December 2023, Seattle

I lay face-down on the damp asphalt in two states: Washington, and incapacitation. My plexus felt about as solar as the drizzly evening.

Who was she? Why did she knock me down? And how in God's green city did she know my name?

It was a calm, misty night in a city that knew how to look beautiful, as long as you don’t look too close. By the way, Emerald City is not what you call it. You call it Cloud City, or Grunge City, or Jet City. Or Sovereign of the Salish Sea if, you know, you’re not into the whole brevity thing. Longtime locals might call it LA of the North, intending to compliment neither place.

Speaking of LA, the Seattle locals laugh and jeer in the theaters at Hollywood’s favorite Seattle trope: heavy downpours, thunder and lightning. This particular Monday evening was more typical for early December. It was like standing in the bathroom with the shower running and the curtain open. Sure, the floor gets wet, and you might end up a little damp yourself, but you’d never open an umbrella and give yourself away as a tourist.

I didn’t live there anymore, but I once had. Growing up in western Montana, Seattle had been our “big city," five hundred miles down I-90. Later, as a young adult, I found myself pulled in by its gravitational beauty. I'd gotten into some trouble: not too much, but enough to know that Seattle ain’t bullshitting. A decade later now, I’d straightened out my life, moved elsewhere and leveraged my ways with people and with technology to become an IT manager. That might make me seem an unlikely candidate for the dickish business that follows, but sometimes the circumstances pick you rather than the other way around.

I still got to visit Seattle once in a while on business, which suited me fine. Unfortunately, ever since COVID, things had seemed dicked to hell. If the state of the world were one of the region's famous jets, the Pandemic had been severe turbulence, knocking us all off course. By 2022, inflation and war were warning lights flashing on the control panel. Now 2023 had us losing altitude, with smoke streaming out of one of the engines.

It's not like this was happening only in Seattle. It seemed there were no cities to love anymore. We had more crime, more war, more division, more climate disasters and more homelessness; and now we had food shortages, cyberattacks disrupting daily life, and a deep recession making last year’s inflation seem quaint. Even the protection gangs now operated in daylight, Seattle’s Finest too overwhelmed to keep up unless you lived in Magnolia or Laurelhurst. I’m not one to rage against machines, but we seemed to be pursuing a long road to ruin, our destination lying somewhere between dystopian and Dickensian. Maybe “Dicktopian” was a word worth coining.

The physical beauty of Seattle somehow made all the human ugliness feel even more tragic than elsewhere. But on this misty evening, my mind had been taken off all the troubles by that very beauty. The steep streetlit hills all around me glowed in the gentle mist. So did the bright ferries plying the blackness of Elliott Bay below me, as did the condo skyscrapers of Belltown towering above me. Despite the slight chill, I always loved the blue of the night on Seattle evenings like this. It was almost romantic.

Oh, speaking of romantic: I had just kissed the pavement, hadn’t I? Like I said, don't look too close.

She had come into view just as I rounded the corner from the Second Avenue Bikeway on my rented sharebike, about to meet a friend at a local bar. She was running up the sidewalk, clad in black Lycra. Medium-thin build, a little taller than average but not that tall - maybe 5’7”, if I had to guess. Her hair, as black as her clothes, was in a ponytail that bounced alluringly as she ran.

Ooh, she was just my type.

I imagined peeling off her sports top as I nibbled on her peachy earlobes and sinewy neck.

I imagined moving onto her firm, supple titties from the neck, my fingers doing some advance scouting down inside those black running tights.

I imagined wrapping my arms around her hips, burying my tongue in her aromatic, juicy hole while she was still sweaty from running, my nose taking in her complex scents. Perhaps through a nearly trimmed triangle of obsidian fur.

These dreams had briefly flashed through my head, even causing my dick to chub up a little, before I realized she wasn’t merely jogging. She was sprinting, staring at me through piercing green eyes.

I was about to pass in front of an alley when she yelled, “Mr. Barnes, look out!”

A stocky bald man charged out of the alley at me, a blade in his hand flashing brighter than his polished head under the streetlights. The runner arrived at the alley entrance at the same time I did. She high-kicked Baldy in the arm just as he swung the shiv, causing him to cut open some rain instead of my neck.

Both of them slammed into me, five hundred pounds of flesh meeting in a chorus of “oofs” and “ughs.” You could almost see the Batman-style “Biff!” - or maybe it was a “Wham!” - hang in the air for a second.

The collision sent my rented steed not falling over like a bicycle, but rather running off like a spooked horse. It bucked back and forth across the street before bouncing off the bumper of a parked car, then cartwheeled end over end after its front wheel hit the curb. It nailed the corner of a brick building abutting the opposite alley, taking a chunk out of one of the bricks. Not to worry; in Seattle, there’s no alley a wad of used chewing gum can’t fix.

The poor mount finally succumbed to its fate and lay down, its front wheel bent, its handlebar askew, and a “tick-tick-tick” sound issuing from the hub as its wobbly rear wheel spun slowly.

Still flat on the pavement, I felt bent, askew and wobbly myself. At least my own hub still appeared to tick, and a lot faster than normal too.

Maybe my dick would also eventually tick again. She might provide some inspiration for that, whoever she was. For the moment, though, I was kissing asphalt when I’d been dreaming of ass a moment before.

