Trace touched his side. “Right. A good sniper wouldn’t have missed.”
“A decent one wouldn’t have missed. But Ron Murray is twenty years old, and he missed. Badly. I don’t think he was supposed to hit James Robert Michaels. Word on the street is you were the target and he was a whoops. It was an equivalent young guy not trained properly who took on you Warden and ended up dead.”
Warden sighed. “I hardly remember the incident. It’s sort of becoming a blur.”
“The painkillers can play havoc with the brain.” Judson rocked back on his feet. “Can we track this Ron Murray back to wherever Marcus is hiding out?”
“That’s what I’m hoping.” He pointed at Kade. “Can you?”
My K nodded. “Of course. Take a few minutes. Unless they have the kind of device I’m making to disguise us, but since I haven’t invented it yet I think that’s unlikely.”
Derrick smirked before he looked at Trace. “So Kade rambling? How long has he been focused on his project that he’s losing communication skills?”
“Not long, actually.” Trace grinned. “Fast descent this time.”
I pointed at both of them. “You two leave Kade alone. He’s fantastic. And adorable when he rambles.”
“Thanks.” Kade snorted. “You can all kiss my ass. Got him. Not even hard. He really is untrained. How sad for Marcus he couldn’t do better than this. Dude was just out wandering yesterday in a totally open-to-surveillance area of Colorado until he disappeared into the zone there that can be hidden.” He grinned. “He never seems to have exited the area so we know, pretty much, where he is. I’ll need to recalibrate the satellites, and I’ll know if I can see in that space. Just a minute.”
Judson sat down on the couch, sprawling out. “I’m always grateful he’s on our side.”
Derrick looked around. “How are things here other than the killing?”
“Trace and Warden are healing. I think otherwise it’s been pretty status quo. We had some really good Chinese food.”
Warden snorted. “Yeah… it was delicious.”
Derrick rubbed his eyes. “I take it there was some kind of sex. Good for all of you.”
“Got it.” Kade pointed at the computer. “Come take a look. Ron entered this house just a few days ago and hasn’t come out.”
I looked over Kade’s shoulder. It did look like an Alliance lair. Huge and imposing. The first thing they’d told me when they explained the Alliance was that it had to be secret. And yet every time I turned around, it was one exhibit of ridiculous display of wealth after another. I shook my head. Right now I wasn’t going to deal with that.
It was another big house and Ron the ridiculously bad sniper was in there with whomever else Marcus had working for him. “Should we watch it on surveillance for a few days?”
“We’ll get the satellites to start recording and ding me if anyone comes and goes.” He stepped away from the computer. “It’ll be good for us to have a sense of who he has working for him as we decide to take him out.”
I nodded. “I don’t suppose we could just blow up the house.”
“We’d have to get in there to do that. If you have an idea how to do that, I’m game.” Derrick tilted his head. “I think a sniper rifle would be better with me on the end of it firing. I’m starving. Do we have any meat? I’d love to grill.”
13
I stared at the screen. It was the same image I’d been looking at on and off for over a week. The house in Colorado. Few people came and no one left. It seemed Marcus liked living in Colorado. The house where Derrick had visited him to threaten him to leave me alone had been there too. But not this one and not as heavily encased in mystery as this one was.
Warden had been grumpy all day, coming off of his pain meds, but he’d managed to get through his physical therapy with Judson, proclaiming him the worst human being on the planet, which meant he was making incredible improvement from how the day before had gone. I’d take it. The yelling at each other bordered on tantrum-like, and I couldn’t help but wonder if everyone was simply getting enough of inaction.
Except for Derrick. He spent an incredible amount of time trying new recipes in the kitchen as though he were on some kind of vacation that included cooking. I chewed on my lip as Kade sank down onto the couch next to me. “Anything new? I didn’t get pinged so I just answered my own question. No, there’s nothing new.”
