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The best part? There’s a window right over the low-slung headboard that makes it feel like a treehouse.
“Tomorrow’s plan—curl up with my morning caffeine hit and watch the birds and squirrels outside,” I say to the empty room. “Get my Snow White on with the forest critters.”
I may never leave this place.
CHAPTER 2
COLE
Stakeouts suck. That’s it. The end.
But more often than not, they’re how I spend my days and nights, weeks and weekends. Alone, staring at a mark, flipping through a file of information either mentally or digitally.
Minutes pass, hours pass, sometimes days and weeks pass. My ass barely moves.
Luckily, this gig probably won’t take that long. The man I’ve been hired to watch is already inside his secretly rented unit, pacing around with a glass of scotch in his hand. Liquid courage, perhaps, for what he’s about to do? He doesn’t seem the type to need it, though.
Mr. Webster is a good-looking man in his late fifties, with salt and pepper hair, a penchant for expensive watches, and apparently, a mistress thirty years his junior. At least that’s the suspicion his wife came to me with, and it seems on par with his type—old enough to be at the top of the food chain career-wise, kids out of the house, and after having lived a life of climbing one ladder after another, looking for some sort of excitement and challenge. Or maybe he’s just an asshole who’s finally getting caught by a wife who’s ignored the signs in the past. Either way, or even both, it doesn’t matter to me.
Infidelity isn’t the type of case I prefer, but unfortunately, it brings people to my door and pays well. Especially with the clientele I serve.
Like Mrs. Webster. She sits on at least three Boards of Directors, two corporate and one non-profit, her perfectly coiffed hair doesn’t dare get out of place, and she moves in a social circle of the wealthy elite courtesy of her husband’s work. So when she showed up, delicately dabbing at bone-dry eyes and proclaiming that she had concerns about her husband’s loyalty, I added an annoyance fee guised as travel costs, and she never batted a glued-on lash.
Because it all comes down to money. It affords people like the Websters the gift of buying their way out of almost any situation without actual consequences. Like an unhappy marriage, for example.
Except for Mr. Webster.
I’m not a simple tool to be aimed at a target and used for someone else’s purposes, and as soon as I accepted Mrs. Webster’s job, I researched her first. After that came Mr. Webster, his company, her boards, their connections, finances, and preferences on everything from how they take their morning coffee to their favorite extravagances.
What I discovered is that any infidelity from either party triggers a clause in their pre-nup agreement. One Mrs. Webster seems to be particularly interested in activating. How a thirty-year-old prenup clause might hold up in court isn’t my area of expertise, so I’ll let the lawyers handle that. My job is just to find the proof.
And so here I am, on stakeout again. This time, like an Army sniper, on my belly in the bushes fifty yards from my target.
Silently, I curse the dragonfly that’s been buzzing around me, occasionally landing on my ass, but I don’t move. My hips ache, my shoulders hurt, I’m out of beef jerky, and I needed to piss three hours ago, but the slightest shift in position might catch my target’s eye, so I stay frozen like a statue, lying prone in the dirt with my eyes pressed to the binoculars.
Why the fuck aren’t we in some five-star, luxury hotel in town for this meet-n-greet? That’d be the usual MO for guys like Webster. Half of the reason they get caught is because they’re stupid enough to leave a credit card trail or someone catches them on social media.
But for some reason, Webster’s rendezvous plan includes a remote cabin in unfriendly woods. It’d make sense if he were doing a clandestine deal with a drug cartel and prioritized an ambush-unfriendly landscape. But that’s not what he’s up to. He’s just getting his dick wet, something he could’ve done around the corner from his downtown penthouse.
Mr. Webster pulls his phone from his pocket and stares at the screen for a moment before a soft smile dawns, transforming his face. I wish I had a cloning app installed on his device, but this trip was too last-minute to risk getting that close to him. So I watch . . . as he talks, nods, and his smile dissolves. He hangs up a moment later, and after dropping his phone to a nearby table, he scrubs his face with his hands and sighs heavily. Whoever it was, that call aged him ten years.
After a long minute, he grabs the bottle of scotch and pours a healthy two fingers into his nearly empty glass. He stares into its depths and then gulps the majority of it in one swallow.
