Thank you, as always, for reading and reviewing.
Apologies for the delay on this update, and if my editing is not up to standard - I have been really unwell, and my energy and creativity reserves are at zero. Hope you enjoy anyway!

Adding Up

Over the next week, I worked with Tank to update the business plan with the recommendations from their visit. We were recommending the purchase of the Haywood Street building, and Ramon had tentatively indicated he would be willing to fund fifty percent of the purchase and refit of the building, in return for a forty-nine percent investment return on net profits for at least five years. Tank told me that Carlos would want to buy Ramon out eventually, but that a five-year investment would likely be acceptable. I wasn't a financial expert, but it sounded like a good deal to me. Rangeman Miami had the lawyers and accountants to work through the details and advise Carlos on the final decision.

When Carlos gets back.

I was starting to get more anxious and edgy as the days turned into weeks.

Vinnie had given us another FTA, and I was able to negotiate that I would do all the research and then Lester would fly up and he and Hector would collect the skip when I had a time and location established. I was working hard on trying to track this guy down; Lacosa was wanted for arson and possession of explosives, and this was his third arrest. Lester and Marco warned me not to make myself a target, so I was trying to keep my investigations and research as discreet as possible. I had spoken with his girlfriend on the phone, hinting that Lacosa was cheating with my best friend, and she might be pregnant. His girlfriend was initially sceptical, then furious, and eventually she gave me an address for Lacosa's cousin. I had done some surveillance, but up to now had seen no signs he had been staying there. It was possible the girlfriend had fed me a line, but I was going to do one more surveillance shift before I gave up on the address.

I had borrowed Mary Lou's minivan and parked on the curb outside a house three doors up on the other side of the street. ML was thrilled to drive my Miata for a few hours; she and her husband Lenny were going to have a date night after leaving the kids with her parents. We had swapped out cars after the school pickup and drop off, and I was hunkered down as dusk fell, trying to be invisible and keep watch on the house where Lacosa may be. I was feeling anxious and restless. It was Thursday evening, and tomorrow was my last day of the business computing course and the final tests. I would much rather be home studying than sitting here waiting on this creep. I thought I would do well on the tests; I certainly hoped so. But I wanted to read over as much as I could before the tests started.

I would have tried to study while I sat here, but I couldn't for two good reasons. Firstly, I would have needed a light, and that would have drawn attention. Secondly, I would likely get distracted with the study, and miss Lacosa if he did happen to wander by. Ninety excruciating minutes passed, and I had started to fidget, restlessly, as my buttocks became numb with the inactivity. I tried to stretch out my arms and legs in the confines of the minivan seat, without much success. As I was turning my neck to stretch out the kinks there, I caught a flicker of movement from the corner of my eye. I froze, and slid lower in the seat, while I pulled up a pair of binoculars that I had borrowed from my grandma. I didn't know why grandma had them, and I didn't want to know. But I had gladly borrowed them for my surveillance. I just wished they had night vision.

I peered through the binoculars into the gloom of the almost-dark at the figure moving stealthily along the other side of the road. He had a hoodie pulled up but was the right height and rough size for Lacosa. I slid even lower as he looked over at the minivan as he passed, but he made no acknowledgment of it, and turned back to head toward the cousin's house. As he walked up the front path, an automatic light came on and illuminated the figure's face. He had turned his head slightly toward me, and I felt a flush of excitement and satisfaction as I realised it was Lacosa. Or someone who looked very much like him. I suppose the cousin could be a lookalike, but the way the figure had moved toward the house had strongly suggested stealth, and he was wearing the hoodie on a warm summer evening, so I was leaning toward Lacosa trying not to be seen.

I could not help the wave of relief that swept over me. Both that I could stop this frustrating surveillance effort and also that I had succeeded alone to track this man down and identify him. It gave me a sense of accomplishment and a rush of pleasure that I helped Carlos and Rangeman. I waited about fifteen minutes before starting up the minivan and motoring off out of the area. I drove back to my apartment; Mary Lou and I were swapping our cars back early tomorrow before school drop off.

When I was back in my apartment, I called Lester on my cell phone. He answered almost immediately, "Yo."

"Yo, yourself Lester. Guess what?"

"You found him Beautiful?" Ever since his visit to Trenton, Lester had started to call me Beautiful. I was a little embarrassed by the nickname, but it was certainly flattering.

"Yep! Sure did. He's staying at his cousin's house, and I spotted him walking home this evening. Even saw pretty clearly since there was an automatic light out front of the house."

