other crap Marge has out there.”
“But if they’ve already checked and know it’s not here,” Gertie said, “then why would they come back?”
“We’d need to draw them out,” I said. “I’m betting that the Seal brothers are keeping watch on Sinful for the SUV. Maybe they think Ida Belle has it in the shop somewhere and it will be back soon. They don’t know that we’re onto them.”
Gertie nodded. “So we drive the SUV down the highway and through Sinful and hope they’re watching. Does that mean we’re letting Carter in on it?”
“No,” I said. “Even if Carter agreed to using the SUV as bait, he’d never let us be in on it. We’ll have to get it back into Sinful without Carter knowing.”
“So you want us to catch them?” Gertie asked.
“Yes, but with a little help,” I said. “Just not the law enforcement kind. In fact, I was thinking just the opposite.”
Gertie’s eyes widened. “You want the Heberts to help?”
“Why not?” I said. “If Carter catches the Seal brothers, they won’t talk because admitting they’re looking for the key means admitting they bashed Hot Rod over the head and then they go right back to prison. But if the Heberts are doing the questioning…”
“They’d go somewhere far worse than prison for not answering,” Gertie said. “Are you sure you want to go that route?”
The CIA assassin in me had gone that route enough times to be able to handle it. After all, it was part of the mission and for the greater good. But the new civilized me found several ethical problems with the setup.
“I think I can convince them to scare the information out of the brothers and then we can turn them over to Carter,” I said.
Gertie glanced over at Ida Belle, and I could tell neither of them was convinced that I could get the Heberts to deal, but I was willing to give it a try, especially if it meant Ida Belle could go back to sleeping at night and in her own bed.
Before I could change my mind, I picked up my cell phone and sent a text to Little.
Have a plan and need to talk. When can you and Big meet?
“There,” I said. “We’ll talk to them and see if they’ll agree to do things my way.”
“And if they won’t?” Ida Belle asked.
I shook my head. “The reality is, they could set up a trap themselves if they wanted to, and if it hasn’t already crossed their minds, it will. They have the SUV in their possession and the ability to put out the word that it’s being repaired at some shop in New Orleans, or whatever. How many people do you think owe them favors? They wouldn’t have any trouble setting up a garage to borrow.”