CHAPTER 27
Kaya
Two and a half hours and nine stitches later and we’re finally walking into the clubhouse. I hardly get in the door before Riley and Sophia are at my side.
“Oh my God! Are you okay?” Riley asks in a rush.
Sophia puts her arm around me and ushers me to the sofa, guiding me to sit. “Are you okay? Do you need anything?”
“I’m fine. It’s nine stitches and nothing else wrong. I got cut from a flying glass shard, but right now I feel absolutely nothing. The local anesthetic numbed it up real good.”
Maverick crosses his arms over his chest. “She refused pain meds.”
“I don’t need them. What I do need to do is get downstairs.”
“You need to take it easy.” Maverick says.
“I will, once I get to the control room. Cipher is at the hospital so there is no one looking into this. That’s why I’m here. If you want to be all protective, that’s fine, but do it downstairs.”
He narrows his eyes on me. I give him a wide toothy grin and I see him relax just slightly. “Can you get me a bottle of water?” He gets up and goes behind the bar to grab me one.
“How close were you when it exploded?” Sophia finally asks.
“We were inside.” I lift my bandaged arm. “This is from a piece of glass that broke when the window exploded in on us. Almost like when our house got shot up, except this was a lot brighter and louder. I know now what it feels like to have a human shield.”
“A lot of good it did.” Maverick says as he hands me the water.
“Yeah, I don’t have glass in my eye or my skull, so I’d say you did good. Come on.” I say as I head to the basement steps.
Maverick follows and takes the seat next to me in front of the computer screens.
I immediately get to work running through the garage’s security footage from the last few hours.
It doesn’t take long at all to find the guy.
He’s nothing special, average height, short blonde hair, wearing jeans and a plain blue t-shirt.
I take a couple screen grabs of his face and then bring them over to the facial recognition database I use.
I hit the search button and let it do its thing.
“That’s him?” Maverick asks.
“Yeah. Does he look familiar?”
He shakes his head as he watches the search engine work.
The man’s face is in the center of the screen.
The engine runs other faces on top of his, checking thousands of measurements, as well as photos from social media and government databases against the original until it finds a match.
After ten minutes or so, The word MATCH appears at the top of the screen with the name David Eugene Briar underneath.
From there I do a full background check on Mr. Briar.
“Okay. He lives on Green Street with his wife and teenage daughter, number 582. He is currently unemployed and used to be a long-haul truck driver. Oh David. It seems our buddy here has a hard time figuring out when it’s time to call an Uber.
He got fired last month after losing his license for his third DUI. ”
“Then he probably did it for the money.” Maverick stands and takes a picture of the screen with his phone.
“His DUIs are about to be the least of his problems.” He grasps a handful of my hair and tips my head back.
He crushes his lips to mine. “Stay here,” he grumbles, before turning and heading upstairs.
And right before my eyes Maverick changed from the soft tender man from this morning back into the rough possessive caveman I first met.
I wanted to tell him not to kill the guy, to just question him and maybe beat him up a bit, but then I remember that he could have killed Tank, killed me, killed Maverick.
The thought makes me shudder. Even if he was just told to drop the truck off, he’s still responsible for what happened after.
Desperation makes people do stupid things, but when those things can possibly kill another person, you better be ready for the consequences.
Hopefully David Briar has some good life insurance.