Page 88 of Lone Wolf

Inexplicably she was wearing a dress.

It snapped him out of his trance.

Joey: in a dress.

Black and modestly cut but not so modest that it didn’t show off her figure. An odd mix of emotions waylaid him—bewilderment, pride in the attractive young woman she’d become, a desire to ensconce her more-shapely-than-he-wanted-to-acknowledge form in a potato sack.

One of her calves was tanner than usual. Could that be—a partially rolled-on stocking? And something wagged beside it, dangling by her ankle. The other shriveled pantyhose leg?

Before he could ensure that he hadn’t tumbled through a rip in the multiverse, Joey said, “Melinda got back DNA on the Wolf. We got her!”

Evan followed her back.

Melinda Truong was up on the big front screens of the Vault, life-size and crisply beautiful. Joey had put visual security filters on, fuzzing everything except herself and Evan into modern art. He paused to try to get his bearings, which proved ungettable.

The floor was strewn with discarded pantyhose, bunched, lined, and ripped. Various cardboard boxes with egg logos were torn open, a dinosaur hatching of hosiery. Against the Vault’s masculine concretes and steels, the delicate fabric looked bizarrely out of place. Joey sat on top of the L-shaped table, shoving her bare foot into another pair of nylons. Her toes broke through, an image reminiscent of werewolf transformation. She gave a lupine growl, tossed them aside, and freed a fresh victim from a box.

Evan felt his eyebrows knitting together. “What the hell are you—”

“Karissa Lopatina, aka the Wolf,” Melinda cut in, never one to waste time. “Your protégé and I hit it from different angles, pulled together a pretty good picture of her.”

Evan looked at Joey, mouthed, Protégé?, but she’d paused from her sartorial misadventures to take note of the compliment and was glowing too much to pay him any mind. On both side walls, her custom cracker ran, targeting RC4’s inherent biases, pounding away on Solventry’s encryptions. It looked complicated as hell, the progress bars showing at least another forty hours to get into Hill’s files. For now Evan would have to focus on Lopatina.

Which meant focusing on Melinda. He remembered her atop him last night, bare-torsoed, leaning over him. Her lips fuller yet with the added weight of gravity as she pressed her mouth to his. She was so petite and yet she’d been all around him, encompassing him, a whirl of sensation to breathe in. He’d been unsure how their next engagement would go, but Melinda presented now as the stone-cold professional she was. If anything she’d hardened her perimeters in the wake of the tryst. Her clarity set him at ease.

She continued, “She’s been on the FBI’s radar for a little over a decade now. Remember that guy who got his head taken off by a Russian 7.62x54 rimmed round in his Super Bowl suite a few years back?”

Of course he did. Nearly impossible to trace given that the Siberian ammo factory pumped out millions of rounds with no traceable taggants.

“The oil executive,” he said.

“Third quarter. Fourth and goal. Two hundred ninety-five meters with a Dragunov SVD. That was Lopatina. A lady who can handle her hardware. Double tap to the chest on the L in Chicago. Car bomb in Dulles long-term parking. Knife nick of the femoral artery in Central Park.”

Internal agency reports, dossiers, and crime-scene photos populated the digital space. As Melinda spoke, Joey clicked through, bringing relevant files to the fore, Lopatina’s trail of destruction painted in vivid reds and charred blacks.

“How am I supposed to put these fucking things on?” Joey hissed, her thumbs ripping through the pantyhose. “What are they, like, designed for butterfly feet?”

“You’re asking me?” Evan said, out of the side of his mouth.

“Lopatina’s not generally so showy,” Melinda continued. “An accident specialist. Family of five dead in their beds of carbon-monoxide poisoning, private airplane fell out of the sky, a yakuza oyabun slipped and fell off a bullet train. Of course, these are just the ones they were lucky enough to tie to her. Who knows how many hits have gone unnoticed?”

“A lot of people have accidents,” Evan said. A ripping sound distracted him, another stocking meeting its untimely end, impaled by an unmanicured foot of Josephine Morales. Evan leaned over once more, whispered, “Maybe if you don’t act like you’re punting a football.”

“You try ramming your appendage into a spiderweb.”

“Only if the spiderweb buys me dinner first.”

Melinda snapped her fingers at him. “Hey, người yêu! Am I boring you?” Despite the term of endearment, she used the tone generally reserved for her workers. It resonated in his lumbar and he snapped to. “And you!” Melinda’s eyes darted over to Joey. “What are you doing all contorted on that desk? You look like you’re trying to hump your knee.”

Joey colored. “Nothing.”

“Ask her,” Evan whispered to Joey.

Melinda: “Ask me what?”

“Nothing!”

“Josephine.”