Page 78 of Direct Action

“Ryan—”

“Baby, in a minute.” She stopped struggling but started glaring. “I’ve been waiting a long time to have you right where you are.” Her glare dissipated, and she melted into me. “This morning, waking up next to you, then watching you walk out of your room in nothing but my tee, giving me what you gave me, that was a dream come true. Thank you, baby.”

“Ryan,” she whispered.

“Now kiss me so you can get dressed.”

There was another knock at the door, followed by “You know I can pick the lock.”

Fucking Pete.

“Can he really?”

“Yep.”

She quickly leaned forward, gave me a hard, closed-mouth kiss, and jumped off my lap. This time I let her.

I waited until she closed her bedroom door before I opened up for Pete.

“You’re a pain in the ass,” he said as he pushed past me, holding a box of donuts.

“You’re a cock blocker, so we’re even.”

He followed me into the kitchen and tossed the box of donuts onto the table.

His eyes landed on the folded clothes on Chloe’s coffee table. “You doing something about that?”

He wasn’t talking about tidying up. He was talking about me easing her burden.

“As much as she’ll let me.”

“I heard Marco ask Grace if Chloe’s dad—”

“Don’t.” I interrupted him before he could tell me what he’d overheard between two of our employees. “She hasn’t given me specifics, and I want those to come from her, not you, and certainly not bar gossip. So unless there’s something wrong I need to handle within the hour, I don’t want to know what you heard.”

Pete dipped his chin.

“Anything on the flight logs?”

“No. Not yet. But last night I dug into Tyson Morrison.” Fuck, I forgot to tell Chloe about him. “He has a mortgage. I pulled the loan application, he works for a company called The Tap House.”

“Sounds like a bar. Is it local?”

“There are thirty-six bars in California with some variation of Tap House in their name. None of them match the EIN. Now that was a rabbit hole that took all night to dig myself out of. Bogus companies piled on top of bogus companies. I get setting up LLCs to own other LLCs. We do it to hide our safe houses and other properties. But if someone is trying to fly under the radar or hide their felonious shit, they don’t set up payroll accounts and get the IRS involved. The Tap House has three current employees—Tyson Morrison, Tobias Reeves, and Noah Farley.”

“Current?”

“A little over two years ago, Lucy Macmillan received four payments from The Tap House totaling twenty grand, before Uncle Sam took his cut.”

Holy shit.

“The missing bartender.”

Pete nodded. “The missing bartender, with Sterling Blackwell being the sole owner of Blackwell Inc., the corporation that’s buried seven layers deep that owns Tap House LLC.”

A flicker of light flashed at the end of the tunnel. We needed those flight logs. And we needed to get our hands on the Vault’s membership list. As much as I wanted to abandon investigating the Vault altogether and concentrate on Sterling, you didn’t sheer off a weed—you ripped the roots out of the ground so it didn’t grow back.

“Did you run Reeves and Farley?”