Page 40 of Knocked Up by my Best Friend's Brothers

“Yes, but with a better sense of style,” he replies, then points to the ankle monitoring device again. “I wear this as a badge of honor.”

“You cut a deal, didn’t you?”

He nods once. “Yeah, I gave up the rest of my crew. Burned some bridges along the way. But I also gave the Feds some really good leads. It ended in major drug and IT equipment seizures. Entire operations burned to the ground. My current situation is really the best out of the worst possible outcomes. I could be rotting in jail with the others.”

“If they find you running these systems, that is precisely where you’ll end up,” I warn him.

“I know. But I haven’t given my PO reasons to doubt me. I do my part. I use better aliases. I’ve gotten way better at covering my tracks, too. You’d be impressed with my cloaking algorithms.”

“I’m sure.” I sigh deeply. “And I’m sorry I didn’t come see you sooner. I’m sorry I’m here for something other than catching up and visiting an old friend.”

Spike shrugs it off. He was always so good at shrugging everything off. He’s also one of the sharpest minds I’ve ever had the honor of dealing with, long before I ended up at CalTech. Before California and fintech, Spike and I were building software and selling them to rising startups for kicks.

“It’s fine, Christa. Life happened to both of us. I’m just glad to see you’re walking around like the queen you are.” He winks at me, then claps his hands together. “So! Hawthorne Corporation, huh? The one place I never hacked into in all of Portland.”

“Really? Why not?” I laugh.

“Come on, you know the Hawthorne brothers. Former US Marines. Total badasses. I don’t ever want to get on their bad side. They were a force to be reckoned when we were kids, and now, they’ve got billions at their fingertips. I’m not just older; I’m wiser.”

“You make a fair argument there,” I reply, one hand in my pocket, touching the letter. “Here’s the thing, Spike. I need to know if you have access to any of the underworld chatter here in Portland.”

“Underworld?”

“Mob-type underworld.”

“Mob type,” he repeats. “What did you get yourself into?”

I give him a strained smile. “For your safety, the less you know, the better. But the short and sweet version of it, and it’s for your ears only… do you remember Perry-Sage?”

“Holy shit,” he gasps, his green eyes as wide as saucers. “I knew it!”

“What did you know, kid genius?”

“I had a feeling. Don’t ask me how or why. Call it instinct. But I was sure you had something to do with it. The last time we spoke, you’d just landed in Los Angeles after CalTech. And you were working for a big fintech corporation whose name youcouldn’t disclose. Very hush-hush and whatnot,” he says. “You slipped little bits and pieces into the conversation. Subliminal stuff. Details I remembered when the news broke. I couldn’t find you then. You’d changed your number.”

“I had to wipe everything.”

“I noticed. All of your socials, too.”

“Luckily, I never really stood out in high school, and I only had a handful of friends to begin with, so nobody actually noticed.”

“You were tight with me and the Hawthornes, and that’s pretty much it.”

I nod once, my cheeks burning. He’s right about that.

“Right. I was already an undisclosed employee at Perry-Sage, so when the shit hit the fan, all I needed to do was break into their HR systems and wipe everything. I used SpikeyWorm, by the way.”

“No-ho-ho,” he laughs copiously. “My password breaker. You kept a copy.”

“I most certainly did,” I reply with a warm smile. “I deleted everything about myself from their system.”

“What about the people who worked there with you?”

A knot thickens in my throat. “Most of them were killed. The ones who survived didn’t really know or remember me.”

“Wow, you were doing some pretty sensitive work for that company, then?”

“All the encryption for their payment systems. The fewer eyes on that, the safer for the company’s protocols. That was myluck, truth be told. Otherwise, I probably would’ve had to reach out to the Feds and ask for witness protection. But I couldn’t really trust them. I wasn’t sure how deeply the Mancinis were involved.”

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