May lunges at her, and she runs off shrieking to the kitchen.
May looks at me, pausing between the family room and the hallway. “Are we all set? Is there anything special you need me to do?”
I shake my head. “No, I don’t think so. Their dinner’s there on the table, there’s some sorbet for dessert, and you know where to find all their stuff. They’ve already had their baths, and Sophie’s homework is done. All you have to do is have fun.” I try to sell it with a big smile.
May’s not buying it. Her expression softens. “Don’t be nervous, sweetie. You’ve got this. You know what you’re doing, and Lucky is a nice guy.”
I nod. “He is a nice guy. I’m not worried about Lucky at all. Although, honestly, May, he’s a little bit too good-looking, don’t you think?”
“I know,” she says, enthusiastically. “It’s weird, right? It blew me away when I first met him, but I don’t notice it so much anymore. The more you’re around him the less you’ll be distracted by it.”
“I hope so.”
“Hmmm, is there a little somethin’-somethin’ going on there maybe?” she asks in a suggestive tone.
I shake my head vigorously. “No way. Seriously, don’t even go there. I am not interested.”
May uses her coy voice on me next. “That’s good, because I think somebody would be a little bit disappointed if he found out you were interested in Lucky.”
My heart does a little double skip followed by a triple skip. “What are you talking about?” I’m trying so hard to be coy like she is, but I’m not sure it’s working.
“Don’t play. You know exactly who I’m talking about. Dev.”
“Oh. Dev?” I shrug, playing it so cool. “He’s pretty nice. He took me and Sammy to McDonald’s the other day.”
“Oh, believe me, I heard about it.”
I’m seized by the sudden need to know every single detail. I walk over to my sister and grab her arm, breathing my hot breath right in her face. “Tell me!”
She starts to walk toward the kitchen, pulling her arm from my kung fu grip. “Sorry, Sis, but you have to get to work. We can talk about this later.”
I whine at her. “But I want to know nowwww . . .”
She laughs. “Don’t worry; I’ll give you all the dirty details when you come home.”
“But I might not be back until four o’clock in the morning.”
Her teasing voice disappears in an instant. “Don’t wake me up. I don’t want to be up before six.” She goes back to smiling. “But I will have breakfast with you, and we can talk all about it then. And you can tell me about your exciting night working with the handsome Lucky doing undercover ops.”
A dark cloud instantly settles over me. “Don’t say that.”
“Don’t say what?”
“Don’t say undercover ops. This is just a job. I’m the person on the no-risk crew. Lucky and I don’t get involved in all that commando bullshit.”
“Okay, okay. Don’t be so sensitive. I was just joking around.” She tilts her head at me and narrows her eyes. “Are you worried about something in particular?”
I sigh out an annoyed breath. May is a really smart girl, but sometimes she can be really dense. “Of course I’m worried.” I gesture toward the kitchen. “I have three kids. I can’t afford to do something risky that might put my life in jeopardy.”
May looks at me like I’m off my rocker. “Calm down, Jenny. You’re just going to be working on computers in an empty office.”
“Exactly. But what if somebody comes in? What if the person who’s doing this embezzlement or whatever decides to come work in the middle of the night? If they’re taking as much money as Lucky thinks they are, they’re going to be really pissed. Maybe they’ll have a gun or maybe they’ll throw some punches. I can’t afford to have black eyes the next time Miles comes over here to get the kids. He’ll take them away from me.”
May walks over and puts her hands on my shoulders, staring deeply into my eyes. “First of all, you’ll have Lucky there. Lucky will be carrying a firearm, just in case. Don’t freak out about it! Second . . . nobody’s going to come in there in the middle of the night to work. Who does that? And, last but not least, Miles is not going to take the kids from you. He doesn’t want that responsibility, remember? He can’t even take them for an entire weekend, for shit’s sake.”
A little voice speaks up from behind May. “What do you mean, my dad doesn’t want the responsibility?”
My heart sinks when I realize it’s Sophie uttering those horrible words. I step around May and squat down so that I can look into my daughter’s eyes. “Darling, Auntie May is just trying to calm me down when I’m acting like a silly mama. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Of course your father would love to have you at his house more often. He’s just really busy with work. But this Christmas, he’s going to take you for two whole weeks! Won’t that be exciting?”
Sophie shrugs. “Maybe. But if he has that stuck-up girlfriend with him, maybe not.”
“Girlfriend?” May’s curiosity is obviously piqued.
I stand and shake my head at her. “Don’t even ask. Just let the kids have a nice, peaceful evening without talk about girlfriends or any of that stuff.” I look at my daughter and point to the kitchen. “Go. Set the table, so Auntie May can serve you your delicious spaghetti dinner.”
May pulls me into a hug. “You’re going to be totally fine. Better than fine. You are gonna kick butt and take names, and bring all that crap back to Bourbon Street Boys so you can show them how amazing you are.”
I pull out of her embrace because it’s way too tempting to stay there and chicken out. “Thanks. I’ll call you when I’m headed home.”
She winks at me. “Excellent. I can’t wait to hear about your adventure.”