“How can a house be so full of people and never have them leave? We leave. Judson and Trace went to the dry cleaner today. We had groceries delivered. People do things. Not them.” I pointed at the screen. “They’re holed up in there like we’re in a nuclear winter.”
He laughed, throwing back his head. “Thanks for that imagery, Everly.”
“You’re welcome. I live to please.” I rolled my eyes at him. “How are you? Making progress?”
“No.” He grinned. “But I will. You can count on it. One day it’ll just be…” He snapped his fingers. “Done like that.”
Warden crossed into the room and sat down. “The elusive Marcus remains in his house. I never knew he was such an agoraphobic.”
“If you had shitty assassins working for you and knew Derrick wanted to kill you, would you go wandering around?” Trace and Judson came in through the front door, T jumping into the conversation right away.
I shook my head. “The question is: when Derrick arrived at his original home and threatened Marcus, why Marcus didn’t just kill him right then? Or have him destroyed when he exited the house? Was he so overwhelmingly intimidated by Derrick that he just didn’t take an obvious shot?”
Judson shook his head. “Both good questions we don’t have answers to.”
“I like the ‘I’m just so intimidating he couldn’t take it’ answer.” Derrick grinned from the doorway.
“I’ve had enough of this.” I rose. Patience wasn’t my strong suit. I’d own it. “I’ll tell you what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to sit in this house and wait for them to find us or see if they ever deign to come out. Kade, do we know from the satellites roughly how many people are in the house based on body heat?”
He winced. “It’s an estimate. I never thought to improve that tech. If you want me to break into the CIA or the Delta force databases I can probably…”
I held up my hand. “Guestimate is fine based on what you do have?”
“I think there are twenty-five people in that house.”
That was a shit ton of people to be stuck inside and never leaving. We were going stir crazy and we were leaving the house and were only a party of six. Of course, it might have been just enough people to never need to leave. Maybe Marcus was having a constant orgy in there. “Is he big on sex parties?”
Trace blinked rapidly. “Not that I ever heard of, and people do tend to tell me that kind of stuff.”
“All right, then we need to get them out of there. Force them to come out.”
Derrick nodded. “Easier said than done. How do you propose doing that?”
That was a good question. “What gets people out of the house? Fire. If the house caught on fire we could absolutely get them out.”
Trace shook his head. “Too risky. We want them dead, but not until we get to question him. I don’t want him to die before he tells me why he targeted me. Judson was running around and he didn’t get shot.”
“I wasn’t exactly running around.” He held up his hand. “Point taken. If they’d wanted to take a shot at me they could have.”
“Not to mention fire is so… unreliable. Someone could just put it out.” Derrick walked over, placing guacamole in front of me on the coffee table. He’d spread tortilla chips out around it. I stared at it for a second. Apparently when Derrick wasn’t killing anyone or training me to do so, he made dips. All of the others bent over quickly and started spooning the green dip onto the plates Derrick set down. They started crunching all around me.
I didn’t have the heart to tell Derrick I couldn’t stand guacamole. It was a
mental thing I needed to get over but couldn’t. My grandmother had dragged me to her friend Miz Viola’s home one afternoon. She was a well-dressed woman who never left the house without a pound of makeup on her face, wearing clothes that needed to be pressed to even be put in her closet. The two old biddies got along like they’d always been best friends, even though I thought they’d met at church only a year before the incident that would forever end my ability to eat guacamole.
Miz Viola had made the dip. In retrospect, even as my mind threw itself back in time, lost in the memory of the sheer grossness of what had happened, it was kind of odd that she’d made it at all. The two ladies were much more likely to drink sweet tea and snack on fried shrimp than the guacamole. But for whatever reason, she’d served it that day.
I’d been eight years old. My stomach turned, and I had to look away from Derrick’s creation just to get through thinking about it. I’d put my chip into Miz Vi’s dip and looked down to see the largest collection of cockroaches I’d ever seen or would see in my life. They’d been all over the floor, practically swarming all over each other; two of them had climbed up my leg.
