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Except… could I even trust him?
No. Maybe. He was there, offering me what I wanted because this mattered to him too. He’d made that clear in the conference room. And Reaper knew how to get shit done. Maybe we could work together. Just this once.
Plus, I wanted to prove my team wrong. Since when did we let one weak-ass man stop us from doing our jobs?
It was just cameras. A simple task. In and out. I’d done it before. Granted, Chris had helped, but I could do it.
I walked around the couch and stood facing Reaper. “Fine. We’ll do this together, on one condition.” He dropped his phone to the couch and gave me all his attention. “I’m the lead. You have to do what I tell you, when I tell you, how I tell you.”
“Done.” He looked so comfortable sitting on my couch. Sure didn’t take him long to make himself at home. “I like it when you get bossy.” He winked. “Now, go get changed so we can take care of business.”
* * *
I fidgeted in my seat, trying to push away the unease that had set in as soon as I got in Reaper’s truck. I’d never gone on a mission without at least one other member of my team.
Betty had accepted our terms when we signed on to work with her. Sometimes she offered her ideas or wisdom, but she always took the backseat on this type of mission. With everything else, she was the coordinator. Our handler, the same way Kingston had been when we were in the Ghost Unit. Being without her was easy. Being without my team made me want to tell him to turn the car around.
“You good?” Reaper asked as he slowed and turned down the street that led to the neighborhood we were hitting.
“Yeah.”Lie.I was freaking out. So energized I could run alongside the truck for an hour and not get tired.
“We could go back. You still have the option to do whatever else you were planning to do.” I liked that he was giving me the option to back out, but I’d made my decision and I was sticking to it.
“No. The only way we turn back is if you decide you can’t follow my lead.” My tone left no space for argument. “If I say we leave, we leave. No matter what.”
“I know. I said I was cool with you calling the shots. Just make sure you say them aloud and not in your head.” I scowled at him. I used to do that when I was younger, but I wasn’t sure I liked him remembering that about me.
It wasn’t my fault I had conversations in my head and played out every possible chain of events so I could prepare myself. The habit had mostly been trained out of me in Ghost Unit because we discussed every contingency aloud. Remaining in my head would have been detrimental to the missions and my team.
It was just past midnight, and the roads were empty. It had taken us ten minutes to get to our destination from my house. The small suburb outside of Portland was much smaller than I’d originally thought, but each house sat on a decent amount of land. The farther we drove into the subdivision, the bigger the houses got, though not all were finished.
“Slow down.” Reaper slowed to a crawl. “Not that slow. Like go fifteen instead of twenty.” He grunted but did what I asked.
We passed the house, confirming there were no cars in the driveway. All the lights were off, and the quick visual gave me a glimpse of the barren property that lacked a fence and any kind of landscaping. I directed Reaper to park several houses down, and he pulled into a lot that was still under construction. Anyone who saw his truck would assume it had been left behind for the night. Maybe Reaper had the instincts for this type of work after all.
I hopped out, pulled on my backpack, and met Reaper in front of his truck. “Stick with the plan. You’re the lookout. When I start installing the cameras, you hand me what I ask for and that’s it.” I’d gone over the installation process before we left, so he knew what I would need and when.
“Got it. I remember everything you showed me. Let’s go.”
We gave a wide berth to the other houses we passed, making sure we were too far in the woods to be picked up by any cameras. Reaper matched my pace and stayed blessedly silent.
Once we got to the house we wanted, I stopped and pulled a tablet from my backpack. The screen lit up, and I tapped in the code, then waited. The small handheld device I’d built had an antenna and acted as a beacon of sorts. It searched for signals of anything running off electricity or batteries within thirty feet. It kept scanning and gave no indication of cameras installed on the backside of the property as I moved forward.
Crouching down in front of the power box on the other side of the house, I took another small device from my pack and checked the wiring. Satisfied that everything was as it should have been, I grabbed my pliers and peeled back the coating that protected the wires from the elements.
“Hold this,” I muttered. Reaper reached over me and held the pliers while I connected the tablet to the cords. The screen came to life, and I tapped the icon for the virus I’d designed and coded to reroute security systems. If the house had an armed system, this would ensure that we didn’t trigger the alarm.
The only flaw was the amount of time it took to load. I hadn’t had an opportunity to perfect the code, and I was irritated with myself for my lack of foresight. In this line of work, every second counted. The screen finally lit green, and I nudged at Reaper to let go of the pliers. Gesturing for him to follow me, I kept to the shadows and led him around to the other side of the house.
My heart raced from adrenaline, but with my head clear and movements sure, I swam down into the calm space in my mind that I reserved for missions.
I told him to check the garage, and he came back and shook his head. Good, no cars in the garage. My heart seized when I realized that he might have walked past a Wi-Fi camera if they had one in the backyard for security. I slipped the Wi-Fi scrambler out of my pocket and pressed the button to turn it on just in case they had any. Even if the husband cared to review the footage, he’d only get an image of a big body. Hopefully he’d think it was a wannabe burglar.
Just to be sure there was no one in the house, I pulled out my infrared. I hadn’t been able to confirm whether they had any pets, and a barking dog was a complication we didn’t need to deal with. My team had made the mistake of not checking for dogs one time, and Izzy still had the imprint of Chihuahua teeth on her right ankle to show for it.
No heat signatures showed on my screen. Slinking toward the back door, I stayed below the windows. Reaper followed, practically crawling to stay low enough. It took me less than thirty seconds to pick the lock on the back door. Still in my crouched position, I waddled into the kitchen. Reaper reached my position, stood to his full height, and stepped farther into the kitchen.
His body went still as a rock. “Fuck,” he muttered. Heart pounding in my ears, I slid my gun out of its holster, flipped off the safety, and placed my finger on the trigger. Had we missed something? Was someone home?