Immediately after the impact, the domehead went after her. She was small, but swift and agile, managing to get neither decked nor diced by that dickwad. Eventually, she got control of his wrist and his blade, finally plunging it into his throat. He lay in the street, gurgling.

Then, a moment later, he was not gurgling.

His eyes went as dull as those of the Coho that the fishmongers at Pike Place Market love to throw around to impress the tourists. His body became as limp and gray as the thick geoducks at the Market that didn’t impress the tourists so much.

“Joe Barnes, Federal Agent Jamie Flynn,” she declared. “I nearly lost you there.” Then she dictated, “Quick, help me dump this dickbrain in the alley before anyone sees him.”

Still struggling to just breathe normally again, absorbing the irony of being attacked on Battery Street, it took me a second or two to process the dictum from the female dick.

“Hurry up! He’s heavy," the agent growled. "I’m not fucking Wonder Woman here.”

As we hauled the body out of street view, I corrected, “Wonder Woman doesn’t have super strength, you know, just special powers.” I’m not that much of a com fan, mind you, but I knew that much.

Maybe I should have kept that thought to myself. Agent Flynn scolded, “Fucking IT guys take your comics way too seriously.” So she knew both my name and my business. I guess there’s no privacy anymore. But I’m in IT, so I already knew that.

A moment later she added with a smirk, “I do have special powers, though."

"Yeah. Sure," I muttered. "Maybe you can show me later.”

I had intended it more sarcastically than flirtatiously, but she retorted, "If you’re good,” her eyes flashing like the emeralds that Seattle doesn’t like being named after.

I smiled back. "Oh, I'm good. But don't worry, I'll get better.” I was pleased with myself for uttering a rare well-timed, clever line. I also knew I was dredging the bottom of that particular well, so I was relieved to be interrupted by the arrival of a panel van.

Black and unmarked, its license plates superimposing all-too-businesslike dark blue letters over an all-too-symbolically faded US flag. It hurriedly backed into the alley, its back tires whirring loudly on the wet pavement.

The driver, a big guy in a dark suit, white shirt and dark tie, got out. He picked up the heavy body and heaved it through the cargo doors like a sack of dog food.

Agent Flynn walked over to the right side of the government van, meanwhile, speaking briefly with the passenger and handing him a phone, which he plugged into a dongle on his laptop.

She returned to me. “Here’s my badge, by the way.” Looked authentic enough, but like most crime victims I was too disoriented to actually examine it. She could have been FBI, US Marshals, DEA, SEC, GSA, NSA, Border Patrol, National Forest Service, National Park Service, or even the National Weather Service, for all I knew. Every single one of those agencies had offices in Seattle, and they all seemed to have their own cop shops. Yes, even the Weather Service had a couple of officers to keep weekend visitors away from the Soundgarden.

Meanwhile, the big dick who'd been driving the van crossed the street to seize the mangled bike from the opposite sidewalk, along with some parts that had fallen off and the dislodged chunk of brick. He casually lobbed all of it in on top of the body. His twisted treasure hunt apparently complete, he got back in.

I heard the dick in the passenger seat speak into his watch. “Jim, we got him. Haul him in. Backup is ten seconds behind you."

The van roared, its sizzling tires throwing spray as it fishtailed out of the alley and up the next block, coincidentally in the direction of my drinking destination. “I’ll be back in three minutes,” Agent Flynn declared. “Turn off your phone so those dicks-for-brains can't track you, and wait here for me.”

My intended destination, by the way, was a place up the street where I was to meet my friend Alan Dickinson. My personal preference was for seedier taverns, of which Seattle still had a few tucked away, but this was a trendier joint with a short one-word name and two-digit drink prices. I was willing to put up with the former since Alan was promising to cover the latter.

After this Monday-evening meetup, my plan for the rest of the week was to work intensively with Alan on a new project. He worked for EightaBase, my employer's data partner, here in Seattle. Tonight I was planning to return his phone, which he'd inadvertently left at our offices during contract signing last week, and also to deliver him a comic book.

I wasn't a big comic fan myself, as I’ve mentioned, but he was a collector. He’d had me keeping an eye out for a few items at the shops in my city. Over the weekend I had hit pay dirt, finding an old mint Dick Tracy that was allegedly worth three grand. The owner of the store who sold it to me had undervalued it, “only” charging me $700. Alan would pay me two grand, which seemed decent enough to me.

So far my evening plan was working to perplexion, though, and the Dick Tracy was now torn and wrinkled from the altercation. I'd lost Alan's phone too. Some postman I'd turned out to be. The thirteen Benjamins I'd been chasing now seemed pretty unlucky. Did someone really just try to rob me of a fucking comic book? I might not have been shocked to get mugged down in Pioneer Square or the I-District, but in Belltown? Boy, crime sure was up these days.

Seconds after the van tore off, what was left of the evening's quiet was shattered by a gunshot and exploding glass. Those sounds were followed almost instantly by a series of deeper, muffled-sounding shots. Then I heard the screams of the bar patrons as they ran out and the dicks ran in. Boy, crime sure was up these days.

I'd followed Flynn's first command to turn off my phone but decided to call "no dice" on her other dictum, running like a little dik-dik to ditch these decidedly dickish federal dicks. I wasn't even sure that's what they were.

As my feet hit Fifth, I encountered another assailant sprinting towards me. Fortunately, this pursuer, like the first, was thicker than he was fast. After feinting left, I ran like the Dickens and managed to stay ahead of him for a block, relying for shoe grip on the dry strip of pavement sheltered by the Seattle Monorail tracks above. It sure was turning out to be the day I tried to live.

