Page 68 of Protected
“You know what? I don’t want to do this,” Debby said, backing away. Her movements abrupt, she turned and rushed toward the door.
“Debby, wait!” James called out. When his sister left without stopping, he turned to Kenton. “Let me talk to her. She’s just scared.”
Yeah, she’s scared of something…but what?Chelsey thought.
James backed his way to the door, while saying, “If we decide to move forward, we’ll be in touch.”
“No problem,” Kenton said, and they watched the two leave.
Chelsey folded her arms across her chest. “Was that normal?” she asked, already knowing the answer.
“Nope, and I’m glad we have photos of them.” Kenton moved back around the desk. “We’ll check out the information you gathered fromDebby, if that’s even her name. If she doesn’t check out, we’ll run facial recognition on the two of them.”
“Good.” Chelsey tapped her fingers on the desk as thoughts and various scenarios ran rapid through her mind. “There was something about them… The way they were behaving had my bullshit meter going crazy. I also didn’t like the way they dropped Parker’s name.”
“Yeah, I noticed that, too. We get referrals all the time, and occasionally people request a specific person. However, that’s usuallyaftera security member has been on their detail.”
Chelsey nodded. “I want to know who they are and why they were really here.”
More importantly, she needed to know what they wanted with Parker.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Wolf gritted his teeth and squeezed his cell phone tightly in his hand as he paced the length of his office, struggling to keep himself from throwing the device across the room. What was wrong with this world? Couldn’t anyone do anything right?
There’d been one issue after another today, and the people he had in place to handle such issues acted as if they couldn’t remember how to take care of anything. Like they couldn’t do their jobs—jobs that they’d overseen for years. Now all of a sudden, they’d been calling him for every damn thing, and he was sick of it.
First it was the computer system at his pizzeria that had malfunctioned first thing that morning. Thankfully, the manager eventually got it back up and running before the start of business. Hours after that, he’d been informed that some kids had broken into the office at one of his car washes. So far, his people couldn’t tell what, if anything, had been taken. Then he’d gotten a call from the site manager of his largest liquor store. The building alarm kept going off even though the system was disarmed during business hours.
What. The. Actual. Hell.
Was there some stupid dark cloud hovering over him and his operations? That had to be it. That had to be why he was about ready to sayto hell with it all.
He stopped in front of the large window that overlooked a courtyard with a water fountain flanked by flowers and palm trees and peered out. As usual, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. So his theory about a dark cloud hovering above him was definitely metaphorical.
“Hello? Wolf, are you still there?”
He had temporarily forgotten that he was talking to the manager of his cell phone store, the one in Chula Vista. He’d been on the phone with her for the last fifteen minutes, with her doing most of the talking.
That store was one of several front businesses Wolf owned to conceal some of his illegal activities. That one, along with his car washes and beauty salons, were set up perfectly for laundering money.
“Wolf?”
“Yes, Maxine,” he said as he rubbed his temple, feeling a headache coming on.
“We’re going to need a new computer. This is the second day this week that it just shut down on me. I reached out to Elder, but he isn’t answering his phone.”
“Yeah, he’s in LA taking care of personal business,” Wolf lied. Whenever either of them left town, they rarely gave anyone their location. Not even to people in their crew. It was safer that way, in case they had traitors in their midst.
“Oh, okay. Well, anyway, the other day he said you haven’t approved new technology for our location.”
Wolf listened as the talkative woman went on and on. Yes, Elder had mentioned they needed to update the computer systems in several of their businesses, but Wolf kept putting it off. He didn’t know a damn thing about the devices. If it wasup to him, he’d run all their businesses with pen and paper, like they used to do back in the day. In his opinion, modern technology was highly overrated. Everything ran by some form of it and made their companies too vulnerable to outside sources.
“Call the tech guy you used a couple of months ago,” he finally said. “Find out what it would cost to overhaul the whole system.”
“Great! Thanks. I’ll contact him today.”
Wolf disconnected the call and sighed in relief. He had too much on his mind to be dealing with minor issues. He needed to get ready for the gun deal that was going down in three days. Mando, the dealer out of San Antonio who Wolf had been in communications with, had finally come through.