"For me to do what I need to do." She straightened up. "I need my computer. Can you and your men take me to my car and let me get it. I promise I won’t try nothing. Or you can even send them and have them get it out the back of my car."
I looked at her for a second. Then I walked out of the media room telling Sam to watch her. I came back two minutes later with her laptop. I'd had it pulled from her car the same time my men grabbed her bags. She didn't know I had it. The look on her face when I set it on the table told me she couldn’t believe I had it in my possession.
“You had it the whole time," she said.
“Mm."
Her jaw tightened but she let it go. She sat down, opened it up and got to work. I stood back and watched her move through it. She wasn't hunting around or figuring things out as she went. She knew exactly where she was going. Window to window, database to database, pulling things I didn't recognize and cross referencing them against the image she'd screenshotted from the camera feed with a precision that was completely automatic for her.
This was what she did. Not a hobby. Not a skill she'd picked up. This was her.
I watched her work and said nothing.
Eleven minutes. That's how long it took her.
She stopped. Leaned forward. Stared at the screen for a second like she was confirming what she was looking at.
Then she turned the laptop around and faced it toward me.
"Elijah Reeves," she said. "Big E to the streets. Thirty four. He has a Fort Worth address. Two prior federal charges, both dropped." She paused. "He did has known gang ties to the Brick Boyz." She held my gaze. "You know that name?"
I looked at the screen.
I knew that name.
Brick Boyz. I knew exactly what Brick Boyz was and exactly who ran it because eighteen months ago before I was fully in position my father had done a two month trial run of business with them moving product through a back channel into Dallas from the west side. It didn't go anywhere. My father had shut it down quietly and I'd never gotten the full reason why. All I knew was that they couldn’t move enough weight for the business to be beneficial on our end. Sometimes, shit like that happened and we have to make an amicable split. I guess the shit wasn’t do amicable after all.
Now somebody connected to them had killed Darius and put him on my gate.
This wasn't a random cartel testing new territory.
This was personal.
I lived by a strict code when it came to this shit. When you took something from me, I had to pay you back triple time.
Something went completely still in me. Not the outside, the outside didn't move. But inside everything locked down the way it did when a situation clicked into focus and the only thing left was the response I was about to bring.
I stood there looking at that screen for five full seconds.
Then I closed the laptop.
"Aight," I said.
That was it. That was all I gave her because anything else would have been me showing too much emotion around her. But I was heated like a muthafucka and ready to drop some shit.
But I looked at her. Really looked at her. Standing there in my media room at night after being kidnapped and dragged to my compound. She had sat through my mother's interrogation and watched a dead body get delivered to my gate. After all that, she had still walked to my office, asked for access to my cameras, sat down with her computer and pulled a positive ID in eleven minutes.
"You cold with that," I said.
Two words. That's all she got from me. But I meant them and she heard my sincerity. Something moved across her and I could tell that my words did something to her. She already thought I was an asshole earlier. This was telling her that I probably wasn’t all that bad. I knew how to give a compliment when it was due.
"I told you," she said. Keeping her voice even.
"Yeah," I said. "You did."
I picked up my phone and walked to the door. Dialed Namier before I was fully in the hallway. I’d told him early to be on call because I was about to figure some shit out. When he saw Darius body before I had it moved, Namier instantly went from the playful ass lil brother, to a nigga with Murda on his mind. Darius was his boy and this shit was personal.
He picked up on the second ring.
