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She said it before, but honestly, it was worth repeating. “This is a bad idea.”
“Oh, shut up, it’s not that bad of an idea.”
“It’s a terrible idea. We’re going to get ourselves killed.”
Iris looked over at Linda and sighed, clearly exasperated. They had spent the entire drive over arguing about the exact same thing (apparently Iris did not adhere to Linda’s point of view that not going in was the best option and the one most likely to keep them from dying) and those arguments had, likewise, failed to convince her. Linda wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake sense into her, or maybe just drag her back to the car and drive out of there, but if there was one thing she had learned from two years of being the friend of CCPN investigative reporter Iris West, it was that the story came before sense.
“You’re a reporter, aren’t you?” Iris asked, glancing over to the back entrance they were going to break into. Or walk into, as Iris insisted earlier. They were going to walk into an underground mob casino.
“A sports reporter! Sports! And the mob isn’t exactly competing in the Central City soccer finals, Iris,” she said.
Iris held up a finger. “As far as you know,” she said solemnly, and Linda rolled her eyes. Okay, well, there were probably a few mob guys who were on the teams, but really, it’s not like there was a team called the ‘Central City Mobsters’ or something. “And anyway, we’re not going after the mob. We’re going after a city official who frequents this place. My informant said he’d be here at around this time.”
Linda groaned. “Because that’s so much better,” she responded. She pulled on the sleeves of her uncomfortable (and starched) white button up, trying to give her wrists a little more room to move. She wanted to roll up the sleeves, but Iris told her that the waitresses didn’t roll up their sleeves in this joint because it would look too manly. According, of course, to her informant. Linda pulled on her tie, sighing, trying to adjust it to make it slightly more comfortable. She failed. “God, I can’t believe we’re actually going to do this. In disguises. Like, actual, real life disguises. It’s almost like you read ‘Lois Lane’s Rules of Reporting’ and took them to heart.”
Iris stilled, and Linda watched as she paled. “No.”
“What?” Iris asked, throwing her hands into the air. “She’s won, like, every prize known to journalism. Lois Lane is a household name! And she’s only three years older than us.”
It took every ounce of strength Linda had not to slam her head into the wall of the alley they were standing in. “She also has a bullet-proof superhuman guardian angel. What do you have, The Flash? Does he even know you’re here?”
Iris cut Linda a withering look, but said nothing. “Great. So we’re about to walk into a mob den with the only superhero you know blissfully unaware we’re heading into certain doom. We’re going to die. I’m 27, Iris. I’m too young to die. I have plans. I have goals. I have-”
“Shut up,” Iris hissed. Her eyes narrowed at something around the corner of the alley, and Linda peeked over her shoulder. The door they were trying to sneak into opened, and a few men (probably cooks) walked out, laughing and smoking. Iris grabbed Linda’s hand and pulled them forward, suddenly starting to talk, a little too loudly for a private conversation, about some imagined break-up, and how glad she was to find this job because she could not afford a new place on her own. The cooks took a look at their uniforms and then looked them up and down.
Linda’s stomach squirmed, but Iris looked as unruffled as ever. She just smiled at the cooks, letting all her charm spill out at once, and one of them graciously opened the door for them. Iris thanked him and Linda followed her in, kind of amazed at how easily she flitted into different roles.
The door clanged shut behind them and Iris let out a breath before turning to Linda and grinning happily. “We’re in!”
“You really shouldn’t sound so surprised, Iris,” Linda said. “This was your plan.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t think it would work,” she gushed, overly happy. No one was this happy to go to work. God, Iris had gotten them in the door and now she was going to get them found out. “Now we just have to find where the dining hall is and scope out the councilman and maybe get a few shots of him.”
They walked in cautious silence through the back hallway, trying to guide themselves. They found the bathroom first, and then a store-room filled with food, and then were looking around another pantry type room when someone rounded a corner and found them. Linda’s hand shot out and grabbed Iris’s wrist, making sure that if this person started yelling, she would be able to pull Iris to safety. For her part, Iris just kind of froze, and watched the interloper with big eyes.
“Thank God you’re here,” the woman (an actual waitress, Linda guessed) said. “I thought we were just short staffed today, but instead I find two of my girls trying to go at it in the back room.”
Iris cleared her throat quickly. “We weren’t-”
“Look,” the woman said, “I don’t care what you do on your time off or even when there is a lull. This back room has seen a lot worse than two girls, let me tell you. But the dining room’s a bitch right now, and someone’s got to get it done. Might as well be you two. Now, roll up your sleeves, take these,” she said as she handed them little notepads and two extra aprons, “and get out there.”
Neither Iris or Linda had to time refuse or even come up with an excuse to get out of waitressing duty. The woman grabbed their shoulders and pulled them forward through the kitchen and into a large, expensive looking dining room. Linda thanked whatever lucky stars that she had left that Iris was once a barista and she had a waitressing job all through college. The woman deposited them in the room, pointed out their tables, and disappeared into seemingly thin air.
Iris glanced over at Linda and shrugged her shoulders before rolling up her shirt sleeves in the completely wrong way for long sleeved button ups. Linda stopped her and showed her exactly how to unbutton the cuffs, roll the sleeve up, and then fold it over perfectly. Iris took in a sharp breath and Linda’s eyebrow quirked, questioning. “The sleeves, uh, make your arms look really good,” Iris said, and Linda smirked.