She leaves me standing in the front hallway, shouting out to the kids as she goes. “Whoever wants to be my favorite niece or nephew . . . Auntie May is really thirsty! Whoever gets her a big glass of water will be her favorite for the next two minutes!”
I hear them scrambling as I walk out the door, and it makes me smile. I may be nervous about this job I’m about to do tonight, but I would never be nervous with my sister as a substitute mom to my children.
I push away the dark thoughts that want to intrude, the ones that say if anything ever happened to me she would become that person permanently.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
After I meet Lucky at the warehouse, we get into his SUV and ride over to the Blue Marine headquarters. It’s nine-thirty at night, and although we’re arriving later than we originally planned, I feel much better about being here at this time. Lucky pulls around to the back of the building and parks the vehicle in a space in the corner, far from the door we will go through.
“You ready?” He has a laptop in a bag strapped over his shoulder, and a briefcase full of files. He pauses with his hand on the door, waiting for my response.
I nod, trying to look more confident than I feel. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”
“That’s the spirit. Come on. Let’s bang this thing out and go have a drink.”
I don’t know about the drink part, but I’m definitely on board for getting this thing banged out. I just want to get it over with and leave. I feel weird slinking around in the dark, sneaking into someone’s business, even though I have permission to be there from one of the owners. I keep worrying that one of the other owners or an employee is going to show up and yell at me. Or worse. I stop myself from imagining what that worse thing could be.
We get out of the car and walk quietly over to the back door. The gravel in the parking lot crunches under our feet, and it sounds to me like we’re announcing to the entire neighborhood that we’re here and up to no good.
“Are you nervous?” Lucky asks. He’s talking in a regular tone of voice instead of whispering like I think he should be doing.
“Very. Does it show?” I try to giggle, to show how cool I am, but it come
s out more like a cackle. It reminds me that I still need another piece of my witch costume for Halloween. I have less than a month left to prepare, and I have nothing for my get-up other than a few parts that are left over from years past.
“No, it doesn’t show. But I think it would be kind of weird if you weren’t nervous on your first night of work.”
“I think even if this were my fiftieth night of work, I’d still be nervous about sneaking into someone’s building at night.”
“Sneaking? This isn’t sneaking. We have permission to be here. See?” He holds up a set of keys and jingles them at me.
I reach up and grab them to stop them from making so much noise. “I guess I’m just worried that some random employee or one of the other owners will come by while we’re in here. What if they call the police?” I let the keys go so he can use them to open the door.
“Already got that covered.” He uses two different keys to do the unlocking.
“What do you mean you’ve got it covered?”
“Ozzie contacted the police and let them know what we’re going to be up to tonight, so the cops are going to swing by later to make sure everything’s cool.”
I breathe out a huge sigh of relief. “You have no idea how much better that makes me feel.” Most of the phantoms that were haunting me disappear into the night air. I have nothing to worry about. The cops are in on it with us. Phew!
He pauses in the process of turning the door handle to give me one of his big Hollywood smiles. “I thought that might make you feel better.”
He pushes the door in and holds it open for me, but I stand there and give him an awkward look.
“I know you’re being a gentleman holding the door for me, but would you mind going in first?”
“Absolutely.” He doesn’t hesitate for a second. He walks right in and turns on a light. Two seconds later he faces me again. “All secure. You are free to enter.”
Feeling like a total weenie, I come in behind him. I’m careful to shut the door and lock it. I wish I could put a bar across it too.
Time to face the music. I turn around and examine the space around me. We’re in a back hall with a bathroom on one side and a janitorial closet on the other.
“Come this way,” Lucky says. “The offices we’re looking for are down the hall on the right and the left.”
I follow behind him, my eyes scanning side to side. The coward inside me is expecting someone to jump out and attack us at any second. My blood pressure is through the roof, and my heart is beating like crazy. The only good news in this scenario is that I’m probably losing a lot of weight with all the sweat that’s started to roll off my body.
Lucky turns on some more lights. “Do you want to work together in the same room, or do you want to split up?” He turns around and looks at me as he waits for my answer.
I give him my best mom-look. “Are you kidding me?”
He smiles again and hitches his computer up higher on his shoulder. “Same room it is.” He points to the right. “Let’s start in here.”
I stay in his shadow and take the seat next to his. We’re sitting at two computers used by administrative personnel, but there’s no way for me to know who they are or what they do yet.
Lucky sets his laptop down along with his briefcase. I put my purse next to his things. I’m very tempted to take my can of pepper spray out of my purse and set it on the desk next to me, but I don’t. May said that Lucky has a firearm, and I know he’s been trained by Dev and Ozzie on how to use it. I don’t have anything to worry about. The cops are going to be here soon, I’m sure.
Lucky pulls something out of his briefcase and unfolds it. It’s larger than a regular-sized piece of paper. “This is a little schematic of the office and all of the computers in it,” he says. “I thought we could start at the individual stations, and then we could move to the server after.”
I take a look at the diagram and place myself on it. I point to the desk on the schematic where I’m sitting. “This is me here, and that’s you there.”
He nods. “Yes, exactly. So you’re sitting at one of the accounting spots, and so am I. Perfect.” After he puts a mark on the paper over the two computers we’re working on, he turns to his computer. “Let’s fire these babies up and see what we can find.”
