Page 33 of Constantly Cotton
“So are you,” Burton murmured. “An avenging angel, full of justice. But that’s not a bad thing.”
“You’re impossible,” Jason said, rolling over to his other side. Cotton was there, warm and welcoming and not shaming him for napping in the middle of the morning, and he was suddenly so weak and so tired he couldn’t think of any other requirement in a companion.
Not a single one.
Two Heartbeats
COTTON HADto pee. He had to pee, and he was all alone in bed, and it was pretty much the only thing that was keeping him awake.
That and the air had assumed that odd, mosquito-y tinge to it that told him long shadows were falling. He had no idea why that made him feel like mosquitos were out there, but he knew the little bastards were somewhere.
It was time to get up and get dressed and face them.
His clothes were draped over a chair, and as he rolled out of bed, he was aware that his body felt lighter somehow, like that embarrassing hysterical laughter had unburdened him. He dressed quickly and made it to the bathroom, his body fighting to remember those moments cocooned with Jason under the covers.
Twice now, they’d been there together, snuggled on the small bed, Jason’s arm wrapped around his waist, and he was suddenly wondering if he could sleep any other way.
After his trip to the bathroom, he found his way to the living room, where their comfortable kitchen table had been converted to an electronics store.
“What the—”
“Sh…,” Jason muttered, using a screwdriver on a bank of monitors. “I’m teching.”
“That’s not a word,” Cotton muttered. Squinting, he found the clock on the microwave and realized he’d slept for a couple of hours. It wasn’t six or seven, as he’d imagined, but closer to four in the afternoon. The long shadows from the surrounding conifers made the world seem both safer and a more closely guarded secret.
He stepped toward the kitchen window. As he’d discovered that morning when he’d gone to fix breakfast, it was sort of a stunning beveled creation that stuck out about four inches from the wall, with a shelf that could be used for plants or recipes. It looked out over the slope of a hill that led to what appeared to be a branch of a small lake.
“Isn’t Tahoe big and round?” he muttered, frowning. “This is small and sort of starfish shaped.”
“It’s Caples Lake,” Jason replied. “We’re on one of the branches. If you look out over to the left, you can see the resort. Lucky us, we just hit the off-season at the end of August/beginning of September.”
“Why lucky us?” Cotton turned to look at him and noticed he was still “teching.”
“Yeah, Burton wanted a contingent to keep an eye on us, but it’s hard to be secret when you’ve got a bunch of special ops guys living in your cabin. So he rented one of those cabins off-season for cheap. The guys get to watch us in shifts, but they also get to enjoy the lake. He said there were people jumping for this assignment. They should be in place by tomorrow morning.”
“Where is he now?”
Jason held up a finger and then tinkered with something on the table in front of him. “Hanging up cameras outside,” he murmured. Then he picked up the cell phone lying on the table in the mess next to the monitor in front of him and said, “Camera three’s a go. Could you point it thirty degrees north? That way there’s not so much overlap with camera two, and we have a better view of anyone coming down the road.”
“You’re setting up security?” Cotton turned toward him and really took in what he was doing. A laptop sat open on the table, still charging, apparently from a cord that stretched to the wall behind where Jason sat. Next to that was an old computer monitor hooked up to… the hell was that?
“Is that a modem?” Cotton asked, surprised he even knew what one looked like.
“Internet is sketchy as fuck up here,” Jason murmured. He had a small soldering iron next to him and a motherboard underneath it. Every now and then he’d take a wire and touch it to a contact point, and then, given what he saw on the monitor, he’d solder it on. “We don’t have acres of cable to set up a good perimeter, but what we do have is….” He picked up the phone. “That’s good. Camera three’s a lock. Two more to go.”
Burton said something Cotton didn’t catch, but Jason answered.
“Yup. He’s up. Asking questions. As he should. Yeah, we’ll have breakfast ready for our guys tomorrow. Make sure you cross-reference them with Talbot’s advisor circle. I don’t want any conflict of—”
“They all hate Talbot, sir.”
Cotton smirked. “Well, that came in clear,” he said.
Jason arched a warning eyebrow at him. “Hush,” he mouthed. “Did you make that a requisite?” He aimed the question over the coms.
“No, sir, but we did ask if they had any connections to him, and their consensus was that he was an asshole who thought anybody underneath his rank was expendable.”
“Well, that’s special,” Jason muttered. “Wonderful. Are you putting up camera four now?”