“What, your boyfriend doesn’t know how to properly roll his sleeves?” Iris shook her head and Linda chuckled quietly. “I’ll have to show him, then. When a guy does it, trust me, it’s much better. They have the right amount of fore and upper arm muscle to really pull it off.”
Iris just gulped down something in her throat and reminded her to be on the lookout for the wayward councilman, stalking off to her first tables. Linda grinned at her back and walked off to her own tables, taking order after order and running things back and forth. It was pretty easy, and though the establishment’s patrons did oogle her (male and female alike, because Linda had to admit, the rolled up sleeves looked pretty great on her), she didn’t really mind it. She was a little surprised that no one questioned them, but the turnover rate for waitresses in the mob business was probably fairly high.
Iris grabbed her the next time they were both in the kitchen and pushed her into an isolated corner. “He just sat down. In your section.”
Linda guessed from all the wide eyed, silent head tipping Iris had done earlier that the well dressed man in his early 50s was their guy. She had just chosen to ignore it. “What, do you want me to like ask for his autograph and tell him to put where we first met or something?”
The shrug that followed was the opposite of promising. Linda pressed her lips into a thin line and inclined her head, waiting. Waiting for Iris to admit what she actually wanted for the story. “I need you to get a picture of him taking some kind of bribe or doing something illegal.”
“I thought you said you just needed a picture of him here! Not explicitly partaking in illegal activity,” Linda hissed.
“No one would read a story about a councilman eating at an underground mob casino,” Iris whined. “That’s not an issue. I think this qualifies as a really seedy dive or something.”
One day, she was going to have to tell Iris that puppy dog eyes didn’t really work on her best friend. But she conceded, and promised to be on the lookout for anything suspicious, her phone at the ready. Linda tried to act as natural as possible, delivering drinks to everyone, weaving through tables to take orders and drop off food, all the while keeping her eyes on the councilman. Work wound down slowly, and still the councilman stayed, and still he followed the letter of the law, talking to the people at his table about his recent fishing trip and his wife’s cooking and other little things.
The room emptied out and Iris kept trying to silently ask whether she had gotten anything so they could leave. But all Linda could do was shake her head and make exaggerated eye movements back to express that no, she hadn’t gotten anything. She was starting to think that today was a complete and total bust (which meant Iris was going to drag her back tomorrow) when she came back to deliver coffee and saw the councilman with his head bent over a document and a wad of cash on the table. Linda dropped off the coffee and stood slightly behind them, off to the side, and grabbed her phone.
She watched for a few seconds, the recording on her phone live and catching every moment of the deal. The councilman was taking money in exchange for getting some of their people out of jail, and making sure the right people overlooked some extra spent money on construction projects the mob was handling for the city.
Linda tried her best not to make a sound, and kept glancing around the room. Guards in one corner, away from the kitchen, were talking lazily to each other, ignoring her. Iris watched with big eyes as she rolled recently washed and dried utensils into cloth napkins. And no one came in or out of the kitchen, meaning that no one was suspicious of her just yet.
The councilman said something and Linda almost gasped out loud. God, Iris was going to get such a good story out of this - nearly two minutes of illegal activity. But the other man finally took notice of her, though luckily he missed the phone in her hand that was still recording. “Why are you still here?” he asked, and she tried to look like he had startled her out of some daze, like she wasn’t really paying attention. And then, he squinted at her, like he was trying to place her, and she felt a weight drop in her stomach. “Aren’t you that sports girl? The one from CCPN? What are you doing here?”
He started shouting, and the councilman pushed away from the table toward her, but she was already gone. “Shit, Iris! The other way!” Linda yelled as Iris ran toward her, grabbing her friend’s wrist and pulling her along behind her toward the closest exit. They ran through the kitchen, and luckily the cooks played music too loud to hear all the commotion from the dining room, because they only looked confused as two waitresses bust through their prep areas and out the other side.
They ran down the hallway and Linda wished that, like Lois Lane, Superman was watching out for them too. But there was no such luck, and she had to push Iris into a wall to avoid some of the bullets that were fired toward them before they charged out of the back door and dashed toward the alleyway.
She and Iris didn’t stop running until they were at least half a mile away. Iris tried to slow down a few times, and Linda tried to call out to her that she spent too much time being carted around by the Flash but she was way too winded and panicked to tease. When they finally reached her car, which was luckily still in the mall parking lot, Linda nearly cried in relief.
“Next time,” she heaved, pointing at Iris, “you either fucking tell Barry where we are or you get him on speed dial as soon as shit goes down.”
Iris had her hands on her knees and she was leaning against Linda’s car. “I didn’t want him to be pissed at me,” Iris huffed, trying to catch her breath.
“I’d rather him be mad at you then have to explain to him why your dead body was found in some river in Keystone!”
Iris looked up and frowned. “Oh, so you’d make it out alive to tell the tale?”
Linda snorted. “Um, of course,” she said. “Did you see me back there? I was literally a badass. I saved you from being shot, I got the footage you wanted, and I handled three tables over my limit without breaking a sweat. I’m an undercover extraordinaire.”