A Bit of Spice

You can’t blame a girl for wanting a bit of spice in her life, officer. That’s really how it all started. I developed a taste for lying when I first told a boy that my father would have him sent to prison if he didn’t stop tugging on my pigtails. I was exhilarated with the power and the attention that instantaneously followed a lie leaving my lips. Every woman does it. My appetite for the attention just happens to be harder to satiate than most others.

When I was a teenager I would tell people that I was being raised by my bodyguard, that I actually was royalty. I would tell them that my upbringing was meant to be that of a normal person so as to relate to the common man. Why? It actually got me a few free rides. People, for whatever reason tend to sympathize with the rich and powerful. I earned as many friends as I did enemies in high school. I started the lie in my sophomore year and it wasn’t until someone’s jealousy drove them to follow me all the way home to find out the truth. Or as I like to call it, “a boring lie.”

College was an interesting time for me. Nobody knew anybody. You can walk down any good-sized campus in the country and you would be hard pressed to find ten individuals that all knew each other. As a compulsive liar, you couldn’t ask for a better scenario. And, might I add, lying is so much easier when you’re a woman… especially in college. In fact, I don’t think lying was all that necessary if I wanted to manipulate the boys.

Sure, getting the smart ones to do my homework and the popular ones to improve my reputation was great and all, but I needed something more substantial. Money. Plain and simple, I needed more money. At first I would start off slow, going to fraternity poker nights and using my wile and cunning to build up the pot and clean out all of Greek row. I then went to the local sports bar and began hustling at the pool tables. Unfortunately, I got greedy and attracted the wrong kind of attention. And that bar is where I got arrested for the first time. That would explain that blemish on my record, officer.

You might be asking yourself how I got myself out of jail being so far from home and without any cash that wasn’t submitted as evidence. Well, if you keep reading that report you’ll see that I was assigned to a P.O. named Fred Heflin. Heflin? Can you believe he actually used his real name? I mean, I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound like the name of a parole officer. The truth is that he didn’t work for the police after all.

Fred, it turned out, was actually a recruiter for a very covert branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. It was one of those branches that everyone knows is there, but never really talks about. We handled a lot of black ops stuff. You know all those good spy movies? A majority of those were written by my colleagues trying to make an extra buck.

Anyway, Fred heard of my reputation. He heard about my insatiable appetite for a bit of spice in my life so he offered me a position as an agent. It was good money for something I loved to do anyway, so I jumped at the chance. Two years later and I’m actually up for a promotion. There’s one problem. Fred said that it would involve murder. He told me that the guy had it coming. That the mark, or target, sold drugs to kids and raped young girls. And I should mention that he was parading around as a champion of the people. He was an elected official, a congressman for God’s sake.

But I couldn’t do it. As much as I felt that he deserved to be taken out, I didn’t see myself as a murderer. I went so far as to track the mark and but a top of the line sniper rifle. It was cold up on the roof, but I knew that I wouldn’t be caught. Nobody would pay any attention where I was located unless they were looking for me. My finger trembled as it curled behind the finger guard. All I had to do was take aim and squeeze back.

Nobody told me his family would be there; the family that he hides behind and puts on a pedestal to make it look like he was a huge family man. I couldn’t do it in front of them. A human life is a life and I’m just not brave enough to take one. Even if it was spent degrading more lives than he was promising he could help. I told Fred the next day that I couldn’t take the promotion. It just wasn’t in my blood.

So you can see officer, there’s no way that I could be the one that killed your partner. Your partner was a good man. He had a beautiful wife and two darling children. As you mentioned earlier, he volunteered on weekends at homeless shelters, coached his son’s little league team, and even helped his daughter sell cookies for her Girl Scout troop.

I may have been a suspect in one of his investigations on the attempt on the Congressman’s life but that doesn’t mean anything. I told you that I was the first person hired to get rid of the guy. Like I said, the government wanted that man dead and it was going to happen with or without me. I know that you did some digging and found that I happened to be one of the young girls that scumbag raped, and that my brother overdosed on the drugs that he sold. That’s one of the reasons Fred picked me for that particular mission, but I’m no murderer. Ask Fred. I’m just a girl looking for a bit of spice in her life.