Free Spook Squad by Jordan Castillo Price

locksmith? A car door’s got all kinds of wires in it, and there’s always a chance to mess up—”
    “You’ve done this before, though?”
    “More times than I can count.”
    What was the encore, hiding in the back seat and introducing a well-placed bullet to the unsuspecting driver? I stood several steps away while she peeled back the weather stripping and slid the tool in. “You’ve gotta take your time,” she said. “When you finally do grab the lock, you can tell by the way it feels.” I checked her side. Was she packing? It didn’t look like it, not unless she had a really, really small firearm under her fitted suit.  
    “Sorry to pull you away from your…” I let it hang, hoping she’d fill in the blank with her job title.
    “No problem. I don’t mind.”
    I so sucked at covert questioning. I gathered myself for another try. “When you’re not popping locks, what is it you do?”
    She laughed. It sounded a bit self-conscious. Maybe I made her as nervous as she made me, which was never a good sign. That’s what they always say about things like bees and stray dogs, right before you end up in a world of pain. “Agent Dreyfuss calls me The Fixer. Because I can fix just about anything.”
    Anything at all…like the Roger Burke situation? Hoping she might be circling around to an explanation, I said, “Like what?”
    “I think I found the spot.” She paused in her lock-fishing and did a few shoulder rolls, then looked me in the eye. “Things like stopping a movement to have Psychs disqualified for state college aid. You wouldn’t have heard about it—we nipped that one early. Things like locating partners and allies in the business community willing to provide us with additional monitoring. Things like checking out our personnel.”
    She dropped her gaze as she said that last item. Since I was on the FPMP hire-list, I could only presume it meant she knew every last thing about me. In other words, the balance of power here was way more skewed than I’d thought. I did my best impression of “comfortable” by aiming for a light tone. “As job titles go, it’s got a better ring to it than PC-M5.”
    Maybe she had perused all my un-private records, but she didn’t know me well enough to see that I was faking comfort. She laughed nervously. “It is pretty catchy. Too bad all my official paperwork says Operations Coordinator .” She turned back to the car door while a million grisly variations of fixing things flashed before my mind’s eye. “I think it was…okay, there. Right there.” Pull, click, and the rear door was open. “You can reach into the front to hit the power-lock. You’ve got longer arms.”
    Why couldn’t a person unlock a whole car from the rear doors? Not everyone kept small children in the back seat. Some of us consumers would have preferred to open up the vehicle without exposing our backs to the person who’d just helped us break in. I solved this dilemma by facing her the whole time I stretched over the passenger seat rather than making my back a target. Luckily I did have long arms and I got the car open in a few awkward flails. I then hopped in the front door and grabbed my keys from the ignition.  
    As I battened down the car, I was relieved our little lockpicking stunt was over. Unfortunately, it hadn’t really told me anything at all about the elusive Operations Coordinator—other than the fact that I’d now need to check my back seat every time I got in my car to make sure she wasn’t hiding there with the ice scrapers and poorly folded maps. All my careful maneuvering, and I’d managed to come up with a job title, one that Jacob could have easily supplied. Super. I attempted to pry out just a little bit more. “So does everyone pack a slim jim…or is exclusive to The Fixer?”
    She held up the narrow strip of metal. “This isn’t exactly standard issue.” She began to walk toward the elevator, while I hung back to buy a bit of time. She was