Page 12 of Remote Access

Lane scrambled into his truck and gave Quincy directions to the parking lot where he'd left his car. They made the switch fast, Quincy throwing clothes into Lane's car as well. Lane had packed light because when he'd said start over, he'd meant it. He had nothing on him or around him so anyone could trace him back to his old identity.

He froze as he was halfway in his car. The camera had been behind him when Quincy had grabbed it and looked it over. “Did that camera in his secret room have a mic?”

“No.” Quincy jumped in and slammed the door.

He’d said his name in that room. That small bit of relief didn’t do much, though. He’d fudged this whole operation to hell.

“Come on,” Quincy yelled. “We'll hit Highway 44. Find a place to hole up for the rest of the night somewhere in the city."

"He has no way to track us unless you think your own phone is bugged." Lane climbed fully inside and started his car.

"Nah. It's pay-as-you go and only a couple of friends have the number. Speaking of which." He tugged it out of his pocket, his knees hitting the underside of the dashboard as he wiggled in the passenger seat. Dude's legs were crazy long.

“Hey Isaac—” He grunted in the phone, then chuckled. “Yeah, yeah, I know what time it is. Listen, everything changed tonight.” He went on to explain Lane’s arrival, the information they got. “I won’t be able to go back in and he’ll be sending people after us.”

He listened for a few moments.

“He admitted the cameras were down then? He had more than we knew, including a room we didn’t know about. Did you get anything on ours?”

He listened a few more minutes. “Hey, I’ll have to call you back, but I need you guys to pick up my truck in the morning.”

While Quincy finished his call, Lane got them onto Highway 44 and headed east. Adrenaline still pumped through his system so hard he felt shaky and nauseous. It was something he'd forced himself to get used to over the years. It didn't matter how many pieces he stole, each and every job had given him days of fear beforehand and nights of sweating and anxiety afterward. And during, the adrenaline would spike in his body like he'd mainlined thirty high energy drinks.

He'd known he was courting serious danger by breaking into Letsen's house, but it had been a last minute detour in his plans. He'd been squirreling away money for years, building up a different identity—one he even had a job for—and the plan had been to take his mother and run when he had everything he needed for them both to disappear. Her death had changed everything.

Grief slammed into him, the pain in his chest so intense, he tightened his fingers on the steering wheel until it made a cracking noise. He'd hoped to pull this off in one more year. He couldn't help but wonder if he'd played it a little less safe and just ran with her earlier, she wouldn't have been on that corner when the guy had popped the curb and plowed into the driver's side of her car.

"Truck is taken care of,” Quincy said as he turned to look out the back window. “My friend is going to store it in his garage until I need it again."

Lane didn't have the heart to tell him that probably wouldn't happen. Letsen would never let up and if he ended up in jail, the others in his black market business would still come after them.

Quincy Holt hadn't realized that he was now on the run, too. Permanently.

They drove past the city and the crash from all the adrenaline hit him hard. Lane felt it in every muscle of his body and mind—like someone had stuffed weights in his brain, making his head too heavy to hold up. Quincy still watched the road ahead and behind, but he'd started to slump in his seat. "Hey," Lane said, nodding at the exit coming up. "Let's find a motel. Somewhere we can park in back. We can stay there and go through the paperwork."

He glanced over to find Quincy watching him.

"Listen," Lane said on a sigh. "I'm not going to take off. I know you have no reason to trust me and honestly, I have no reason to trust you at this point either. But I could use more eyes to help me find what I'm looking for faster. And I saw some things in the files I did manage to read last night that are fishy."

"More fishy than making a teenager steal priceless collectibles?"

"Yeah. Like I said, it's a bigger operation than even I realized and I knew it had to be. I stepped on private jets that landed in private airstrips. There are major funds running through this."

"Why risk his business with children, with untrained teenagers, when he makes enough money to hire professional thieves?" Quincy's question was little more than a murmur. “That’s the part I’m not getting at all.”

"How long would those professionals have put up with a partial cut of the sales before they moved in on the action? And with us, with what he held over us, he held the reins." Lane should have talked to his mother and found out just how many people had been involved in the break-in she’d done with Hayrick, because he was pretty sure that's where Hayrick had mined his first group of thieves.

"And the paper files? When he had people like you?"

"That one’s easy. The man is quirky as hell. Plus, he uses another person like me to infiltrate everything, so he knows how vulnerable he is to hackers. But I have a feeling there are electronic copies somewhere. Probably at his other place up north. I thought of going there first, but this place was closer. And he's lived in Oklahoma longer."

"So you thought the files would be in the older house."

Lane shrugged as they headed off the highway onto an access road. Anger that they’d managed to only get five boxes burned in his chest. "Those couldn't be all of them. And to be honest, I actually hadn't planned to ever step foot in his house. Because of the tight timeline, I didn't have a lot of time to stake out the place. Hence you."

"Me?"

"I had no idea he'd hired an on-site security guard. He's so arrogant and so secretive, I never expected him to trust anyone in his private area that much." A thought hit him. "Wait, does he have something on you?"

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