Chapter 3

Three

Wednesday.

Hump day.

Well, it used to be. Now it was delivery day.

A message pinged my civilian phone with the drop off details. The driver was here. I checked the external camera, zoomed in on the truck.

It was correct. Then the driver. The number was familiar, but there were only three drivers that brought my deliveries. The one time they sent the wrong driver, I refused to let them in. The service had been far more particular since then.

When the ring sounded on my phone, I hit answer. “Hello Jimmy, you’re early today.”

“First drop-off for a change,” he said. “I have everything except the ice cream. They said they were out. But they will have it for next week’s delivery.”

“I’ll live.” At least they didn’t try to replace it with frozen yogurt.

I opened the exterior garage so he could bring the groceries in. He always lined them up neatly on the table along the side of the garage with the cold stuffs closest to the door.

When he was done, he grabbed the trash can and the recycle bins and wheeled them up. One of the neighbors always grabbed them for me and put them at the curb. My drivers always brought them in.

“You all good, Ms. Kensington?”

“I’m great, thank you so much, Jimmy. Have a good rest of your week.”

“You got it—oh, hey, your laundry service is here. Want me to stay and make sure they put it where it goes?”

“You don’t have to do that,” I told him.

“I know, but my wife would smack me if I told her I left while they were here.”

A laugh escaped me. “Well, we wouldn’t want that.”

“No, ma’am,” he said. “We wouldn’t.” So Jimmy hung around as the driver carried the fresh laundry up, then collected the bag from the porch. I’d put it out first thing. They collected laundry every week when they dropped off the fresh.

Locked inside my office, with a gun on the desk next to me, I watched as Jimmy supervised it all. Once they were done, he waved the driver off then waved to my camera.

I pressed the button to close the garage then added more to Jimmy’s tip. Only after the external door was closed and secure did I let myself out of the office. I secured the gun to the holster at the base of my spine, then hurried through the process of ferrying everything inside the house.

Mail always came in through the slot. A package door had been installed before I moved in. The beauty of the Internet, everything was available online and could be delivered. Made maintaining a low profile easy.

Kettle on to make tea, I studied the fresh contents of my fridge. Fully stocked and I had no idea what I wanted to eat. Grilled cheese was probably where I’d end up. My secondary phone beeped and I checked my watch to see who it was before I tapped the button on my headset.

“Talk to me,” I said as I answered.

“Hey, gorgeous,” Boxer said and I closed the fridge.

“No,” was my answer.

“You don’t even know what I was going to ask,” Boxer argued. Despite the playfulness, there was an undercurrent of sobriety in his words.

“I don’t have to know, you only open the call with compliments when you want a favor.” The kettle was boiling. “You only want favors when you want me to take on new clients after I told you I was taking a break from newbies.”

“Goddamn, Patch.” He almost managed to sound offended. “You don’t think much of me, do you?”

“I don’t have to think much, I know you. Now, if you want to invite me to game or if you want to shoot the shit or something else fun?—”

He sighed. “I just—need a second set of eyes on this guy.”

Uh huh. “What’s wrong with him?” I poured the water into the pot and set the tea ball into it so it would steep. Probably good, because my soothing tea was going downstairs with me.

Boxer didn’t answer immediately. While he wrestled with the balance between needing assistance and how much to disclose, I threw together a sandwich and carried all of it downstairs to the office.

Once I was in, I engaged the locks and brought my system up.

“I don’t know,” he finally said. “Just—something hinky. You have good instincts. Even when you can’t put your finger on what’s wrong, you can tell when something is.”

Lips pursed, I considered his comment then shook my head. “Boxer, if you’re feeling uneasy decline. One thing I’ve learned about this business—our clients have to trust us implicitly, but that means we have to trust them.”

“I hate turning it down—it’s good money.”

“Money isn’t everything.”

“Says the operator with steady clients.”

I shrugged, I wouldn’t defend my work ethic or my clients. I’d whittled the list down this year. Normally, I only ran five to seven operatives. But currently? I had three regulars and two intermittent. Three more were on my list, but two of those were on an extended vacation. The third one had dropped completely off the map.

They could be dead, I supposed. Hopefully not.

A beep signaled another call coming through and it was McQuade. He was right on time.

“Boxer, if your gut says no—then say no. A job is not worth the stress if you can’t be certain of the client.”

The other operator let out a forlorn sigh. “Yeah, I guess.” He didn’t say anything for another long moment. “Thanks, Patch.” Then he was gone.

Shaking my head, I clicked over to McQuade’s call. “Talk to me, big boy.” I put a little drawl on the endearment.

“No one else I’d rather talk to, sugar bear,” he fired back, snappy and sassy.

A snort of laughter escaped me. “You win.”

He chuckled. “Damn, you gave in almost too fast. There’s no fun if you don’t make me work for it.”

“Next time,” I promised, my cheeks aching from my smile. Thankfully, I hadn’t choked on my tea. “But that was a good one.”

“Well, since I won and you seem to like it so much, Sugar Bear, we’ll go with it.”

