Bodyguard by Melanie Shawn

47

Gage

I satin the van with Bear, staring at the window of the apartment that we were pretty sure belonged to our target.

It had been a long couple days of research, but we had gone through every single piece of digital paper that Crypt had sent over. I was convinced that crypt had identified the correct kid. So was Bear. So was Savannah, for that matter. She didn't have the kind of training that Bear and I had, but she had damn good instincts, and I trusted them.

When we’d seen him for the first time through the window of the apartment, Bear and I agreed that that cinched the deal. The kid had Barlowe’s olive skin, his pinched eyes, and long, narrow, beak-like nose. The magic of genetics.

His name was Liam “Mac” Macintosh.

His mother had been one of Barlowe's whores, just like Woodward had said. Not only that, he was the right age, and he had the history of mysteriously disappearing arrests that we were looking for.

The clincher was that his mother’s solicitation busts had stopped right around the time the kid was born. Of course, it was completely understandable – maybe even predictable — that someone would want to stop hooking when they had a baby.

But, you would be surprised. That didn't always happen. In fact, it didn't even happen very often. When someone is trapped in the life… Well, they didn’t call it ‘trapped’ for no reason.

But, regardless of her professional aspirations, the one thing that was clear was that she never had a traceable source of income again after that. Yet, she was able to upgrade to a comfortable apartment in a nice neighborhood, where she had raised the kid in what looked, from every outside perspective, to be, if not luxury, then at least ease.

And even now, the kid himself lived in an apartment of his own, and survived with no visible means of support. He definitely didn't have a job. Not only had he never filed a tax return and had never had any income attributed to his Social Security number – thanks, Crypt – Bear and I had been watching him intermittently throughout both the day and night for the past couple of days.

Not only did he never leave the apartment, he never even left his couch and his gaming console. He had only gone to answer the door once. For a delivery from his hook up –of what looked like a pretty copious amount of weed.

From the looks of it, this wasn't some sort of staycation. This was his life.

This was Barlowe’s kid. No doubt about it.

His couch-bound lifestyle would make him easier to snatch in some ways. He clearly had no situational awareness. No awareness at all, really. We would have him in the van and be halfway back to the safe house before he even knew what was happening.

And that was another benefit — all of the weed in his system from long-term use would have slowed his reactions considerably. Even if he had had the requisite training to fight back against two trained operatives like Bear and me, he wouldn't have had the reflexes.

His lifestyle also presented significant challenges, though.

First of all, it wasn’t that he rarely left his apartment. He never left his apartment. The weed delivery had been the only time he’d even gone close to the door.

We had never seen him get a food delivery, but judging by the large number of empty pizza boxes strewn around his coffee table and the parts of the couch he wasn't sitting on, they did happen.

The kid was a literal couch potato.

What that meant was, if we were going to snatch him, we were either going to have to breach the perimeter of his apartment and grab him from inside, or we were going to have to lure him out.

Both scenarios presented problems. Serious ones.

Snatching him from inside his apartment was dangerous. After all, even if he had no sense of the world his father was involved in, his father did. And since his father was obviously paying for the apartment, he might have had it outfitted with security cameras so he could keep an eye on the kid. If I had been in Barlowe's position — a sentence that honestly made me sick to even think— that's what I would've done.

After all, considering the kid’s record and what Barlowe’d had to do to get it erased piece by piece, Mac had no talent for keeping himself out of trouble. I was sure that Barlowe must have taken steps to proactively keep him on the straight and narrow, since he clearly couldn't do it for himself.

And even setting that aside, there were practical concerns. Factors that made it more risky. Just the amount of time in exposure inherent in getting him from his apartment’s front door down to the van was a factor for consideration. There were ways around that, but no good ones.

Then there was the tactic of luring him out. That also came with issues. First of all, what would be a good enough lure? Just like with his father, we also only had one shot, most likely. No matter how dim a bulb he was, he was pretty likely to get suspicious if he was suddenly getting a lot of random invitations from Internet strangers.

And the other issue – there would be traces left. Digital traces of our presence.

If everything went well, that wouldn't matter. But you could never count on everything going well. Never. So it mattered.

"He's in for the night," Bear said. "We can probably head out."

I looked over at Bear and saw that his always-present smirk was in full effect. I got the joke. The kid was always in for the night. And the day. He was never out.

But, I couldn't really find it funny. Nothing against Bear, or his sense of humor. It was just that the problem was so complicated, the timeline was so short, and the stakes were so high. Nothing would be funny to me until Savannah was safe.

I nodded. "Yeah. Let's head back."

Hopefully, something brilliant would occur to me on the drive back to the safe house. Was it likely? No. But was it critical? Yes.