Chapter 51
RJ
The chilly van, the still night, it’s as if the whole world holds its breath while we wait for the storm tomorrow will bring.
I park around the corner from the storage facility, pulling up the list of properties owned by Trips’ dad or his shell corporations.
Many of them were registered in lawless parts of the world, the effort to tie them back to the man in question taking most of my energy these last few weeks.
The rest I spent trying to squeeze whatever details I can about the girls from the dark web for the cops while putting the finishing touches on the worm I’ll need for tomorrow night.
We were lucky we’d gotten the right number during the visit Mr. Westerhouse made before Thanksgiving—the space holding all the blackmail is a shell company with a single holding—this unit.
But it’s not our only target. We’re hitting all the Westerhouse units, trying to make as big of a splash as we can. In a few short hours, they’ll be empty. He’ll know we’re coming for him. The country cops who hate the rich and entitled will have something tangible to dig into.
And every bit of blackmail will go up in a towering inferno.
I can’t fucking wait.
I also can’t help but glance over at Walker as he clambers into the back of the van.
“Ready?” I ask, before handing him a device I built last week.
I used the specs I found on an ancient invoice deep in Trip’s dad’s email inbox for a security system that was installed a month after the shell company rented this unit.
That system isn’t active at the estate, so I’m confident it will bypass whatever security they find in there.
Jansen throws himself inside with us a moment later. “You’d better be, man. RJ’s got enough to do in the van, so I hope you brought those muscles you’ve been working on. Unless they’re just for show?”
Walker goes to deck Jansen, who slips away with a chuckle. “Stay still and I’ll show you how real they are,” he gripes.
“Which one are we hitting first?” Jansen asks, perching on my desk. I push him off, not sure that it will hold his weight.
I hope we’ve got the time and energy to do all of them. “We’re doing the blackmail first. Look for a directory. He’s organized to a fault—there’s going to be one.”
“We’re going for totally empty, right?” He straightens his gloves, green eyes dark in the dim light of the van.
“Yup.” Pulling out the case of earpieces, I distribute one to each of them. “I’m assuming you got a truck?” I ask him.
“I went the free route, just in case.”
“Any problems?” Walker clarifies.
“With stealing a rental truck? No. Of course not.”
Walker shakes his head at our resident thief. “I guess for you, that’s easy. Let’s hope that the code name Trips shared works, so that’s easy, too.”
They both head out the back, checking their mics as they get buckled in the purloined truck. Meanwhile, I send my drone out again, wanting eyes on them just in case things don’t go to plan.
Jansen lets out a long whistle when they get into the blackmail storage unit, my device working flawlessly. “Man, you should see all this stuff.”
Walker cuts through a moment later. “He’s got a paper registry of everything in here. And it’s thick.”
“Of course it’s paper,” I grumble.
They’re quiet, mumbling more to each other than to me as they flip through whatever the bastard has there.
“Should we keep it? Just in case?” Walker asks.
Jansen’s angry voice answers before I do. “If we keep it, we’re no better than he is.”
“The names in here, though. People should know what their best and brightest are really up to.”
Jansen’s huff of frustration is clear. “Listen, I’m as much of a crook as anybody, but who’s to say these people did whatever without coercion, without being set up by that man?
We know that’s the way it’s been for Trips and Clara.
If these people are really as rotten as they look and they’re used to having someone make their messes disappear, well, they’ll screw up again. Eventually.”
Knowing I’ll be the deciding vote, I voice my thoughts. “Can one of you bring it to me? It’s going to take forever to get the data collated, and we don’t have forever. But I see both of your points. We can decide once we’re done here.”
“Got it,” Jansen says. “I’ll meet you at the truck.”
“Wait, you’re not going to help?” Walker asks.
“I’ll be back. I’m taking a shortcut.”
Then I watch from the hovering drone as Jansen trots out to the fence by me—and after doing something with his jacket and the huge binder—climbs over. A few moments later, he pops open the back end.
“Delivery!” he sings, throwing the heavy tome at me.
“Shit,” I curse as it almost takes out my monitor, saved only because I toss the controller for the drone on the desk. The visuals take a deep swoop, and I chuck the binder back at Jansen’s laughing face, barely pulling the thing out of a precipitous dive toward the top of the storage unit.
“Ow,” he whines, rubbing his nose. “You weren’t supposed to throw it back.”
“You weren’t supposed to throw it in the first place,” I bark.
Jansen looks sheepish as he realizes how mad I am at his antics.
Walker’s chuckles sound on the speakers. “I never would have guessed that hauling this shit by myself was the better job.”
“Set the book on the table. Please,” I force out, not wanting things to escalate any more than they already have.
“On it,” Jansen says, still rubbing his nose, setting the binder on the corner and pushing it closer with one foot.
“What’s that for?”
“You’re violent tonight. And I’ve only got one nose. I’d rather keep it looking its best.”
Walker’s laughter doubles in volume on the speaker. Before I can reply, Jansen hops out of the back of the van, making his escape back into the winter night.
Jansen continues his streak of ridiculousness, and it takes me longer than it should to realize he’s trying to keep our moods up.
Not that hovering somewhere between annoyed and frustrated with the man is typically fun for me.
But once I see what he’s up to, I laugh more than grumble when he steals Walker’s hat and throws it on the roof, or when he fakes dropping an armful of blackmail not once, not twice, but three times on the same trip down the stairs.
Tonight might be important, but it’s not what’s dangerous. That comes tomorrow. We might as well laugh while we still can.
By the time they empty all the spaces, I’m feeding the second stack of paper through my newly adapted OCR scanning software, slowly collecting the phone numbers helpfully penciled into the directory. Type A villains are officially my favorite.
I glance at the drone as Walker bumps into Jansen from behind, lifting the keys to the truck from Jansen.
Jansen cackles, while Walker demands an exchange of the keys for his hat back on his head.
The most surprising part of the lift, though, is that we’re all laughing, giving in to the ridiculousness Jansen’s forcing on us.
“This is supposed to be fun. Otherwise, why are we doing it?” he says as he clambers onto the roof. I can think of a dozen reasons why we’re doing this that have nothing to do with fun, but I get where he’s coming from.
It hasn’t been fun, not for months. It’s been heavy, suffocating, tinged with fear and grief. But if tomorrow goes the way we hope, maybe it could be fun again. Maybe we’ll have years of Jansen making us laugh when we get too serious.
And that eventuality is something I’m looking forward to—I can’t last much longer the way things have been. It’s not sustainable.
And I’m not the only one who’s feeling it.
Fun might just be the right goal to aim for, assuming tomorrow goes well.
Until then, I’m prepping for frozen fingers and fear.
Because while tonight has shaped up to be fun, there’s no way tomorrow will be anything but torture.