XXV: Real or Not
Sawyer had expected her to come up with some excuse. She could have come up with quite a few. "I didn't drug you" would have been a decent start to any number of them, and he would have believed it, maybe. She offered no such explanation or excuse. Instead, she only looked at him, waiting patiently for him to wake up. "I'm sorry," she said, and he thought that she should have been a hell of a lot sorrier for spiking his drink, and he should have been a hell of a lot smarter. Anyone with brains would have seen that coming.
He pushed himself to sit up, studying her. She spread her hands helplessly, in a gesture of self-defense. She didn't seem terribly worried about him, though, sitting there with her hands on her knees, and her head cocked slightly, birdlike, to figure out what he was going to do next. He should do something, shouldn't he? The notion struck him as good, although his fingers felt fuzzy and his tongue felt thick, and he couldn't work out a good plan. All of his cons, and here he was, sitting, waiting for someone who had attacked him to make the first move. You stupid son of a bitch.
"We need to talk," she said crisply, just repeating the last assertion she'd made. Her brows drew together, but no other part of her face moved. Had she always been this businesslike? He stared, eyes wide, trying to figure out what this was all about. Sure, he'd been screwed over, but there had to be a reason for it. Jeannie had the reason.
"You thought I was there by chance in Miami. I wasn't, James."
"Come to see me?" Sawyer grinned at her automatically. "Well, darlin', I appreciate the compliment of your traveling all that way, but listen, I ain't exactly in the business of paying for travel in the exchange rate of – "
"No, just like you didn't come to see me," Jeannie returned flatly. Her eyes were sharp on him, and he sobered as best he could while half-drunk and recently drugged. "I was there working."
He nodded. His head stung. "At a diner just like every other goddamn place from here to the Mason-Dixon line. Yeah, I know."
Her face closed off further, and she looked past his left shoulder. He knew that trick. He'd used it lots in school. She still couldn't look him in the eye. Her face was tight and her eyes were cold, and she paused for a moment, her fingers twisting around one another. Something was making her not want to talk about what she needed to talk about, and he couldn't figure out why. It raised his hackles plenty, though, and he wondered why he was afraid. That was dumb, sitting here being worried about some damn silly thing like why her apartment didn't fit together quite right.
"I was there working," she continued, her voice halting and slow, "for a company. We're undercover."
His throat tightened. "Cops?"
She shook her head quickly. "No. But like I told you, we'd like to talk to you. We want your help in a little project we're working on."
"I don't look that good in a tinfoil hat."
She smirked, but there was still that weird tension to the expression. "It's not that, James. It's nothing wrong."
He hadn't said there was anything wrong, so the fact that she felt the need to bring it up fired his senses. Alert, he stared at her, trying to see some sort of fanatic craziness in her eyes, glancing towards the exit. He could leave. She wouldn't beat him to the door. Something was keeping him there, though. It was the sort of curiosity that had gotten him in trouble before. Her choice of words continued to nag at him. "We – this company – what the hell are you talkin' about? What's the company?"
Jeannie's response was unexpected. "What do you think?"
"I don't know. Maybe it's some X-Files stuff. You're acting spooky enough about it." Sawyer didn't care, though. Whatever she was doing, it was none of his business, no matter how much she seemed to want to make it his business. He knew better than to press, but he wanted to find out anyway. "And why does your tinfoil hat crowd care about me?"
She shrugged. Her eyes traveled over his hand on the sofa, and as he glanced down too, he was reminded of how wrong the mod sofa was, compared to the rest of the apartment's grandmotherly furnishings. How much time between them had been real, and how much had been an act? He knew women. He should have been able to tell. Everything had gotten weird suddenly, though, and maybe Jeannie was a better con artist than he was. He didn't like to admit that it was a possibility, but it was.
"I don't think that you're ready to know that yet."
Frustrated, he snapped back, "Why the hell not?!"
Jeannie simply shrugged, looking past him, looking dismissive. She was bored of his conversation now, and he wondered why his reaction had not been what she'd wanted. Had the conversation been planned without him being aware of it? "Do you think you can get me something else from a Volunteers game?"
His body tensed, and for a moment, as wrong as he knew it was, he felt ready to smack her. Just like dad, he thought, and the realization cooled his heels and settled his hand. He let out a frustrated noise and sat there watching her. He wasn't about to get it out of her by bullying her for answers. He would have to find another, more subtle way to do it. It would have to be sometime when she wasn't there, and he would have to be quick as he possibly could do.
If the sofa was what was wrong with the place, it wasn't a bad place to start looking the next morning, once Jeannie went off to the Pollo Tropical. Checking the cushions revealed nothing but spare change. Running a finger along the plasticene cushions showed him that the couch hadn't been in the apartment long enough to accumulate dust. Jeannie had lived here for at least a year. She was neat enough, but she wasn't meticulous – the coins had fallen through, but the cushions had never been flipped. The sofa had been placed here much later than she'd moved in.
It bothered him though, that big cherry-colored piece sitting there like the proverbial red flag. It wasn't Jeannie's. Maybe – He knelt on the wall-to-wall carpeting, winching himself between the side of the sofa and the wall, shoving a hand underneath the draped fabric that touched the floor. The tag was around here somewhere, if it was made in a factory.
The fake-silk feel of the tag alerted him, and he seized on it and yanked, his arm withdrawing from beneath the furniture, his prize in hand. He sat up, resting his head on the arm on the sofa, and drew his legs up Indian-style to study the tag.
DI. 4815. The same numbers as Jeannie's apartment. That couldn't be coincidence. He wasn't that superstitious, but the odds of something like that had to be astronomical. FORD, J.
Now that was something special.
He turned over the tag in his hands. So the sofa was intentionally there, and it had been planted to draw his suspicion. But by whom? And for what purpose? And why was Jeannie in on it? He figured now why she couldn't tell him – he was the target of something -- but he wondered what it was. Someone knew his name, someone who had gotten it from Jeannie.
This was a sham, he realized. Someone was conning him. He wouldn't let them. He tucked the tag in his jeans pocket and pushed himself up to stand, his legs threatening to give way. He was lightheaded, but he was determined. He had another place to check, and he wanted to find out what he could from it while Jeannie was still at work.
Jeannie didn't keep a diary, but he had her E-mail password. They'd shared passwords a while back, and the only thing she had uncovered of his that was at all incriminating was the typical Playboys. He'd been careful to keep his con jobs away from her sight, and he hoped that she hadn't been similarly careful with her own con.
Three advertisements for spam, and then, buried within the whole thing, an E-mail from someone – Norman? Who the hell was called Norman nowadays anyway?
DH-4815. Subject is to be approached. Advance the idea of vitrification. If reluctant/questioning, cease offer. If subject asks about apartment layout, namely supplied pieces, consider successful; cease contact.
Successful at what? He stared at the screen, hardly believing what he was seeing. The E-mail ended with legal gibberish or doctoral gibberish – he couldn't tell which one. In any case, the only thing keeping Jeannie here was the fact that he hadn't asked about the damn sofa. He was being tested for something, and he thought maybe he should look for cameras.
Namaste and good luck. FM-2030.
More goddamn numbers, he thought. Great. He reached for his cellular phone and clicked the close window on the browser. He didn't want to print out the E-mail. Jeannie would know that he'd read it if she found the printout. She might even know that he'd read it just from him reading it, but that was water under the bridge now.
He knew the number to the Pollo Tropical by heart. He hadn't ever expected to make this phone call, but he had a choice to make, and the con he'd planned with Hibbs for a few days later was the perfect excuse to leave Miami. Whatever the hell vitrification meant anyway.