Page 25 of Single Mom's Bodyguards
“Sean,” I say into comms. “Got a bell at the gate. Visual is negative.”
“Copy,” he says instantly. I hear the turn of his shoes across stone through his mic, the clean, quiet speed that he can’t help even in a mansion. “You getting any plate reads?”
“Visual isnegative.” He seemed out of sorts this morning, so maybe he said copy before he copied. “No approach logged, no motion trip, no profiles. Like a phantom pressed the button.”
“Or a human who knows where your trip wires aren’t,” Huck rumbles. He’s somewhere down by the woods, where the path narrows. The wind picks up in his mic and then dies. “You want me to check the fence line?”
“Hold,” I say. “Give me ten.”
I roll back the DVR buffer further, frame by frame. Nothing at the far edge of the berm, nothing in the ditch. It bothers me that the biker-cut hedge and the flange of the call box hide a sliver ofthe service lane from this angle—an architectural blind spot the original installer probably never noticed. On day one I marked it for a fix. It’s day three, and I still haven’t had a chance to get the low-profile lens mounted. We’ve been triaging with the big stuff. Firmware, lenses, credentialing, air gaps. Didn’t think we’d need it so soon.
Third chime.
“Okay,” I say. “I don’t like it.”
“I’m headed to the gate,” Sean says. “Huck, cover me from the path.”
“On your six.”
I stand even though my job’s the chair. The chair feels wrong when there’s a chime at the gate and no body casting it.
The fourth chime never comes.
Instead, the status bar in the lower left blinks:DELIVERY: YES/NOin the courier API we tied into the intercom. I didn’t build that doorbell, but I’ve rewritten half its brain since Friday, and the way it suddenly decides to speak up is like a stranger addressing me by my middle name.
“Sean,” I say, “I just got a ghost flag—delivery sensor toggled. We didn’t authorize, and there’s no truck.”
“Copy.”
“Don’t touch anything,” I add, because he will, because he’s the one who put bombs on snooze in darker sand than this. “Let me look first.”
Huck’s breathing tightens, a storm-cloud sound. “Wesley.”
“I know.”
I dial in, frame by frame. The front gate cam shows the lane shimmering empty. Then, for two frames—a smudge where the call box meets the hedge, a shadow that could be a sleeve. The thermal overlay catches a warmer signature the size of a forearm, rising a foot above the button panel, then gone.
Black fabric. Covered skin. No hair, no wristwatch, no charm bracelet for me to zoom in and say gotcha.
I pull the wider driveway camera and tunnel in. A rectangle the color of manila materializes at the foot of the gate, inside the property line, on our side. I don’t say what I’m thinking. I’m too angry at myself.
Sean reaches the gate in under a minute. Through his vest cam the world shifts to his angle. Steel bars, hedge, sky. He’s not breathing hard. He never does. I watch his left hand hang loose while his right hovers above the manila envelope.
“Trip?” he asks.
“Negative,” I say. “I’m not reading a crush switch, no RFID handshake, no load cell shift. Infrared is flat. Could be a decoy device, but nothing is screaming at me.”
“Huck?” Sean says.
Huck is a shadow on the path, out of frame. “Clear from my side.”
Sean slits the envelope and slides the contents free. He doesn’t swear.
That’s how I know it’s bad.
He pulls a fan of glossy prints out by their corners, like he’s handling evidence in a courtroom where the judge is God, and the jury is the three of us when we’re tired. He holds the stack up to his vest cam so I can see.
And I am suddenly hollowed out.
