Restless Hearts Sleep Alone #2
Bailey’s eyes widened. “Wow. I… you know, for some reason I assumed she was divorced.” He took a breath. “I should talk to her,” he said after a moment.
Reg cocked his head over his plastic gas-station cup of lemonade. “Why?”
And Bailey heard himself saying it. “Because I lost somebody too. I-I guess I want to ask somebody, you know. About moving on.”
Reg’s eyes widened. “Oh. Wow. Ouch. Are you? Ready to move on?”
Bailey laughed a little, and it wasn’t entirely a happy sound. “I must be. I’m about to concoct a plan that might send me back into the desert after your brother because I don’t want to live without him. I’m pretty sure that’s a big thumbs-up!”
Reg nodded, completely equanimous, as though Bailey hadn’t just ripped open a big fat painful revelation. “Good,” he said, no irony whatsoever. “Because we can’t let on to my parents or siblings that we’re doing this. They’ll worry, and that’s no good. You and me need total commitment.”
Bailey didn’t even want to think of what they’d find if they jumped down the “track Dean’s phone” rabbit hole. But he didn’t want to think of what could happen if they didn’t.
“Or we need to be committed,” he said dryly.
“I understand those places are very peaceful,” Reg said, his lips not even twitching as he did so. “I brought my Tor-networked laptop. It’s in the house, where we can use the secure Wi-Fi in my parents’ office.”
“Secure like….”
“So encrypted I haven’t seen spam in years,” Reg said, matter-of-fact like. “My parents have no idea how many protections they’ve got on their laptops.”
Bailey ran his fingers through his drying, tangled hair. “Does your family have any idea how much you know or how terrifying you are?”
Reg gave one of those now-frightening “quiet” smiles. “Nope. Please don’t tell them. It will only freak them out.”
“Sure,” Bailey said. And part of him knew he should be more freaked out. But part of him was thinking finally they could check in to see how Dean was doing.
He really needed to see how Dean was doing.
“After lunch,” Reg repeated. He grabbed another curried chicken sandwich. “My mom made these for me special. I really don’t want to waste them.”
“GOING TO use the office, Mom!” Reg called casually as he and Bailey entered the house.
Bailey had excused himself to put on his other pair of cargo shorts and to hang up the pair he’d worn in the pool, and the result was his skin was pleasantly cool and more susceptible to the eightyish air-conditioning in the house.
Over dinner the night before, Prock, the “dead center” sibling, had assured him that the AC was perfectly capable of offering subarctic temperatures, even in the overwhelmingly dry heat of a central California summer, but that his parents didn’t like to tax the unit too much, because once in a while 105 degree temperatures gave way to 115 degree temperatures, and they didn’t want to burn out the unit.
It felt exactly like his own father’s house, Bailey had told him, and he and Prock had bonded over parents and their foibles.
But now, following Reg into the small den, the first thing Bailey noticed was the temp was a cool and glorious 72 degrees.
Glancing around, he realized that the out-of-date paneling and wallpaper that marked the rest of the house was missing in the small, plain room.
The walls were thickly plastered and not just dry-walled, Bailey saw, and painted a peaceful pale yellow with pale green accents on the doorframe and the electrical outlets.
The desk was modern, spacious, and comfortable, and the chair ergonomically superior to pretty much any other piece of furniture in the home.
And the place where the window should have been had been plastered and sealed over—if Bailey could recall, the stucco on the other side had been patched and painted as well.
And the small game closet had the door removed, and all of the shelves were full of advanced electronic equipment that would rival the NSA.
Bailey glanced around the room again and realized that the place was probably as hack-proof and surveillance-proof as a SCIF—a sensitive compartmented information facility—in the Pentagon, and he found himself staring at the quietest Royal.
“Do your parents know what this room is?” he asked, wondering at how much damage somebody with an unwholesome intention could do from a room like this.