I heard engines roaring nearby. I hoped I wasn't hearing rival gang members chasing each other, but rather mere street racing, the noisy pastime that seems to have replaced garage bands for so many a young Seattleite. Fortunately, I heard no accompanying gunshots. Two cars came around the corner, just a few feet apart from each other. The first, a blue Infiniti G-something coupe with yellow racing stripes, was going too fast for the corner and went into a flat spin, missing me but nailing the guy who’d been tailing me.

I heard three thuds from the thug in rapid succession: first, car hitting thug; then, thug splatting against Monorail pillar; and finally, thug crumpling down to asphalt. This was followed by a louder fourth noise as the dichromic Infiniti flattened itself against the subsequent Monorail pillar. Next, I heard one of the drivers yell, “Hey, Joe! Stop running!”

They could kiss my ass goodbye again. I still DKDC who these dicks were, or who the other dicks were that were dicking with me, even if the former dicks had given the latter dicks the Dickens. There was a wide dichotomy between what they wanted me to do and what I wanted to do.

I heard the second car, a black Mitsubishi Evo, take off, presumably coming after me. I ducked behind a Dumpster a block away and watched the car growl past. I then spent the next ten minutes working my way east through the Regrade, playing cat and mouse behind garbage cans and parked cars in surface lots. The mouse procedure was really not to my liking.

I ran into the busy natural foods store on Denny, thinking I might procure a nice heavy Prosecco bottle to smash against a curb and defend myself with, or maybe just ladle up a bowl of soup at the hot bar to throw in their faces. I hit the Cancel button on both ideas, traversed the front of the store and slipped out the other entrance. An empty Lake Union Streetcar had glided (or was it glid? glode?) to a stop across the street. I hopped aboard just as it was about to close its doors and inch away.

Boy, after a decade of clean living my capital-T troubles were suddenly adding up again: two attempts on my life; a destroyed sharebike; almost stole soup; and now, fare evasion on the Streetcrawler.

This particular car was the same shade of yellow as the region’s famous banana slugs, and not a whole lot bigger. It was also not a whole lot quicker. It took the Streetcreeper eleven minutes to cover the seven or eight blocks into downtown.

Dashing down the Westlake Center steps into the underground transit hub, I did it legal-like this time, tapping the Orca card that I'd saved from previous Seattle visits, still managing a skin-of-my-teeth squirt through the closing doors of a northbound Link train. Maybe if I stayed on all the way up to Northgate, I thought, I could steal my way through the neighborhood, find a cheap motel room near the mall and hide out until the light of day erased the confusion.

Nope. At the first stop, I saw Agent Flynn staring me down through the train windows, trapping me like a fly in a jar. Now she was wearing a puffy nylon jacket over the running outfit, and a shit-eating grin.

"Orca card?” she chided, rolling her eyes. "Really?"

I guess my more paranoid friends had been right all along. That's how they get you.

She pulled me off the train and up against her, giggling out serious words. "More baddies are after you. We need to stroll out of here", she murmured heatedly in my ear as if we were on a juicy date, "looking like we’re just a couple out on the town.” She undid her ponytail and let her jet hair down at the same time. In my book, the only thing hotter than a ponytail is letting one down. My libido told me it was a good time to swallow my pride and go along for the ride.

“Walk, slowly. Now!”

As we walked along the platform like a couple, I wrapped my arm around her hip, feeling a cold hard bulge on the other side.

She calmly moved my hand higher on her waist and away from the gat, using the same giggly-girlfriend voice to advise, “You better move your hand higher, darling. We don’t want any more misfires tonight.”

Seductively she added, “You can move it even lower when we’re alone. I bet you’ll shoot straight then. “

I didn't think she really meant it, but I was about to grow a steel barrel of my own in my pants anyway. She was the walking, talking trigger.

We climbed the stairs to street level, where even on a Monday the sidewalk was moderately busy with Capitol Hill's usual mix of humanity. I’ll admit that as a young man I had taken in the gayborhood's scene a couple of times out of curiosity, taking in a couple of dicks while I was at it. As we turned a corner onto Broadway, across from Dick’s Drive-In, the smell made me hanker for a Deluxe and fries. She laughed as if I’d said something funny, abruptly pulling me back into a doorway and whispering “Kiss me, now!” She lip-locked me and pressed her firm form up against me.

Agent Flynn was making things look pretty realistic for the passers-by. Hell, she made it feel realistic for me, her lips parting and her tongue probing into my mouth with a giggle and a high moan.

I unwittingly made it realistic for her too, my thickening dick expressing its approval of my tax dollars for this purpose. This prompted a further giggle, as well as a palpation of my penis. This was not the kind of dickwork I ever expected from the Feds.

“Mmm, nicest thing the government has ever done for me,” I breathed in her ear.

“Well, I am a public servant, Joe,” she whispered back.

“Sure beats my student loans.”

“Maybe later I can show you a much nicer way to get fucked by the Feds.” Damn, was she for real? Not that I wasn’t turned on as hell, but she had to be just flirting, right?

After a few seconds, she casually glanced up and down the pavement, then whispered in my ear, “Ok, we’re clear. We can walk again.”

I wasn't so sure about that. I felt like a wet newspaper leaning on a table leg, with two choices: fall over or fold in half.

