“No,” he admitted. “I don’t. Not anymore.”
A SHARPelbow nearly caught Simon in the side of the head. He growled in irritation and shoved the offending limb back onto its own side of the car and got a shirt-muffled apology from Jacob, who was halfway through getting changed into the clothes Simon had brought for him. Glancing sideways he checked out what was really putting his temper on edge—the bare line of Jacob’s arm down to the fuzz-tufted hollow of his armpit, the slice of skin between hip bones and groin, exposed by the unbuttoned fly of his jeans.
He was a liar. He was a criminal. Simon glanced to where Fozzy was lying on the backseat. He was possibly a dognapper. And he was leaving. None of it mattered. Simon still wanted to drag him into his lap and kiss him until he stopped being an idiot. Although that would probably take more time than they had.
“Let me get this straight.” He averted his eyes and scowled out the window at the perfectly manicured gardens and expensively uninteresting houses. Christmas decorations that side of town were apparently minimal—just twinkling lights in the garden and tasteful wreaths on the doors. The gaudiest was a neighborhood anarchist who had a wreath of red, green, and gold baubles on the door. “Your plan is to walk up, try the door, and hope no one stops us?”
Jacob pulled the polo shirt down over his head. He reached around and scratched the back of his neck as though being that close to respectability brought him out in a rash. “I’m not a cat burglar,” he said. “The only house I’ve ever broken into was my family’s when I came home late from curfew, and I’m not going to try climbing up the ivy to crawl in the bathroom window here. So we act like we’re meant to be here, walk up to the door, and try to get in. If we can’t, we think again. But hey, you’re the Marine. If you have a better idea, let’s hear it.”
Cut the power, go in under cover of darkness, do a hard reset on the alarms—after they’d cased the location, either in person or by drone. He’d go in armed—with info as well as artillery. He’d also have the US government backing him, not planning to throw him into jail.
“We’ll try it your way,” he said.
Jacob snorted, hitched his hips up off the seat, and buttoned his fly. “Gee, thanks.” He slid a business card into a lanyard, strung it around his neck, and turned it so the PeaPod logo was visible.
“And what am I supposed to be?” Simon asked.
“Cop.”
Simon gave him a dirty look. “I don’t look like a cop.”
“You look more like a cop than anything they’d expect to see,” Jacob said as he got out of the car. “You look dangerous.”
A chill wriggled through Simon’s chest at the casual statement and made him hesitate on his way out of the car. Most people—his doctor, his bartender, hisdad—said dangerous, but they meant broken. Like whatever the military had done to him inside his head was worse than the ruined arm.
It wasn’t anything he did, anything he said, anything he could change. It was just what he was. Apparently.
“What?” Jacob gave him a curious look over the car. “You look like I kicked our rented dog.”
Simon shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Now who’s the liar?”
“Not wanting to talk to you about something isn’t lying,” Simon said. “It’s just self-preservation and none of your business anymore. Let’s go.”
He stalked away from the car and left Jacob to catch up with him. Jacob stretched his legs enough to match strides, and when he did catch up, he’d changed the way he moved. Not alot, but his shoulders were hunched like someone who spent a lot of time on the computer, and his posture was… tenser, like someone on edge. He definitely passed as a computer geek who’d been press-ganged by the local police.
Simon wanted to ask how Jacob had gotten into the business of stealing secrets for a living, but he’d just taken personal questions off the table. So it was hardly fair.
“Did you find anything about Lau?” he asked.
“I haven’t had a chance to go through everything carefully,” Jacob hedged. “But not yet. On the other hand, Clayton wasn’t going through the company. He hired me with money from his personal account. He met me on his own. That’s not how it goes when they have a board of directors on their side, you know?”
“Good use of your morning,” Simon said dryly. The point wasn’t lost on him, though. “So, as far as PeaPod’s concerned, before Clayton turned up in the river, it was just business as usual?”
“There was one thing,” Jacob said. “Clayton had called a last-minute board meeting for before Christmas. From the complaints that the office manager was getting, they weren’t particularly happy about it. One of them said something about them thinking he had other things to keep him busy these days.”
Simon raised an eyebrow. “Any idea what things?”
Simon got a shrug in answer to that and clenched his jaw on the need to push harder. If there was anything to find, Jacob would have found it. Or would find it when he had a chance to look through his “loot” properly. He had as much motivation as Simon. More.
They turned onto Clayton’s drive and gravel crunched underfoot as they walked. His garden was just a long stretch of manicured grass, bare of detail except for a single lonely magnolia planted in the middle.
Jacob pulled a notebook out of his pocket as they reached the door. A single keypad was inset into the wall, the numbered buttons unhelpfully unworn. Flicking to the back of the book, Jacob frowned at the crib list of codes scribbled there.
While he worked his way through, Simon turned so his body was in the way of anyone who might see what they were doing. But looking up and down the street, it seemed unlikely there were going to be any curtain twitchers in the neighborhood.
When he was growing up, his family had been well-off by the standards of their neighbors. They had a nice house, a pool in the yard. They had still been part of the community, though. When he skipped school, an old lady had told his mom. When Becca snuck Dev in while their parents were at a conference, the neighbors raced each other to spill the beans on the driveway when they got back.
