Chapter 37
NOLAN
“You should get some sleep,” Nolan said to Alexa.
André, a snappily dressed Black man who wore silver shoes with his hair coloured to match, had shown up right after the meeting this morning and greeted Alexa with a, “Daaaaahling,” his arms thrown wide.
She’d stood stiffly as he kissed her on both cheeks, but managed a half smile when she introduced him to Nolan.
They’d walked him through the house, with Nolan pointing out the parts that needed to be finished and Alexa basically rewriting the design brief from scratch.
Somehow, a quick tidy-up had turned into the ripping out everything Marielle had done, a reimagining of the study and library, and a complete rebuild of the cottage.
When Nolan tried to explain about his limited budget, they’d both told him to hush.
Apparently, the budget was no longer an issue.
He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
On the one hand, Alexa had never been materialistic, but on the other hand, he didn’t want to take advantage of her.
He was proud that he’d built Dionysus from the ground up, even if it stood on a foundation of dirty money.
He’d earned it. He had. He’d weathered the storm whipped up by the Sykes family and made a new life for himself.
The thought of some shadowy figure trying to tear down everything he’d created left him sick to his stomach and angry too.
Now he leaned on the doorjamb, watching Alexa as she surveyed her digital kingdom, click-click-clicking a pen as her gaze flicked over the screens.
Even though the study had been cleaned up, neither of them wanted to spend any time in there, so Storm and Marcel had disassembled Alexa’s new desk, carried it downstairs, and reassembled it in the darkest corner of the library.
They’d cleared the corner by moving a bunch more boxes into the study, so now it was almost impossible to get in there, whether anyone wanted to or not.
She looked up at him, and she’d swapped her contacts for glasses again, he noticed. The other day when he’d told her the glasses looked hot, she’d told him that she only wore them when her eyes got tired.
“I can’t sleep, not yet.”
“It’s two a.m.”
“Yeah, and we’re just getting to the good part.”
“The good part?” The note of joy in her tone made Nolan’s stomach lurch, and right away, he knew she’d cooked up another harebrained scheme. “Uh, where’s Jerry?”
“Close by.”
“Define ‘close by.’”
“Like, within a five-mile radius.”
Ah, hell. “Did she go over to the Leland place?”
“Maybe.”
“She’s gonna get caught. She’s gonna get caught, and then the cops will start asking questions, and—”
“Relax, she won’t get caught. Storm’s acting as lookout.”
Nolan sank onto a couch, coughed at the dust, and blew out a long, calming breath. It didn’t help.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because I was right about Margaret being smart. She deleted my phishing emails, she doesn’t use a cloud service, and we don’t have time to waste. The quickest way to get access to her hard drive is for Jez to stuff a dongle into her laptop port.”
“We’ll all end up in jail.”
“You’re so melodramatic.” Alexa turned one of her screens around. “Look, she’s totally fine. A pro.”
The screen showed the inside of a house. The Lelands’ home, presumably. Nolan had visited a couple of times, not recently, but the place looked vaguely familiar.
“Jerry’s filming herself breaking and entering now? Is that what this is?”
“Yes?”
“We’re going to get arrested, aren’t we?”
“Relax, I can erase the footage at the push of a button.”
“Is that some kind of fancy night vision she’s using?”
The picture was surprisingly clear and in colour too. Nolan could see every detail of the deer heads hanging on the wall.
“No, the lights are on. Guess they’re not worried about the price of electricity.”
“What?”
“Utility costs are no joke these days.”
“I meant the lights.”
“They’ll probably turn them off when they go to bed.”
Nolan felt the blood drain out of his face. “You’re telling me the Lelands are still awake?”
“In the living room, watching a movie. But Storm’s keeping an eye on them through the window, so don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t worry? How can I not worry? What if they catch her? What if she gets shot? You need to call them back.”
Alexa rolled those vivid blue eyes, miraculously not bloodshot despite the amount of sleep she hadn’t gotten.
“This is why I didn’t tell you earlier. I knew you’d get your panties in a bunch.”
Nolan loved Alexa, he did. She was loyal, generous to a fault, and liked to help people in her own way. But he’d almost forgotten how crazy she could act when she had her mind set on something.
And when she teamed up with Jerry? Fireworks.
He could do nothing but watch as his former housemate tiptoed through the house, checking each room in turn.
“Are you insane? What if Roy gets up to fetch a glass of water? What if the movie ends?”
“Relax, the movie still has an hour and ten minutes to run.”
“Couldn’t you just wait for them to go to bed?”
“This way is better.”
“How? How is it possibly better?”
“Firstly, the TV provides background noise. Secondly, few people set the security system before they go to bed. And thirdly, nobody expects an intruder while they’re still awake.
If there was a dog, it would be different.
We’d have to drug it before it barked, yada yada yada.
But they don’t have a dog or even a cat. ”
Jerry finally found an open laptop in a messy office, the screensaver on.
She shoved a widget in the side, and Alexa began typing furiously, chewing her lip and frowning as she focused.
She must do that a lot, the frowning. Fine wrinkles crisscrossed her forehead.
Nolan didn’t care about the wrinkles, but he did worry that she was placing herself under too much stress.
“Okay, we’re good,” she said finally. “Time to exfil.”
Jerry removed the widget, crept back through the house, and exited through the unlocked back door.
Instead of heading up the driveway to the road, she snuck across the backyard, sticking to the shadows, past the barn where the Lelands kept a trio of pet llamas and a pony for their granddaughter, past a winery twice the size of Nolan’s, past the machine shed.
“They’re taking the long way,” Alexa explained. “Through the forest, and Marcel will pick them up at the end of an old logging road.”
Give me strength. “You have Marcel playing getaway driver?”
“Usually, Chase does it because Marcel hasn’t quite mastered J-turns. But needs must.”
“I need a Xanax.”
“Why don’t you go pour us some wine? They’ll be back soon.” A pause. “Ah.”
“What? What happened?”
“It’s probably nothing.”
“Alexa…”
“Okay, so Ari was taking a look around the outbuildings while Jez was in the house. And there’s this old barn, but the hasp and padlock look brand new.”
Nolan clenched his teeth. Ari was involved as well? Was he the only person in this so-called team who didn’t pay lip service to the law? What next? Was André going to take up bank robbery?
“So?”
“That doesn’t strike you as odd?”
“Do you realise how much winemaking equipment costs? Even that second-hand destemmer was a few thousand bucks.”
“It’s also the only building with a camera.”
“There’s a camera?”
“Ari understands fields of motion. Just chill.”
“What if she missed one? What if they have a picture of her face?”
“Do you think this is Ari’s first rodeo? She has a detector and a jammer.” Alexa put a finger to her earpiece. “Okay, sure, yeah, give me a minute…”
“A minute for what?” Nolan asked because that last part hadn’t been aimed at him.
“We’re going to interrupt the signal, record a sample of footage, and play it back on a loop while Jez and Ari take a look in the barn.”
“No, no, no, no, no. Tell them to come back. Haven’t you taken enough risks already?”
“Aren’t you a tiny bit curious?”
“No,” he lied.
“It won’t take long.”
She wasn’t kidding about that part. Alexa worked her electronic magic, Jerry fiddled with the padlock, and not ten seconds later, it sprang open. Even if they didn’t go to jail, they were all going to hell.
Jerry took two steps inside, then halted, presumably to let her eyes adjust to the relative darkness after time in the moonlight outside. Nolan could feel the tension through the screen. Whatever was waiting in the gloom, he didn’t like it, and neither did Jerry.
She glanced across at Ari, her head tilted to the side, listening. What was it? An animal?
“Here we go again,” Alexa said. “Fuck.”