Page 524 of Dark Love

Payne shrugs. “The two of them seem to get along pretty well. Barb has visited her several times. Not always for medical stuff.”

That’s odd. Never try to understand a woman. “Shock should be here soon. Did he give you any clues about the trouble he’s gotten into?”

“None. But he seems even stranger than normal.”

Shock and weirdness go hand and hand. “Do you think he’s gotten in trouble with the government again?”

“That will be a pain to fix up. Maybe we should move him to another country. Somewhere with no extradition treaty.”

“Those places don’t usually have the internet capabilities he needs.” Not that I haven’t thought about it many times before. “Maybe we should get him a babysitter.”

“Like we can find one that would have the slightest clue of what he’s doing.” Payne walks over to the window overlooking the club. The view is very similar in his own office.

“We could hand him over to Max. Let him handle Shock. Then outsource our needs.”

“You’d outsource that?”

“No.” But it’s tempting.

“Vincenti wouldn’t rat on us.” They’re liable to steal our marks, not report us.

“Whatever Shock did, we’ll deal with it.”

Payne has always been an idealist.

A knock sounds at my door. Shock pokes his head in. “Good, you’re here.” He carries in a bag, sets it on my desk, and takes a metal box out of it. “Put your phones in the box.” Shock unplugs my desktop computer and unplugs the television from the wall. “Do you have any other electronics in here?”

Definitely squirrely. I give Payne a look and he nods.

Whatever he’s about to tell us is worse than we even thought. Dahlia would ask if we’re spies. Which would be a fair question since this kind of feels like a spy movie at the moment. “No.” I drop my handful of phones in and Payne does the same.

Each phone does a different job.

Shock closes the lid on the box and pulls out another machine. “This should jam anyone trying to record us.” Then he pulls out a laptop and opens it up. “None of what you’re seeing is live. This computer doesn’t have the tech to stay invisible, but it’s air-gapped, so no one will see what I’m about to show you.”

Is this going to be one of his techy rants that make no sense to plebeians like us? “What are you showing us?”

“I’m not sure yet, but it’s bad.” Shock starts to open files.

“Barb didn’t do anything bad.”

“No. But the people that had Barb as a baby might have.”

The screen fills with the image of one of those DNA testing companies. “You found her family?”

“No. Yes. Sort of. These companies are made to help people find out about their history. Since Barb didn’t want to do it, I took a hair follicle off of her brush and sent it to a private company under a fake name.”

“That’s wrong in so many ways,” Payne mutters, looking over Shock’s shoulder at the screen.

“It’s not wrong when it may have saved her life.” Shock hits another key.

That got real fast. “Talk to me.”

“As I was saying, since Barb didn’t volunteer for this, I was going to keep everything private. After I hacked into the private testing company’s site and got her information, I went to build a program that would back door information to me without anyone knowing.”

I can feel the but coming.

“But someone had already done that—”

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