Chapter 2

She led the way to the car and I took the opportunity to reach down inside my waistband, grab my cock and pull it straight up. It would be less visible that way. My eyes never left the undulating ass cheeks packed into that black leather as she walked. I saw she'd put on heels that had maybe two or three inch spikes. They accentuated the hip roll. I could have watched her walk for hours. She turned and tossed me the keys.

"You drive. I drove all day. I'll navigate."

A car rolled by, full of young men who all leaned out of the windows of the car and catcalled to her. She calmly flipped them off. I was astonished. I had seen Kelani work, and her interaction with suspects and witnesses was good, but quite ordinary. I realized I'd never seen her in a social setting until now. We were out on the street, and she was acting like any other good looking girl going out to eat.

She consulted a piece of paper that looked like a map.

"Where'd you get that?" I asked.

"I printed it off," she said.

"On what?" I asked.

"I brought my laptop and the small printer, remember?" she said.

"Oh ... yeah." The printer was one of the things we didn't know if we'd need or not, but wanted along just in case. It had already proved its worth. She used it to guide me to a German restaurant I'd never have found if not for the map.

"You like German food?" I asked.

"I don't know," she said. "I've never had any. That's why I wanted to come here."

I'd done a tour in Germany. Jaeger schnitzel with Bratkartoffeln - fried potatoes - was on my list of all-time favorite foods.

The design of the place was pure American, but the food I could see on the plates we passed as the girl led us to a booth looked authentic. The place smelled good too. They had European beer glasses too, which meant big, and I saw one with that hazy yeasty look of good German beer. My mouth was watering as we sat down across from each other. The waitress left menus and Kelani flipped hers open and then put her elbows on the table and rested her cheeks on the heels of her hands. She was leaning forward, and the tank top let me see the inside swells of her nut-brown breasts.

I salivated even more.

"What funny names for things," she muttered. "I can't tell what anything is."

"I'll translate," I said.

I asked her a few questions and suggested she try Schweine schnitzel, with Spaetzle noodles. I was going to get the potatoes, so if she wanted something less bland than the noodles we could swap portions. When I asked her if she drank beer she nodded in the affirmative.

The waitress came back and I gave her the order, adding a stein of Schwartzbier and another of Weissbier, so that we'd have two tastes at the table, light and dark, and she could choose which she liked better.

She kept looking at the menu, asking questions, and I kept looking down her shirt. The waitress brought the beer, but Kelani ignored both glasses. Finally she closed the menu, looked at both glasses of beer, and chose the amber colored one. I left the Schwartzbier where it was so she could taste it too.

She took a good swig, swallowed, and smiled. "I like that a hell of a lot better than Coors."

"It's the difference between plain water and strong tea," I suggested.

"No, it's just better tasting beer." She smiled. I told her to try the other and she took a swig of it. "That's good too. I'm glad I found out about German beer."

An hour later we both sat back, stuffed, but happy. She was nursing her second beer, and I was on my third.

"I could get used to this," she sighed.

"German food?"

"All of it," she said. "It's nice not to be in the office. It's nice to get really good food. I like going under cover."

"Yeah ... well, it's not necessarily all Schnitzel and beer," I said. "Not that I anticipate this mission is going to turn out to be dangerous, but sometimes it all goes to shit and your ass is hanging in the wind, and all you can think of is how great it would be to have the four boring walls of your office around you again."

"Maybe," she said. "But I'm going to enjoy it until that happens."

I waved at the waitress for the bill. "That's as good a plan as any," I said.

When we left the restaurant, traffic had died down, and getting around in the city was easier. For that reason I asked if she wanted to do any sightseeing. We basically drove east until we got to the Mississippi River, using the big, silver arch St. Louis is known for as our guide. The Arch itself was pretty impressive. It looked too sleek and too thin to go that high up into the air, unsupported by any exterior wires or cables. There was a riverboat docked nearby, ablaze with lights. A sign said it was a floating casino.

Had I been with one of my previous partners, we might have stopped and gambled a while, getting drunk and trying to pick up women. With Kelani in the car, though, I just headed back to the motel.

I took one last look at her, fixing her look in my mind, and we went to our rooms.

I jacked off, remembering what she looked like, and then fell asleep.

Since I still had the keys to the car, I knocked on her door in the morning and took my stuff on down. I started the car and found a public radio station to listen to Morning Edition on while we started the day. I didn't figure she'd want to talk. I hoped things wouldn't be strained between us. We were turning into a pretty good team, and I wanted that to continue.

She came out of her room dressed in hiking shorts with cargo pockets on them, and a long sleeved sweat shirt. She had fabulous legs, if you like legs with muscles on them, and I did. She tossed her stuff in the back seat and slid into her bucket, fastening her seat belt automatically.

"Hit it!" she said.

