Miss Evans looks like a good girl, sure, like Shirley Maclaine's lost youth, but she's stalking nuns. She's standing on the other side of the street, watching them, watching the sisters from down Saint Ann's way, clustering together and gibbering at each other from under their whimples. Miss Evans, who looks like a Nineteen Sixties typing pool girl, she's got them dead in her sights. "Brides of Christ are standing out in front of Hamish's Butcher Shop on East Twenty-Second," she said into the phone pressed to her ear. She doesn't think she needs technical support, not Miss Evans, but she takes it anyway because it cuts down on the boss giving her shit. She hates it when he gives her shit. She can hear Carmine breathing on the other end of the line, and decides to remind him he exists. "Carmine, if you're going to make phone sex noises during an assignment, can you at least dirty talk a little? All the breathing makes me forget I don't."
Which is true; the mad scientist back in Delhi had her hermetically sealed. She doesn't even eat anymore. It surprised Miss Evans, exactly how little she misses either activity. Carmine finally snorts and speaks into the phone. "Sorry, Evans. Trying to fill out dental coverage forms and monitor your creepy operation at the same time. Did I ever tell you I went to Catholic school?"
"No. But I've read your files." Miss Evans feels it necessary to read up on her partners. She knew, for example, that he lived in perpetual existential crisis and as a result was very good at undercover work. Have to respect that, she's terrible at infiltration, even if she doesn't want to hear him having an episode over the phone, muttering about dear, sweet Gus or that fuck-up, Jackie-the-Chin.
"Well, Sister Mary Katherine would have tanned your ass for following them around."
"No, she wouldn't have." Traffic's starting to pick up, approaching rush hour.
"I don't even know what name I'm supposed to fill in," he says after about thirty seconds of nuns gesturing at each other and pedestrians stepping off the curb to go around them. Standard routine, based on witnesses, is half-hour of hanging out in front of Hamish's like a bunch of hoodlums before they walk back to Saint Ann's for afternoon calisthenics. Nuns probably don't normally do calisthenics, do they?
Miss Evans smooths out her knee-length skirt and opens the newspaper she's been keeping under her arm, scanning listlessly and pretending like she's not watching the nuns. Everybody watches the nuns, it's not like she's obvious. "At least you've got first names to keep track of, kiddo. They took mine away from me." It was a different time then, and practically all Carmine has is names, at this point.
The scuffing in her ear suggests Carmine has stopped to adjust himself, twist around in his chair, crack his neck muscles. He has very predictable patterns of unrest. "Dental benefits are shitty, anyway. Four hundred bucks coverage per year? Heaven help me if I need a root canal." Ha. This whole operation cost twenty bucks, maybe, and the cost of the newspaper. And then he remembers what he's supposed to be doing. "What are they up to now?"
"Nothing yet." Across the street, the sisters continue to make unnatural conversation in a dialect that certainly wasn't English, Italian, Latin, or any other recognizable language. They've spoken their own weird tongue for as far back as eighty years, according to independent sources. And occasionally they "find" dead bodies in back alleyways, like those five runaways last week -- there's quite the lengthy article about it in the paper, right next to two columns worth of talk about the fifth sneaker to wash up at the docks with a foot still inside. The nuns clutch their crucifixes and praise God in pig-latin. "The youngest is about eighty if she's a day, Carmine. I know they eat people's livers and the local kids say they have shark-teeth behind their people-teeth, but what's choking a ninety-five-year-old with her own rosary beads going to do for my C.V.?"
© Ben Rawluk, 2008, all rights reserved.