“You try to crawl in bed with my best friend, and you know what’ll happen, right?” Sandra said.
“You’ll tell Mable and she’ll rip off my Mr. Wonderful. I remember.”
“Good to see you awake, Dani.” She leaned over and hugged Dani hard. “I can’t lose my best friend.” She stood and took Dani’s hand. “You’re cold. You need a blanket.”
“I need to puke.” Dani frowned, and lifted her eyes. She looked at Sandra with an odd expression. “Wait. I’m your best friend?”
Sandra frowned. “Of course you are. I love you. Anyway, I found our client. You were right. Room 410.”
“I love you too,” Dani whispered.
Marvin, uncomfortable to his bones, needed to lighten the mood. “I love y’all too. Sooo… a threesome?”
The two gals looked at each other with matching annoyance.Good. That was better than all the girly shit.
“Okay. Leave me,” Dani said. “I’ll pretend to be asleep. The machine will record and transmit everything said in the room, and by morning we’ll have enough to shut this place down.”
“We’re outta here.” Marvin cracked open the door, saw the coast was clear, and he and Sandra sedately left the room, Marvin pushing his small cart.
Mable
Usingthe distraction of a brand new dining room window slipping out of the installer’s hands and crashing to the ground, getting back into Dorm Delta was a piece of cake. They gathered in Marvin’s room, drank real coffee, good tea, and had Zeddie deliver a bottle of wine—for a hefty fee. Hours passed as Mable monitored the activity in the school building and in the Building Z rooms, and kept the IT security department scrambling. She had them convinced that some of the escaped magic had corrupted the system. That was brilliant, even if she had to say it herself.
She continued to decrease the four patients’ meds, and sent the recordings of all the spoken activity in Dani’s room to the Tridevi clerk who was running the shop and amassing the evidence. The kid looked like she was twelve but she had graduated near the top of her class from Furman U., so she must be good.
Now that she had a way in, Mable was having fun playing games against the IT techs. She had been able to keep the IT department and all the monitoring systems shut down, by triggering a single line of code, over and over again. And Tridevi’s small team was also able to check long-ignored emails, texts, and messages, without being caught, and even talk on Zoom to the kids in the office. For the next fourteen hours, they slept and worked in shifts, monitoring the activity in Dani’s room. At six a.m., however, there was a problem.
Sandra
Mable said,“Wake up. Wake up, wake up,wake up!”
Sandra rolled over and nearly fell off the sofa.
Marvin came out from the small bedroom, asking, “What’s happening?”
“Someone in Dani’s room said they’re prepping Dani for surgery. I’ve notified our client’s family and our contact with the local police, but they have to wait for a subpoena. They won’t get here fast enough. So I called Marcus Mattinger and got him out of bed, but still, we’re looking at an hour at least.”
“Mattinger? The state supreme court judge?” Marvin asked, coming fully awake. “You know him?”
Mable didn’t reply, stretching and looking away delicately.
Sandra cleared her throat, trying to make the sound tactful and yet pointed.
“Oh,” Marvin said. “Before you met Mr. Wonderful again.”
Mable pursed her lips but didn’t look at Mr. Wonderful’s owner.
Marvin started the coffeemaker and went to brush his teeth. He wasn’t the jealous type, which was good, with Mable’s history.
Sandra made tea and poured a cup of coffee for Mable. The computer whizz murmured thanks and kept typing on the laptop. Sandra stayed quiet and let her work.
When Marvin returned, he looked ready for work, wearing the sky-blue scrubs the medical types wore. He kissed the top of Mable’s blonde head and said, “Okay, so you need to turn off the electricity in the surgical suite. Right?”
“I can’t,” Mable said. “It is in a different part of Building Z. And every department of Z has its own backup generator.”
“So what do we do?” Sandra asked, finishing off her tea. “We can’t let them perform surgery on Dani.”
“I’ll go in after her, but Mable needs to stay here and monitor the situations in both buildings. You can’t go with me, honey,” Marvin said.
