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“A… less than legal club.”
If Cato was from the area, he knew that those things weren’t common, but they existed. People were always looking for new ways to party. In venues where they could get away with more shit.
Sex clubs.
Dance halls where they could snort and shoot and do whatever they wanted without getting kicked out.
They usually didn’t last long once the cops got wind of them.
I couldn’t help but wonder if the white supremacist club moved around when the cops closed in. Was that why I needed to crawl through ductwork instead of him finding a way to plant a bug?
“Owned by what kind of criminals?” Cato asked.
“Well, they run the club, but they also deal meth. It’s owned by neo-Nazis.”
A snarling sound escaped Cato at that.
“Yeah, I know. I’m still furious I had to pay them money to get into that club,” I said, shaking my head.
“How did it go wrong?” Cato asked, giving my thigh an encouraging squeeze.
“I still don’t know. Maybe there were cameras I didn’t see…” I admitted. I’d been racking my brain trying to figure it out, but kept coming up blank.
“Duct sensors,” Cato said.
“What?” I asked, brows pinching.
“Some places that have issues with raccoons and shit like that getting into the ductwork, or if they’re paranoid of people doing what you did, they can put sensors in the ductwork. Silent alarms or heat sensors. Something that would let them know something or someone was in the ducts.”
Which would prompt someone to go and check. But if they’d been dealing with some sort of infestation, they wouldn’t exactly worry about bringing backup just to check things out.
I’d been unexpected.
And so, so fucking lucky that it had just been the one guy.
I tended to be pretty confident most of the time. But I wasn’t too proud to admit that I didn’t stand a chance against more than one of those bastards. That was why I always made sure to be careful, to plan and plot, to find all the possible screw-ups in my plan.
Duct sensors hadn’t even been on my radar.
Now, though, it would be something I thought about on every future job I did.
“I had just gotten out of the ducts, bleeding all over myself, and thought I was home free,” I told Cato, knowing he wanted those kinds of details. And finding I actually wanted to share them.
“But you weren’t,” Cato said.
“A hand grabbed me by the throat and slammed me against the wall,” I told him, wincing at the memory even as the adrenaline surge I’d felt then rose within me once more as I relived it. The way my skin felt like it was buzzing, my heart hammering, my legs seeming shaky and weak.
“Then… then there was some punching,” I told him, waving at my face. “But I had a bracelet chain that I used to push against his throat, startling him enough to release me.
“But then I ended up on the ground, and that was where shit was going to get a lot worse,” I told him. “I had a small knife in my heel, though, and I managed to get that out, and stab it into his face. Then I took that chance to run like hell out of there.”
“Did they chase you?”
“Yeah. But I was moving in warp speed, I swear. I tossed my wig, got to my car, and flew out of there. I drove around, then got back to the office to wash all the cover-up off my tattoos, clean myself up, and then head home. I had a splitting migraine, so I took a pill to try to sleep it off. That was when you showed up. And… that’s it,” I said, shrugging.
“Are you playing it off like that as a defense mechanism, or do jobs go this sideways often enough that you’re immune to it?” Cato asked.
“I have close calls sometimes. Like when I had to use you for a quick getaway. But a job has never gone this wrong before.”
