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Page 40

It was chaos. Someone from the tanning salon rushed out and asked if they could help, and Lucy nodded.
“Can you take him inside?” she asked. “I think he has low blood sugar.”
That had to be the single lamest excuse I’d ever heard, but the tanning salon employees—some of whom may or may not have been affiliated with our bosses—were ecstatic at the idea of having a hypoglycemic almost-celebrity in their midst, and they carried him inside, at which point in time Lucy somehow convinced them that she was the president of the Heath Shannon Fan Club and that she knew for a fact that he’d been planning to go tanning that day, because he always went tanning on Thursdays, and would it be okay if he used one of their booths?
The guy in charge must have been on the Big Guys’ payroll, because he didn’t offer a single objection to Lucy’s desire to drag an unconscious Heath Shannon into one of the tanning rooms. Once we got him alone, Lucy made quick work of checking his pockets, but came up with nothing.
She sighed. “I guess we’ll have to strip him.”
“What?” I seriously hoped she was joking.
She answered me by pulling off one of his shoes, and within ten minutes, she’d gotten down to his tighty whities, and we still hadn’t found a disk of any kind.
“Ummmm…Toby?” Lucy’s voice was small.
“Yes?” I was careful not to look at our unconscious mark. He might have been an international heartthrob, but there was such a thing as oversharing, and this definitely qualified, even if he was unconscious.
“Could you maybe check the underwear?” Lucy said.
“I’m kind of…wellll…” She searched for the right word.
“Shy.”
“Shy?” I repeated. This, coming from the girl who’d practically begged him to sign her boob. Lucy “Never-Met-a-Stranger” Wheeler.
“About things like this,” Lucy hedged. “Guys in underwear. It makes me…shy.”
I opened my mouth, but when she offered me an apologetic smile, I couldn’t refuse. Forty seconds later, we had the disk. I’d elaborate on how exactly we got the disk, but that information is classified. For the record, however, Lucy really owed me one.
Proving herself to be surprisingly scrappy and strong for her size, Lucy managed to hoist Heath Shannon’s body into a tanning bed. She closed the lid, and together, the two of us used some ultrathin steel cables (which Lucy just happened to be wearing in her hair) to bind the bed shut, locking our mark inside.
When the Big Guys showed up (and I had a feeling it wouldn’t take them long), they’d find Heath Shannon incapacitated and—more likely than not—just a little bit tanner.
“High five!” Lucy said. Glad that she hadn’t demanded we herkie to celebrate, I obliged. By the time I’d settled into the passenger seat of Lucy’s car, I was starting to feel like I’d been cheated out of the adventure of a lifetime. In my mind, I’d imagined that taking down Heath Shannon would involve a lot fewer theatrics and a lot more of me kicking ass. It was bad enough that I hadn’t actually gotten to fight the guy, but the fact that the success of our operation was due in large part to Lucy’s ability to convince celebrities to sign her boobs? Talk about disillusionment.
“What happened back there?” I asked. “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to draw a crowd?”
Lucy glanced at me as she started the car, truly bewildered. “I thought you knew. It’s standard procedure—if it’s public enough that people are going to notice the mark going down, you draw enough of a crowd to mask the fact that you’re the ones behind it. Peyton will probably run checks on everybody who entered the area, but since you Tasered him in the blind spot, they won’t be able to connect it back to us, so they’ll have a long list of suspects, and once they figure out we go to school with Jack and have for years, we’ll be in the clear.
“Besides,” she said, “what cheerleader wouldn’t ask a guy like Heath Shannon to sign her breast?”
“My kind?” I suggested.
Lucy’s face broke into a broad grin. “Did you just admit that you’re a cheerleader?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone. After the thing with the underwear, I owe you one.”
CHAPTER 28
Code Word: Smile
By the time Lucy parked her car in front of the school, I’d managed to come to terms with Operation Playboy. So maybe I hadn’t gotten to go all Kung Fu Toby on an enemy operative, and maybe our success on the mission had had more to do with Lucy’s breasts than with either of our abilities as secret agents, but no good could come from dwelling on the details. We’d incapacitated our mark and left him for the Big Guys to pick up. We’d confiscated a tiny disk that we’d already verified (via Lucy’s CD player, which had more uses than playing horrible nineties girl band CDs) had information on it regarding operatives scattered throughout Asia, Africa, and South America.
We’d saved the day, and quite possibly dozens of lives. That—and the fact that Lucy had sworn never to mention the actual disk-getting methodology—was just going to have to be enough for me. For now.
When we got back to the gym, I reluctantly handed the disk over to Chloe. I was deluded enough to expect her to say something along the lines of “thank you” or “good job,” but the words out of her mouth didn’t even remotely resemble a compliment.
“Get dressed. Practice in ten.”
I severely hoped she was talking about ten hours, because I’d just finished my second classified operation of the day, and I couldn’t forget about the fact that I still had one left to go. I needed some downtime. I needed to change out of this outfit into something that didn’t have the word CHEER embossed across it. I needed to take a shower and burn the memory of Heath Shannon’s tighty whities from my mind. I did not need to deal with herkies and toe touches and hurdlers and handsprings and…
Even thinking the words had my still-dislocated crotch protesting in vain.
And yet, I somehow sucked it up enough to trudge into the locker room, where I found another pair of teeny-tiny pants (this pair opted for LIONS! over CHEER in the butt-message department) waiting in my locker. Beside me, Tara changed into her own shorts (no writing—lucky her) silently.
“Mission went well,” I said. “Find anything interesting in his wallet?”
“Not really,” Tara said. “Find anything interesting in his underwear?”
Her voice was so deadpan casual that it took me a minute to register her meaning.
“Lucy!” I yelled.
Tara grinned. “Your communicator was on,” she said.
“You were pretty verbal about your objections.”
“What objections?” Bubbles asked. I swear, she came out of nowhere.
“Nothing,” I said, shooting Tara a warning look.
“Nothing,” Tara agreed.
“How were things here?” I asked, changing the subject before Bubbles could ask any more questions.
Bubbles didn’t answer. I elaborated. “Party planning? Banner painting? Whatnot?”
Bubbles bit her bottom lip.
“Bubbles?” Tara prodded. “What’s going on?”
“We were working on some stuff for the party,” Bubbles said, “and our line of communication with Brooke and Zee went dead.”
Tara took off then, running toward the Quad.
I turned my attention back to Bubbles, to grill her for more specifics, but she was gone. That girl was stealth incarnate.
When Tara came back five minutes later, I was more than ready for some answers. Whether or not I wanted to be, I was part of this now. This was my squad, my team. Something was going on, and someone was going to tell me what it was, or things were going to get ugly.
“Tara?” I didn’t say anything more than her name.
“The line of communication with Brooke and Zee went dead shortly after they arrived in Al Jawf,” Tara said. “Approximately half an hour ago.”
“And that’s bad?” I guessed.
Tara sat down to put on her athletic shoes. “It wouldn’t be horrible,” she said, her voice eerily devoid of emotion.