“Yours. They keep doing some weird twitching thing that’s very unsettling,” I explain.
“I waswinking.”
“Very unsettling,” Everly adds, and I have to hand it to Micah, he does a fantastic job of pretending that he doesn’t hear any of this.
“Okay, so… where is Raul then?” Jackson asks.
“Hold on…” I say as my phone beeps. “Looks like Tucker’s informant has come through. She said he’s throwing his grandchild’s birthday party at his estate.” I glance up from my phone and look at Cassel to see what he thinks of this information but he doesn’t seem surprised by it, telling me he was probably getting to that next.
Tavish shrugs. “And the problem with that? We’ll just go in, fuck shit up, and leave. The kid doesn’t even need to know.”
“It’s on his estate which is heavily guarded,” Cassel says. “I’m sure people are on high alert with the party going on.”
“Should we wait until tonight or tomorrow, then?” Tavish asks.
“If we wait, then he’ll have even more guards on his ass,” I realize. “Right now, half of them are in this building waiting for us.”
“That is correct,” Cassel says.
“So how do we make him think we’re still showing up here while heading right to his house?” I ask.
“I mean… we can pretend to show our faces here. You’re hoping to make them drop their guard?” Cassel asks.
“Yeah.”
“What… what if you stay here and the rest of us deal with Raul?” Tavish asks. “Perfect job for a weasel. Weasels doing what weasels were made to do.”
“I think this job is much better meant for a bear,” I growl. “I could be wrong, but you see that guy there?” I point to a man sitting at a bus stop. “He’s skipped getting on every bus that’s stopped. When I looked at the bus schedule, it’s already repeated once, telling me that he’s not waiting for a specific bus. He’s probably waiting for us.”
“So we show ourselves just enough to make him think we’re scouting out this area before leaving,” Jackson says.
“I’m going to walk his direction and into that shop right there,” I explain. “Once I leave the shop, I’ll head around back, so pick me up in the alley there, alright?”
“Got it,” Jeremy, who is driving, says.
I get out of the SUV and walk with purpose. I don’t want him to find me too suspicious or he might suspect something’s off. I want him to see me doing what I normally did in these cases before I had Cassel’s brain to do a deep dive into security systems I don’t even know how to touch.
The man notices me almost immediately as I begin examining buildings facing the business, like I’m looking for a good vantage point. There’s a small bakery on the corner that sits below some apartments, so I zip inside.
I waste a couple of minutes getting cookies before I slip out a side door onto the street he’s not facing. I hurry down and toward the back of the apartments once I see him tailing me, but I’m careful not to indicate that I know he’s following me. I see a door that doesn’t seem to shut all the way and dart inside. Careful to make sure I leave it cracked just enough for him to get in without it locking, I stand to the side, using the stairwell to hide myself.
It doesn’t take him long to slip inside. He probably has this idea that if he takes down the Sandman, he can brag about it for years to come. I consider choking him out, tying him up, and tossing him somewhere, but I’d rather have him think he can’t find me. They’ll waste time trying to pinpoint where I’ve chosen to station myself, and in the meantime, we’ll be over at a birthday party.
He’s quiet while he makes his way up the stairs and out of my sight, and I only have to wait a minute before the door opens and another man walks in. He glances at me, but nothing more as I use his open door to slip out and rush around the corner to where the SUV is waiting for me.
I get inside and Jeremy takes off.
“So?” Cassel asks.
“He followed me into the apartment building and promptly lost me,” I say as I open my bag of goodies.
Henry’s eyes are on them the moment they’re revealed.
“Everyone has to say one nice thing about The Fenceorsing me a song to get one,” I announce.
“I find The Fence less o-fence-ive than you,” Tavish says, and then plucks out a cookie that he hands to Ellis. “I got you one.”
“You just want to harass him a second time, don’t you?” Ellis asks.
