Page 89 of Lone Wolf

“Fine!” Joey threw up her hands, the latest abused pair of nylons flying overhead. “I don’t know how to put on stockings, okay? No one ever taught me. They keep ripping and tearing and getting streaks and shit and I don’t know how to do it. Okay?”

“What are you angry with me about?” Melinda said. “I’m not the one dressing you.”

Joey’s face softened. “Sorry.”

“A good rule of thumb, child. If you want help, don’t act like an asshole.”

Evan hadn’t thought it possible to find a new level of respect for Melinda, but there it was. He felt an internal glow of a sentiment even more specific than schadenfreude, something even the Germans hadn’t gotten around to naming yet.

Quieter Joey voice now: “Okay. It’s just … I have this dumb sorority event I’m late for already”—an aggravated flap of her hand at her endlessly pinging phone—“and I don’t want to show up looking all street.”

Melinda snapped her perfectly manicured fingers. “Let me see your toenails.”

Joey hesitated. Then held up the offending foot.

Melinda recoiled. “Clip those nails. That’s your first problem. They look bovine.”

“Sorry I’m not dipping them in, like, veal milk,” Joey shot back. “It’s not like I have some foot fetish, okay? I mean, feet are for walking. And kicking people.”

Melinda looked puzzled. “Veal milk?”

“Artistic liberty,” Joey said. “And your metaphor didn’t make sense either. It’s not like cows have toenails.”

“No. They have hoofs.”

“Gawd, you two!” Joey said. “Fine. I’ll add ‘supple girl feet’ to my vision board.”

Evan: “Vision board?”

“It’s a collage you make to help you visualize what you want your life to feel like. I know it’s hard for you to grasp, X, since you just think what you want, clench your butt cheeks, and it materializes.”

“Please,” Evan said to Melinda, “can we ignore and proceed?”

“Go,” Melinda said to Joey. “Find scissors or perhaps a suitable machete. Clip them. File them. Then get a fresh pair of stockings. You tuck tuck tuck tuck tuck all the way to the toe. And then put them on very slowly. If you get a small run, use clear nail polish to stop it.” And then, in the same even tone, “Can we please get back to the assassin now?”

“Gladly,” Evan said. “Do you have a closer look at Lopatina?”

Joey brought up a few young pictures of Karissa. Fuzzy childhood Polaroid, a driver’s-license picture from when she was sixteen. Smooth, even features, white-blond hair. She looked more likely to sell you Girl Scout cookies than take your head off with a post-WWII Russian sniper rifle, but then again, even psychopaths started out as children. In that youthful face, he recognized the features of the woman who’d cinched a zip tie around Jayla’s throat, sent sniper rounds toward his head, given him that dead-eyed two-finger salute. See ya around.

“Anything more current?” he asked.

Joey rooted in her pocket, came up with a Swiss Army knife with a scissors attachment, and set to work on her toes.

Atop Evan’s desk.

Not wanting to draw Melinda’s ire, he fought down an admonishment.

“Intel gets scarce after Lopatina slipped off into the underworld but the girl did her best.” Melinda chinned at Joey.

The girl. That was more like it.

Joey scowled at him before setting down the Swiss Army knife and calling up a few images of Lopatina as an adult. Grainy surveillance shots and a few CCTV angles, not one capturing her face cleanly. Evan studied them and the surrounding crime-scene reports. “She’s well-rounded,” he said. “Good at distance and up close. Evasion and concealment. Covers her tracks.”

“State-of-the-art gear, too,” Melinda said. “French Gendarmerie revolvers and Dragunov SVDs. Whoever’s putting the steel in her hands might as well be pulling the trigger themselves. A few of my men are seeing if they can backtrace any of the gear now.”

An audible snip sent a toenail clipping airborne, landing on Evan’s mouse pad. Vera III looked on with disdain, for once siding with him. He shot eye daggers at Joey until she picked up the clipping, and then got to sawing with the metal nail file.

Back to Melinda: “Any other leads on Lopatina?” Evan asked. “Where she’s been, where she’s heading?”