Page 141 of Devil’s Disciples

At five feet ten, he was the shortest member of the club. Nevertheless, women found him irresistible. They often approached him in the bar under the belief he wasn’t with the five “thugs” that surrounded him. His repeated successes at bagging women had been a matter of contention with me since we were kids. Although he was a lifelong friend and club brother, he spent a good period of his time irritating the fuck out of me.

I always walked away prior to our arguments becoming physical. If there was one man in the club that could come close to whipping me in a fight, it was Tito. He’d been raised by parents who owned martial arts training facilities and had studied Jiu-Jitsu since he could walk.

Knowing so didn’t keep me from antagonizing him.

“What about that fucking berry-flavored water you always drink?” I snapped back. “That shit probably has something in it that’ll make you shit like a goose and grow hairy moles on your nut sack.”

“It’s water with the essence of fruit added. It’s healthy.”

I gave him a crazy-eyed look. “What the fuck is ‘essence of fruit’?”

“When fruit is cooked to make juice, the vapor that evaporates is captured. It condenses, forming water droplets that have a highly concentrated flavor of the fruit. Those droplets are the ‘essence of fruit’. A few drops of that concentrate are added to water, giving it the flavor of the fruit. It’s chemical and sweetener free.”

“Well, la-tee-da,” I said mockingly.

Baker chuckled. “Good comeback, Cash.”

Reluctantly, I screwed the lid on the yogurt bottle and waved my hand in Tito’s direction. “Fuck this little know-it-all. I’ll drink these fuckers if I want to.”

Baker looked at Tito and raised his eyebrows. “What did you find out?”

Tito reached for his opened his fancy little laptop, traced his finger across the screen, and then looked up. “He’s got a smart home system that connects to wi-fi and can be controlled by Alexa, Google Home, or Siri. He can watch any of the twenty or so cameras on his cell phone in real time from wherever he might be at any time of the night or day. Open and close garage doors remotely, that kind of stuff.”

I let out a laugh. “You can recite the dangers of aspartame without looking at a book, but you had to look at your fancy little laptop to tell us that?”

He turned the laptop to face me. A hand-drawn sketch of the drug dealer’s compound, complete with dimensions of the walls, locations of cameras, bushes, trees, and anything else that could be imagined was on the screen. It appeared that an architect had drafted it.

“I don’t need this ‘fancy little computer’ to explain his security system, no,” he said in a shitty tone. “But I thought it might come in useful to show what we’d be dealing with.”

He handed Baker the computer. “Take a look. He’s gone a little overboard with camera placement, but I’d expect nothing less from a drug dealer. They’re always paranoid.”

Baker looked at the sketch and then at Tito. “What are the half-moon shapes?”

“Motion activated lights.”

After a lengthy study, Baker handed the laptop to Tito. “Bottom line? Can we get in there?”

“I can get video samples from each camera, then loop them into the system remotely. It’ll be a pain in the ass, but it’s possible, yes.”

“What’s our biggest risk?” Baker asked.

“Two things. One, that he comes home when we’re in there,” Tito said.

“What’s the second thing?” Baker asked.

“That he tries to pan the cameras while the system is in an altered state. If he does, it won’t work, and he might get worried. There will be video images, but they’ll be fixed video. If he tried to pan the cameras, he’ll realize it.”

“This is one of those systems that you can control from your cell phone?” I asked.

Tito nodded. “Correct.”

“And he can move the cameras back and forth and shit from his phone?”

“He won’t be able to on that night, no.”

I chuckled. “Fuckers like him sit in the bar and just stare at their phones, wondering if someone’s coming to steal their stash. You know he’ll figure it out sooner or later.”

Tito offered a half-assed shrug. “There’s only one way to manipulate a system like that, and it isn’t easy. If we want to get in, our only option is to send him a false video signal.”