Jay smiled, adjusting the camera angle as Gary sat, still looking sour. “I’d offer a long apology but—”
“But it isn’t your style.”
“—but we don’t have time,” Jay corrected. “Do you have an in?”
Gary stopped trying to mop coffee off his table and smirked. “Of course. I might not be you, but I do know my business.”
Jay’s lips twitched as he fought to hold in a laugh. “See the port on the left side? Plug the USB in there. I’ll do the rest.”
Gary nodded and drew the tiny USB Jay had given him from inside his pocket.
“You only used this with the tablet I gave you, right?” Jay asked as Gary made to plug it in.
“If you’re going to question me like I’m not seven years your senior in this business, I might reconsider our alliance.”
Jay’s field of vision was interrupted by a series of letters, asking him for passcodes. Once the download had begun, he shifted it to the side so he could have a clear view of Gary’s face.
“Do you have any suspicions of who might be behind this?”
Gary tilted his head. “Nothing specific. But with the news that’s followed your footsteps, I’d say they’ve been following closely and not just since your release.”
Jay nodded, feeling his chest tighten. He had come to the same conclusion. “I agree. They’ve been watching me since my prison days.”
“Maybe before,” Gary suggested. “Depends whether you think they already had a mole in your prison before you began your sentence.”
Jay froze on the rooftop. “You’re thinking that, to be effective, they’d need a well established role within the prison.”
“Yes.”
“Or maybe just a well respected role,” Jay said after a moment’s pause. “Listen, when this is done, your next task is to look at staff at the prison. Focus on those that left their employ soon after my term ended.”
Gary nodded then shook his head. “Talking like this is uncanny. You usually give a lot away in your face if the person watching knows what to look for.”
Jay felt another blow. “I’ll need to be careful with that then.”
The download finished and flashed back into the center of his field of vision. Jay used the controls in his hand to skim through the information before ordering it stored. He would look at it more closely at home.
“You can remove the drive,” Jay told Gary who had begun to doodle absently on the corner of a notepad.
Gary sighed and pulled the drive free. “Now what? Do we move on this? I can—”
“No. I know it is a long shot that Stella is still alive, but if she is, we need to be careful. Whoever this is has laid out every move. If we start ruining their careful work with careless abandon, they will get angry.”
Gary pocketed the drive and nodded. “Okay. So am I just looking into the prison then? Also, why can you not do that?”
Jay smirked. “I suppose if I can teach you to fish for yourself, then the reputation I will build you over the next three years will have a better chance of staying up.”
Gary evidently heard the smirk in his voice because he scowled. “Are you going to answer or not?”
“Sure. I don’t know yet how closely I am being monitored, but so far, with the exception of you, I have always been a step behind. As such, I must be careful that any work I do in my usual way is understandable. That way my watcher will believe that I am still playing their game. So anything that shows I might know more than I am letting on needs to be dealt with in secrecy.”
Gary suddenly nodded. “I see. And because you don’t know who your enemy is yet, you can’t be certain where would be safe. If you stay at the gym too often or for too long, they’d catch on. So instead, it is safer if you don’t do the leg work at all.”
Jay allowed himself a wide grin in place of the laugh that wanted out. Gary could not see the former, but he’d certainly hear the latter. Gary looked so desperately proud of himself.
“Exactly. So, you ready for your orders?”
Gary’s triumph vanished, and his face became sour once more.
“Don’t worry. Once this is all tied up, you’ll be the boss.”
Gary huffed then jerked his head once in a short nod. “Go on then. What’s my next job.”
“I’ll be giving your number to a friend. He’ll be in contact. All you need to do is help him out.”
Gary frowned. “I’m not you. I don’t deal with criminals. If I did, I would have just stuck with Lloyd.”
“How about upstanding law enforcers?” Jay asked, a hint of impatience in his voice.
“Who is it?”
“Hector Piers.”
Gary’s face shifted with comical speed from confused to surprised and then folded into his usual skeptical frown. “I heard he’s dead.”
“Of course you did.”
“That was you?”
Jay smiled, letting it be heard in his voice. “I knew my watcher had rules about outside help. Since Salisbury and the attack at Mr. Haraby’s, I realized that only leads they had left me were allowed. The rest would be punished.”
“So you brought them in knowing they’d be in danger?”
Jay chuckled. “I brought them in to see if my opponent could be duped. Turns out, he can. The whole world now believes that Hector and his wife died in a freak explosion.”
“But the bodies—”
“Dentals are easy enough to fake, and there will always be corpses if one knows who to ask.”
Gary made a choking noise in the back of his throat, waving his hands over the camera as if determined to shut Jay up.
Jay chuckled again. “So, can you work with Hector Piers?”
“Did he know about your plan?”
“No.
