AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You two share a house?” Okay, Dimitri knew it wasn’t the most important thing to take from Bob’s statement. So sue him.
Callum glared at him and Tessa looked at him like he was an idiot.
“Come on,” Dimitri said. “Don’t tell me you didn’t think that was interesting?”
“The house is plenty big enough for two couples,” Bob said. “Big enough for privacy when you get noisy with the missus and don’t want anybody to hear.” He waggled his eyebrows. “If you know what we mean.”
Bill rolled his eyes. “Everybody knows what you mean. It wasn’t subtle.” He looked at Dimitri. “When the kids moved out we thought of selling, but we liked the house. Bob and Dianne didn’t mind sharing. It works out great. Except during ladies nights.”
“Okay.” Callum stared at the ceiling. Dimitri imagined he was praying for strength. After a few seconds, he faced the brothers. “Now that we’ve got your living arrangements sorted out, how about you tell us what the hell happened here?”
The two men obviously decided they weren’t in trouble any longer and jerked their arms from their keepers.
“I need a seat.” Bill tottered over to bench against the wall and plopped down. A second later his brother did the same.
“We were down here,” Bill said, “when there was a crash upstairs. We thought it was one of you coming back and opened the door to shout up to you, let you know we were down here.”
Bob nodded. “We didn’t want to scare the women if they caught us in our underwear.”
“You could have just got dressed,” Dimitri pointed out.
Bill shook his head. “We were in the middle of a fight.”
“That I was winning,” Bob said.
Bill pointedly ignored his brother. “Anyway, we heard shouting. Somebody said to do as much damage as possible. It took us a minute to figure out what was going on.”
“There was another order, this time telling them to sweep the building.” Bob looked confused. “That’s how he put it. Seemed weird, but never mind. We could hear everything because they were in the stairwell at that point and this building is like a big echo chamber when it’s empty.”
“We knew we had to hide.” Bill shared a look with his brother, before turning to Callum. “We already told Julia this, but you lot need a panic room. Make that several panic rooms. One on each floor. For the people who can’t run fast to the other ones.”
“Like us,” Bob patted his belly. “I need to cut back on my cooked breakfasts.”
“We ran into the nearest interrogation room and planned to lock ourselves in there.”
“Only we discovered that the bloody door automatically locked when you entered and only opened from the outside. Which left us stuck in a room, with no way out and a building full of bad guys.”
“It’s a design flaw.” Bill waved his hands around. The reason for all his gesturing was unclear. “What if there’s a fire? How is a person supposed to get out of there?”
“Nobody is supposed to be in there without supervision,” Dimitri pointed out. “If there was a fire, your handler would get you out.”
Bob wasn’t mollified. “We thought we’d be safe. Instead we were trapped. It would have been like shooting fish in a barrel.” He glared at Callum. “You’re getting a panic room. I don’t care if you don’t want one. You’re getting one.”
Dimitri had to shake his head to clear it. “You’re carpenters. What are you going to do? Build a panic box and shove it in the corner of the room?”
Bill pointed a bony finger at him. “That’s the sort of attitude we’d expect from the younger, more ignorant generation. Don’t you think we have connections in the business, son? We can tap our sources and get a state of the art panic room installed tomorrow. We’ve been at the building game longer than you’ve been out of nappies. Bloody insulting, that’s what your attitude is, bloody insulting.” He clasped his hands on top of his round belly and huffed.
“Back to the intruders.” At the strained sound of Callum’s voice, Dimitri placed himself between his boss and the wall of death. Just in case Callum snapped and decided to put the Granger brothers out of his misery. “What else can you tell us?”
“The guy in charge was looking for somebody,” Bill said. “He told his men to bring the blonde to him.”
Dimitri’s muscles locked in place as the old men stared at him.
“Guess that means they’re after your girlfriend,” Bob said. “She’s the only blonde in the building.”
“What did she do this time?” Bill said. “Has this got something to do with this afternoon? Did she Taser some other poor idiot after she knocked you out?”
Tessa cocked an eyebrow at him. “Your girlfriend Tasered you?”
