Scarlett Undercover by Jennifer Latham Page A

“You have no idea, do you?”
    “Not usually, no.”
    The gold in her eyes hardened.
    “There
is
no death for us, little detective. Once the ring is ours, we’ll live forever.”
    “Sure. You go with that,” I said, and walked out of the alley without a backward glance. She didn’t follow me, but at the next intersection, I could have sworn I caught a flash of Mook’s duster, turning past a building to my left.
    “Mook?” I called out.
    But there was no response, no sign of Mook when I rounded the corner.
    Two against one and a death threat on top of that
, I thought.
And my guardian angel just walks away.
    The downtown bus I needed pulled into its stop a few blocks up. Even if I ran, I wouldn’t catch it.
    “Dumb freakin’ luck,” I said to no one in particular. And started to walk.

    The doors to City Hall were still locked when I got there, which left me standing out in the morning wind for ten minutes, cursing Las Almas bureaucrats for not waking up early like the rest of the world. I was cold, I was impatient, and I needed more info on The Parker and George Fagin. That meant digging through the hellish stacks of permits, blueprints, and assorted useless documents they kept on file in the records office.It was slow, tedious, old-school detective work. And in a twisted sort of way, I liked it.
    City Hall was a stoic building, impressive and grand and as stuffy as they came. Back before the stock market crash in the twenties, when millionaires did their best to prove new money could buy class, a bunch of old white guys had built the place and passed it on to future generations of old white guys. I always wore my secondhand biker boots there because they felt so inappropriate. Today, I’d brought along my dark gray fedora to class the joint up even more.
    “Hey, Delores. How’s it going?” I said at the records office window. Delores and I went way back. The first time I’d visited, she’d ignored me. When I rang the desk bell in front of her, she’d ignored me even harder. It had not been an auspicious start.
    “Whaddaya want?”
    Her cherry menthol breath hit my nose. Delores never said hello, never smiled, and always had a lozenge in her yap. She was a sour woman with a perpetual sore throat and an appliquéd sweater for every occasion.
    “Permits and blueprints for The Parker, please.”
    “Copies? Or you just gonna look?”
    “Copies, please.”
    “Got cash?”
    “Always.”
    “Requisition slip?”
    I handed her the form, filled out in my neatest print.
    “Take a seat,” she said.
    “Thanks, Delores. You’re a pal.”
    She grunted. I sat in a molded plastic chair and tried not to dwell on how uncomfortable it was. Things in the records office moved slower than glaciers, so the best thing to do was make peace with the awful decor and ponder the string of teddy bears marching across Delores’s doughy bosom.
    Forty-five minutes later she called me to her window.
    “There’s nothing there,” she said.
    “Come again?”
    “There’s. Nothing. There. Whole file’s gone.”
    “Everything? Every single one of The Parker’s records?”
    She gave me a look like salted lemons.
    “How could that happen?” I said. “Those files aren’t supposed to leave the archive.”
    “Brass probably took ’em out.” She shrugged. “They can do that.”
    “Could the file have been stolen?”
    She shrugged again.
    “Aren’t there duplicates?”
    The brown lines penciled in where her eyebrows should have been crept higher on her forehead.
    “And it took you forty-five minutes to tell me this?” I said.
    Delores smiled and hollered, “Next!”
    “Delores?”
    The brown lines lifted again.
    “You’re a real pip.”
    “Have a nice day,” she said. “Come again soon.”
    I stomped out of the records office and back across the rotunda, loud enough to make the decrepit old security guard frown. He didn’t like it when I asked for my blackjack back, either, but then, I hadn’t liked giving it