“I just saved you a third time, honey,” she whispered. Third? Oh, that had been her driving the Infiniti that had smeared the minion on the Monorail pylon.

She continued whispering in my ear. “The goon with the black beanie who just walked by is from the same knuckle farm as those two twits now toting toe tags. As long you don’t dick me around anymore, I can get you across town to a safe house.”

We turned another corner, and there was the same black Mitsubishi that had chased me earlier. The driver, a suit I recognized as the passenger from the van, got out, leaving the keys in it. “Debrief at 0900, Jamie.”

"Aww, fuck. Brassholes?”

“At least two bigwigs, yeah,” he replied, with no small disappointment in his voice.

“Dammit. No good deed goes unpunished. Those dicks are going to have my ass, you know,” she spat, ramming the stick into first, popping out the third pedal and roaring further up the hill.

She screamed, “Fuuuuuuuck!” She pounded her fists against the wheel in between a couple of skillful skids around the mini-roundabouts of the tightly packed neighborhood.

After a moment she looked at me contritely. “Sorry for the outburst. We’ve got a dead primary perp, plus two dead goons, the rest of Remipede chasing us without sufficient backup to take them on, let alone take them out, and half the mess splattered across the news. But!” She held up a finger and smiled sarcastically. “We recovered a phone and saved a civilian life for once. In my business, we call that a happy ending.” I realized she must have lifted Alan's phone from me in the earlier confusion, though I wasn't yet sure why.

“And what, exactly, is your business?”

“White-collar crime specialist. A seemingly futile endeavor sometimes, but occasionally I make a dent. And once in a while, they let me out on Street assignments like this, on loan to special interagency task forces.”

“Mercenary work, huh?” I inquired with a raised eyebrow. “Does that have something to do with your so-called special powers?”

So far, these powers appeared to include covert ops, pickpocketing, hand-to-hand combat, extreme urban driving … and some damn fine kissing. It's amazing what they teach these agents at Fed U.

“Two excellent deductions, Joe.” Flirtatiously she continued, “And by the way, I’m still happy to demo those powers for you later. You have become a better man, as you promised earlier. I might be inclined to reward you.”

I could only imagine what other surprises this domestic dick might have tucked up her sleeve, or running tights. My imagination reeled. My dick unreeled. The possibilities were unreal.

Jamie was now working a path southward across Cherry Hill. I noticed that in addition to a green dot with our position, this car’s nav screen showed a bunch of moving red dots and a few blue ones. Both appeared to be some distance behind, but following.

“So your ‘friend’ Alan Dick-in-Scum was involved in some dicey doo-doo that a decent dude like you does NOT want to direct his dick into. He's going to be pushing up dicots now.”

“At first I thought this was over a vintage Dick Tracy," I mused, pulling the damaged rag out of my bag to show her.

She laughed uproariously. "Oh my God, you thought that?" She beamed a warm smile at me. "Oh, my dear sweet Joe. I spend so much time battling bad guys and bureaucrats, it's always nice to deal with a good clean citizen once in a while,” she declared, pinching me on the cheek, “making up for the rest of us sinners. No, it's much bigger than that, sweetheart.”

“Is that why we’re running away from the bad guys instead of chasing them?”

“Very good, Joe! We can’t call in the yokels. Remipede has its fingers in more pies than you can imagine.”

"So is it like SPECTRE or something?”

“Worse, Joe. They’ve taken advantage of power vacuums all over the world since the Pandemic, and hooked fresh tendrils into everything. They own politicians all over, and have turned badges in every major PD in the country, including Seattle. Sometimes my department has to go it alone. It's just too risky to call others in.”

More somberly she added, “By the way, I would like to make clear that I’ve never iced anyone before."

"So do you get a special call sign now?" I deadpanned.

"No, dickhead," she chuckled. "No double-O status. We're not MI6 or CIA.” I wondered if that meant CIA had a similar convention too. “Fully domestic. Prime directive for this detective is to be protective of civilian life. Not to take it."

“I’ve never seen anyone die before.”

“Aww, don’t worry, sweetie,” she said, hand against my cheek, her tone saccharine this time. “It’s not like you’re going to suddenly start seeing thestrals.”

“What am I, the Boy Who Lived?” I asked as she skated us sideways onto Twelfth, all four tires spinning on the pavement as she poured on the petrol and slingshotted us southward.

"So it seems tonight," she mused. I wondered how much longer that would remain true as we roared through red lights in Little Saigon at seventy miles an hour.

“And good comeback to my Thestral comment,” she said, her voice softer, calmer, more feminine again, yet strongly resonant. “In my line of work, one develops a warped sense of humor, which you’re showing signs of yourself.” She smiled as we rocketed across the Twelfth Avenue Bridge at speeds that prevented me from taking in the lovely view of downtown and SoDo, where lots of lumens emitted from the stadium where the Hawks were playing a rare Monday Night game.

“Also, excellent instincts staying ahead of me after I mashed that meathead under the Monorail. I think you have just the combination of street savvy and tech talent that we need. You should consider coming to work for us. We could use more people like you, with how much white-collar crime is tied up in IT these days."

