“How much you got to do on your orders for tomorrow?” Gabe asked.
“The cookies are decorated and bagged. The cakes are baked and crumb coated. I just need to spend a couple of hours decorating them, deliver by two, and then I’m done.”
“Good. But want you in bed early tonight. If shit is gonna go down tomorrow, you need to be rested and ready to be sharp.”
I was getting bossy Gabe because we were barreling toward the iffy part of the mission, and he was worried.
Therefore, I didn’t inform him we were talking to Titus so Titus could help us, therefore we weren’t going to ignore what he said. Also, I’d already planned to get good rest so I could be all I needed to be for tomorrow night. This was why I busted my ass to get all the cookies decorated and bagged.
I just said, “Gotcha.”
He looked at his watch then to me. “You gotta go.”
Ugh.
I wanted Duane to be out from under this, but in that moment, I didn’t want to move an inch.
Gabe rolled into me, kissed me long and wet (and now I wanted to go even less), and then pulled us out of the couch.
“Go,” he ordered on a little scooch with his hand on my ass.
“Don’t wait up for me,” I bid as I headed to my purse on the island.
“Don’t be late,” he replied.
We had to wait for everyone to be off shift, so our meeting with Titus was at eight. I figured planning a complicated operation took more than half an hour.
Still, I said, “I’ll try.”
As I walked to the garage door, I looked back at him to see him, arms crossed on his chest, feet planted, watching me go.
Thus, with that in my vision, of course, I smiled.
Gabe smiled back.
That hit me in all the right places.
So I was good.
Therefore, I left.
We were at AAHQ, all of us reading through the briefing Arthur sent about Amy Small and William Dexter—save Raye and Luna, who’d already read it.
After Raye gave us a few minutes to look it over, she launched into a verbal briefing that was briefer than what we had in our hands.
“So, Amy and Dexter are a couple. They’ve been together for years. It was Amy who hooked her son up in Dexter’s piddly-ass operation,” Raye said. “And it doesn’t seem like they’re all that great at what they do. Low level shit. Lots of arrests, including Amy, who’s been arrested seven times, most of them misdemeanors, but one she pled out, the other she did six months for.”
I was flipping the page to the list of known associates and members of Dexter’s ragtag “gang.”
There was a short list of active crew members (this being three of them, including Dexter).
There was a long list under the heading: Incarcerated.
Mm-hmm, didn’t seem like these guys were even close to criminal masterminds.
This was my thought when Luna chimed in.
“So we figure it was Amy who clocked Duane and marked him to mess with. Duane says he’s supposed to pick up something from them tomorrow night at ten thirty. Deliver it. Good guess, it’s money. He’ll then accept what they’ve got to give to him and return that to whoever is gonna front Dexter’s crew, doing this for the supposed release of Amy. Another guess, what he’s supposed to pick up is drugs.”
