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"Think I'd rather have my brains spill out than deal with his ministrations again."
"I'm hurt," Pagan informed me, coming in from the backyard. "I have a great bedside manner."
"Yeah, I mean right next to Dr. Kevorkian," Janie agreed, popping the tab on one of the energy drinks.
"How did you track her down?" Reign piped in. "Janie and Alex haven't been able to find any trace of her on the cameras this morning."
"Just figured where I would go if I were in town and didn't want to be found."
"It's not like the Hadlet Hotel is that discreet, though," Alex supplied.
"No," I agreed. "But the parking lot was out front and off a highway. If you get a front-facing room, you can see any possible threats coming."
"How come she didn't see you coming then?" Pagan asked, half-distracted by his phone.
"She was in the shower."
That made his head pop up, lips twitching. "Yeah?"
"I let her finish her shower," I told him, rolling my eyes. "Then we had a little, ah, talk."
"About?" Reign demanded to know.
"How she has been on my ass for almost fifteen years, watching me move."
"But she didn't move until now?" Reign asked, brows moving down.
"I know what you're thinking," I told him with a nod. It would seem suspicious to me, too, that the only time she moved in close was when I was with The Henchmen. It certainly looked like she may have been trying to get information on his organization. "But I don't think that's what this is. Apparently, she's been working as a finder for the past fifteen years."
"And if she was able to track down a spy who no one was supposed to know the whereabouts of, it says she is somebody," Janie surmised, she and Alex sharing a look before typing away.
"Ask about Mack, not Mackenzie," I told them, figuring they were reaching out to all their underground contacts to try to see if they could find out more about what she has been up to, who she may have been connected to in both the past and present.
"Got it," Alex agreed.
"So, if you don't think she's here for us, you think it's for you," Reign went on. "But..."
"She's letting me live," I finished for him. "Honestly, I don't know what her plan is. Or if she is acting on one, or just plain impulse."
"She spent days digging that tunnel, likely weeks doing surveillance before that. Doesn't seem like a whim to me," Reign decided.
He wasn't wrong, either.
It didn't make sense.
But this was also the longest period of time I had stayed still since I was a kid. If she had conducted her business over the years in the areas where I was stationed for jobs, she had variety, likely endless cases, shit to keep herself occupied, her mind focused.
But if she was here with me for any length of time, then she was probably getting bored. It wasn't like there was a whole fuckuva lot of finding to do in New Jersey. And what there was to find, generally went to people around with more established enterprises. Like Quin's "fixer firm" or Sawyer's investigator firm. They didn't trust some random woman without a storefront or business cards.
What she did was generally the stuff passed around through word-of-mouth by certain people in specific circles.
I had no doubt that Janie and Alex would find more than a handful of people who had heard her name, who knew her by reputation. That was how this worked.
But because Navesink Bank generally had organizations that cleaned up their own messes, found their own missing people, she was probably spending a lot of time doing a whole lot of nothing.
Maybe it made her impulsive.
Maybe it made her act before she had a plan.
It seemed asinine that she would track me for years without being sure what she would do with me when she finally did track me down.
But I once knew a guy who spent twenty years tracking down his lost love, only to find her one day, watched her from afar for an hour, then went back home.
People often found themselves motivated to pursue things without knowing what would come of it.
Emotion was unpredictable.
Revenge especially so.
It acted as a kindling fire that fueled you, kept you warm, kept you going.
But it became a part of you.
And confronted with the opportunity to finally do it, act on it, you faced an unexpected dilemma.
Yes, you could get your revenge.
But you lost something that had become a vital part of yourself.
And, suddenly, your life was missing its driving force.
You would have to start over, fill that hole with something else, find another purpose to drive you.
It wasn't easy.
And a lot of people choked when they had a gun cocked and aimed.
Maybe it was as simple as that.
It had to be as simple as that.
