Page 68 of Devil and the Deep Blue Fish

Do that. But do what he’s doing and make sure you are not alone.He thought of Piper Lutz, bribing poor Otto with food. How had she known where he would be? How many “errands” had she had the boy run for her before?

Jackson heard voices coming down the hallway and shook himself, realizing with a start that he’d almost fallen asleep during his woolgathering. Okay, then. He’d pushed himself pretty damned far today—this had to be his last adventure before he went and picked Ellery up from Jade’s house. Hurriedly he sank to the inside of the desk, the property management files on his lap, and he started rifling through them, taking pictures of any document with a signature and sending them to Galen and Ellery without any more banter.

Galen would know what to look for, and it was time to get to work.

HE’D GOTTENmost of the property management file, as well as a couple of Miscellaneous Expenses files, none of them on computer, all of them neatly done, by hand, in triplicate. Sometime as he took his umpteenth picture it occurred to him to wonder why he hadn’t made a beeline for the laptop. Plenty of women were amazing at technology, he thought, trying to follow his gut instinct back down to its root. It wasn’t a misogyny thing. What was it about theseparticularwomen….

They all know each other.

He blinked, the thought important enough to take a moment with it.

Retty did what Twitty said. Piper got a guttersnipe to do her bidding. Cora was blackmailed by Retty and Twitty for a mistake she hadn’t even made a million years and three thousand miles ago.

The ties that bound these people wouldn’t be in the computer. Of course records could be subpoenaed, and there would probably be a list of employees on the payroll, but that wasn’t going to prove anything. There werepersonalitiesat play here, things that were understood and not said.

Now she’s the package.

Things like that, which would make their henchwoman so terrified she’d fight against going with people who clearly worked for the same outfit she did.

Those things wouldn’t be on computer, but proof of themmightbe in tax records and property records, and those were the things people kept on paper. Andthesepeople would make sure the paper trail was clean and pristine. Nobody could get them on back taxes—no they could not.

It was the people those papers might connect them with that would bring this batch of snakes down, Jackson had no doubt.

He’d made his way through the property records, the employee records, the Miscellaneous Expense files, and was searching the file cabinet for one more thing—anything—when he stumbled upon it without even thinking.

Permission Forms.

Oh. Oh fuck. Yes.

Kids.

His movements quickened, any trace of hesitation and pondering what he was looking for and why dissolving as herealized he was dealing with ahugestack of paperwork, and he might not be able to photograph everything.

He’d already been girding his loins for plowing through a whole lot of data that night, and he was torn between takingallthe pictures or maybe just, well,stealing the file,when he heard a clatter from upstairs and Cody Gabriel bellowed, “Plan B now!”

Jackson shoved the file under his shirt and into his waistband, hoping that was enough to keep it secure, grabbed the portable dolly, and bolted out of the room.

And right into a gaggle of women so thin and brittle they reminded him of uncooked linguini.

He identified Piper Lutz on sight, and most of the other women—they were all one of many shades of blond—scattered, but one woman, midsized, with the slim, powerful physique he associated with tennis players and dancers—stood in the middle of the hallway and shouted “Stop!”

Jackson had never been great at taking orders.

“Nope,” he said, dodging around her and staying well out of arm’s reach of her smaller form. Not that he didn’t think Twitty couldn’t kick the shit out of him, but hitting women was not first on his list of defense moves, no matter how much he might have hated this one.

“Get back here!” she screeched, but while she might have been in superior fighting shape, Jackson had meant what he’d said to Cody about running every day so you could escape what chased you. Still holding the dolly under one arm, he leaped off the porch, clearing the steps in one go and collapsing into the soft, wet ground when his feet hit it. He rolled, dropped the dolly, bounded up, and kept running, cutting through the trees on the grounds since he didn’t have to take the sidewalks anymore and trying not to slip on the wet leaves behind the front of the main house. He kept to the shadows, dodging behind treesand staying well out of reach of the sodium lights that ran the length of the street.

He watched as the crowd of women, all in dress flats and sweater sets, went charging down the sidewalk in search of him. He assumed they’d separated, since none of them had been through the door before he’d darted behind the topiary to skirt the wrought iron fence behind the foliage. He kept running, keeping one eye on the lit street where the enemy was scurrying, crying to each other with shrill voices.

His favorite cry was, “What in the hell do we do if we catch him?”

He’d decided he wasn’t going to hang around to see what would happen if somebody came up with an answer to that question when he saw—lagging behind the women but still pretty fast—two big shadows in dark uniforms.

Security guards,he thought.Upstairs—not downstairs.

They knew what they were protecting—and it wasn’t paperwork.

Jackson continued to hug the shadows, wondering if it was lack of imagination or if everybody had the same aversion to snails and slugs Cody did but still finding it easier to move in the darkness than to outrun a witch hunt.

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