26. Jinx
Jinx
The lobby of the overpriced highrise where Waterson keeps his office is dead silent the moment we walk in.
Marble floors, a huge fountain with a vaguely phallic shaped design, the whole shebang.
There's a receptionist behind a desk the size of a small yacht, and her eyes skate off me like I'm a grease stain on her sleeve.
Perfect.
I readjust my grip on Cyrus's arm, letting my hip cock out a little further, and make sure the thigh-high with the bow at the top is visible under the hem of this absolute scrap of a skirt.
The crop top says LOVE SICK in baby-pink rhinestones across tits I am not remotely equipped with.
My wig is strawberry blonde and eight inches past my shoulders, parted down the middle, and the lashes are doing half the acting for me.
The receptionist's eyes don't even come up from her monitor. She looks like she's being held at gunpoint.
"Evening," Cyrus says with zero warmth. He flashes his cloned badge at her boredly.
"Mmhm."
Not a look or so much as a can I help you, sir. She wants plausible deniability in case someone's wife comes asking about the pink disaster draped around the rich guy's bicep.
I do not, under any circumstances, let myself grin.
The elevator dings. Cyrus guides me in with a hand at the small of my back. The doors close and we're alone in a brass-walled box, surrounded by our reflections on all four sides, and Cyrus exhales through his nose.
"I'm really not sure this was the best disguise."
I turn my head to look at him in the brass. My lipstick is a color called Blowjob and it looks the part.
"Are you kidding me? Did you see the way she actively avoided eye contact? This crop top is practically an invisibility cloak, Cy. I could walk out of here with a filing cabinet full of classified documents strapped to my back and she'd still be deciding she saw nothing."
"You look like a poster girl at a ring."
"That's the point. We're hiding in plain sight."
He grunts in concession because he can't be bothered to argue.
The elevator climbs and I watch the floor numbers tick away.
"Also," I add, "I look fucking hot."
"Jinx."
"I'm just saying."
"Focus."
"I am focused," I say, adjusting my hair in the reflection. "I'm just also focused on how hot I look. It's a little thing I like to call multitasking."
The doors open on the fifteenth floor.
The hallway up here is even quieter than the lobby, which is saying something. There are low lights in sconces, a runner rug that probably cost a fortune for looking so cheap, and no one at the desk outside Todd's office. Perfect.
Cyrus raises the badge to the reader by Todd's door.
It turns red.
He taps again. Red.
"Oh," I say, in my best bored-hooker register, "is it broken?"
"It's a secondary system," he says in a low voice. "The badge gets him to the floor. There's a PIN on the door itself."
"A PIN you don't have?"
"A PIN I'm about to have."
Holy shit, this man literally takes the implication that he's not omniscient as a personal attack.
He pulls a little black rectangle from inside his suit jacket, no bigger than a business card, and holds it flush to the keypad. His thumb moves across his phone screen and a few more seconds pass before the keypad beeps and flashes green, and the lock thunks open.
"Show-off."
"Inside, now."
He shoves me, and I land on my feet. Mostly.
Todd's office is exactly what you'd expect from Todd's office, which is that it was clearly designed by someone else. Someone who was all too happy to take his black card and fleece him on the whole '90s capitalist motif.
Everything is brown. I didn't even know there were this many shades of brown in existence.
There's a big mahogany desk, a red leather chair, bookshelves of leather-bound things he obviously hasn't ever cracked open, and a rug with a medallion pattern.
Oh, and a minibar, but the coup de grace is a bronze bust of Richard Nixon sitting on a marble pedestal in the corner.
What the fuck.
"Oh my God," I breathe. "It's even worse than his house."
"Focus."
"He has a Nixon bust, Cy. That's like cartoonish degrees of villainy. Even Nixon wouldn't have had a Nixon bust!"
Cyrus is already at the desk. He's got his laptop out, cable snaking into the back of Todd's desktop tower. I watch his jaw set as whatever he's running starts working.
"Pull the drawers," he says, not looking at me.
"Yes, sir," I say with my most serious salute. "Hopefully there won't be any more devastating childhood secrets in these ones."
I go around the other side of the desk and start from the bottom up, because Tank taught me that a decade ago and Tank is usually right about things that involve hands.
