Free Indelible Ink by Matt Betts

at that moment. Got it?”
    Garrett thought hard about what to say. This was a new side of his supervisor that he’d never seen. They worked well together because they could bounce ideas off each other and collaborate in helpful ways. “Yeah.” He turned and started toward the yellow police-tape perimeter. His route took him past Marty Tan.
    “Don’t forget to leave your notes,” Harris called.
    Garrett took his notebook out of his coat pocket and handed it to Tan as he passed. “Good luck reading this, my handwriting sucks.” He didn’t wait for a reply.
    “You don’t use your tablet for notes?”
    Pel laughed and fell in step behind him.
    “They didn’t banish you ,” Garrett said. “Just me.”
    “I’m not hanging around to work with those assholes,” Pel said.
    “You don’t even know them, I’m sure they’re lovely people.”
    “Right.”
    They ducked under the tape and pressed through the crowd. As they rounded a police van, they came to where Rivers and Rice had been sitting in their car. The two agents and the car were gone.
    “Great. I had a question or two for them.” Garrett felt tired. The weight of the day caught up with him quickly.
    “Well, at least now we’ll have time to polish up our resumes before we see them again,” Pel said. “Let’s just go back and look at that video and see what else we can see, maybe copy it before we give it to the terrorism guys.”
    Garrett walked a few feet before he discovered the woman wasn’t following anymore. He turned and saw Pel just standing there with her face scrunched up. “You didn’t take the disk out of the laptop when we left the car, did you?” Pel asked.
    Garrett had to shake his head no. “It crossed my mind, it really did, but… I had no idea how to do it.”
    “You’re the most technologically challenged federal agent I know.”
    “I’m taking classes,” Garrett said.
    “They’re not helping.”

14
    In the cab, Avi spoke in low tones. “Why did you run away from me at the airport? If you were having so much trouble, you should have told me,” Avi said. He reached out and she moved away from him as best she could.
    “Avi, I don’t know what…”
    “And why are you suddenly acting all Amish?”
    “Amish? That’s a good one. Were you expecting me to jump you? Were you hoping that the little teenager would grab you hard and stick her tongue down your throat? That what you were looking for?” They’d had a pretty tumultuous relationship, punctuated by periods of deciding it was a bad idea for people in their line of work to be together in any sort of emotional entanglement. The times in between were not really much of a relationship. They had to keep things hidden from everyone in the organization, her sister included. It boiled down to brief periods of intense sex. “Pedophile much?” The cab driver looked at them in his rearview mirror, but Deena couldn’t be sure he heard her. She frowned at him and he turned away.
    “What the hell? What do want from me? You leave on a job, we’re all handsy and fucktacular, you come back like a Catholic schoolgirl on a fieldtrip and announce you’re joining a convent.” Avi looked understandably confused. “And you expect me to shift gears without missing a beat? Fuck you.”
    “Oh, poor you. Poor Avi. You’re not getting laid today. That’s much worse than what’s going on with me. Take a good look at me. I lost ten years of my life here. My mind constantly fights with itself as to whether I’m going to have a coherent thought, or if I’m going to repeat lyrics from boy band songs over and over for an hour,” Deena said. It was frustrating to explain such a profound change to someone who didn’t seem to want to know.
    “You already look older than when we met up in the airport. You’ll snap back. You always do.”
    “Maybe my body will, maybe even my mind, but I’ve never questioned my life this way. It can’t go on the way things were. And you have to