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“Yeah, well, I think I would.”
More laughter, more bliss. Austin got up and walked to the bathroom, his ass giving me the perfect view as I lay like a glazed donut on the bed. I wondered just how many times we had done this before, and then I wondered if we could make up for all the lost time by not stopping until the sun came up.
I guess I’m lucky. I got to have two first times with Austin.
Austin came back, his swollen cock swinging between his legs, still dripping with some come. I resisted the urge to lick him clean, grabbing the towel he handed me instead.
My body was spent. I didn’t even have enough energy to wipe off. My muscles were as useful as a bucket of soaking wet spaghetti, which happened to be what my dick looked like. I wiped it clean and stood, the towel dropping to the floor.
“I got it,” Austin said, bending down. He grabbed the towel but then froze. “Hmm, that’s odd.”
“What? What is it? Is it a spider? Fuckin’ hell, man.”
I was very close to jumping up onto the bed and bouncing around on my tiptoes, but Austin assured me it wasn’t any creepy-crawly thing that grabbed his attention.
“This piece of flooring, it’s different from the rest.” He dropped the towel and gave the lighter slab of wood a shake. Sure enough, the panel seemed loose compared to the ones next to it.
“Does it come out?” I asked. I had never noticed it before, but then again, I wasn’t the detective in this situation.
Austin gave it another wiggle and then another. He dug his nails into the side and pulled…
The floor lifted, which resulted in my jaw dropping.
“Holy shit,” I said, looking down at what was revealed underneath.
15
Austin Romero
“Holy shit,” Charlie said as I moved aside the loose floorboard. “What the hell are those?”
I grabbed the stack of dusty papers that had been crammed into their hiding place. They weren’t extremely yellow or dusty, so they must not have been that old.
“Wait a second, that’s my handwriting.” Charlie grabbed the first page and started to read it out loud. “Instructions on how to set up a surveillance hut are below. Covert and necessary. If we do this, then we can get what we need to take the head off this snake. Hank will help with whatever I need.” Charlie put the paper down and looked at me, mouth quirked to the side and head shaking left and right. “What in the actual fuck?”
“It looks like you wanted to keep track of things but didn’t feel safe doing it electronically. And good thing you did.” I waved the rest of the papers in my hand. “The answer to this case could be somewhere in these pages.”
“It better be.” Charlie messed with his already messy head of blond hair. “A surveillance hut? Why the hell would I need to make a ‘covert’ surveillance hut?”
The piece clicked right into place. “You wanted to spy on someone. That’s why you were in that cherry picker. You might have been scouting out the location or just using it instead of the surveillance hut.”
Charlie’s forehead and eyebrows scrunched together, and he said, “No, that can’t be it… could it?”
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s put some clothes on and head out on the deck. We can go through them there.”
Charlie agreed, standing, still flushed from hooking up, matching the same pink hue that lingered on my chest. This was good, though. This could be the break we needed. If Charlie left enough in these papers, we could know what happened leading up to the day he fell and who could be behind it. I was far past the point of thinking it was an accident.
After we got dressed, me in just a pair of green shorts and Charlie in even less with his black briefs and nothing else, we moved outside to the fire pit on the private deck. I threw some of the wood already stacked around the stone pit, and then Charlie lit it, the fire crackling up into the night sky. The orange glow reflected in Charlie’s blue eyes, which weren’t as relaxed as they were before we found the secret papers. Worry played clear on his face as he chewed on his bottom lip. His shoulder sported a thick scar around the side and a few more across the top from all the surgeries he’d needed after the fall.
I hated the reminder of what he went through, but it also made me determined to get to the bottom of it.
“Ready?” I asked him, placing the stack of yellowed and dusty pages on my lap.
“Let’s see what’s in there.”
And we did. After the first page, which were the notes Charlie had written on how to set up a surveillance hut along with a line about Hank and him cracking “Operation Rome,” we found more notes written in different handwriting. The first couple of pages were a written schedule with names, and most of them all seemed to be dancers at Honey and Wood. A few I recognized as having gone missing over the years from a couple of news articles I had dug up.