Les snorted at that, "Amateur."

I smiled, "So when do you think you can get up here?"

I could hear the flirtatious leer in his voice as he replied, "Missing me that much, Beautiful? I knew I ruined you for other men!"

I laughed but replied, "Sorry Les, in another lifetime, maybe. But another man already ruined me."

"Oh, Beautiful, you wound me so deeply! My heart is breaking." His voice dropped back to semi-seriousness as he continued, "I can probably get there tomorrow late afternoon. I'll check with Hector that he can help, and then book a flight. I'll let you know."

"How is Hector's arm? Will he be ok to help?"

"No problem, Steph. He's pretty much recovered; it was just a flesh wound."

I was relieved to hear it, "Did you want me to come and pick you up at the airport?"

Lester considered for a moment, "No. I know you have your course finals tomorrow night. You should stay and study for it. I'll get a cab to Ranger's apartment and take his truck."

"But how will you get into his apartment, Les? Do you have spare key?"

"Beautiful," was his only reply.

"What does that mean? I don't understand."

He sighed almost inaudibly, "I don't need a key, Steph. I can get in without one."

"Oh." I should have guessed. He probably had mad break-in skills. All of Rangeman employees probably had mad skills. Let alone Carlos. "Ok, then. Well, let me know what you figure out. I'll be at the college campus until after 8pm, but I will want to hear from you after eight. Whenever you pick him up, I want to know. And don't get hurt this time!" I added fiercely.

He chuckled lowly, "I can't promise Beautiful, but I'll try. Ok, well I'll call you tomorrow and let you know what I'm doing. Meanwhile, you get some sleep and knock 'em dead tomorrow night with your finals."

"Thanks, Les. Good night."

"Night Beautiful."

The next morning, I rose early to drive over to Mary Lou's to swap back our cars. Mornings at the Stankovic household were chaotic. ML had two school-age kids and two who juggled preschool or playgroups on different days. I tried not to disrupt the organised chaos since ML seemed to be somewhat in control, and just left quickly to drive to the Tasty Pastry bakery to grab some donuts and coffee, since I was in the Burg.

The Tasty Pastry is the bakery I worked at when I was sixteen; the first job I had. I looked back on it mostly fondly, because of the leftovers and 'imperfect' items I had scored while working there. Less of a fond memory was the memory of losing my virginity to Joe Morelli behind the éclair case. The experience itself wasn't the worst memory, but the fallout from him writing about it in Burg bathrooms and then bunking off into the Navy was hideous.

I stood in line, inhaling the scents and basking in an impending sugar coma, when my pleasant musings were interrupted by a leering voice. "Hey cupcake. Fancy meeting you here." Speak of the devil and he flies out your ass!

I tried not to sigh, "Good morning, Detective," I replied formally. I wasn't going to give him an inch. Or an opening.

He stepped up into my space and murmured, "You can call me Joe, cupcake. Or anything else you want," he smirked.

I deliberately stepped away from him, "Thank you, Detective," was all I replied.

He sighed and rolled his eyes at me. "Being here sure does bring back memories," he went on in what was clearly intended to be a seductive tone. "For both of us, I imagine."

I tried desperately to restrain myself, but in the end, I could not help responding, in a deathly cold and quiet voice, "I certainly do remember being fired after the owners heard about what you wrote on filthy bathroom walls." I added a fleeting, scathing sideways glance. "I remember being harassed by boys who thought I was easy because of a boy who couldn't resist destroying my reputation and damaging my future, before he ran away like a coward. That's what memories are coming back to me." I took a deep breath and turned away from him, "Please excuse me, Detective, I seem to have lost my appetite."

I turned and walked out of the bakery and made my way to my car, trembling with anger-induced adrenaline. Inside, I tried to take some more deep breaths. Through the window, I could see Morelli standing there, looking at me, with a dumbfounded expression on his face. Either he never got turned down before, or he had never realised how badly I had taken his previous actions. Given that I had actually run him over with a Buick, it didn't say a lot for his detective skills if he couldn't tell I didn't like him. I ignored him and drove off quickly. I decided to go to the golden arches to grab a breakfast sandwich and coffee, since I did not get my donuts.

At the office, I managed to put Morelli out of my mind, as I concentrated on some administrative tasks and typing up a draft template for a letter of introduction for Rangeman to local businesses. I was also making a list of things we would need to do to go ahead with the purchase of the Haywood Street building. It wasn't a fait accompli just yet, but I was really hopeful it would go ahead.