I’d dropped the guacamole, and for the rest of my life I carried the association of those roaches with the guacamole, even though they’d technically not been related other than a comment on Miz Viola’s cleanliness. My grandmother had been a nightmare about it, blaming me for the bug event. God forbid, the woman ever take my side. I’d never found out where those bugs came from or how they got there. It was always just the guacamole incident in my mind.
“Everly, you want some?” Derrick lifted his eyebrows.
I shot Trace a quick look as I answered D. I didn’t need Trace outing me for lying to Derrick right that second, not when I was being polite. Trace could take his observations about human behavior and shove them at the moment.
“I’m still full from lunch. I think if I tried to eat right now, I’d make myself sick.”
Derrick nodded, seeming to accept that as true. “Try some later.”
“Will do.” I smiled even as Trace lifted his eyebrows to let me know he’d not missed any of that and still kept his mouth shut.
The whole memory was… I rubbed my arms, a plan formulating in my head in a sudden rush as though it had always been there. “I know how we get them out of the house.”
Judson ate his chip. “How?”
Goosebumps broke out on my arms, bringing with it a surge of pain that I ignored. I could be grossed out later. “Bugs.”
Silence met my remark so I kept speaking. “I’m dead serious. Bugs. Fleas. Bed bugs. An infestation of cockroaches. Trust me, it will get people out of the house. If they have to bug bomb the house, they have to leave it.”
Kade opened and closed his mouth. “I… Yes, bugs. They would most likely leave the house if bugs came into it, and it’s not as obvious as say setting it on fire. They won’t necessarily see it coming.”
Derrick nodded. “How do we get the bugs in the house? I mean, yes, I agree. I love it actually and, Evs, the fact that you came up with this idea? It’s sexy in how gross it is. The way your mind works. Gross.”
I wasn’t insulted. For Derrick, that was a compliment. He was more impressed with me the darker I got. For both of us, that could be deadly, but I wasn’t afraid of the hard stuff.
Kade drummed his fingers on the table, and I caught another look at the guacamole. I was really going to need to get away from it or get them to put it away.
Judson narrowed his eyes at me but didn’t say anything else. It was Warden who finally spoke. “How do we get the bugs in there? That’s not any easier than setting things on fire. That’s not like Kade crashing their computers.”
“They clearly have a tech guy. That much I know. I made a gentle tug at their firewalls and found them very strong. I didn’t push harder to not give us away, but I can work on it. If you want me to.”
I shook my head. “No, don’t. I know this was my idea and maybe that’s why I’m focused on it. But there has to be a way to get the bugs inside.”
“I know a guy who has bugs. I mean who could get fleas. A lot of them.” Trace’s announcement had us all turning around to face him.
Derrick’s mouth fell open. “You have a guy who has bugs?”
I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. That was hysterical. Trace had officially shocked Derrick. Pretty soon everyone was laughing. It was the most ridiculous, wonderful moment. Here we were, sitting in the living room staring at a screen at a house, waiting for people to come out, and talking about Trace and his bug guy. How had this gotten so normal?
How had it gotten so fantastic?
I leaned on my elbow. They were mine. There were lots of things in the universe I was unsure of, but how they felt about me wasn’t one of them. I blinked. When had that happened? How was it so easy? Not very long ago I’d left them and now here we were. I chewed on my lip, which hurt because I’d been doing it a lot lately. I needed to stop, find some gross lip-gloss I didn’t like the flavor of, and put it on so I’d be less inclined to taste my own lip.
Truth was I knew the answer to my internal query. I’d been one hundred percent certain of their feelings for me the day I’d left them. I’d known it. I just hadn’t been sure of my own. These days, I knew how I felt for them. I loved them. I just didn’t know how I felt about it.