As we flew up to the crest of Beacon Hill, I noticed that a new blue dot had appeared on the screen, a few blocks away on a side street and closing fast. Then, a second later, a red dot appeared out of nowhere, less than half a block away. Before Jamie could continue her recruitment pitch for a racket that sounded more spook than dick …

The red dot had become a yellow Ford Focus charging at us from a side street with its lights off. Bam! We got hit in the tail section and started going into a spin, heading for the opposite curb. Somehow Jamie caught the spin and kept us going, now on the left side of the street. The Ford still tailed us, its bumper cover dragging noisily on the pavement.

Then the blue dot that had recently appeared on the screen came at us from the next side street. I braced for another impact, but instead, a black government-issue-looking Tahoe turned in behind us. Interestingly, over the roar of its V-8 I heard the distinctive squeal of a supercharger. Chevy makes such an engine, but ordinary citizens can’t get it in a Tahoe. Apparently, Jamie’s team can.

The big SUV rammed the Focus, spraying glass across the street, flipping it and wrapping it around a light pole. “Make that three dead goons,” Jamie declared. So far, the joke did seem to be on Remipede tonight.

The Focus was in flames now. No, it didn’t blow up. We’re trying to avoid nonsensical Hollywood tropes, remember?

Well, except for car chases. We still love those.

“For someone who’s never killed before, you sure seem to be enjoying it, Agent Flynn.”

“Believe me,” she said more seriously, executing a flawless handbrake wedge turn back northwest onto Beacon Avenue, palming the wheel effortlessly as we pivoted around an electric bus and back into the lane, “I’ll be paying a psychological price once the adrenaline wears off. Something maybe we can help each other out with later. And please,” she added, “call me Jamie.”

I might have calmed down enough to smile. “Well, I do like that better than Agent Flynn. “

“I hope you’ll like me better than you like Agent Flynn,” she said demurely, smiling and placing her hand on my knee as she used her left hand to drift the vehicle down the tree-lined curve and onto the decline of the Holgate overpass.

“This car's burned," Jamie declared, pulling into the Post Office garage off Lander. "Baddies are two minutes, forty behind us. I called in a favor to get us this switch car.”

Another vehicle was waiting with its doors wide open as if prepared to be ravaged like the last. The next victim was a stealthy all-black Mustang, with no badges or writing except for license plates ending in “SP.” I knew the State Patrol here had lots of Mustangs in their stable, but I’d never seen one that wasn’t white.

Or was a GT350. "Buckle up, buckaroo," I told myself.

We rumbled up the eastern span of Spokane Street, around the curve and onto the freeway. Jamie cackled, “This is where we ditch those dickheads," easing us left onto the I-5 Express Lanes as we headed north at a hundred-ten per. On the freeway's lower deck, beneath the groins of the Columbia and Union Square towers whose dick shapes rise to such great heights, the caterwauling cacophony of our carriage made it impossible to continue our question session.

Soon our pony car reared up behind a group of cars going about fifty, the twin lanes held up by two classic remnants of old Seattle: an aged Tercel wagon and a truly ancient VW bus. The hill of downtown dropping out below us as the freeway transitioned from underground to elevated, Agent Flynn murmured, “Right behind you, Shelly” into her watch.

“I can hear you without the comms, Jamie,” I heard an amused-sounding female voice reply. The instant we passed the on-ramp coming up from the Mercer Mess, the Toyota jumped ahead of the VW and into the right lane, allowing the antsy intervening drivers to speed up. Flynn waved acknowledgment at the blonde driving the Tercel, then gave a quick flash of blue and red lights to scoot a couple of luxo-SUVs out of the way.

“I don’t want anyone to see where we exit,” she said. I hoped she wasn’t referring to our existence. She downshifted, funneling fuel and revving the Voodoo engine past eight grand. The scream that reverberated against the freeway’s upper deck sounded more like five hundred twenty-six power saws than the same number of horses.

Seconds later, barely even with Eastlake, our speed had topped a buck-fifty. We crested onto the Ship Canal bridge, briefly out of view of the trailing cars behind, even the limp-dick in the BMW who’d used us as an excuse to do eighty. Buh-bye Bimmer.

Over the roar of the wind and tires and combustion and exhaust, Flynn finally eased up on the juice, yelling, "Hang on, Joe!"

"What? Hang on NOW?!"

Oh, shit. She going to try to take the U-District offramp. I guess it made sense to leave the Espresso Lanes before they surfaced in the center of the I-5 mainline, where goons could spot us or shoot us.

It seemed more likely she would splatter us across a couple of hundred yards of freeway wall trying, or maybe flip us over the wall and drop us through the roof of the Northlake Tavern. At least the pizza toppings there would be deep enough to pad our landing.

With the north end of the bridge coming up frightfully fast, Agent Flynn clamped the brakes. Eleven-inch-wide tires latched the dry aggregate like Velcro. I felt like I was at the bottom of a bungee jump, my stomach in my mouth, or maybe the glove box. I wondered if the seatbelt was going to leave a bruise.

We were still doing eighty as we shot the tiny exit hole in the concrete wall. Jamie rounded us through the wet downhill curve of the ramp, somehow managing to reach a sane speed as we sailed past a stop sign and onto the surface streets.

"Good. I don’t think we left a mark back up there," she said, referencing the fact that she hadn't jammed the brakes quite hard enough to skid the tires and make black spots on the concrete.

“Might have left a mark in my pants,” I deadpanned.

She giggled in response. "Good one. See, you could be good at this.” She grabbed my hand. “Seriously, come work for us! We need a few good men!”

