Page 23 of Not Even A Mouse
Soup with sass
Myron
“I don’t know what the fuck you want from me.” Myron tossed the controller to the table. “Clearly I’m not living up to whatever you need, so why don’t you just do it yourself.” He turned on his heel and stalked to the door, stopped there by the quiet voice of his friend.
“Brother, stop.” Bones’ voice held too much of too many things. Compassion,affection, tolerance, and a tiny blade of anger. Myron decided to grab onto that.
“I’m serious. You think it’s so easy to do this?” He gestured towards the screen, ignoring the wide-eyed stares from the men seated around the table. “That goddamned drone is in Florida, and I’m here. We don’t know what I’m looking for, only that I’m looking for”—he used his fingers to make air quotes—“somethingout of the ordinary.Well,I’m here to tell you, clue the fuck in, because from where I stand, everything looks out of the ordinary in Florida.”
“I think the drone is still flying, and you are the only one of us who can bring it safely back to where it needs to be.” Bones stared at him. “It’s not like you to quit on us.”
“I’m not quitting.” As Bones no doubt knew it would, the words goaded Myroninto returning to the table and picking up the controller. “And it would go home as soon as the battery got too low.” He shook his head sharply. “I’m just frustrated.” He yawed the bird, turning it in a circle then pitched it forward to begin flying again.
“As you should be. This is not enough information to warrant a full excursion, and not one of us expects you to find something actionableon a first pass.”
“Hold up.” Myron spotted something odd on the screen and touched a toggle on the controller, bringing up a secondary instrument window on the screen. “I think…” He flipped toinfrared,and a small spoton the displayglowed brightly. “That’s a hot spot, and that’s in the middle of a field of some kind. What do they grow in Florida?”
“I dunno,” one of the men said with a laugh.“But, it was a lot of green before you swapped. Are those trees?”
“Christmas trees,” Bones agreed, and Myron directed the drone towards the hot spot. He brought it closer, maintaining the current height, then dropped it lower. The spot didn’t move, so he dropped it lower yet. The trees could be seen now, ranging thirty feet below in rows off into the distance.Stillthe spot didn’t move. He changedthe view back to thecameraand heard someone in the room suck in abreath. The person’s clothing was stark white against the brown and greens of the dirt and trees, but the red was brilliant and bright. “That is not old blood.” Bones shook his head. “I would say that this”—he gestured towards the screen—“is proof that even when you don’t know what you’re looking for, you seem to find the oddestthings.”
Myron slipped into that place in his head where he sorted things. Where all things made sense if you only looked at them the right way. Over the next five minutes, he asked questions aloud and waited for responses, then assigned men to different duties such as calling the Jailbreakers MC, their main contacts in the area. Bones called Mason’s sister and delicately deduced Justine’s safetywithout flipping her straight into FBI mode, while Myron ran an online search to scour the local PD websites looking for missingpersonsreports.
Myron fixed the drone at the same height, even though he knew the body lying on the ground in a distant Florida field was dead. From the size, it was a small woman, or a…he just hoped it was a small woman. After a few minutes, Myron had an errant thoughtand flipped back toinfrared,so he could study the screen. “Bones,” he calledsoftly,and waited until the man steppedclose. “Does it look like the body’scooledin this short time? I thought the heat would be keeping it constant.”
“It looks less bright on the screen, yes.” Bones nodded.
“If the body is still cooling, then thisjusthappened.” The drone shot up at his command and he beganflying it in larger, concentric circles using the body as a pivot point.
“What is therange onthis device?”
“Seven klicks, but I don’t trust it. I reset the geofence when I launched, but it could still head home.” Myron consulted the clock on the screen. “I’ve got about twenty minutes left before I have to get it back to the shed.” There were drone “sheds” all across the states and Myron wastapped into their network, thanks to Mason shelling out a pretty penny for his access. If therewasneed and prep time, he could even have a swarm delivered near any specific location, giving him up to ten drones to use.
“What was that?” Bones question corresponded to Myron’s movements of the drone, angling towards a grouping of hot spots. “Where are we?”
“About two miles east from the body.There are three men.” These bodies were much larger, and their heat wasn’tnotwaning,because they were very much alive. “They’re bushwhacking out to the road.”
“Fly ahead, see where they are aiming their feet.”
Myron ranged out and found a road, then found the little pull-off that was on a straight route back to where he’d seen the men walking. Waiting at that pull-off was another man, andfive bikes. “Tell Shades we have a different target for the Jailbreakers. Can you get them this info?” He rattled off the highway information and added, “Tell them they’ve got less than five minutes and these guys will be wind.” He checked the clock again. “Shit, I have about the same before I have to lock GPS so the bird can fly home. Lemme do something.” He flipped the drone intohoverand movedto the computer. The screen split and within moments, a second view appeared, showing the dim inside of a building. A few seconds passed while his fingers flew across the keyboard, and then the new drone lifted off, turning and yawing for a moment before it oriented on an open door in the ceiling. He watched the screen for a couple of beats, then returned to the controller. “I launched a second,paired it to the original. It’ll be onsite in a couple of minutes. That should give us enough time.”
“Technology is a strange and marvelous thing.”
“It was cool to have Ester video chatting with me the other day.” Myron smiled as he backed the drone away, angling to capture the moving images of the men returning to the lone man next to the bikes. “We should see if she’d be open to doing thatagain.”
“Yes, it was cool. What wasnotcool was you upsetting her for no reason.” Myron glanced at Bones, seeingtensionin his face. “That was not cool at all.”
“What do you mean?”
Bones scoffed and shuffled his feet, taking up a stance that looked aggressive, thumbs hooked over the chainlink belt he always wore. “Threatening her with your absence, when you clearly had no such intent. Thatwas not justnot cool,” Bones’ head whipped to the side, his angry gaze slicing through Myron, “that was cruel, and not something I expected from you.”
“I’m.” Myron paused and licked his lips. “I see how it might look that way. I had something happen and decided it would be better to absent myself from the Fort for a few days.” He shook his head. “But I am moving. House should be ready to movein by the end of the week. Things are just not…what I had hoped for right now.”
He stared at the screen, seeing Andy’s face again just before he’d slammed the door, his expression awash with hurt and uncertainty, confusion. Over the past week, Myron had ignored all calls and texts, holding firm through the days and hours until the attempted contacts had dwindled down to nothing.What if I gotit wrong?The questions plagued him.It felt so right. Everything did.
He missed Talya. Missed the little girl with an ever-present ache in his chest. The week he’d spent with them after her release from the hospital had been perfect, like living in a dream. When he thought about Andy, that ache turned to pain. Crushing, grinding him to nothing, the anguish burned in his body all the time. Evenhere, days later and miles away, standing surrounded by friends and brothers, his throat was tight with the remembered moments spent living…free. Not just out of the closet, but alongside someone who mattered.Someone I could love.
“I can’t…it’s hard to know what to do right now, Bones.” He sucked in a hard breath, forcing the wet from his eyes. “I didn’t mean to hurt her. She’s my sister, man.I love her.”She’d love Talya. “I just…things are hard right now.”
