Free Vision Impossible by Victoria Laurie Page B

filled with what looked like wrinkled navy blue material. “Sometimes Rick gets all wrapped up in his business stuff and he’s not so good about checking in with me. I got tired of waiting for him in that smelly condo in Prague, and I was homesick. So I figured I’d come back to Canada. I mean, I knew he’d come home sooner or later, but I didn’t exactly know he was here now.” She looked up from her purse again. “Didn’t he tell you he had a girlfriend?”
    “Uh . . . not in so many words,” I said, still trying to figure out how I wanted to play this.
    Grillfriend eyed me suddenly, her eyes suspicious. “ When did he hire you, exactly?”
    “Yesterday,” I told her.
    Again she appeared quite surprised. “And when did he get into town, again?”
    “This morning. I picked him up from the airport myself, actually. You two probably just missed each other.”
    “If he hired you yesterday and you picked him up today, then how did he meet you to hire you?”
    “We had a virtual interview last week, and he called me yesterday to offer me the position.”
    “A virtual what?”
    “Interview.”
    “How does that work?” I could tell she was stalling, feeling me out, so I just went with it.
    “Skype,” I said. “He has a webcam and I have a webcam and we can speak to each other and see each other over the Internet.”
    “You mean like webcam sex?”
    “A bit like that, yes,” I said. “Only no sex. Just an interview.” Oh, boy, Tanner hadn’t been kidding. Des Vries did like ’em dumb and slutty.
    “Well,” she said, moving into the condo and over to the TV, “you can go home now. I’m gonna wait here till he gets back.”
    Crap. Now what? In desperation I sent a text to Dutch. “I’ll just let Mr. Des Vries know that you’re here and tell him that I’m leaving for the evening,” I said merrily.
    She didn’t even look up from the couch. “Whatevs,” she said, sifting through the plastic bag to pull out a blue blazer, matching skirt, red and white scarf, and what looked like an ID badge. She then got up to toss the whole bundle into the fireplace.
    “Don’t like your uniform?” I asked, curious about her actions.
    “I got fired,” she said testily. “And it was total bullshit. I mean, you spill one pot of coffee on an Arabian prince, and it’s like you murdered someone or something.” Mandy then moved over to the switch by the side of the fireplace and flicked it. Flames sprouted immediately and began to consume the clothes. She smiled at the sight of the flames consuming her clothes. “The condo in Prague didn’t have a fireplace,” she said.
    “Are you going to get a new job?” I said, eyeing the screen of my phone anxiously. Where was Dutch?
    Mandy made a tsk ing sound. “Rick told me that if I ever got sick of working for the airlines, that I should just quit, so this is practically the same thing. I only flew a couple of times a month anyway, and that was only so I could fly free when Rick had one of his business meetings out of the country and he wanted me along.”
    “Ah,” I said again, just as my phone pinged with an incoming message.
    When I read the text, I nearly laughed, but it would have been mean, so I held in the chuckle and took the phone over to show Grillfriend, holding it up for her so she could see the text. “He sent you a message,” I said.
    She leaned forward from her seat on the couch and squinted at the screen to read the text line by line . . . out loud. “ ‘Tell Mandy to get her ass out of my condo. I’ve met someone else. It’s over between us.’ ”
    Grillfriend squinted at the message for about ten more seconds and then she burst into tears.
    I spent the next hour trying to convince Mandy to leave the condo. She had a meltdown to end all meltdowns. There were a lot of waterworks and Kleenex, and I knew that until she left, Dutch couldn’t come home. Short of zapping her with my stun gun and dragging her limp self into the elevator, I