Chloe
I typed away as quickly as I possibly could while using the bullet-pointed list of requirements that Agent Tightwad had typed up for me in some bullshit document. I hated it when he did that. I hated it when he treated me like I had no fucking clue what I was doing. I was so focused on pulling up that footage just so I could get out of there that I didn’t notice anything else going on around me.
Like, the fact that Chad stared me down from head to toe.
“Any reason why you couldn't meet up with me at the office?” he asked.
I furrowed my brow. “You’re the one that said meet you here. Doesn’t sound like a ‘me’ issue.”
“Yeah, because we pinged your cell phone and noticed you were scores away from your apartment.”
I slowly looked at him from beyond the outer edge of the laptop screen. “Did you have any particular reason to do that outside of being curious?”
He shrugged. “You know the rules regarding your informant contract. You know we can ping you at any time if we feel you’re in danger or somehow a threat to others around you.”
“So, which did you believe it was? Was I in danger to you? Or was I somehow a threat?”
He grinned. “So, why are you staying in the middle of nowhere?”
“I was on a retreat,” I said flatly.
“Uh huh. What kind of retreat? Maybe my girlfriend would enjoy it.”
I quickly changed the subject. “I’m almost done with the searches you’ve asked for. Five more minutes, at the most.”
He reclined back in his chair. “You know, you’ve helped us a hell of a lot on this case. No matter what we do, we can’t seem to track these assholes down. They keep siphoning money electronically out of people’s bank accounts into an offshore account, but we can’t back trace anything. There’s never any…”
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher after a hot ass minute. Cybercrime was always what they came to me for, and it was always the same fucking story: some asshat with a little bit of coding knowledge was fucking them over because the FBI was old-school and didn’t feel the need to come into the twenty-first century with how they did anything. So, they came to me half of the time.
“We’re even researching some hotels that have gotten hit lately as well,” Agent Baker said.
I snickered. “Hotels holding onto cash now, too?”
“No, but they do hold onto credit card information.”
That made me want to find the bastards even more. “Well, here’s all of the traffic camera footage. I even took the liberty of editing it down so you could look at the snippets your suspects are in.”
I turned the laptop around and shoved it toward him, but he didn’t take his eyes off me. I hated it when he did that. I hated it when he looked at me like I was nothing but a disposable entity he might be able to sink his dick in. But it was much better than rotting away in a federal prison for the rest of my life.
“So?” I asked.
His gaze finally dropped to the laptop. “Good work, Chlo.”
“Chloe.”
“Whatever.”
He pulled his vibrating cell phone out of his breast coat pocket. “That’s my boss, so I need to get out of here. I’ll have more information for you in a week or so. Stay by your phone.”
I shook my head. “My retreat is going t—”
He closed the laptop and answered his cell. “Hey there, bossman. What can I do ya for?”
And after he tossed me a wink, he brushed by me as if I were nothing but dirt on the bottom of his shiny black shoe.
I sat there for a few minutes and simply stared at the wall. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to speak. All I wanted was to envision a life where I wasn’t cooped up and I wasn’t having my strings pulled by a horn-dog FBI agent. I needed to take a look at the contract I had signed with them. I’d been informing them for years, and that had to count for something, right? They’d gotten plenty of free work out of me; there had to be something in my contract that stipulated how long this needed to go on for before I had earned my life back.
Earned my freedom back.
