AN: I bet you thought I was going to be a long time before posting again! Actually what happened was I got on a roll with writing, finished the first draft of Saturday and started a new story. There are four chapters left after this one, thanks for all of your support and I hope you enjoy!
"Ow fuck!" I shouted as I woke up. I'd kicked something hard in my sleep, and whatever it was, was solid enough that I felt like I'd broken my middle toe.
"My sentiments exactly," Ranger said.
"Did I kick anything critical?" I asked, eyes closed and wincing.
"Just my shin."
"It could have been a lot worse?" I said. I opened my eyes, and I apologized by kissing him.
"You're keeping me on my toes, Babe. I'm used to you being something of a hazard magnet, but I didn't realize I was taking my life into my hands by sleeping next to you. Dreaming again?"
"Not that I can remember, but I keep waking up feeling like there's something on the tip of my brain."
"That explains the restlessness," he said. "The last time this happened, you got locked in a humidor. You probably have a little PTSD."
"That vacation your planning for us is probably a good idea," I said.
"It wouldn't hurt," he said.
His phone rang, and he reached behind him to pick it up off of the nightstand. "Yo," he said. He paused for a second. "You're sure? We'll be down in a minute."
"What's up?" I asked. I took his phone from him so that I could check the time. We'd crashed after Ranger had decided to thoroughly scratch his itch. It was a little after six.
"Lester's back," Ranger said.
"Where the hell has he been?"
"Establishing a presence elsewhere," Ranger said.
"Is this one of those, 'the less I know, the better,' scenarios?"
"Probably," Ranger said. "Come on. I think you need this meeting that's about to happen."
I got dressed but refused to put on anything with a waistband. I rooted around in my closet and found a dress Ella had bought me a few months ago. It was a "post-workout" dress by some athletics wear company and made of stretchy cotton. It was sleeveless and had an adjustable ruched hemline. I drew on the little strings on one side of the dress to be a little above my knee. Ranger walked by me and yanked the ties until the skirt barely covered my doodah. We compromised for it being two inches below my ass. It was still plenty short, but I wasn't going to flash anyone the second I sat down. I shoved my feet in a pair of flip flops, and we made our way downstairs.
We went to one of the conference rooms, where a team that included Lester, Bobby, Hector, Hal, Ram, and Minnie was waiting for us. I plopped down in a seat next to Lester, "Hey Buddy," I said. "I hope you don't mind, but I borrowed your cube today."
"I don't," he said, "I assume you had a reason?"
"I spent a few hours with your sister having a stats lesson; I wanted to crunch some numbers while it was still fresh in my head, and you have the same fancy calculator she has."
"Who do you think bought her the calculator? What did Molly teach you?"
"Standard Deviation. I'm going through a bunch of ballplayers' game stats and seeing if there's anything funky with them."
"And you're doing it by hand? You know you can do that shit in Excel, right?"
"Well, I do now!" I said. "Do you know how much time I wasted figuring that shit out?"
"I'm surprised Molly didn't show you the formulas for it," Lester said. "Hell, once you told her what you were calculating, she normally would have formatted the spreadsheet for you and everything."
"Well, I didn't exactly tell her what it was for; I just told her I wanted to know how to do it so I could understand something better."
"Ah," he said.
"Shit! I didn't want her to be involved that much, but that would have saved me a lot of trouble."
"Julie's doing data entry shit. Get her to build and populate the spreadsheet, and I'll put the formulas in before I go," Lester said.
"Are you here long?"
"Couple of days, maybe less. I have to go to Boston, and I like to get there early to get settled before I have to think," he said.
"There's more math to go with the Standard Deviation stuff. Can you look at that for me too?"
"Yep," he said. "And hey, look on the bright side, you learned something new today. Would you like a Scooby snack?"
Ranger cocked an eyebrow at Lester, "Laugh it up. She's about to make you feel like an idiot."
"Wouldn't be a first for me," Lester said. "But in this case, I doubt it. I've been over this thing with a fine-toothed comb. There are no flaws in this plan. Not a one. Minnie has learned from the Master, and he's done me proud."
