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that his name wasn’t “George,” it wasn’t “Brad,” and it wasn’t “Mel.” It was “Melvin.”
    “You probably should have heard by now,” he said.
    She refused to let him rile her. Tall, geeky-looking, with an extremely prominent Adam’s apple, Mel had the annoying habit of using his third finger to push his thick wire-rimmed glasses back up on his ski nose. Margo, another coworker, told Avery that Mel did it on purpose. It was his way of letting the other three know how superior he felt he was.
    Avery disagreed. Mel wouldn’t do anything improper. He lived by a code of ethics he believed personified the FBI. He was dedicated, responsible, hardworking, ambitious, and he dressed for the job he wanted . . . with one little glitch. Although he was only twenty-seven years old, his clothing resembled the attire agents wore back in the fifties. Black suits, white long-sleeved shirts with button-down collars, skinny black ties, black wingtip shoes with a perfect shine, and a crew cut she knew he got trimmed once every two weeks.
    For all of his strange habits—he could quote any line from The FBI Story, starring Jimmy Stewart—he had an incredibly sharp mind and was the ultimate team player. He just needed to lighten up a bit. That was all.
    “I mean, don’t you think you should have heard by now?” He sounded as worried as she felt.
    “It’s still early.” Then, less than five seconds later, she said, “You’re right. We should have heard by now.”
    “No,” he corrected. “I said that you should have heard. Lou and Margo and I didn’t have anything to do with your decision to call in the SWAT team.”
    Oh, God, what had she been thinking? “In other words, you don’t want to take the flak if I’m wrong?”
    “Not flak,” he said. “The fall. I need this job. It’s the closest I’m going to get to being an agent. With my eyesight . . .”
    “I know, Mel.”
    “Melvin,” he automatically corrected. “And the benefits are great.”
    Margo stood so she could join the conversation. “The pay sucks, though.”
    Mel shrugged. “So does the work environment,” he said. “But still . . . it’s the FBI.”
    “What’s wrong with our work environment?” Lou asked as he too stood. His workstation was on Avery’s left. Mel’s was directly in front of hers, and Margo’s cubicle was adjacent to Lou’s. The pen—as they lovingly called their hellhole office space—was located behind the mechanical room with its noisy water heaters and compressors. “I mean, really, what’s wrong with it?” he asked again, sounding bewildered.
    Lou was as clueless as ever, but also endearing, Avery thought. Whenever she looked at him, she was reminded of Pig-Pen in the old Peanuts cartoon. Lou always looked disheveled. He was absolutely brilliant, yet he couldn’t seem to find his mouth when he was eating, and his short-sleeved shirt usually had at least one stain. This morning there were two. One was jelly from the raspberry-filled doughnuts Margo had brought in. The big red spot was just above the black ink stain from the cartridge pen in his white shirt pocket.
    Lou tucked in his shirttail for the third time that morning and said, “I like being down here. It’s cozy.”
    “We work in the corner of the basement without any windows,” Margo pointed out.
    “So what?” Lou asked. “Where we work doesn’t make us any less important. We’re all part of a team.”
    “I’d like to be a part of the team that has windows,” Margo said.
    “Can’t have everything. Say, Avery, how’s the knee?” he asked, suddenly changing subjects.
    She gingerly lifted the icepack and surveyed the damage. “The swelling’s gone down.”
    “How’d it happen?” Mel asked. He was the only one who hadn’t heard the grisly details.
    Margo ran her fingers through her short dark curls and said, “An old lady nearly killed her.”
    “With her Cadillac,” Lou said. “It happened in her parking garage. The woman