Page 68 of Chasing Grace
He also happened to be a menace with guns, knives, and even blunt pencils. Davis had been so unprepared for what he’d gotten himself into, Adam had needed to intervene by separating him from the real losers before he landed facedown in a shallow grave.
He’d meant to send him away with a couple of grand and an order to stay out of trouble. Instead, Davis had ended up as Adam’s personal assistant, running errands for Sam Black while trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible.
“I need you to do something for me,” Adam said.
Davis looked up at him expectantly, a glob of pasta suspended between plate and finish line. “Yes, sir?”
Adam sighed. No matter how often he told the kid not to call him sir, he always did. It made him feel like he should be looking over his shoulder for the colonel. “I need you to find out what’s going on at the warehouse in Savannah. Can you do that?”
He hadn’t been able to reach Drummond or Hood for the last couple of days, and that meant they were up to no good. Bodak had let it slip; he’d ordered the pair to squat at the warehouse in Savannah. The move made no sense.
“Yes, sir.” Overeager to please, Davis would have agreed to eat shit if Adam had asked him to. Not a personal trait that screamed “badass mother with a loaded weapon here.”
“Should I leave now?”
Finding it difficult to keep a straight face, Adam turned his back to pour the last of the wine into his glass. “Finish your dinner first. We’ll go over the details after.”
He planned to give the kid one last job, an envelope of cash, and a one-way ticket. When Davis finished at the warehouse, his final orders would be to take off and not come back.
“Thanks. This is really good. Is there, ah, any more fancy spaghetti?” he asked, hope making him sound even younger than he looked.
CHAPTERTWENTY-NINE
After doing his security rounds,Chase came into the COMMs center to find Jay sitting in the dark. Eyes narrowed and flicking left to right, he absorbed information at a rate that would boggle most minds.
“You’ve been at it too long,” Chase said. “Go knock back a couple of rums with Doc and get some sleep.”
Gaze locked on his computer screen, and chewing on the cuticle of his thumb, a definite sign his goose was cooked, Jay spit out in frustration, “Christ. It’s in here somewhere. I’m just not seeing it.”
Convinced Gray would prove to be Wright’s biggest mistake; he’d given up all other leads and focused his efforts on her. They all knew the connection existed. They just hadn’t figured out what the common denominator was, and she had no idea who Wright might be or why he had a personal interest in her.
It was up to Jay to find the link, and they were running out of time. Wright had made his move, and they were hanging on with little more than hope and a prayer.
“Fuck me.” He rubbed his brows with a thumb and two fingers, his other hand resting on the keyboard as if he communicated from one Intel processor to the other through his fingertips.
“I’m serious, Mann. You’re out of juice. Go get some sleep. You’ll figure this out tomorrow.”
With a string of curses, Jay ran his hands through his hair, curling it away from his head at odd angles. He looked like a black-haired Albert Einstein with a week’s worth of facial scruff. Obsessed was the best way to describe him when he reached the stage at which he didn’t stop to shave. “Is that an order?”
“I can make it one.”
“Asshole.” Jay sprang upright and punched a key.
The screens went black, throwing him into shadow—no fancy screen-saver light show allowed on his hardware. To break into his system, you needed to be sporting Jay Mann’s fingerprints and have a twenty-two-digit alphanumeric code memorized. If you didn’t get it right the first time, you were screwed. His system didn’t give second chances.
“You heading to the crib?” Jay tapped his fingers on the butt of his forty where it sat on his hip.
“Nah. I’m gonna raid the fridge. I’ll catch up with you later.”
They walked out together. “Can you tell Gray to find me when she wakes up? I need to talk to her.”
Chase cocked a brow but didn’t ask why. Wouldn’t matter. Jay wouldn’t tell anyway. “Sure. Go catch Doc before the rum’s gone.” He clapped a hand on his buddy’s shoulder and shoved him out the screen door.
After checking the fridge for leftover pizza, Chase made his way empty handed to the couch in the colonel’s office and stretched out. The armrest felt like a cement block under his head, his boots hanging off the other end by a good two feet.
As small as it was, he would have preferred to be in his bed with Gray’s ass snuggled against him. But recognizing he’d pushed her pretty damn hard today, he wanted to give her some space.
She needed a good night’s sleep. No alcohol. No drama. No demands. And no two-hundred-pound man with a raging hard-on taking up ninety-five percent of the mattress. Chase adjusted himself to relieve his discomfort.