After grabbing a sandwich for lunch from the deli downstairs, I came back up to continue studying for my tests tonight. I was startled from my review of Excel functions by the ringing of my office phone. I answered it to hear Lester greeting me cheerfully, "Hi Beautiful, just letting you know I have spoken with Hector and we're good to go for tonight. I'm on my way to the airport now and will be in Newark by sixteen hundred." I had to think about that for a minute before realising he meant 4pm. "I'll pick Hec up at eighteen-thirty and we'll head over to the address. Can you just give it to me again?"

I repeated the address for the cousin's house and wished him and Hector luck with the pickup. I reminded him to call me when he was done, as long as it was after eight. He agreed and left to go to the airport.

I went back to my studying. I could feel a sense of unease at the back of my mind. It had been niggling for a couple of days now, but I couldn't place it. I was fairly sure it wasn't for my tests or the pickup that Les and Hector were doing, so I could only let it sit and germinate. I hoped it wasn't a portent of something bad to come.

Tricia and I sat in our last class, watching as Mr Logan went around, handing out the tests. The written test had gone well, and I was pretty confident I had achieved good marks. We were now in the lab class and about to begin our practical test. I was on edge, hoping I would be able to accomplish it successfully. We had been told there were six tasks to complete, so we should take no more than ten minutes to complete each to get done in time.

As Mr Logan put our test booklet down beside each of us, I mouthed 'Good luck' to Tricia and she nodded and mouthed, 'You too'. I opened the booklet when directed, and relaxed as I saw the first task, 'Write an email to w_logan introducing yourself as a business owner and promoting your goods or services. Include an image from the temporary files on the computer as part of the email.'

I set to work. I wrote the email pretty quickly. The images were basic pictures of people at work. I selected one that looked like a beefy man in a uniform to represent a security officer and talked about the importance of security. After I finished the email, I moved to a task to create an income and expenditure spreadsheet based on the figures given for a butcher's shop, setting up formulae to calculate incoming and outgoing finances. I added a couple of columns for additional expenses like insurance and utilities, and for projected savings, based on a percentage of profits. I hoped my initiative would earn me an extra mark or two.

The next task was to create a short, four-slide presentation for an art show, using some clip-art images of paintings and sculptures. I had played around with PowerPoint some more on my own, and I had found out how to use images as backgrounds through trial and error. So, I took an image of an abstract design in pale pastels to use as the background and tried to make the text and images look as professional and informative as I could. The fourth task was to write in Word a proposal for an event in four weeks, with dot-point descriptions of the event, and a table with a planning timeline. There were three example events listed, so I chose one for a business lunch for a visiting client from Japan. I used my knowledge of the Japanese restaurant in Newark to include some information about food choices and venue, so I hoped that added to my planning.

The last two tasks were related to the internet. There were a series of questions where we had to try and find information or sources of information as answers by searching on at least three search tools. The last task was to create a web page. It was just simple HTML; we were given the file of text and had to format it up to display effectively. We had to choose a background colour, a font for the text, an image from the temporary files at the centre top, and one other feature of our choosing. I chose to replace the bullet dots in the text with tiny images of arrows. The first background colour I chose turned out to be a vibrant orange. It was certainly eye-catching, but I thought it made it pretty hard to read the text. So, I looked for another colour, eventually settling on a pale blue. The black text and bright yellow arrows seemed to pop pretty well on the screen, so I decided I was happy.

It was still about five minutes before the test was scheduled to be finished, so I went back over everything I had done, correcting a typo in the Word document, adding borders to cells in the spreadsheet, recentering the image and playing around with a couple of fonts on the web page, before deciding on Century Gothic. I thought the Comic Sans font was cute, but not very professional or businesslike. I drew in a deep breath of relief when Mr Logan announced the test was over. On his instruction, we all copied our files over to the floppy disk provided and wrote our names and college IDs on the labels, before handing them in.

I smiled as I looked over at Tricia and she nodded at me. I hoped we had both done well. Mr Logan spoke for a couple of minutes, telling us that he would be marking our tests next week and we would receive a letter from him with our results within two weeks. He then wished us luck and said he hoped we would come back for more courses at Mercer County Community. We gave him a cheer and stood to gather our things and move toward the door.

Several of the students in the class mentioned they were heading over to a nearby bar for a celebratory drink and Tricia and I decided to join them. It had been a long two weeks without Carlos, and, despite my successes, I needed a break.

I liked your guesses for the next character to be introduced. But you're going to have to wait to find out if you were right. He, he, he... (evil laugh) Please review!