Bodyguard by Melanie Shawn

24

Gage

I hadn’t seenCrypt in a while, but he hadn’t changed much in all the years that I’d known him, and—much like my grandmother with the cell phone—I didn’t see any reason why he’d think now was a good time to start.

Bear pulled his black SUV, which was pretty similar to mine, up to the unassuming roll-up door in what looked like any other decaying brick warehouse in the slightly-run-down section of any urban sprawl.

We sat for a moment. Much like at Bear’s place, there was no buzzer to press. There wasn’t even a visible security camera. In fact, if you didn’t know what you were looking for, you would have sworn the place was deserted.

That was exactly how Crypt wanted it.

After just a few seconds, the door rolled up and we pulled inside. Bear stopped the SUV just a few feet inside the building and we climbed out.

“Back here!” came a thin, reedy voice from the cavernous recesses of the echoey space. We started walking toward it without a word.

Well inside the space, where no light from the monitors could have reached any of the barred windows placed high on the three-story-high walls even if they hadn’t been blacked out, Crypt had a setup unlike any I’d ever seen.

I didn’t understand any of his equipment, and I’d never asked him to explain. Not that he would’ve. Trying to dumb his genius down to my level would be, in his opinion, a waste of precious time and energy.

Crypt sat in front of a bank of monitors, the artificial light giving his sallow skin an even more unhealthy glow.

In some ways, he was like the typical nerd-hacker you’d see in a movie. He had a non-descript face, was in indeterminate early-to-mid-adulthood, wore glasses, and a perpetual uniform of ill-fitting jeans and a hoodie.

In other ways, though, he was anything but typical. He was almost seven feet tall, and lanky. Really lanky. So much so that I’d sometimes wondered how his wrists didn’t snap when he slammed them down on the melamine counter that his keyboard rested on when he was particularly fired up about a problem he was trying to solve.

Despite his skinny frame, though, I’d never seen the guy when he wasn’t stuffing his face with junk food. Salty, sweet, savory—it didn’t matter. The only requirement seemed to be that it was unhealthy. Snacks were chips, soda, candy. Meals were burgers, microwave burritos, pizza pockets. He was probably only in his late twenties or early thirties, but I still wasn’t quite sure how he hadn’t dropped dead of a heart attack yet.

“Took you long enough,” he grumbled.

There was also the stress that being a grumpy bastard a hundred and ten percent of the time must have caused on his ticker. Yeah. I was mystified how he was still walking around.

“We have a bit of a tough one for you,” I said. I had no idea if that were true. There was no scale I could understand that would measure how tough or easy something was to him. But I knew that he loved to show off. If I could get him interested in showing me how easy something was for him when I had thought it would be difficult, he’d do it twice as fast just to be able to sneer at me.

And if it actually was tough, then accomplishing it would give him bragging rights. Which he’d take full advantage of.

“Hit me,” he said, and then popped a Bagel Bite mini-pizza in his mouth.

I swear, I’d never seen anything go down his gullet where the demographic the commercial would be aimed at was anyone over ten years old.

“We’ve got a breach in WITSEC. My protectee was in for the last twelve years. Her father went up against Mitch Barlowe. Three nights ago, her father was assassinated. She escaped. We need to know how the breach went down. We also need details on Barlowe. Anything you can give us. And we need to know the details of how the father pissed off Barlowe, and if he might have still had anything on him.”

“The daughter doesn’t know?”

I glanced at Savannah. I knew it must be excruciating to hear the details of her personal tragedy played out in such a cold, matter-of-fact recitation. But she was stone-faced. Crypt hadn’t even guessed that she was the protectee. That’s how much strong, capable energy she gave off.

I was about to answer when she chimed in.

“No,” she said evenly. “He never wanted to talk about it.”

Crypt looked up at her. The first time he’d taken his eyes from his monitors the entire time we’d been here. He stared at her for a long moment. I thought he must be realizing that she’d just lost her father. I thought I might witness the first kind words I’d ever heard come out of his mouth.

Finally, he mumbled, “That was dumb,” and looked back at his monitor.

Should’ve known better.

I took an involuntary step forward, body tensing, brows drawn together. I don’t know what I’d been planning on doing. Hell, there wasn’t a plan. But it never got that far. Savannah put her hand on my wrist and, when I looked at her, shook her head.

I took a deep breath. She was right. We needed Crypt. I couldn’t kick his fucking ass because he was an asshole. Besides. He’d always been an asshole. So, basically, he was just being himself.

“Names.”

He spat the command, and I complied, listing off the names of everyone involved and what their role in the situation was. He typed furiously as I did so.

We stood, waiting as he continued to pound the keyboard. After a few minutes, he looked up, face crinkled in an expression of bewilderment, as if he hadn’t expected to see us there. “It’s gonna take a while. Go...sit...or something.”

Immediately, he was immersed in his work again. We made our way over to a couch that sat off to the side, like an afterthought. We sat in tense silence, no one wanting to disturb the charged atmosphere, in which only the sound of clicking keys and the occasional beep sounded.

Savannah reached over and took my hand. It wasn’t romantic. It was to steady herself. I could tell the difference. Even Bear didn’t raise an eyebrow. Although I wasn’t sure he would’ve either way. He could probably sense the history between us. And he was never one for personal talk.

Finally Crypt said, “Yeah. Okay. Got something.”

We stood and walked over. Savannah never let go of my hand. Hers was trembling a little now.

We circled around behind Crypt so we could see his monitors.

There wasn’t much to see. Scanned documents covered the screen, but they overlapped and weren’t laid out in any kind of intelligible way so that they formed a coherent narrative.

“What’s the upshot?” Bear asked.

I was glad. I felt like Crypt was already annoyed enough with me based on the minimal things I’d already said. That only slowed him down.

Just one more example of the way Bear and I functioned like a well-oiled machine. I was relieved to have him on Savannah’s team.

Crypt shrugged. “There was something they were looking for. Something her father had that they wanted back.”

“What was it?” Savannah asked. It seemed like the obvious question.

Crypt looked at her like she was crazy, though. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t have said ‘something.’”

He wasn’t wrong. But he was also wearing down my patience. Normally, I was able to put up with his eccentricities. I didn’t really have a choice, if I wanted to avail myself of his talent. They were a package deal. But with Savannah, it was different. With Savannah, I wanted fucking results, and I wanted them fucking now.

I opened my mouth to speak, but Savannah placed another restraining hand on my wrist. I snapped my mouth shut. Fuck. She was probably right. She’d always been better than I was at saying the right things to people.

I seethed. Fucking Crypt. Why couldn’t he just be a genius and a normal person?

“Can you give us any clues? Bigger than a breadbox?” Bear asked dryly.

Probably best to let him do the talking for a while. He didn’t have the kind of personal skin in the game that I did, so there was a lot less of a chance that he would snap Crypt’s head off and burn our best tech contact.

Or knock his fucking teeth in. Which I’d never been tempted to do before, no matter how much of a jackass he’d been.

FUCK.As much as I loved having Savannah back, the raging protectiveness I felt for her, twenty-four hours a day since the moment I’d seen her soaking wet and shivering on my porch, was burning a hole in my gut. I was going to have to get it under control if I were going to keep operating at peak levels.

The only question was: how?