Page 48 of Kill Me Sweetly

“That’s ridiculous.” I made my way over, slipped a five dollar bill into the machine since we really only had one load, and got my stupid card.

“Do we know who we’re meeting?” Angel started pulling out the sheets Mason had asked us to wash while we were there.

“Not a clue.” I began stuffing them into the large machine.

“Uh…” Noel scrunched his nose. “We have no detergent or fabric softener.”

The way I dragged my feet to the main desk, you’d think I was being led to my death. How were the three of us so inept aboutdoing laundry? Growing up, our adoptive parents had taught us all the basics and made us do our own clothes. I brushed it off, blaming all that I had on my mind.

The lady took my money and handed me a small container of detergent and another of fabric softener, plus dryer sheets.

Once we finally had the washer going, we sat on a bench and waited for whoever wanted to meet with us.

“Oh, guess what?” Noel slapped my arm.

“Why hit me, dickbag? I’m literally right next to you.”

He rolled his eyes, not addressing my question. “Nick and I were going through the security for the house because Angel wanted us to make sure our wires weren’t in a knot.” Noel snorted and Angel sighed.

“That’s not how I put it.”

Noel waved him off. “Anyway. Apparently in mine and Nick’s infinite wisdom, when the house was built and property secured, we put up blockers.”

I stared at him and waited for him to realize I had no fucking idea what he was talking about.

“Right, you’re tech-challenged.” Noel pulled out his phone and tapped a few buttons. “This is our property. All those red dots are what Nick and I call boomerangs.”

“Okay, and?” I gestured for him to go on.

“Right. So I say blockers but what that means is, say the mailman comes to our house to drop something off. He enters here.” Noel pointed to the top of the long road we live on. “Goes to our house and plops it down.”

“Thank you for explaining the intricacies of a postal worker’s job,” I deadpanned.

“Asshole.” He wiggled the phone. “There at the top of our road is a red dot, and more are strategically placed along the rest of the property. Now…say the postal worker went missing and they wanted to track his phone, they’d follow his routeblah,blahbut the second he came to our street, it would bounce to a different location.”

“So, it’s like he was never there, instead somewhere else?” I asked, thinking how brilliant that was.

“Exactly. When the house was done, Nick and I talked about it and he implemented it. We just forgot until we were doing checks.”

I tilted my head. “So, Four’s chip was never an issue?”

Noel winced. “So, um, I guess we could have just removed it at the house and crushed it, butc’est la vie.” He shrugged.

“And because of that, the Investigators might try and track Four, but they’ll see his tracker bounce him to some other location downtown,” Angel added.

“Ha. I bet JJ will be happy to hear that.”

Noel and Angel hummed. I watched the sheets spin, the motion actually quite lulling.

“It’s nine fifteen. Where is this fucker?” Angel huffed.

“What about the shop?”

Noel looked at me. “Like for the boomerangs?”

I nodded. “Do you have them up there?”

Noel started playing on his phone, and I watched the laundry while he searched for the answer.

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