I saw a Dunkin' Donuts with a drive through and that gave us something to get out of town on. We were heading west on I-70, which rapidly took us into rolling hills to the west of St. Louis. Traffic was light. We lost the public radio station an hour later. About all I could find was country music or loud preachers. There was a sprinkling of oldie rock stations, but I wasn't in the mood, so I just turned the radio off.

I was just thinking of turning the AC on when she pulled the sweat shirt up and over her head. It was interesting, because dealing with her hair made it harder than the average woman would have to face.

She was wearing a bright yellow bikini top under the sweatshirt. It went with her dusky skin beautifully, and showed a lot of that skin.

"I'm not criticizing here," I said, looking over at her. "But what convinced you you'd need a bikini in the mountains?"

"They have a hot tub," she said.

"Oh yeah," I said.

"You didn't bring something for the hot tub?"

"I didn't think about using the hot tub," I said.

"That's where people sit around for a long time and loosen up," she said. "You can pump them for all kinds of information in a hot tub."

"And why do we need to pump the guests for information again?" I asked.

"I like hot tubs!" she growled. "Where I came from they didn't have things like that."

I let some silence fill the car. I had always had some minor curiosity about her background. Now the urge to probe got stronger. And partners shared everything...

"So where did you come from?" I asked.

"I was raised in a village called Tokorau," she said.

"Wow!" I replied. "Named after your grandfather or something like that?"

"No, I was named after it, sort of. It's complicated."

"Fascinating," I said. "Where is Tokorau?"

"It's on the southern island of New Zealand," she said, "just off the eastern coast. It's a Maori village. I'm part Maori."

"And part... ?" I asked.

"American," she said. "My mother was American."

"Fascinating," I said again.

"She worked for a whale watching outfit in Kaikoura, a town on the coast."

"Whale watching?" I had never associated whales with New Zealand.

"When the Maori had to give up headhunting and eating all the white men who came to spoil our paradise, they had to have some way of surviving, so they went into the tourist business. Now we just take the white man's money, instead of his head, heart and liver."

She said it so seriously that I stared at her too long and drifted onto the rumble strip on the side of the freeway. I got the car back into my lane as she laughed.

"Well, that's what white people want to believe."

"Which part?" I asked.

"They want to believe we were savages, cannibals and such like. It never happened, but it makes good stories for the tourists."

"So how does one get named after a village?" I asked.

"My mother died when I was little. I barely remember her. From then on, I was raised by my aunties and uncles. It would be called foster care here. I was shuttled between, and raised by, three different families. Nobody would actually admit it, but I figured out that my father came from one of those families, but nobody knew which one. When my mother died, they wanted to raise me as a native, but couldn't decide which name I should have, so I became the village daughter."

"Wow," I said. "I guess it really does take a whole village to raise a child."

She looked over at me. "Ha-ha."

I ignored her sarcasm. "I don't know why, but if you'd have asked me if there were Americans living in New Zealand, I'd have thought not."

"There are a lot of American ex-pats in New Zealand," said Kelani. "I guess a lot of GIs in World War Two were stationed in New Zealand and after the war a bunch of them came back to live."

"So how did the village daughter end up in her mother's country?"

"I was offered a scholarship at a stateside college. I jumped at it."

"And stayed?"

"Being the village child, my future would have been ... shall we say ... less than exciting."

"In what way?"

"I had no sub-clan elders - parents - to barter for me in a marriage proposal. And there is racism in all peoples, so I wasn't considered a good catch anyway."

"You're kidding," I said.

"There, my white features were considered odd and distasteful. I thought I could get away from that, but in America my looks were a burden too."

"Guys hitting on you all the time," I said.

"All the time," she said. "But I learned how to deflect unwanted attention. And since there was nothing to go back for, I decided to stay here and see what kind of life I could build in my mother's country."

"Well, welcome to America," I said.

She grinned. "And it only took you six months to say it."

She asked me about my military career, and interesting cases I'd worked while I was an Agent for the IG. That took us through Kansas City and into the prairie that was most of western Kansas and the eastern edge of Colorado.

We had shared a little, which was a big step for us, though what we covered was something we should have known about each other within a month of working together. There was a forced quality to it, like we were trying too hard to get to know each other. Finally I started going over the game plan for what we'd do once we checked in at the reception area in the park.

When we had beaten our plans to death, there was silence for a while, and she looked out the window of the car.

"It's amazing," she said.

"What's that?"

"This country. It's so huge. Right now it looks like I'm looking out at some strange ocean."

I looked at the vast stretches of wheat, rippling in the wind, golden and ready for harvest. I looked back at her upper body, graced by the yellow cloth of that bikini top.

"At least you're dressed for the ocean," I quipped.

When we got into Colorado we stopped for gas and switched drivers. I took a nap, and woke up to see her spreading sunscreen on her chest and arms. Watching her hand dip down into that bikini top made my cock twitch.

She saw me move and looked over at me. She didn't seem at all embarrassed about what I had apparently just seen.