“Oh hell no,” Reg said absently. “I asked Dad if I could redo the den, and then I rewired the Wi-Fi, and then I thickened the walls and specially funneled all the power to a different transformer. I had a friend from high school help, and we put the AC unit on the same transformer so we wouldn’t tax my parents’ electric bill, but since they’re insane and apparently like sweat in their armpits I also gave it its own separate thermostat so the server towers wouldn’t overheat the place.
” He paused. “And there’s special foil insulation under the plaster to make it fireproof.
And there’s a trapdoor under the desk that leads to a crawlspace under the house that comes out in the mother-in-law cottage.
Which reminds me, I need to make sure my dad doesn’t plaster or paint that over, so thank you, I’ll go out there tonight. ”
Bailey couldn’t help staring. “You… you did all this without your parents’ knowledge?”
Reg gave him a mild look. “I’ll tell them if they need to know.”
“But why the secret tunnel? Who are you working for that you need a secret tunnel?”
Reg laughed. “No, no. Nothing like that. See, my folks went on a trip right after Chance graduated from school, and I asked if I could redo the den since my job needed more computing power and memory space—particularly when I’m doing design and coding and stuff.
They said yeah, I could do it then, as long as I didn’t let any of the cats escape, and I got some of my friends and some of Dad’s friends to help me.
And because of all the computer specs—and the fact that I wanted it subarctic in here when I was working—everybody started to joke that it was like a secret spy room.
The tunnel to the mother-in-law cottage was a joke, really, but we realized that if the place was ever on fire, there was enough fresh air blowing up from there to make it a safe place to get out if the other ways were blocked. And since I’d blocked up the window….”
Bailey nodded helplessly. “Wow,” he said. “Just… damn, son. Does Anthony have any idea about this?”
Reg frowned a little. “Why would Anthony know about the secret passage to the mother-in-law cottage?”
Bailey shook his head. “So I could tell him?” he asked.
“Oh, well, sure,” Reg said. “It was mostly a lark, you know?”
“Sure,” Bailey said. He was going to tell Dean about it too. But all that depended on whether or not they could get Dean the hell out of Mexico with his skin intact. “But about Dean….”
“Okay, then,” Reg said, and with that he opened his laptop and did shit that Bailey didn’t even recognize.
He assumed he was logging into a special server, but given the setup he saw in the erstwhile closet, he could have arranged his own server, one completely clear of any pesky entanglements like, say, the websites belonging to the DOJ, who were apparently blissfully unaware of this unassuming kid who’d been tracking one of their own for nigh on three years because he’d been worried about his sibling.
“So,” Reg was murmuring, obviously oblivious to the boggling Bailey was doing in his own head, “here’s where Dean was three days ago, about an hour after he left you.
He’s about a hundred miles away from where Val picked you up.
I’m going to assume the plane landed about forty-five minutes after you got pushed out of it, because the distance tracks.
Mostly.” Reg frowned, and Bailey was afraid to ask him what he suspected.
“Okay, either way the phone needed to be charged between then and now, so we’re going to assume Dean’s alive to have done that. ”
“He’s got sixty-zillion phone batteries on and around his person and stuff,” Bailey said, remembering Marcus remarking on it. “It’s sort of a glitch for him.”
Reg made a happy little wiggle with his shoulders. “I taught him that,” he said proudly.
Bailey wanted to ask this kid what happened to him to make him so damned careful, but now was not the time.
“So how long did he stay there?” he asked, and Reg tapped a menu by the little red dot Bailey assumed was Dean, and got a readout of movement by hour.
“Well, they landed and then took off again,” Reg said carefully.
“They’re going around thirty, forty miles per hour, and they’re riding on old roads—the sort that aren’t nice to vehicle suspensions or chassis—I’m going to assume they’re on motorcycles or in a Jeep, but probably motorcycles.
They’re going faster than a Jeep.” Reg frowned.
“Maybe a bike with a trailer? Their speed isn’t…
usual. It should be twenty to twenty-five in a Jeep or forty to fifty on a motorcycle, but it’s thirty to forty—”
“Does it matter?” Bailey asked, not wanting to talk over him but needing the big picture before he could triage the situation.