I rolled my eyes, but didn’t argue. After all, he had won. “So, what are we doing?” I managed a sip of my tea without inhaling it or spitting it over my keyboard. “Your request didn’t go into a lot of details—just, you needed to talk to me.”

“Can’t a guy want to talk to his sugar bear?”

“Keep it up, big boy,” I teased. “Sure, you can, but if we’re just gonna log in to play a game somewhere, I need to switch headphones.”

“Hmm…there’s something sexy about imagining you plowing through the bad guys in Fortnight.”

“I prefer Halo, though the new Fallout was pretty damn sexy too.”

“Sugar Bear, keep talking to me all gamer-like, it’s turning me on.”

“Hmm-hmm. Spill, what did you need the special appointment for?” John McQuade was a lot of things, but he wasn’t frivolous and he didn’t waste time. When he asked for specific appointments, he usually had work to do.

“Promise to not get mad at me?” He sounded so hopeful, like a child who’d done something wrong and knew it.

“No,” I informed him. “You tell me what you did and why it’s now my problem and we’ll go from there.”

“Damn,” he said. “Here I was hoping to avoid the doghouse.”

“What did you do, John?”

He grunted something that sounded vaguely like German. Maybe Dutch. I took another sip of the tea and waited.

“Got a job,” he finally admitted. “Feels off. Did the research, still feels off. Want you take a look at it for me?”

“You did the research?” I raised my eyebrows. “You cheating on me, John?”

“I would never, Sugar Bear—most of the time.” That nickname was going to stick, wasn’t it?

“Uh huh.” I clucked my tongue at him. “Why didn’t you just ask me to look at it in the first place?”

A file popped into my dropbox and I was already opening them.

“I don’t want to take all your time with business. Sometimes, I like talking to you for fun.”

“Big Boy, I am more than capable of handling you and more besides, who did you go to for this?”

I was already separating out the different file components. The job description. The company. The targets. Incorporation papers were there, founding, board of directors?—

It was strange because it was way too clean. Everything was—perfect. Humans were innately flawed. Everyone had secrets, and no one who succeeded at that level in business was quite that squeaky clean.

Not when they handled equipment, pharmaceutical, and weapons sales of both the legal and illegal variety. They were very good at burying their various deals and holding companies beneath a complicated and intricate series of shells.

“Marcus,” he finally admitted. “He’s good.”

“I’m better.” It wasn’t bragging. “Marcus is a surface skimmer. He won’t dig too deep unless you tell him to.”

“I did tell him to go deep,” McQuade complained. “Problem is, he said the deeper he went, the more nothing he found.”

“But you don’t believe that.” It wasn’t a question. I didn’t believe it either. The deeper I dug, the more shells I found. Back tracing them was creating an intricate puzzle. What secret were they trying to hide behind this web of deceit?

“No,” he admitted, and there was a growl punctuating that word. “Learned a long time ago to trust my gut. Doesn’t matter how clean it is or how much they doctor the logo, if it feels like a cheap knockoff?—”

“It probably is. Now this is interesting…”

“What?” I had his full attention.

“Each series of shells is covered by three more. It’s almost like a shell game within a shell game, within a shell game. Each time I track to the next, it splits off again.”

“Someone doesn’t want us to know where everything ties back to.”

“No, they don’t,” I said as I worked on a program to break through that algorithm a little faster. “It’s also set up to create phantom shells. One in three of these are legit, but they are cloning them, then using a replicating pattern to keep the real ones hidden. It’s a really sexy little game of dress-up.”

“You sound like you’re enjoying it,” he murmured and it was like having some big cat rumbling a purr in my ear.

“I like it when someone, who is almost as smart as me, provides me with a puzzle that’s a challenge.”

His soft laughter encouraged me. “Damn, Sugar Bear, you sound hot when you’re in pursuit.”

The algorithm did its job, and helped me crack through the clones and false fronts until I was able to track the whole thing back to a company in…

“You can’t take this job,” I told him. It didn’t matter what they were calling the business. They’d changed the incorporation papers, but I recognized the man behind it.

“Why not?”

“Yuri Andronvich.”

“It’s a trap,” McQuade sounded almost delighted. “Really?”

“Yes, really. Why are you so happy about it?”

“Androvich is almost like the guy who got away. And the son of a bitch never paid me for the two jobs I did before he tried to kill me.”

“John,” I said, refusing to be charmed by his engaged tone. “He didn’t plan to pay you because he wanted to kill you. Then you screwed that last job for him—it not only cost him a few hundred million, but it put a price on his head.”

“Couldn’t happen to a nicer dickbag. So he set a trap for me.” He clapped his hands.

“You’re going to spring the trap.”

“Yes, Sugar Bear, I am. Guess I’m off to Morocco. Want me to bring you back something nice?”

“Well, you coming back alive would be good,” I said.

“If you insist,” he teased. “I’ll call you when I’m ready to move.”

“I’ll be here.”

Then he was gone and I stared at the information on the screen. Where was Androvich right now?