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Mauz watched through binoculars from the front seat as the buses slowly unloaded their cargo. About twenty minutes after they arrived, he thought he spotted the Perez kid jump down from one of them.
He picked up his phone and flipped to the photo Logan had sent him of the kid that morning: dark hair, blue shorts and a green T-shirt with a dinosaur on the front, navy blue sneakers.
It was him.
“Kid is on his way in,” Mauz said into the comms system.
“In position in the lobby,” Jag said.
Mauz scanned the parking area, looking for anything that stood out. Nothing did. The lot was full of mid-class sedans, SUVs, and minivans. At the front of the aquarium, more buses were in line, waiting to unload their cargo of excited kids.
Mauz couldn’t see around back, but it wouldn’t have mattered if he could. They’d already talked about covering the service entrances: it was impossible with so little notice to position someone near them that wouldn’t attract too much attention.
He stifled his frustration. This was why it was a bad idea to mix business with pleasure. If Perez had been any other client, Logan would have put his foot down, said in no uncertain terms that the kid couldn’t go on the field trip.
I know it sucks, kid, but that’s life.
But not with Perez’s kid, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out why. Logan was obviously balls deep in a rekindled relationship with the woman, pun intended, and if that wasn’t bad enough, he was playing house with the kid too.
It was enough to make Mauz feel a little bit smug. It was true that once upon a time, he’d fallen for the whole wife-kids-white-picket-fence thing, but he’d smartened up, graduated from the life of hard knocks.
Putting your happiness in the hands of someone else was always a mistake.
Putting your heart there was a fucking catastrophe, and one you deserved if you were stupid enough to do it.
“See anything?” Holt asked. He’d moved to the passenger seat when Jag left the car, and Mauz realized he was still looking through the binoculars even though he wasn’t paying attention to what he was seeing.
He’d let the past get too close.
“Nah,” Mauz said, lowering the binoculars. He handed them to Holt. “Take a look. Tell me what you see.”
Holt looked even more baby-faced than usual as he scanned the aquarium’s parking lot and entrance. Either Mauz really was getting old or Imperium was hiring babies now, because there’s no fucking way Mauz had looked that fresh-faced when Hawk recruited him.
“Just cars,” Holt said. “Average looking cars. In the lot anyway. There are a few vans and trucks driving around to the service entrance in back though.”
“Good,” Mauz said. “What do you think we should do about those?”
Holt continued to hold the binoculars with one hand while he picked up his phone with another. “Take pictures, check them out online, make sure they’re legit.”
“Exactly. Go to it.”
Holt took pictures of a food service truck, a water delivery van, and a truck delivering paper products. “How do I keep watch on the new trucks that come in while I look up these ones?”
Mauz looked at him. “You want me to do the job for you too?”
The kid’s face reddened. “No, I got it.”
“Good.”
Mauz knew everyone thought he was a hard-ass, but it was for their own good. Some of the men they recruited were military vets. Some had done stints with intelligence services. Others were just street kids, used to scrapping their way through life with their mouths and fists.
All of them had to develop the skills necessary to do more than one thing at a time, to problem-solve in the midst of a crisis, to act and react quickly, on instinct, without making a list of fucking pros and cons.
This was how they learned. Or how Mauz taught them anyway.
“Kid’s in the building,” Jag said in Mauz’s earpiece. “They’re moving toward the reef exhibit.”
Mauz picked up the map he’d printed from the internet. The reef exhibit was in a contained area featuring exhibits on the Amazon, the Caribbean, and other bodies of water.
