Shirl Henke - Sneak And Rescue

“Oh, you silly, what are you doing at a Space Quest con if you don’t know we’re Dribbles?” Mellie asked.

“You know, the little furry animals that keep making more until Captain Turk’s ship is filled with them?” Tiff supplied in the same tone of voice that a person might use to explain why woodpeckers don’t like concrete posts.

“And I’m Harriett Mudd, the lovable but unscrupulous space merchant who brought them aboard,” Jenny said brightly.

Sometimes Sam thought Jenny’s voice was the only thing bright about her. “Uh, yeah, I get it. You’re big Spacer fans, right?” She groaned inwardly. On the case where she’d met Matt, Jenny and her two dragon kids had been nothing but trouble, nearly getting Matt killed by the Russian mob. “I thought you and your sister were living in San Diego,” she said.

“Oh, we are, but the girls begged to come to the con.”

“Is it safe? I mean, you know…” Sam groped for words, not wanting to bring up the girls’ father, who’d kidnapped them two years earlier.

“Oh, my ex got caught passing bad checks in Salt Lake. He’s doing three to five in a Utah state pen,” Jenny said blithely.

“Are you here to snatch somebody?” Mellie asked eagerly.

Great. All Sam needed were Larry, Curley and Mo bollixing up her retrieval as they had with Matt. “Nothing I can tell you about,” she replied, trying to think up an excuse to keep them out of it. “But I am attending the con. Er, it’s research for a case back in Miami.”

“If you’re going to snatch somebody at the con, you’d better wear a costume or you’ll never get close to whoever it is,” Tiff said, not fooled for a minute by Sam’s denial.

Sage wisdom from an eight-year-old. “I guess I could rent one,” Sam replied uncertainly.

Jenny shook her head. “Every good costume in town’s already been taken, but I have a great one for you. Why don’t you come back to our suite at the Renaissance and we can fix you up? Oh, if I was you I’d leave your car parked here. During the day it’s almost impossible to find a vacancy and the hotel’s just up the street. We have plenty of room. My sister insisted on paying because she and her son had to cancel at the last minute.”

What the hell? It was where she was headed anyway and there’d be no dodging their interference if they ran into her later and figured that she was after a guest. “Okay, I appreciate it,” Sam said as they started walking. “Say, what kind of costume do you have? I sometimes have to move quick and those…” She paused, gesturing to the girls covered head to toe in fuzz. “Well, anything like that would stop me.”

Jenny laughed but before she could explain, Mellie blurted out, “Mommy thought she looked fat in the outfit.”

“Believe me, it won’t keep you from kicking ass,” Tiff said cheerfully.

“Young lady! I won’t have such language,” Jenny replied with a genuine bite in her voice. “You apologize to Mrs. Granger at once.”

To Sam’s surprise, the girl meekly bowed what looked to be the top end of her “dribble” and said contritely, “I apologize for using a bad word.”

Now wasn’t the time to explain that she hadn’t changed her name when she married Matthew Granger. “Apology accepted,” she said with a grin.

“Tiff’s being good because Mommy says she won’t take us on the Questar battle simulation day after tomorrow if we don’t behave,” Mellie piped up.

That explained it, sort of. Whatever a Questar was.

Ida Kleb was a wiry little woman with a bulldog’s face and gorilla-size hands that looked capable of snapping the neck of anyone who crossed her. She wore a perpetual scowl and her gray eyes cut like lasers. No one in the IRS messed with her. Matt wasn’t about to break that rule. He stood in the door of her cramped little office, looking from Kleb to her austere surroundings. All the papers in the room were lined up with razor-edged neatness as if even inanimate objects understood her demands.

“You, again, Mr. Granger. I’ve already told you, our investigation of Dr. Reicht is confidential. Go find something else to write about for the Herald .”

“I’m not here on a story. I thought maybe you and I could have an exchange of information about the good doc.” Her eyes narrowed to tiny slits, seeming to move as if she were a Cylon Centurion from the original television series Battlestar Galactica . Matt smiled inwardly. Guess Sam was right. I’m still a geek.

“Any information you possess about Dr. Reicht you are obligated to give the Internal Revenue Service.” Kleb stared up at him as she walked around the desk. Despite the disparity in their heights, she was utterly undaunted.

He couldn’t help looking down at the rounded toes of her sensible shoes, wondering about a poison dagger for an instant before he replied, “Whatever happened to First Amendment rights for the press?”

“Nowadays, it doesn’t have any,” she shot back, standing almost toe-to-toe with him.

He refused to back away, but he did raise his hands in mock surrender. “Look, I just want to help. He’s involved in a case my wife’s working on and I’m looking out for her safety. I found out a few things that might help your investigation…if you help me, it might protect Sam.”

“You go first,” she said.

“You play chess?”

She turned and shuffled a stack of papers, straightening them even though they didn’t need it. “I don’t have time for hobbies, Mr. Granger.” Then, crossing her arms, she placed her big hands around her elbows and waited him out.

“Could I at least sit down?” he asked, eyeing a battered chair in front of her desk. Ida nodded and returned to her own counterpart behind it. Matt was stalling, figuring the odds of getting anything useful out of this cagey dame. Might as well go for it. “I did a little digging through a source with ties to the drug scene.” She might buy it since he’d done a big exposé on Russian and Colombian mobsters last year.

“Go on,” she prompted, tapping a sharpened pencil impatiently on a blotter.

“The doc’s been a naughty boy. He couldn’t disclose all of his income the last couple of years because it’s drug related. He’s got a lot of very rich patients with expensive recreational habits—illegal recreational habits.” He watched her for a reaction. The best she gave was one minute twitch of an eyebrow.

She tossed the pencil across the desk to cover it up. “We knew that, of course. You’re wasting my time.”

“I don’t think you did.”

“Give me the names of these patients.”

“Tell me what tipped you to go after him first,” he countered.

After sleeping poorly on the Hide-A-Bed in the sitting room of Jenny’s suite, Sam had arisen with two kids jumping up and down, yelling at each other while their mother entered the room carrying the promised costume. Sam took the outfit and headed to the bathroom to change into it. When she walked out the door and looked into the full-length mirror across the room, she flinched. “I look like a hooker from South Beach,” she said, then could’ve bitten her tongue.

“What’s a hooker, Mrs. Granger?” Mellie asked.

“Sorry, you’d think I didn’t grow up in a house with six younger kids,” Sam said to Jenny, not about to admit that her street-tough south-Boston brothers knew a lot more than that when they were Mellie’s age.

“A hooker is a bad lady,” Tiff explained, although from her expression, her mother and Sam figured she really wasn’t sure.

“But Lt. O’Hara isn’t bad,” Mellie said.

“I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just that this getup’s uncomfortable.” Sam tugged at the spandex miniskirt and tried to shift the plunging neckline of the uniform so it didn’t reveal quite so much of her “best assets,” as Matt liked to call them.