“I’m not letting some unknown stranger touch my mom’s laptop-”
“Jack knows people that he can trust who can get it for us and bring it to us safe and sound.” Annabelle cut her gaze from Dylan to Jack. She knew she was right.
Jack closed his mouth again and blinked. Then his smile broadened and he shook his head slowly. “Very well. I’ll make a phone call.” He reached back into the pocket of the sports coat and pulled out the same cell phone he’d used before. Then he used his other hand to pull a second cell phone from the opposite inside pocket. The second phone, he tossed to Annabelle, who caught it easily but looked up at him questioningly. “Order a pizza,” he told her as he opened his phone and turned to leave the room. “I have no food in this bloody apartment.”
“We’re going to need to get a copy of that suicide note,” Annabelle said, breaking the silence that had enveloped the three of them. They were sitting in the entertainment room of the vast apartment, Dylan on the couch, now wearing a black Rolling Stones t-shirt and tennis shoes with his jeans, Annabelle and Jack in opposite chairs. The furniture set faced a forty-inch screen on which Linda Hamilton, whose body reminded Annabelle of a much skinnier version of Sherry, stabbed a Buck knife into a wooden table and then got up and left. The director’s cut of Terminator Two was a shared love between Dylan and Annabelle. Normally, they would be commenting on editorial mistakes and physical unlikelihoods throughout the entire movie, but at the moment, Dylan stared at the screen as if he couldn’t see it. And Annabelle stared at Jack.
He stared back.
“Yes. I’ve already taken care of it.”
Annabelle didn’t wonder at how he’d accomplished that. She knew him well enough by now. With some effort, she pulled her gaze away from his and glanced, distractedly, at the screen. She ran her hands through her hair, which was still damp from her five-minute shower, and separated the long strands so that they could dry. She’d dressed in clothes that Jack had just happened to have on-hand in this apartment. The man obviously enjoyed shopping at Victoria’s Secret, because she was now wearing a pair of Victoria’s Secret Pink sweats, a few layering V.S. tank tops and a signature Pink zip-up hooded sweat shirt. Everything was in her size. Not Sherry’s, who would most likely need a size or two larger than Annabelle, just to squeeze all of those muscles into. Annabelle couldn’t help but mull that over in her head. Jack, shopping for her. What did that mean?
After donning a fresh pair of white socks, she’d slipped back into her riding boots. They looked preposterous with the rest of her outfit, but she felt more comfortable with them on. They were familiar. They gave her some small sense of power, of control over her situation. They were practically all she ever wore these days.
Besides, she figured she’d set a trend tonight and pretty soon, women across the country would be wearing sweats with biker boots. Or hiking boots. Hell, they already wore sweats with Uggs.
Jack had put back on his sports coat and looked like a cross between James Bond and whatever bad guy wanted Bond dead. There was a knock at the door. One loud bang followed by several seconds of silence and then another loud bang. Annabelle turned a questioning look on Jack and Dylan turned to look at him as well.
Jack took a deep breath and then stood, pulling a gun from beneath his jacket. A long, sleek black silencer had been screwed onto the end of the barrel. Annabelle was all out of emotion at that moment and couldn’t summon up any surprise. However, Dylan could. His eyes widened and Annabelle put a hand on his shoulder.
Jack turned away from them and left the room. Annabelle couldn’t help it. She stood and followed him out, Dylan hot on her tail.
At the door to the apartment, Jack paused and peeked through the eye hole. Annabelle had seen people do that on movies and she’d always thought that it would be a good way to make sure you took someone’s head off – just aim for the peek hole on the door. However, Jack wasn’t a Hollywood boy and his life didn’t follow a script. The door had been bullet-proofed long ago.
Jack re-holstered his gun, then stepped back from the door and unbolted it, swinging it open. A tall, skinny figure in basketball shorts and a baggy shirt stepped into the foyer and Jack closed the door behind him. Annabelle and Dylan stayed where they were, at the edge of the kitchen, and studied the newcomer in wary silence.
He had buzz-cut blonde hair and wore a headband over his forehead. His high tops were brand new LeBron’s. He looked to be somewhere between twenty and forty years old; one of those people who remain ageless for decades. He said nothing to Jack, but nodded at him and then at Annabelle and Dylan. Who nodded back.
Then he lifted his extra-large shirt and pulled the laptop from beneath it. Jack took it just as Dylan came forward, clearly eager to have it back in his own hands. Jack didn’t hesitate in handing it to the teenager, who took it gingerly and nodded once in thanks.
“Thank you,” Jack told the tall man.
The man nodded and smiled, revealing perfect white teeth. “Hey, anything to pay off my debt.” He turned then and left the room. Jack closed and bolted the door behind him.
“Set up in the family room. I have a power strip that’ll fit.” Jack gestured for Dylan and Annabelle to head into the living room, and he turned and walked through the kitchen, heading for a door in the hallway that Annabelle knew led to his office.
He returned with a power strip a few seconds later and Dylan accepted it without a word. He plugged the laptop in and set it on the coffee table. As he worked, Annabelle claimed the love seat across the coffee table.
Within a few minutes, Dylan had bypassed the password protected operating system and gotten into the computer’s D-drive, which was filled with a myriad of documents.
“What exactly are we looking for?”
“Something having to do with forests or pastel pink?” Jack took the seat opposite to Annabelle’s and leaned forward on his thighs. “Unless either of you can recall anything more concrete?”
Annabelle leaned forward as well and closed her eyes. The day was still a blur – a horrible, haunting blur – but pieces of it stood out in her mind like snapshots stuck on pause in a film on fast forward. She concentrated on those pieces, wondering if they might be sticking out in her mind for a reason.
“Forest pink pastel,” she whispered. Why did those words suddenly ring some sort of bell with her? Forest… pink… pastel…
“Lovely, Bella. That’s something.” Jack smiled at her and turned to Dylan. “The Fresh Foods job wouldn’t, by any chance, have been transferred onto that computer, would it?”
Dylan didn’t answer. He was too busy checking for the same thing. His finger slid over the laptop’s mouse piece like an ice skater across a rink. His thumb clicked on this and that, opening files and closing them again. Finally, his stern, concentrated expression permitted the tiniest bit of a grin to curl the corners of his lips. “I’ve got something. May be it.”
Annabelle and Jack both leaned closer.
“The format’s been changed. I can’t open it in PhotoShop or any other program that will allow images, but I can get the coding up.” He did a few more things on the keyboard and a white screen with a bunch of mumbo jumbo appeared before them. “Here it is.”
“Okay…” Annabelle blinked and licked her lips. She could recognize some of it right off the bat. A lot of it was her own handiwork. “Hand it here.”
Dylan turned the laptop to face her and she scrolled down through the text. “The fact that Max would transfer the file onto Teresa’s computer has to mean something. He did offer to help me with some of my work load, but he didn’t mention Fresh Foods. He was going to help with Mackenzie. It’s way different than this.” She stopped talking then as she noticed something. Her brow furrowed.
“What is it, luv?”
“Well, the formatting didn’t transfer properly in the first place, which is to be expected. But this part here is totally wrong. He changed the background from the ginger I had it in originally to, of all things, flamingo. That’s pink.” She straightened and looked up at Dylan, then at Jack. “There’s no way he did this by mistake. He meant for us to find it. Fresh Foods wanted a background that better matched their logo – i.e., green. Not pink.”
“Is there anything hidden around that part of the coding that might help us?” Dylan asked. His expression was pinched, tight. He was on edge. Did he feel as if he was getting closer to the people who murdered his father? His mother?
Annabelle turned back to the screen and concentrated. Though the text had a few more commas and colons
