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“Thanks,” she said, turning back to the cabinet.
I went and got the supplies for coffee and a candle. It didn’t take me very long to realize that bringing water to a boil over the tiny flame was going to be impossible, so I went ahead and poured it over the grounds. Then I poured two cups of room-temperature brew I’d created and brought them back to the file cabinet.
I handed one to Alison. “This is probably going to taste like crap,” I warned. “We don’t get gourmet beans here or anything, and I wasn’t able to heat it either.”
“Caffeine is caffeine.”
“Yeah, that’s how I feel about it too.” I knocked some of mine back like a shot, not bothering to let myself taste it. It felt slimy in my mouth.
“I don’t suppose you’d want to help me find my way through all this?” Alison asked, waving a hand at the papers.
“You’re looking for financial records?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re in the wrong drawer.” I pushed the one she’d opened closed and slid open another one. “These are organized by year. See?”
I could tell she was impressed. “You could have just given me this from the start, and we could have avoided the runaround.”
“The runaround was fun.” I leaned against the side of the file cabinet. “And I know I’m not the only one who thinks so, by the way.”
She groaned. “Have you always been fucking impossible?”
“I don’t let teenagers see that side of me.”
“Yeah, I wonder why that is.” She pulled out a stack of files. “I’m going to go look through these, okay?”“I’ll help you.”“I don’t need any help.”
“Well, I’m coming with you anyway,” I said.
“Still can’t stand to let me do anything on my own, huh?”
“No reason I should.” I followed her over to the desk she had decided was hers. It was unoccupied—no one worked here—so it was a decent choice, and I thought that was probably why she’d picked it. No one’s personal crap was cluttering up the workspace.
She sat down and flipped open the first folder. “So you’d say there’s no chance I’m going to find anything here that shouldn’t be, right?”
“This is the SEALs,” I reminded her. “We’re the best of the best. You know that. We don’t let just anybody in. Everyone who gets into this branch of the military is screened within an inch of their life. There are no criminals here.”
“No criminals who’ve ever been caught,” she amended.
“If you think I can’t tell a good seed from a bad one, you don’t know me as well as you think you do.”
“Oh, I already realized that I didn’t know you as well as I thought I did,” she said, looking up at me. “Believe me, Brian; I’ve been learning all kinds of things about you since I started this assignment.”
I cleared my throat. “So… what are you looking for in those files?”
“Discrepancies.” She turned her attention back to the papers in front of her.
“You’re not going to find any.”“You said that. And I hope you’re right,” she said. “I don’twantto find anything.”“I thought you wanted to impress the feds by making some big bust on your first assignment.”
“I want to do a good job on my assignment,” she corrected me. “I don’t want to find anything. I want to prove that there’s nothing to find. The SEALs mean almost as much to me as they do to you, Brian.”
I doubted that was true, but I did want to believe her intentions.
And I wanted to show her a little trust, too. She’d earned it from me by now.
“I’ll go into my office,” I told her.
“You’re not going to sit here and watch me?”“You said you didn’t need any help.”
