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Nope.
Tomer stops obsessively watching the teams creep closer to their destinations, glancing at the other PC where we’re running an ongoing facial rec search for any Lettie sightings. There’s been no sign of her. Not on a single camera since she disappeared in the back of that fucking Honda.
He pauses his frantic clicking to lean close to me, then whisper sings, “Schmidt fucked the captain’s daughter. Schmidt fucked the captain’s daughter.” His normally monotone delivery is replaced by a singsong tone that sounds almost exactly like Channing Tatum’s line from the scene where he skips around the glass office after finding out that his partner committed the cardinal sin.
I join him, singing along for another round while Valerie laughs her ass off in the corner.
He gulps, growing serious again. “Thanks for laughing with me. I needed that.”
When we return to our individual tasks, a thought smacks me clear upside the head. Speaking of people sleeping with women they shouldn’t be… Could Tomer be sleeping with Lettie?
No.
But maybe?
An alert on my cell phone halts my forward progress down that path. As I slide my chair over to see the screen, my pulse thrums wildly in my neck.
A notification from my home security system reads:Monitoring System Offline.
I swipe my thumb across the screen to open the app. And sure enough, the entire system is offline. The camera feeds, perimeter motion detectors, along with door and window sensors— all inoperable.
Although this couldtheoreticallybe a tiny network hiccup or power surge, it’s improbable. Shit like that doesn’t often happen when your system has two fail-safe backups.
I access the history log to see what happened right before it went offline. Nothing unusual. All the sensors, signals, and feeds were operational. No warnings or errors.
And then it went down.
I need to run diagnostics on the system on my laptop to see what caused the shutdown. Unfortunately, whatever’s happening at my house must wait.
It’s go time.
“Shep and Aaron are on scene at Yuri’s strip club,” Tomer announces.
The chair in the corner squeaks, and Valerie approaches us a second later.
“He’ll be fine, Val,” I reassure her. “Shep and Yuri go way back. He’s not likely to be in danger other than alcohol poisoning.”
“Oh I know. I was there the night he got home after seeing Yuri the last time.”
With one ear on the conversation between Shep and Aaron as they approach the club, I ask her, “How was he that night?”
I can already imagine the answer, but I want to see how she describes that level of intoxication.
“He jumped on Lionheart’s back, pretending to be a cowboy riding a bull.”
If I had water in my mouth, I would have spit it out.
“I miss all the good shit,” Tomer mutters from beside me, a smile plucking at his lips.
“Don’t worry, Val. He’s not drinking tonight,” I tell her, hoping to ease her mind.
Tomer groans. “Glad there’s two of us on the con. Our timing couldn’t be shittier. Bravo is in the strip club, and alpha team just dropped Kri off at the Whistle. They’re pulling around the corner to park at the restaurant behind the bar.”
I tap him on the shoulder. “It’s okay, bud. We’ve got this.”
He nibbles on his thumbnail. “I wish we could have staggered these to avoid running them simultaneously, but I won’t risk her any longer than we already have.”
“Well, that’s why you have me. I’ve got bravo, and you have alpha.”