“Everly?” Warden touched my cheek. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m mulling over life.” I smiled at each of them. I could think about the nature of our relationship and how I found myself in this odd situation another time when I was alone. For now, I needed to focus. They needed to get rid of Marcus so we’d all be safe and they could go ahead and take over the Alliance. And I could… well, I didn’t know what the fuck I was going to do, but I’d figure it out later.
Trace winked at me. “I think for a second there you were really happy.”
“I was. I’ll be happy all the time when this is done.”
He laughed, throwing his head back. “No one is happy all the time. Ever. The best we can all hopeful is contentment and no one in the Alliance is ever that. Sorry, Everly, your life is bound to be torn up in angst and disgruntled moments.”
“Well, just so long as you all keep fucking me then I guess I’ll be fine.”
Trace jerked. He hadn’t expected me to say that. I slowly smiled at him. Trace wasn’t the only one who could say mouth dropping things. I shook my head. “Surely there must be a way to get bugs in the house. Enough that they don’t see them come in and then they have no choice but to get out of there so we can get a good look at all of them.”
“Well, I’d probably be the perfect person to do that, actually, had they not already tried to kill me. I could go pretend I wanted to change sides and drop the bugs. But since they’ve already scarred me up with one bullet, I’d really rather not risk another one.” He shook his head. “Guess I’m not helpful right now.”
He was right. He couldn’t go walking in there with the bugs and somehow get them into the house. The absurd nature of this entire endeavor hit me at once and yet I couldn’t dismiss it. This would work. I knew it in my gut. No one was going to stay in a house during a bug infestation. I shuddered even thinking about it.
“Warden and Trace, you both got shot at. My question is would they shoot at all of you or was it specifically just them? And is there a way to test it? Like for example, Judson could go in if we knew he’d be safe.”
He stopped chewing mid-way through a bite, and I watched him visibly swallow the chip in his mouth. “Me? I’m not really the subterfuge guy.”
“That’s why you’re perfect for it.” I actually had no doubt about Judson’s ability to lie. All of these guys could summon up fabrication when they needed to. They lied about their entire existence to most people every day. The problem wasn’t that he couldn’t pull off a trip to see Marcus, the problem was that there was no way I was sending Judson out alone where he might very well get shot and die.
Judson lifted his eyebrows. “Do you want me to go to Marcus’?”
“If we can guarantee your safety, yes. Only so far as you can do some snooping and drop off the bugs.”
He winced. “So we’re really going with this bug thing? And I’m not certain how we’re going to guarantee my safety.”
“Me.” Derrick sat forward. “I’ve already been in and out of one of his houses and not gotten killed. You weren’t targeted. I think you’d be fine, but just in case, we go in together. Me to argue for them to leave her alone and you to act like you’re going to betray her.”
Judson jumped to his feet. “Me to betray her? What the fuck? You think I would? That anyone would believe that?”
“Yes.” Derrick didn’t even flinch at Judson’s temper. “You want a return to the old ways of the Alliance. That is the last thing anyone heard you say before you disappeared mostly from sight. In the hotel while we fought for our lives and you had no idea. While you made that speech they applauded you for.”
Judson put his hand over his heart. “If I had the slightest idea what was happening upstairs I would have been up there with you. I never would have stayed in the banquet hall and made a speech.”
“Everyone knows that.” I rose. “And as to that, Jud, you can let that go. You couldn’t have gotten into the elevator. They were blocked off from everyone except apparently my father, who may have been coming to kill me. He was at the very least working with Ben. And none of that matters because I killed him.” I’d finally gotten to the point where I could say that and feel nothing at all about it. Or at least it didn’t feel like it was going to pull me under into a pit of self-pity. “So please don’t worry on that account.”
Judson crossed his arms across his chest. “I’ll do it. Work on the details. You can count on me. I’ll get the bugs in the house.”
I glared at Derrick. “Do it because you believe it can work. Do it because you want to. Not because Derrick just emotionally manipulated you to do it by bringing that up.”
Deadly Truths: Kiss Her Goodbye #3 Page 15