Page 66 of Baby One Last Time
“You carried Mr. Cuddles down the stairs for our next-door neighbor Mrs. Lind. With her arthritis, she couldn’t have managed it herself.” Mom laughed. “You loved that crotchety old cat. She sent me a Christmas letter each year, and that old cat lived another five years thanks to you saving him.”
“Mr. Cuddles.” God, I had loved him. And then I’d forgotten him for eighteen years. “I never realized I forgot things. I never thought of that night that way.”
“How did you think about it?” Mom asked.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I said, and I meant it.
“We should probably talk about this some more, sweetie.”
“We should.” I couldn’t believe what I was about to say. “I’d like that. I’d like to know the truth.” There was a knock on the bungalow door. I glanced at my watch. It was time for the team meeting. “I have to go now, Mom, but I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
I hung up and clasped my phone in my hands. It didn’t matter. Fucking up. Making bad calls. Making mistakes. What mattered was setting things right whenever possible, learning from the failures, and doing better next time. Or at least doing my damnedest. Now it was time to put all of that into action and, as Mai had put it, go get my man.
Chapter 17
Now that Beecherand his thugs knew there was a breach in their security system, even if they did believe Derek was on their side of the law, returning to the scene of many crimes was as hard as we’d anticipated. Luckily for us, Alder and Jensen always had something up their tech-savvy sleeves.
Mai and I stood by the back gate of La Parisienne. I held a little magical box full of mysterious electronics beside the security box until a soft click permeated the cool night air and announced success. We slipped through the gate and waited for the snick of the lock and the security system to click back into place.
“Good to go,” Jensen said through the comms.
He and Alder sat with TJ and Bond in an unmarked black van half a block down the street, which might as well be a thousand miles away if things went pear-shaped and you needed your medic fast. But now that Beecher had kicked his security into high alert, his men had added surveillance cameras, which precluded parking any closer, at least until Alder rerouted them from live video to a loop. The cleanup crews, Penn and Sparks of course, but also three crews pulled in from other teams, were farther away, establishing a perimeter to keep the bad guys in and any backup they might call out.
“Street and property cameras rerouted,” Alder said thirty seconds later.
“OK, Lead and IT are moving closer,” TJ said. “Tactical, you’re good to go.”
That didn’t mean we could move right away. There was a low glow from security lights partially illuminating the back yard. We clocked the perimeter guards, four in total, nodded to each other when it looked like we could thread through their vision lines, and took off at a flat-out run. We skirted the swimming pool, snaked around the side of the house under the cover of shadows, and stood by a side entrance.
“We’re in position,” I announced over the comms. “Ready for more of your magic, Jensen.”
“Anything for you, sex kitten,” he said.
I scowled, but forgave him when the magical box blinked through a series of red, white, and green lights. Festive. It reminded me that Christmas was tomorrow. If things went really well—okay, if they went perfectly—there was a chance I’d get dispensation to leave this sweltering hell-scape of a city and hole up in a remote, snow-covered cabin by Boxing Day. And there was no question who I’d need with me to keep my feet—and my naughty bits—warm at night. And all day. And at civilian twilight.
All the lights changed to green.
“Okay, door security is down,” Jensen said. “Alder’s still working on the interior cameras, so...”
The comms clicked off. I glanced at Mai, who arched an eyebrow in a silentWhat the fuck?
The comms clicked back on. “Hold position, Tactical.” It was TJ. “We have an IT issue.”
Mai and I turned and stood back to back. IT issue was better than a hostiles-in-proximity situation, but still bad news.
“Are you seeing that?” Alder asked, presumably to Jensen. “It’s not me, right?”
“Definitely not you,” Jensen said. “TJ, we—”
The comms clicked off again.
I gritted my teeth. The blackout was intentional. They didn’t want us to hear their conversation.
“Okay, we can stay on this channel,” Alder said in our ears ten seconds later. “But we have a problem inside the house.”
Fuck me.
