Carter was so tempted to dip his chin, to claim the lips that were right there for the taking. Lips that were moving again. Making words Carter should pay attention to.
“You get a lay of this land yet?” Lincoln asked.
“Yes.” He pointed over Lincoln’s right shoulder. “Mr. Hates-Paper can use the computer over there to search vehicle registrations. I’ll look through the paper accident reports.”
“You’re a saint.”
“You want to bow to me?”
“Fucking hell.” Fifteen shades of red and an eye roll. Score. Lincoln spun and almost teetered over.
Carter grabbed him by the back of his coat, steadied him, then leaned in, whispering in his ear, “It’s fine. I prefer to be the one on my knees.”
Lincoln lurched forward, out of his grasp with a croaked “Must work,” but not before the fleeting heat from his ear scorched a path over Carter’s cheek.
Charming AF.
Lincoln popped the side of the CPU a second time. “What the fuck, dude?”
“What did I do now?” Carter called from somewhere in the records stacks behind him.
“Not you,” Lincoln said. “This dinosaur of a computer.”
“Maybe you should stop hitting it.”
Lincoln halted his hand a half inch from the imminent third pop. He glanced over his shoulder as Carter emerged from the stacks, a banker’s box in each hand. He hefted them onto the table, and Lincoln spun back around, determined not to fixate on Carter’s bulging biceps in his snug Henley.
“It’s stuck again,” he said, mentally cursing the spinning beach ball on-screen. “And it had just loaded the search segment on the vehicles before it went all fuzzy.” The results were right there, grayed out behind a command box that wouldn’t finish loading. He drummed his fingers on the desk. “W-W-E-D?”
“Did you just misspell weed?”
“Weed would probably help right now, but no. W-W-E-D. What would Elena do? My daughter, she’s a computer whiz.”
“Okay, then.” Carter came to stand next to him. “W-W-E-D?”
“Well, I already tried to quit the program and that didn’t work. So . . .” He eyed the power key at the top of the keyboard. “Restart the computer.”
“Hold a sec.” Carter withdrew his phone and, kneeling next to Lincoln, snapped a few pictures of the screen. “Not sure it’s legible, but maybe in conjunction with the paper records, we can sort it.”
Lincoln restarted the computer. “Hopefully this does the trick anyway.” He spun half around, keeping one eye on the computer, the other on Carter, who retreated to the table of boxes. “What’d you pull?”
“Accident records from the past twelve months. Let’s see if Zia’s accident in Apex, or any other here, involved a car with matching paint. If you find something there”—he gestured at the computer—“it’ll make this go quicker.”
Lincoln checked the rebooting computer. “Almost there.”
And then suddenly they were the opposite of almost there, the computer screen and every light around them flickering out.
“Well done, L.” Carter clapped. “You killed the power.”
“Me?” Lincoln rocketed out of his chair. “It’s all those fucking lights out there.”
“You are so the Grinch.” Carter’s smirking face appeared in a cone of light cast by his phone flashlight. “And Larry mentioned earlier the breaker box needed replacing.”
“See, it’s not my fa?—”
Glass shattered, the direction of the lobby.
“What the fuck was that?” Lincoln started toward the door.