"Enlighten us then, would you?" Ranger said.
"It's a simple enough plan," Lester said. "I've had a look at their security systems and have a workaround that will get us in and out. The cameras on-site are dummies, so all we have to do is get in, plant the keystroke log and get out. We'll wait a week and retrieve the data. Easy peasy, and the system won't detect a virus because we're not planting a virus."
"You've scouted the place?" Ranger said.
"No, I'm using the intel Ram gave me."
"Ram?" Ranger said.
"We've watched the target for the last three weeks. She has a set routine. Tuesday to Friday, she gets to work at 08:55 and leaves promptly at 17:00. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, she takes kickboxing lessons. Mondays, she starts work at 08:30 and leaves at 16:30. This is the day she does her shopping. Weekends she sticks to her house except for the early service at St. Mike's and Sunday dinner in New Brunswick with her family."
"How did you acquire this information? I didn't authorize anyone to follow her," Ranger said.
"Minnie planted a GPS tracker on her car," Ram said.
"Minnie?" Ranger said.
"We think Sunday is our best bet. The building is empty all day; of all staff. If we were to park at the service entrance, we wouldn't be visible from the street. We'd make entry there, plant the keystroke log, and pick it up the following week."
"You don't think people will notice a car entering the empty lot?" Ranger asked.
"No," Minnie said. "Last week, we planted a camera in the lot to check activity on Sundays, and it's not unusual for people to drive up to the door to check the hours of operation."
"Show me where the service entrance is," Ranger said. Hector punched somethings on his iPad, and the smart board in the meeting room lit up with a picture of the library.
"You're fucking kidding me," I said. "This is all so you can break into the library?"
"Well, the computer they use for their billing is completely off-network," Lester said. "It's the only way we're going to get the account information."
"And you've all thought long and hard about this?" I said.
"Yeah," he said.
I turned to Ranger. "You told me they were thinking a little too far outside of the box."
"I did," Ranger said.
"They aren't thinking outside of the box," I said. "They've lost the box, Ranger. Hell, that box is no longer in New Jersey."
"What?" Lester demanded, looking at me, "What did I miss? We've all been over this a million fucking times."
"Ranger asked Minnie to find out where Mark Duggan was vacationing weeks ago so we could ask him for permission to access mom's files."
"Uh oh," Minnie said.
"Where the hell did you geniuses think he went? Mars? The man's probably been back for the majority of the time you've been working on this! Instead of breaking and entering, why don't we try something revolutionary like I dunno, going to the library?"
"But we've made all of these plans," Lester said.
"Just how much time have you all devoted to this?" I asked.
"More than you want to know," Ranger said.
"Jesus, no wonder mom's still pissy; I thought we'd handled this weeks ago!"
"Would it make this any better if we told you that we put this much effort into this for you because we care?" Bobby asked.
"Did you?" I asked.
"No," Bobby said. "We lost the plot a little bit."
"In fairness," Ram said. "I didn't know that you wanted a 20 on Mark Duggan. I joined in when they said they needed to track Irene Sporkle. Hal too."
"So who was the genius who originally misplaced the plot?" I asked.
Everyone looked at Lester, "I've had a lot on my mind recently, okay? Minnie came up to me and asked me how he was supposed to find Mark Duggan. The man pays cash for everything, and it was going to take a bit. I said it would probably be easier to just hack into the computer, and that's when we got Hector involved. Then the stuff happened with Molly, and that's when Bobby took over."
The office played broken telephone, and Minnie got swept away by those more experienced than him. "Well, Genius," I said. "Do you know how late the library is open?"
"2030," Lester said.
"In English," I said.
"8:30," Minnie said.
"Come on, Jackass," I said to Lester, "Let's sort out this mess."
"In the meantime," Ranger said to Minnie, "Get your cousin, Julie; I want the two of you to get started on the data entry. Santos is probably going to be leaving town in the morning. I want him to be able to work with it before he leaves. It's the blue binder in Santos's cube. Bring it to me before you get started."