“Probably to Dean,” Reg said. “We need to keep it in mind. Okay, then. They travel for about six hours after they drop you off, and as it’s getting dark, they make camp. Now, according to my sources, they are out in the middle of Snakeshit Acres, but what do I know.”
“What,” Bailey joked grimly. “No satellite access?”
Reg gave him a baleful look. “I try not to do anything that can get me convicted or exiled to another country,” he said, with so much sincerity Bailey was suddenly very afraid.
“Understood. So they camp in the middle of Snakeshit Acres, and then….”
“And then…,” Reg murmured, almost to himself, “they camp some more. Why are we camping in Snakeshit Acres, Dean? What’s out there that keeps you and Marcus camping for two nights?
Hmm….” Reg grunted and continued to scroll the timeline.
“Okay. So, last night they… well, they traveled a little. Didn’t so much leave Snakeshit Acres as tour the grounds. And then….”
Bailey frowned at the map with the little red dot blinking. The dot didn’t go out , which was good because Bailey might have dropped dead right there from heart failure, but it did… fuzz?
“What’s causing that?” he asked.
“Interference,” Reg said bluntly. “Okay, so my map says Snakeshit Acres, but given Dean and Marcus stayed still like mice for two days and now their signals are getting fuzzy, I’m thinking there might be a big building or complex that’s not really Snakeshit in Snakeshit Acres.”
Bailey grunted with relief as he saw the other dot that was Marcus. “It looks like Marcus maybe charged his phone too,” Bailey said.
“He probably kept his off,” Reg told him. “Which makes me think they were really camped out. Dean kept his on and charged for emergencies, Marcus shut his off to save battery. And last night, as we slept, they snuck? I mean, it is sneaking if it’s late night/early morning, right?”
“Especially if you’re in Snakeshit Acres that’s not really Snakeshit Acres,” Bailey confirmed, both of them staring at the dots and the scroll of activity beside them.
“So they’re in a complex or camp or something,” Reg murmured.
“Something with enough of a computer tower or enough electronic equipment to make it harder to track their phones. Given that they camped out next to it for so long, I’m going to assume they want to be there, but what are they doing there? ”
And with that, he turned his hazel-eyed gaze to Bailey, who rubbed his stomach.
Oh God.
“This whole thing started when I saw a murder,” he said softly. “And then I saw the two hit men—Russian mobsters, Dean told me. Easily identifiable. And—” He swallowed. “—well known for their ties to the local drug cartel.”
“Oh wow,” Reg said, taking a deep breath.
“Okay, so that’s why you got pushed out of the plane.
They took you far away from where anybody could see you land, pushed you out, and arranged for pickup.
Boom! Suddenly you’re here , and my family is taking care of you so you don’t have an electronic footprint or a paper trail.
Have you told anybody where you are? Even texted somebody? ”
Bailey shook his head. “No. Dean told me not to, and my dad too. In fact I turned off my phone once I got picked up.” Dean had told him to do that somewhere in all that rush on the way to the airstrip.
To turn off his phone as soon as the plane revved.
If his father hadn’t been on the ground to greet him, he might have rethought it, but no, Dean had planned for everything.
“I had Val text my friend Sarree when he got back to Texas, so she’d know I was okay, but that’s it. ”
“Good,” Reg said, staring at the screen. “Because I think my brother and Marcus are doing something huge and dangerous out in Snakeshit Acres to make sure you don’t get hunted down because you saw a couple of Russian mobsters in the middle of cartel country.”
Bailey rubbed his stomach again and thought of Dean, plastering himself along Bailey’s back, holding him so tight Bailey forgot all about holding on to hurt, holding on to escape.
“Oh God,” he muttered. “Reg, he’s got to be okay.”
“I’m putting an alarm on this little dot,” Reg murmured. “The minute it goes on the move again, you and I are taking the family minivan to go greet it. How’s that sound?”
Dangerous. Reckless. The exact opposite of what Dean and Marcus had wanted them to do.
“I’m totally in,” Bailey said, because fuck Dean if he thought Bailey was going to leave him out there in Snakeshit Acres without Bailey as backup.