“Isn’t that the Marines? And don’t you want women too?”

“Ehh, close enough for government work,” she quipped with lighthearted sarcasm.

Our burbling vehicle calmly cruised back under the bridge into Wallingford, where tech millionaires and wealth managers had long since snagged the well-kept period bungalows from university professors. These days, our exhaust rumble fit right in with the AMGs and BMW Ms which had long since replaced the Hondas and Subarus that used to line the narrow streets.

Still pushing her pitch, she playfully commanded, “Uncle Sam wants YOU to serve your country,” pointing her finger at me as in the old recruitment posters.

Jamie was enjoying this way too much for a Federal agent, acting more like we were on a Fun with Dick and Jane caper than any government business. A regular rebel girl. By now I was smitten.

After a few blocks, she rolled us through the open garage door of a Nineties-era condo building on the stretch of Pacific where they used to let people sleep in their vans, back when it was university professors living just up the hill.

We were greeted in the garage by a rigidly erect dick. A state detective stood there, dressed in a suit with a badge pinned to the lapel. Flynn parked the car, flung the keys to the man and said, "Thanks for the rental, Dick. Warmed up the tires for you."

Of course Dick would be his name. You didn’t seriously expect it to be Woody, Peter, Willie or Rod, did you?

Forget about dick; he looked just like the kind of guy with enough balls to shepherd a nonconforming purchase through state vehicle procurement, and then proceed to lend it to a rogue team of Feds without prior auth.

"Anytime, James. Heard you bagged some mystery meat tonight," he replied with a grin as Jamie steered me towards the stairs. I hoped he was referring to the dead henchmen and not me.

“Three down, infinity to go,” she yelled back over her shoulder.

"About right. Always happy to help win a battle while we lose the war.”

Jamie went first as we rounded each half-flight of steps, hand on her right hip, apparently ready to draw in an instant.

We got inside the fourth-floor condo, stepping over an elevated threshold, a four-inch-thick door slamming behind us like a bank vault.

"Whew! Finally. You are safe here, Joe.”

The place was quieter than a recording studio after the engineers went home and the band passed out. The walls and ceiling were layered in enough gray corrugated foam to coddle ten thousand eggs. The light green carpet was so thick I thought they should lay off the fertilizer.

“I feel like I’m in a safe.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Oxygen?”

“Clever, Joe.”

She sauntered over towards the kitchen. The sight of the fully stocked bar grabbed my attention right away. Then the movement of her hips got in the way, commanding even more of it.

“I have more explaining to do about why we are both here, but let me get myself a drink first.”

She turned her head and winked. “Don’t worry, I’ll get you one too.” She must have caught me leering at her ass as she glanced back, but she didn’t let on as to whether she enjoyed it.

"Better make it a double.”

“Double … gin and tonic, isn’t it, Joe?”

“How is it you know so much about me?”

She shot me a look as if I should be surprised. “Do you think I'd be trying this hard to get you on board if we hadn't already vetted you? And by the way, you’re passing your first field test with flying colors.”

Join the Feds? That sounded like a thankless job in this crumbling world.

Resignedly I added, “Fine. Gin and tonic.”

Jamie made our drinks and sat down next to me on the couch.

“First of all, what you witnessed tonight involved an exceptional risk to national security. We are taking exceptional steps to mitigate it.”

“That’s comforting. I guess.”

She placed her hand on my knee. “Good! Then at least I’m doing part of my job.”

"Your special powers?” I asked quizzically.

“Possibly.” She withdrew her hand, leaving a cold spot on my knee.

“So what transpired tonight is that you were an unwitting mule, transporting a fake phone filled with sensitive intel that is worth millions of dollars to certain foreign entities. The nature of some of the intel made this a national security emergency. Unofficially. Alan deliberately left the dirty device in your company’s conference room for Chuck to load up, for you to return to Alan, and then for Alan to deliver to the Russian Mafia. Wisely, they did it this way to keep the info out of the Cloud, where it could be tracked and hacked. But besides stupidly packing heat tonight, Alan’s other golden blunder was to click on a phishing email that allowed Remipede, a much nastier international organization, to monitor his Signal messages.”

“Fuck me.”

She let out a little guffaw, almost spitting out some of her drink. “Ha!” She looked at me slyly. “Your instincts are better than you realize, Joe. I hope you won't think any less of me for it, but I was assigned to this case to pry that smoking gun of a phone off of Alan ‘by any means necessary,’ as they say in the movies, in case I couldn’t get it from you first."

"Also ‘by any means necessary?'" I asked.

"You wish!” she said, her hand on my knee again. “I would have enjoyed that,” she continued, sliding it a couple of inches up my thigh, then withdrawing it. “Sadly, though, I'd planned on merely asking you for it, rather than the more persuasive methods I was prepared to use on Alan. He is known to have a weakness for women like me.” I had an inkling now of what she meant. I seemed to be developing a similar weakness.

“But that plan got dicked all to hell when we found out at the last minute that these Remipede dickholes were involved. Took Langley way too long to connect the dots and read us in.”

“This is going to be on the news, isn’t it? Is that why I’m here? So you can coach me on what to tell them?”

“Among other things, yes,” she replied, reaching for the TV remote and turning on the regional cable news channel with the volume muted. “Here’s what the world gets to see,” she explained.

