| Listen to Reason |
[03 Apr 2008|10:36pm] |
The warm afternoon sun streamed through the living room windows as Julie curled up on the couch with one of the finds from her latest trip to the used bookstore. Her lunchtime shift downstairs was over and the rest of her roommates were out of the apartment for the day, so she had the place to herself to just relax and enjoy the rest of her day.
She'd opened the window to let fresh air into the apartment which had been sealed up for months due to a particularly harsh winter for southern Nevada. The werewolf could smell the scents of the various desert plants wafting in on the breeze, the desert in its all too brief spring blooming phase.
Romance novels were one of her guilty pleasures and Julie was looking forward to devouring most of the book over the course of the afternoon and evening. She took a sip from her drink and set it back on the coffee table before opening up her latest acquisition.
The knock on the door would've come as a surprise. There weren't many solicitors in the small town, so excluding the possibility that a roommate had forgotten a key, there was either a neighbor or a stranger at the door.
In this case, it was an Agent from the Department of Homeland Security.
Dahlia Rimes kept a miniature lint roller in her unmarked sedan; nevertheless, she checked her blazer for lint a second time. It was clean. She remembered the first time she'd seen a government employee with pet hair on his suit, and the entire facade of professionalism had been broken. She was fastidious not by nature, but by necessity. Having an Ivy Leaguer's resume rather than a military one made credibility even more difficult to gain in the intelligence community, and she wasn't about to be undone by something as menial as a run in her stockings.
A light breeze stirred. She clamped her arm more tightly against Julia Sanchez's file.
The knock did indeed came as a surprise, and Julie looked up from her book toward the door with a quizzical expression before getting up to respond to it. Her initial thought was to ignore it and hope whoever it was went away, but it could be something important and so she walked to the door and opened it.
Whatever she was expecting, the tall, serious looking woman in a dark business suit wasn't it. She definitely didn't have the appearance of a Jehovah's witness or a saleswoman, and there was no hint of perfume in her scent, only the faint odors of residual soap and shampoo that would be undetectable to the normal nose.
Julie tried not to let her annoyance at being taken from her book show, and simply plastered her professional bartender smile on her face. "I'm sorry, but the bar is downstairs. This is a residence."
"Yes, I know," the Agent answered without rancor. "My name is Dahlia Rimes. I've come to speak to you, Ms. Sanchez." With a graceful shuffle of her file, the brunette withdrew a business card from its holder and passed it Julie's way. It was white, embossed with the Department's seal and her rank and contact information. Dahlia carried on seamlessly. "I hoped I could take a few minutes' time to explain the Project to you personally. I trust you've heard about it... I want to make myself available for any questions you might have."
Dahlia's brown eyes reached beyond the woman at the door, into the darkened apartment. No curious onlookers, then. That was better. "Yours is an interesting file," she added, returning attention to Julie's face.
( The Soft Sell )
[Thread: Open to Julie]
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