Free Soldiers of Fortune by Jana DeLeon Page B

this week. I’ll believe it when I see it, but it’s nice to have hope again. I do remember that trip. I thought we’d never find a nice place, and then we ended up finding it somewhere we never would have looked if we hadn’t been exploring outside of the usual tourist lines. If things don’t cool down here soon, I’m going to start checking into a vacation. I probably should start doing some research and see what looks good.
    In other news, the auditors are here, so everything is a mess. They have a knack for asking for the one damned receipt that seems to be missing from files. So far, we’ve been able to satisfy them on everything. They should be done by the end of next week.  
    Well, guess I better run and get back to work. My dad is getting better every day. He’s started complaining—loudly—so I know he’ll be fine. Talk to you later!

    I took a bite of my cookie and read the message again. Harrison had gotten my hint about Ahmad changing his appearance and looked like he was going to move on that line of investigation, which was great. Also great was that the first part of his message seemed to indicate he had a lead on Ahmad’s location. With any luck, that would pan out and I could go back to only looking over my shoulder every minute instead of every ten seconds.
    The audit part confused me for a moment, but then it clicked—he was doing a sweep of the financial records of the other agents, which fit in line with my thinking earlier that someone was getting a hell of a payoff to try to find me. His message indicated no success so far, but that didn’t surprise me. No agent was foolish enough to dump a bunch of money in a US bank account, but looking at everyone might expose some oddities that made him do a wider sweep. Everyone thought international bank accounts were private, but the reality was, nothing in the world was private if someone with technology and money didn’t want it to be.
    I swallowed the rest of the cookie, downed half my glass of milk, and hit Reply.

    To: [email protected]
    From: [email protected]
    A vacation sounds like a wonderful idea. Let me know if you find anything interesting. I might want to try it out when things settle down here. Yuck on the auditors. That doesn’t sound fun at all. Hopefully they’ll finish up soon and you can move on to bigger and better things.  
    I’m glad your dad is improving. Complaining is usually a sign that someone is on the mend. Well, time to feed the animals. Good luck with the vacation hunt.

    I hit Send and reached for another cookie. I knew Harrison was doing everything he could to locate Ahmad and the mole, but I couldn’t help but wish I were there helping. Surely two of us working on it would be more efficient. On the other hand, a moving target was more of a hindrance than a help. But it still grated. This was my life and my career on the line.  
    I took another bite of the cookie and frowned, contemplating my own line of thought. At one time, the idea that my career could be in jeopardy would have sent me into a tailspin of anxiety and despair. I was only my career. Fortune Redding, the person, didn’t exist other than to fill that role. But ever since I’d arrived in Sinful, I’d started to wonder just how much living I’d been missing out on. Granted, with the recent burst of criminal activity here, I hadn’t really had time off the job, per se, but there was downtime in between emergency investigations that I enjoyed. I really liked eating breakfast at the café and chatting with Francine and the regulars. I liked hanging out with Gertie and Ida Belle watching television, even though Gertie had exposed me to things I might have to bleach my eyes to forget. I loved lying in my hammock in the backyard and reading a great book, and if two months ago, anyone had told me I’d think that, I would have shot them for being stupid.
    I wanted the problem with Ahmad to be over. Wanted it more than anything. And I wanted