Eric caught the glance between the desk sergeant and the dispatcher, who had quietly started to listen in on the conversation. He remembered Brady’s account, about how the dispatcher had been shitty to him, telling him that if backup wasn’t showing up, maybe it wasn’t that important. He didn’t know if this was the same person or not—butthisperson looked furtive, like she was in the know, where the desk sergeant—as loathsome as he was—wasnot.
“Here’s your pen,” Desk Sergeant Vance muttered, handing it over. As Eric bent to his work (which consisted of filling out a lot of boxes with the letters F, U, C, K, Y, O, and U), the desk sergeant walked over to the dispatcher, and they starteda whispered conversation that, given the nearly empty police station in the middle of nowhere, struck Eric as particularly absurd.
But it kept their attention away from the end of the building with Arlen Cuthbert’s office, so it was also very necessary.
“Nice attempt to defend my honor,” Brady murmured.
“They should all be strangled with coat hangers,” Eric replied under his breath, and Brady’s chuff of amusement probably kept Eric from pulling out his gun and dropping the dumb and the corrupt from where he stood.
“I’m getting nothing here,” Brady said. “Our time’s almost u—”
The crunch of gravel from immediately outside the building cut him off, and as Eric swiveled around to see Arlen Cuthbert’s RV slide into four parking spaces in front of the door, his phone clicked in his ear. It was Burton.
“Jason found the phone,” he said. “Get out of there.”
“Cuthbert just pulled up,” Eric said, sidling toward the hall as he watched the paunchy, sour-faced man alight from the SUV. The glass windows and doors of the police station were coated to keep the people inside the station from getting cooked by the sun, so odds were good Cuthbert couldn’t see who was in the station in the emerging light, but Eric wanted to be out of that lobby by the time he entered.
“You can see the highway from the front, right?” Burton said.
“Yup.”
“Get out of sight until you hear the signal.”
“What’s the signal?” Eric asked as he slid down the hall, invisible to the loathsome twosome in the front and hopefully out of Cuthbert’s awareness as well.
“You’ll know.”
ONCE, WHENundercover with the same assassins’ outfit Burton was pretty sure Eric Christiansen had worked with, Lee had been forced to monitor two people he now knew and respected as they lived their lives, sorted their shit, and yes, had massive quantities of panting, screaming, sweating sex.
He still hadn’t forgiven Jason for giving him that gig, but he had to admit, watching his boss and his boss’s boyfriend work a con on some poor, sad, box-wine cat woman who had the bad luck to fall in with Arlen Cuthbert was almost as uncomfortable. He was grateful for being on comms with Eric and Brady, Jai, and Ace and Sonny at the same time, but boy, would he be glad when Jasongot out of that fucking apartment.
He sat at the table of a coffee shop that wasn’t open yet, his motorcycle up on the sidewalk next to him. He’d already knocked out every camera for a mile radius and was busy on the laptop Eric had bought the day before, setting up the network of people he was going to send the phone’s information to the minute Jason put it in his hot little hand.
Boy, he wished the coffee shop was open.
Ernie had brewed him a thermos of his best before Burton had left for the military base, but Burton had put that down already. Much like Ace’s tweaking of the plan involving distraction and handoffs, Burton’s had come to him after chewing on the options for a while. There he was, asleeponErnie on the couch, when he’d suddenly awakened and thought, “What if the motherfucking phone ain’t there?”
And he’d been lying in the dark, blinking, wondering how to get up without bothering Ernie, when his pants buzzed.
He’d slid off with as much stealth as he could manage and checked his phone, standing naked in his living room, staring at the glowing eyes of about twelve of Ernie’s favorite pet cats who were upset at being displaced from their soon-to-be-replaced couch.
Sure enough, Jason had texted,What if the fucking phone is somewhere else?
Which meant he and Jason had gotten about thirty minutes of sleep apiece before Jason had taken them to the military base to do some superhacking, and so Burton could get his motorcycle and gear.
What they hadn’t counted on was Cotton, jumping smoothly into the tiny back seat of the convertible while Jason waited for Burton to fasten his safety belt.
“What in the…?” Jason had muttered. “You wereasleep.”
“No, I wasn’t,” Cotton said affably. “I waspretendingto be asleep so you’d think you could fall asleep, but you had some sort of brain flash, so now everybody’s in the car. Now go, or Ernie’s going to join us, and this back seat really barely even fitsme.”
Of course Ernie wouldn’t join them because Ernie had his assignment already, but Jason started the car anyway, probably because it would be useless to argue. It had taken Lee—and Jason, he assumed—a little bit of time to understand, but just because the person you were with wasn’t all trained as a badass, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t want to be in on the stuff that wasn’t work related.
Cotton—young, beautiful, sloe-eyed, practically a fuzzy bunny with a perfect body—may have seemed easy to manipulate, the perfect “little woman” who would go back to school while the badasses did the badass stuff, but he was, in fact, not. Burton understood Cotton had given up his first “found” family to be here. He still visited them, loved them, talked to them, but their little haven in the desert was as important to him as it was to the rest of them.
Burton got that Cotton wouldn’t want to just run back to school instead of staying to help save their home, but he was honestly at a loss for what the boy could do.
Until they were all on the way to the base in the convertible (top up because it wascoldin the morning) and Cotton said, “No, you don’t need to kidnap the poor woman. If Jason can figure out how to get in a back way, I’ll distract her. It’ll be fine.”