"Can we work on it in my apartment? I'm starving," Minnie asked.
Ranger nodded, and when Minnie left the conference room, the men took that as a dismissal and started gathering their stuff.
"No," Ranger said, and they all froze. "Santos, Brown, Ram, and Hal, you will be on the Kazinsky stakeout tonight. Hector, you'll be doing a shift on the monitors."
Damn. That sucked. Kazinsky was a fugitive with a high price on his head. It seemed he was good at breaking out of jail but not so good at not getting caught again. All you had to do was wait at one of four locations, and within a week, he'd show up. Since he was so easy to catch, they didn't put a lot of manpower into it, only one man per car, who would call for backup when Kazinsky showed up. It was fucking boring, and monitor duty was almost as bad.
"This sucks," Lester pouted as we walked to the car.
"Do you realize this almost got Morelli killed?" I said.
"How do you figure?" The idea seemed to cheer Lester.
"Mom has been pissed for weeks, and I thought it was still about the wedding. It's about a stupid book! I told her weeks ago that Ranger said he would take care of it, which is why she hasn't been nagging me about it constantly. All this time, she's been freaked out that the neighbours are going to find out about her bad standing with the library, and she's taking it out on dad."
"I'm not following," Lester said. So I told him all about how dad cracked under the punishment she was inflicting and decided to kill Morelli. When I was finished, Lester was grinning. "That's going to make up for the numb ass I'm going to develop tonight on the Kazinsky job. Remind me to buy your dad a bottle of Scotch."
We got into my Boxter, and Lester headed towards the library. Rush hour was over, so the traffic was moving, but it was still heavy. "So you found out about Joe and Molly, huh?" Lester said. "Are you okay?"
"I've known about Joe and Molly for longer than you've known about Joe and Molly," I said. "I just didn't want to hear you bitch about it."
"Oh, come on! I've not been that bad!"
"Ranger was considering sending you to Turkmenistan without a passport, so you'd have enough time on your journey home to get used to the idea and stop whining."
"I'm hurt that you didn't want to be there for me in my hour of need," Lester said.
"You wrote off my car when you found out!"
"Okay, that's fair, but I'm better now."
"Uh-huh," I said. "Whatever."
"I'll prove it. Next time someone brings up Joe and Molly, I'll just stand there with a smile on my face."
"Because you're happy your little sister is happy, or because my dad's gifted you with the mental picture of Joe being improbably castrated?"
"Was he planning on just using his bare hands, or did he bring tools? You know, so I can accurately construct visualization."
I rolled my eyes, "You'll have to ask my dad. I didn't get all of the particulars."
We arrived at the library, and we went inside. "Oh good, Gladys is here," I said when I saw her nameplate on the desk. Lester chuckled softly to himself, and I didn't entirely trust that particular laugh.
"What?"
"Nothing," he said. "I'm just picturing a little granny wearing a cardigan, has her hair in a bun, and glasses on a chain around her neck."
Well, he was a little right. Gladys was maybe in her mid-twenties, gorgeous, and she had a cardigan draped over the back of her chair. When I last saw her, her hair was blonde to pink ombre.
She wasn't at the desk, so Lester rang the bell, and she exited the little office behind the counter. A soft copper blonde had replaced the blonde and pink hair that she had loosely French braided and draped over her shoulder. It turned out, though, that Lester was half right and that she did wear a pair of glasses on a chain around her neck. They were almost invisible against her grey shirt. They were frameless, octagonal lenses, with a pale gold nose piece and arms.
"Oh hello, Stephanie," she said, but her eyes strayed to Lester. He was pretty good looking, so I didn't exactly blame her.
"Loving the hair," I said. "The pink was cool, too, though."
"This is my natural hair," she said, bringing her attention back to me. "I have to be in the mood for pink. What can I do for you?"
"My mother borrowed a book about two years ago, and I said I'd return it. Only I'm pretty sure it got blown up in one of my car wrecks."