I wiggle the mouse at my station, and the monitor goes on. It’s asking me for a username and password. Because I read the file Lucky had sent over, I know that we have access to this information. Before I can even think to say something about it, Lucky is pulling two papers out of a file folder and handing one of them to me. “Here are all the usernames and passwords. A copy for you and a copy for me.”
I nod and start entering the data immediately. The faster I can get this done, the sooner we’ll get out of here.
Lucky starts to whistle, but it doesn’t bother me. It’s better than working with somebody who wants to chat. With this type of work, it’s better for me to either hear some kind of random noise or nothing at all. I need to keep all of my attention on what I’m doing. It’s monotonous, but when I get in the zone, I’m a machine. Nobody can work faster than I can.
I easily maneuver myself into the computer. From there it’s a simple thing to call up the different parts of the different drives and examine their contents to see if anything funny is going on. We were given a full view of their system’s architecture before we got here, and I studied it at length from home while the kids were sleeping last night, so I know what I should be looking at. Anything that’s not supposed to be here will jump out at me.
Other than the fact that this particular employee spends a lot of time doing her online shopping at work, I don’t see any cause for alarm on her computer; but just to be sure, I take the thumb drive that I brought from my purse, plug it into her tower, and upload the virus. When it’s finished doing its thing, I look over at Lucky. “I’m cloning this machine. Are you cool with doing that one too?”
Lucky looks over at me. “What do you think? Should I?”
I shrug. “I don’t see anything going on with this station, but just to be sure, I’m going to go ahead and clone it anyway. It can’t hurt, right? It’s just going to take a little bit of extra time.” I want to get out of here as soon as possible, but that doesn’t mean I want to shortchange the operation. Having clones will make it possible for us to monitor what’s going on later and dig deeper off-site. And if we don’t need them, we can just delete them.”
“If you think we should do it, then I’ll do it,” Lucky says. “Do you have another one of those thumb drives?”
I nod, reaching down to dig in my purse. I pull out the second thumb drive and hand it to him. “Here you go. Just double-click on that executable file, and it’ll do the rest.”
“And there will be no evidence that they can see that this has been done?”
I go back to my computer and ensure that the process is finished before shutting things down. “No, there shouldn’t be. It’s a pretty decent program. I checked it at home before I left.”
“Do I want to know where you got it?” He’s smiling, so I know he doesn’t mean anything bad by it.
“Let’s just say I got it from a trusted source.”
In fact, I got it from one of my former coworkers. There are a few kids barely out of high school working for my old employer who spend way too much of their free time wreaking havoc on the Internet. They aren’t bad kids, per se; they just lack the maturity needed to restrain themselves from causing trouble out of pure boredom. Lucky for me, they looked up to me as a kind of mother figure when we worked together, so it wasn’t too difficult to convince them I needed their help.
They actually thought it was funny when I asked for the program. I told them that I was making a clone of my daughter’s computer so I could watch what she was doing in chat rooms and such. Because they know very well the kind of garbage that’s out there on the Internet, they were more than happy to act as big brothers and step in with a solution to my “
problem.”
“Okay, I won’t ask any more questions.” Lucky puts his thumb drive into the tower he’s working on and starts the virus running.
I look down at the schematic. “Where to next?”
Lucky’s attention is on the computer when he answers. “Wherever you want to go is fine with me.”
I pick the next logical spot, trying to move around the room in an orderly fashion, taking my purse with me. This is already going faster than I thought it would. We might even be out of here by midnight. I hope it’ll be early enough to catch May while she’s still awake so I can talk to her about whatever Dev said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I’m in one of the back offices finishing up cloning the last drive when a strange sound comes from the end of the hall near the back door. My hand freezes on the mouse.
Holy crap. What was that?
Lucky is in a different part of the office working on another computer. After three hours of working together, I calmed down enough to agree to work separately, but now I’m definitely regretting that decision.
All of my attention is focused on that hallway. Did I hear something or am I just imagining it because I’m so tired? I want to call out to Lucky, but I’m afraid if somebody is coming in, they’ll hear me.
I grab my cell phone from the desk next to me. Thank God I brought it with me. Unfortunately, I left my purse and everything else in the first office that we started in.
I quickly type out a text message to May, cursing myself for not getting Lucky’s number. I turn off the sound on my phone and send the message. It’s one in the morning, so May is probably sound asleep, but maybe I’ll get lucky and this message will wake her up.
Me: At Blue Marine. Someone coming in. Don’t have Lucky’s number. He’s in the other room.
More sounds come from the hallway. Someone is definitely breaking in. There are two voices, and they’re speaking in hushed tones. My palms start sweating and my heart races. My worst nightmare has come true. We’re busted!
I reach over and turn off the computer monitor, pick up the paper with passwords on it, and drop down below the level of the desk. I’m tempted to hide completely underneath the thing, but I want to verify whether I’m just imagining things, and I need to be able to see over the desk to do that. I wonder what Lucky’s doing. Is he panicking like I am? Is he sending a text to Ozzie? Is he calling the police?