A banner proclaiming “Shootout in Seattle’s Belltown” topped the screen, above a video loop of police vehicles, flashing lights and broken glass in front of the bar where I’d been set to meet Alan. A subheading, “SEC Insider Trading Arrest Ends in Bloodshed,” ran across the bottom. She turned it back off.

“Jesus.”

“Feel free to beseech the deity of your choice, Joe. This is some heavy-duty doodie. The world is a darker, scarier place than you realize, with Remipede running more of it than you want to know. Your more paranoid friends aren’t as far off as you think about shadowy groups vying for world domination, and the good guys are losing.

“No one outside this safe house, my team and a selected handful of muckety-mucks must ever know what really happened tonight. The world will see no international intrigue. No mysterious crustacean organizations. No Highly Classified government data. Nothing at all beyond Chuck supplying plain old corporate inside information to Alan, foolishly via EightaBase’s Cloud server, as the world will think. Alan's phone was just a phone and had nothing to do with any of this.

“You will tell your bereaved colleagues, both at EightaBase and back home, that you were just about to arrive at the bar to meet Alan when you witnessed the shootout that resulted in his death. And that is precisely true, isn’t it?”

I nodded, taking in the weight of it all. How much about this night should I remember?

“This is why you are in protective custody tonight. Very convenient and enjoyable for me, by the way, since tonight’s proceedings have put me on admin leave. My goal is to get you to where you can go back into the world confidently speaking that truth. We will have a whole day to accomplish that because EightaBase will be closed tomorrow in Alan’s memory, while we confirm the likely outcome that Remipede’s thugs will have left town. I will supply you with an identical-looking phone to Alan's, for you to deliver to their HR on Wednesday morning. Then you will resume your work with his grieving coworkers.

“Besides locking down your story, I can help you, and myself, with tonight’s trauma.” Her hand on mine and her green gaze penetrating me, she declared, “You see, Joe, I believe that brushes with death disconnect us, physically and emotionally, from ourselves. The resulting dissociation and desensitization can enable further violence. Positive bodily contact, with your own body or with another, is immensely helpful in reestablishing this vital connection.”

“Sounds like ‘shared bodily heat,’” I offered with a knowing grin, referencing the trite Hollywood spy trope.

“Listen, smartass,” she said playfully, patting me on the knee and standing up. “What I was about to add is that I am a certified practitioner of both yoga and massage therapy. Both are very effective techniques.”

“Yet more special powers,” I mused as she walked to the bar to refresh our drinks. There really was something in the way her hips swayed. I suspected one more special power she hadn’t mentioned yet. I could hardly wait to ask for a demo.

As she walked toward me, she declared with a soft smile, “Of course, the more intimate the positive bodily contact, the more complete the catharsis.”

I stood up to meet her. “I have a powerful interest in completion tonight.”

As her lips approached mine she whispered, “So do I.”

We picked up our kiss right where we had left off in that Broadway doorway, gently at first, then more intensely.

I chewed on her soft, firm lips first, then her earlobes, then her neck. Remember when I said she was the type whose sports top I would like to peel off as I suckled on her sinewy neck? Now I got to do that.

Then I migrated my chewing from her neck to her soft, supple titties, provoking gasps of pleasure. I pulled down her running tights, just as I had imagined earlier, revealing smooth firm legs and black lace panties over a firm ass. But before wrapping my arms around those hips and burying my face in them …

“I think you have one more power yet to disclose,” I whispered in her ear.

“Excellent detective work, Joe. I keep saying you would make a good dick. Let me show you mine. ”

I pulled down her final lacy layer of concealment, revealing not the aromatic hole I had imagined earlier, but what I had finally deduced was there instead: a very erect dick.

I feasted my eyes, almost drooling. It was medium-sized, a bit wider than mine, with a mess of precum smeared around the end.

“Looks like you got a little excited tonight, Jamie.”

I had been with dick-dangling dudes a couple of times before, but here was a smoking-hot dick-dangling dame. I wanted her, dick and all.

I wanted her dick first, actually. I moved from feasting my eyes to feasting my mouth. I took her warm shaft in one hand and licked some of the frosting off the beater. Better than buttercream, I thought. I motioned for her to sit on the edge of the bed, not far away in the small condo. I licked my lips, wrapped my arms around her hips, opened my mouth and sucked in her dickaliciousness until she was tickling my tonsils.

Much as I’d imagined earlier, my nose took in her complex scent, enhanced by tonight’s athletic activities, through a neatly trimmed triangle of obsidian fur. Of course, the scent was considerably different from the one that I’d imagined earlier but still intoxicating.

She swooned, grabbing my shoulders with her hands. “That feels really, really good, Joe. I must warn you I won’t last long after all that excitement.”

“That’s okay. I will drain your dick as many times as you want tonight.” I licked and sucked her for about a minute, then bobbed steadily up and down for another minute, my hands running up her back and down again. I massaged and tweaked her tits, making her start to tense and tremble. Then I grabbed her hands tight. She erupted with pulse after pulse of pure pearly product. I swallowed eagerly.

Hands still clasped with mine, she pulled me up to her and we embraced tenderly, kissing slowly and deeply. “Oh Joe, that’s exactly what I needed tonight. But I am supposed to be rehabilitating you.”

She undressed me from shirt to socks, kissing and licking each body part as it became exposed, starting with my shoulder and ending with my balls.

