LITMIR.BIZ

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be perfectly calm and relaxed, but Shannon could have easily ticked off five telltale signs broadcasting how incredibly anxious she was.

      She didn’t look at all as Shannon had expected from the initial phone call. The person on the phone had been all business, very mature sounding. What had entered her office looked more like a street urchin, the type you’d see on Queen Street West or one of those huge joints in the club district – the kind who often got into a lot of trouble.

      Height 5’7", solidly built, she obviously worked hard to keep in shape. Her face wouldn’t turn too many male heads, but it wasn’t unpleasant, a good thing when you didn’t want to be too noticeable.What caused more than a few alarm bells to go off was the short purple hair that looked as if it had been hacked at with a dull knife. She had on new jeans, and under an unbuttoned flannel shirt was a T-shirt emblazoned with “You got a problem with that?”, not the sort of thing most would choose to wear to a job interview, even a business as casually run as O’Brien Investigates.

      Taking her time going over all the documentation and the background check she’d done, Shannon let the prospective employee stew in her own juices. If she couldn’t control her nerves in a job interview, what good would she be out on the street?

      After five minutes, she looked across the desk, nailing the woman right in the eyes. “When we did our background check, we ran across your name in regards to a death several years ago. Tell me about it.”

      Now she looked really uneasy. “It involved the murder of a friend. The cops thought the murderer was some escaped wacko, and my friends and I thought it was someone else. We set out to find that person. I got involved more than the others and stirred up some sh – stuff. The real murderer came after me. There was a fight. I got lucky, and he wound up dead.”

      “I was told you stabbed him in the throat.”

      Her expression was pained. “I was trying to stab him anywhere. He’d already nailed me pretty good.”

      “Where?”

      “Here,” she answered, as she pulled her shirt and T-shirt off one shoulder. The ugly scar was very plain. “It went right through the joint into the wall behind me. There was another one in my leg.” Her expression changed. “Do you want to see that, too?”

      Shannon kept a straight face at the woman’s impudence. “My sources tell me he was ex-military. How did you get so good at knife fighting?”

      “It’s called trying to survive any way you can. Like I said, I got lucky.”

      The PI nodded. “Okay. Well, everything seems to be in order as far as the documentation goes, Ms Goode. With your qualifications, though, it seems to me you’d be happier with a police service or maybe the Mounties. Why do you want to be a private investigator?”

      Goode frowned and straightened up. “I don’t think I’d fit in with any police force.”

      “That’s pretty forthright. Why?”

      “I’ve never been able to fit in.” She tried a grin, but it didn’t quite make the grade. “I tend to be a bit of a loner.”

      Shannon nodded. Despite the misanthropic characters populating detective novels, good cops had to be team players. If you couldn’t manage that, you generally didn’t stay a cop for long. The girl had enough sense to realize it.

      “You’re going to be thirty-three next month. Do you think that might be a little late to start down this road?”

      Jackie Goode managed a real smile this time. “How old are you?”

      “I’m not just starting out.”

      “Fair enough. Let’s just say it took me a while to find my focus. I think I can handle whatever is thrown at me – physically and mentally.You can see from the transcripts that the instructors thought I have what it takes.”

      “How are you at dealing with boredom?”

      “You’re going to tell me how boring this job is most of the time?”

      “Yes.”

      “Well, the way I look at it, there’s boredom and there’s boredom.”

      “Explain.”

      Goode slouched back in her chair again. “I can handle boredom if it’s just the calm before the storm. I don’t get discouraged easily. Real boredom is when there’s no purpose to what you’re doing.”

      Shannon nodded. It was a good answer. At first, she was not going to hire this woman. Reading between the lines on the transcripts and the background check, it was easy to see that the people who’d trained her thought she was a pain in the butt. They praised only her skills and determination, not her personality. There was little about attitude and interpersonal skills. Those omissions were significant.

      The more they talked, though, the more Shannon felt swayed. For one, Goode looked at her levelly at all times, her eyes never shifted away. She meant what she said, and there wasn’t any evasiveness in her answers. If she didn’t know something, she said so, with refreshing bluntness.

      But Shannon also knew without a shadow of a doubt that Jackie Goode might be more trouble than she was worth.

      Business had been good lately, too good. Shannon needed one or two more operatives, and she needed them fast. Having to let Warren go last week had been a huge blow. Good help was hard to find these days, and everyone she’d interviewed had knocked themselves out of the running pretty early, usually because they’d been cops who hadn’t been able to make the grade. It took only a little digging to come up with the straight goods, if it didn’t come out in the interview itself. Doing the background information on the job she’d just accepted might be a good place to start this woman off. Let her do the legwork by way of an extended audition.

      Shannon leaned back in an imitation of the woman across from her.

      It wasn’t lost on Goode, who grinned back at her, tension draining from her body. “Do I have the job?”

      “Maybe. I’d like to try you out on something. See how you do. Then we’ll talk.”

      After an extensive briefing about the Curran case, the woman was on her way to the door when Shannon called out, “And lose that hair, Goode. Way too noticeable. But I’m sure you knew that.”

      ***

      Jackie Goode packed it in for the night around two a.m. She felt completely done in, but it was a good tiredness. On the streetcar ride back to her one-room apartment in Parkdale, she thought back on her eventful day.

      The interview that morning had gone way better than the previous ones, perhaps because there’d been a woman behind the desk.

      Considering what a straight arrow her (hopefully) new employer seemed to be, she’d shown no outward surprise at the way Jackie looked and acted – except for the crack about her hair as she’d left the office.

      When Jackie had called about the job, she’d pictured the person at the other end of the phone as some tough old broad.What she’d found when she got ushered into the office looked more like a “soccer mom”.

      It was easy to imagine Shannon O’Brien going home at night to a husband, two-and-a-half kids, dog and nice suburban house. But Jackie had done her own digging and knew that this woman had been through a messy divorce, an even messier murder investigation and was currently the girlfriend of a genuine rock and roll legend.

      During the lengthy interview, O’Brien had been very undemonstrative, although it was easy to see that her interest had grown as Jackie spoke. In past ones, the shutters behind the eyes of prospective employers had come down pretty quickly and never once cracked open again.

      Jackie was well aware that her frank – no, be honest – abrasive way of communicating often put people off, especially men, but she wasn’t going to change her stripes just to get a goddamn job. She’d always done things her way, and they

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