"Oh dear," she said and sat down in front of her computer. She put the glasses on, and they just seemed to enhance her hazel eyes rather than do anything to hide her face. "What's your mother's name?"
"Helen Plum."
She did some typing. "I have an Ellen Plum. Could that be it?"
"Yes," I said. "Mom would have been too polite to correct the mistake."
She read off mom's address, and it was undoubtedly her.
"Well, that's not right," Gladys said.
"What isn't?"
"This fine is ludicrous," she said. "Give me a moment."
She did some more typing on the computer and shook her head. "Yes, we wrote that book off eighteen months ago and replaced it. Your mother's fine is $30 for the cost of the book, not $980. The program is supposed to cap the charges at the cost of replacing the book and not keep building up the fines to this level. I mean, honestly. I told Mark that we shouldn't give that intern the responsibility of putting the new books into the system. You'd be surprised how inept people can be when filling out a database."
She did some more typing, corrected the mistake, and printed off mom a new library card.
"Can you tell us what the name of the book is?" I asked.
"Yes," Gladys said, "It's called the Wake of Lady O'Reilly."
"And you say you have a copy here?"
"We should," Gladys said and went back to her computer, "Oh wow, we have four copies of it. There's only one left; it appears to be a popular book."
"Where can I find it?" I asked. "I'm not going to check it out; I just want to take a picture of the cover for my mom."
"Sure," she said. "I can't leave the desk at the moment because I'm starting to close up, but I can tell you where to find it."
She gave me the instructions, and I went off in search of the book while Lester stayed behind to hit on the sexy librarian. The book was unsurprisingly a romance novel and a well-read one from the looks of it. I flipped it over. It was about a woman who goes to her aunt's funeral in Ireland and learns that she's the heiress to her aunt's vast estates. There's a man at the funeral who will do anything to get his hands on the estate, even if it means seducing the heiress. But what will she do when she learns his secrets?
It wasn't the sort of thing that usually floated my boat, but as we have already discussed, I'm hardly a prolific reader, and maybe it was good. I was sure as hell not going to borrow it from the library, though. Just in case it got blown up again. I could have gone back to the desk at that point, but I felt it was my duty as a fellow Rangeman to serve as Lester's wingman and decided that I would browse for a bit longer so he could work his magic. After about ten minutes, I walked back through the stacks to find that Lester was now behind the desk, his hand on the back of Gladys's chair as he leaned around her to show her something on the computer.
She handed him a new library card and smiled at him; from the look she was giving him, he'd had enough time to seal the deal on at least her number, if not a date. I came back and held up my phone to show them the picture. "I'm done. I'd like to go to my mother's house now to show her that the book is finally dealt with."
"I'm good to go," Lester said and tapped his library card on the desk before putting it in his wallet. "Remember what I said."
"I'll believe it when it happens," Gladys said. He winked at her, and I waved goodbye.
"You're terrible," I said once we were in the parking lot. "You're going out of town, and you have to work tonight."
"Your point?" Lester asked with a grin.
"She has a very protective big brother, you know?"
"I'm familiar with the breed," he said, still grinning, "Besides, I like a challenge."
"I'll drop you off back at Rangeman if you want, and then I'll head over to mom's."
"That's a good idea," he said. "I'd like to eat and grab a shower before I have to sit and be bored."
"Remember your new mental picture."
"Oh, that's been replaced," Lester said. "I've always like gingers."
I rolled my eyes again and dropped him off at Rangeman and then drove to my parents' house. My cell phone rang as I pulled onto their street and saw my mother's name on the phone. "I'm just outside," I said when I answered.
She disconnected without saying anything and ran to the door. That she hadn't been there waiting for me already should have been my clue that something was up, but I figured it out quickly when I saw the expression on her face as she flung open the screen door. She looked shaken. I ran up the steps to the door, and she waved me in. "What's happened? Is it grandma? Dad?"
"No," mom said and ushered me into the living room. Sitting on the sofa looking haggard and in desperate need of a shower was Waldo Dickerson.
"You have to help me," he said.