She crawled on top of me, kissing me with our bodies and dicks pressed together, hers semi-stiff and mine fully. “Mmm, now that’s what I call rehabilitation.” I hadn’t been sure at first about the psychological value of ‘positive bodily contact,’ but I decided this was indeed therapeutic.

“I’ll take this over yoga,” I replied, kissing and licking the nape of her neck.

“And we’re just getting started,” she said, shifting down to kissing my neck and clavicle, her ass crack now pressing back against my dick.

I moaned at the prospect. Jamie scooted down and sucked me expertly for a few seconds, then deftly unrolled a dick gasket over me.

She then agilely moved back up, kissing me, and eased my dick into her tight, hot dorsal doorway.

She pulled her torso tight against mine, both of us again relishing not only my insertion to the hilt inside her and her re-hardening dick pressed between our bellies, but medicinal full-body contact with another human. It was good we were holding steady and not moving our hips, or I would have come instantly.

I suckled on her lovely boobies again. They were modestly sized, perhaps small B’s, but very soft and womanly-shaped, complete with pointy nipples. I would have taken them for total naturals.

This attention got her moaning loudly. Then she started rocking her hips, and it was all over for me. I pulled her body tight against mine as I exploded in one of the most extended orgasms of my life, seemingly thirty seconds long. As I came down, I had her sit up a bit so I could tenderly work her warm, velvety, throbbing thing in my hands. She moaned appreciatively.

I continued to gently stroke her dick for several minutes, my own still buried in her bowels. Eventually, I shrank and popped out of her, the sheepskin sheath shucking off my shank and leaking my large load onto the linens. I kept on massaging her, leading her into throes as more Jamie-juice ejected from her dickhole onto my chest and belly.

She scooped some up with two fingers. I hungrily took them in my mouth, slurping.

We rolled to the side and she snuggled up in my arms. She dragged a finger across my chest, murmuring, “Joe Barnes, you sure know how to take care of a woman. Even a woman like me.”

“So I’m a natural, huh?”

“At all things dick.” Looking up into my eyes she declared, “I really do think you should work for us. You could actually help us fight the bastards. Of course, it wouldn't be this dangerous at first. The first few years, you would be eyes and ears working for one of the consulting firms in our quiver, before finally getting any Street assignments. Pay's a little better than what you make right now, though it's nothing like what the tech people with stock options in this town get."

By pure timing, her phone beeped at that very moment. She wandered nude over to the coffee table and picked it up.

“Oh, good. They got Chuck too.”

“Aww, shit. He’s dead too?”

“No, hon. Fortunately, we've got your boss alive and in custody. I wasn’t sure we could still nab him tonight with all the publicity around Alan, but he must not have heard in time. We caught him at a dead drop.”

She turned on the TV again. Now the story read, “Second Suspect Arrested in Insider Trading Scheme,” with a mug shot of Chuck in the corner of the screen.

“Alan was supposed to text an associate back in your neck of the woods once he got the phony phone, so he could hand off a half mil. Despite Alan’s dismissal from this dimension, we managed to spoof his real phone, and the dinero still got dropped. We nailed Chuck pulling a briefcase full of hundies out of a garbage can in a park.”

“Damn.”

The next story on the channel was video of flashing police lights and an Infiniti coupe smashed up against a Monorail pillar, “At Least Two Dead in Seattle Street Racing Mayhem” on the banner.

The volume was muted, but Jamie provided narration in a voice that sounded remarkably like that of a popular female Seattle newscaster. “In a bizarre twist, the driver of the car that killed the pedestrian was himself stabbed to death in the collision. For some reason, he had a knife in his hand when his airbag deployed, driving it right into his throat.

“And in yet another unusual incident, about an hour later," the footage on the screen shifting to Beacon Hill, "a car was found crashed into streetlight on Seattle's Beacon Hill. It appeared to have been hit by another vehicle, reportedly a pickup. The car was so badly damaged that it appeared unlikely any occupants could have survived, but police found no one in the car. Based on witness reports, Seattle Police are asking the public to be on the lookout for a silver Ram pickup with extensive front-end damage.”

Reverting to a normal voice, she added, “Guess who placed the Ram pickup tip with CrimeStoppers. With no body and too many other crimes to fight, this will never see an SPD dick's desk.”

“Is there still a loose end with the bike? I hadn’t closed out my session.”

“Ah yes, the bike. Such a responsible citizen, and good thinking. Don’t worry about that. Your bike was reported returned on the same block as the bar a few minutes ago. It appears you forgot to end your session right away, and ended up paying for a couple extra hours. In reality, it’s now at the bottom of the Sound, along with about 500 other sharebikes. Plus one added goon in cement shoes. You’d think those companies would care a little more about their property. Especially the bikes.”

“Wow, you really do have special powers.”

“Want to see some more?” she asked as she walked back to me, her dick swinging provocatively.

I got on all fours. She dicked me good, tits pressed into my back, arm wrapped around my chest (and then my dick) while she drilled. I definitely felt healed by all this full-body contact.

In the morning, Jamie and I had a long, lovely sixty-nine session before she had to leave for her brutal debrief with her bosses. She came back at noon with a pizza and a hunger to swallow more semen than slices. We ended up swapping dicks for much of the afternoon.

I went into EightaBase for the rest of the week as planned. For the following month, I fulfilled my obligations in getting the project off the ground.

Then I handed in my resignation, casting my die to follow Jamie into the dark. I would begin my training with the Feds and become a tech dick.