Page 82 of Agency

The final thing most people forget? Disposing of all the evidence, like the bullets. The only trouble with that was having to find them. We’d have to search and find where any misses, or through-and-throughs, eventually landed, then dig them out.

I climbed down and replaced him, swearing loudly when he dropped the shovel down after me. The blade sliced into the earth right next to my foot, so closely that my little piggies almost all ran home.

“What?” he asked.

“Well, for starters, you could have handed me the damn thing, instead of trying to javelin it down like you were in the goddamn Olympic tryouts. You trying to get me to walk lopsided for the rest of my life?”

“Quiet, or I’ll kick dirt down on you.”

“Whatever.”

“You really think they made up?”

“Ambyr and Jericho, you mean?”

“Definitely not talking about Ambyr and Joergensen.”

“I dunno. Maybe.”

“Jericho holds a grudge, man. Remember that time with the major?”

“That was because the major almost got us killed with an artillery strike, though.”

“Wait. Do you seriously think almost killing us with an artillery strike is all that different from… wait for it… knocking you and Thomas unconscious and almost assassinating our client?” He let out a bark of laughter.

“Well, when you put it that way…” Trailing off, I continued to shovel within the tight space.

“You’re on bullet duty, by the way,” he said after a while.

“Seriously? I hate that part.”

“Yep. Should have secured your weapon more… Securely? Whatever. Only two or three to find when we get back into the cabin.”

I grunted my response. Ten minutes later, I was calling the vertical pit dug, and Andrew was grabbing my hand and pulling me from the grave like the worst ever recreation of the Sistine Chapel.

Ambyr and Jericho were approaching by the time I was back on my feet and bending down to wrap nylon cord around the tarpaulin we’d used to carry Joergensen from the cabin. No dragging, and no blood dripping. Didn’t want to leave even the slightest evidence that the body had come from somewhere nearby.

Jericho looked better than when we’d first seen him this morning. And he was even limping in line with Ambyr–not too far ahead, or too far behind.

Ambyr wasn’t pulling away from him, either, which seemed to make something in my chest light and fluttery, like Bob Ross painting some happy little clouds. Jericho must have muttered some cantankerous gripe, because her pony tail whipped around as she turned to him and grinned. And, while watching them, that fluttering something in my chest tried to take flight, and I smiled despite the grim start to our morning.

Which, don’t even get me going about the weirdness of my smiling about the fact that my boss might be back to getting along with the woman I’d fucked multiple times in the last week, one of which times had been an insanely hot threesome with myotherbuddy while she was technically a prisoner in our custody.

There were already too many emotions swirling in my gut for me to stop and consider how exactly I was feeling, what those emotions might actually be named, or the entire FUBAR situation that was my love life.

“He not ready yet?” Jericho called as he and Ambyr approached, the sound of crunching sticks and dry, rustling leaves accompanying their arrival. “Gave you guys plenty of time. Could have had a whole platoon’s worth of latrines dug if I’d been the one doing it.”

“You want a hole dug deep, well, or fast?” I asked as Andrew grabbed one end of the nylon cord and began to help me with tying closed the tarp. “Because you can get two out of the three, but not all of them. And this one has to do more than cover up the smell of chow-hall shits.”

“Anything interesting in his car?” Andrew asked as we secured the tarp around Joergensen’s corpse. He nodded to an electronic device in Ambyr’s hands, one that I hadn’t noticed when they were first on approach.

“What’s that?” he continued.

“Not sure exactly,” she replied. “Think it’s a GPS nav device.”

“Was he using it to find our address out here, or something?”

“That was my first thought,” Jericho said. “But seems kind of overkill for who you can probably find on Google Maps, you know?”