The bottom drawer is full of bar supplies, including napkins with the senator's logo, which exists for some reason, a cigar cutter, and two lighters I pocket on instinct because Kade collects them.
The middle drawer is for stationery. The top drawer is full of receipts and pens, plus a half-empty box of condoms.
Gross. Something tells me those aren't for when Ellie's mom visits.
Nothing of value, though. I feel along the undersides because that's where the interesting things usually live.
There's nothing, so I go back to bugging Cyrus, leaning on the arm of his chair. Or Todd's.
"We should fuck on Todd's desk. That would show him."
"Show him what, exactly?" He doesn't stop typing. "He's not even going to know we were in here. That's sort of the point of a clandestine operation."
"You lack imagination."
"I lack patience. For you. Right now. Get off me."
I do not get off him. I lean in more, close enough that my lips brush his ear, and I watch the muscle in his jaw tick. "Any luck?"
"There's an account," he murmurs, almost to himself. "It wasn't on the home network, but he's got it mounted as a hidden partition. He's smart, but not as smart as he thinks."
More typing, and then the cursor moves. A tree of folders pops up on his screen, and it all looks meaningless to me, but I can tell it's not to him.
"Okay, nerd, what is it?"
"It's routing. Wire transfers with dates, amounts, and accounts on the receiving end.
Some of them are account numbers I've already flagged for Southside.
" His mouth twitches slightly at the corners.
"Todd is the funnel, just like I thought.
There's enough evidence here that he's not only involved in Southside's business but bankrolling them. "
"How much?"
He looks up at me, his glasses glinting in the desk light. "Enough to make it look like they killed him over money if we play our cards right."
Ooh. Frame Southside, make it look like another classic case of rich guy pays some losers from the wrong side of the track to do his dirty work, said losers turn on him.
"So you've got enough evidence on there?" I gesture to the computer.
"Yep." He's already focused back on whatever bullshit he's typing to make Todd's computer sing like a canary. "If you shut up and let me work."
I hold my hands up in defense. "Okay, genius. Work away."
Cyrus rolls his eyes and spends the next five minutes pulling data.
He finally pulls the cable, pockets the drive, and shuts his laptop.
Then he wipes the desktop's keyboard with the edge of his sleeve, puts the chair back to the exact angle it was at before, and straightens a pen on the blotter so it sits parallel to the edge of the leather.
Because he's as thorough as he is neurotic.
"Cameras?"
"Looped from the lobby up. Ninety more seconds and it resyncs, so move. We've got everything we need."
I don't need to be told twice. Bronze Nixon is giving me the creeps.
In the elevator on the way down, I watch our reflections again. Cy might be focused on the mission, but I know the sight of those letters is lingering in the back of his mind, same as it is mine.
"Cy?"
"Hmm."
"When do we tell her about the letters?"
He doesn't answer immediately. "Tonight," he finally says. "There have been enough secrets between all of us."
I can't help but wonder if that includes the ones involving only the two of us, but before I can ask, his phone buzzes.
"What?" he asks, bringing it to his ear.
His face goes blank and I feel a drop in my stomach that has nothing to do with the elevator descending down fifteen floors. "Seriously? All right… yeah, we got it. Keep me posted."
"What's wrong?" I demand. "Did something happen at the mixer?"
If that son of a bitch laid a finger on Ellie again…
"Ellie's mother," Cyrus says, slipping his phone back into his pocket. "She overdosed."
The doors open with a ding that feels almost like a mockery, given the circumstances. "What?" I choke, my mind flashing back to last week, and Ellie going through her own personal hell to get clean.
And the realization of just how easily that could have been her makes me fucking sick. "Is she…?"
"At the hospital. Kade's there with Ellie now," Cyrus answers, striding out of the elevator. The desk worker isn't at her post when we get to the lobby and I can't help but wonder if that's because she heard us coming.
"We have to go to the hospital to be with Ellie," I say, picking up my pace.
"Absolutely not. Kade being there is already a risk," he mutters. "With Todd there, it'll just draw even more attention to Ellie."
I clench my jaw, knowing he's right and fucking hating it anyway.
We both get into the car and ride back to the mansion in silence.
One thing is for sure right now. There's no fucking way we're telling Ellie about the letters tonight.