C21 Box Set

Chapter 3-6

How the hell did I talk myself into this? I know ace-deuce about undercover work. Oh, yeah, I don’t want to be tortured and killed. Especially since it might not do any good to begin with. Dylan stopped staring out the window when Mars and Alastair came back upstairs.

“Are you going to join us, Dylan?” Alastair asked when he and Mars were seated at the table.

“I’d rather stand. I’m nervous enough about what I seem to be committing to. If I sit, I’ll go crazy.”

“That’s fine with me,” Mars told him. “The first question we have is, how will we…well you, explain to Mr. Webb where you’ve been for the last five days?”

“It’s only been that long?” Dylan said with surprise. “It feels like it’s been weeks.” He began to pace. “Obviously I can’t say I was hiding out at the apartment. The hotel is out too. Even though I could have gotten into one of the vacant rooms, I wouldn’t have known which ones they were. I don’t know anyone who would have let me hide out with them.”

“No friends?” Alistair asked.

“Acquaintances, at best. Men I’ve had brief flings with. I lost any real friends after getting involved with Tommy.”

“You could say you got a room at some one-hour motel where they don’t ask questions,” Mars said, then shook his head. “Unless Webb is a complete i***t he’d want to know where, and then he’d check it out.”

“There is one other, safer, option,” Alastair put in. “You took to the streets.” When Dylan c****d his head in question, Alastair explained. “You found out from…an online news site sometime late Tuesday afternoon that Samson’s body had been found Monday night, and the cops were looking for you. So you decided it wouldn’t be safe to go home. You could search the news from your computer at work, I presume.”

“Yeah,” Dylan said. “Actually, I kept expecting the cops to come knocking on my door, or find me at the hotel sooner than that. I figured if, when they did, I’d admit I knew Tommy because he was my ex, but that was all. Of course,” he grimaced, “I didn’t know they had a witness.”

“They found him Tuesday while canvassing the neighborhood. You got lucky, Dylan. The police showed up at the hotel twenty minutes after you left for the day,” Alastair said. “I checked after Mars said he was following you from there.”

“Something Webb probably already knows,” Mars pointed out. “I didn’t see anyone who seemed interested in you at that point but…” He shrugged.

“So…I didn’t have anywhere I thought it was safe to lie low and what? I’ve spent the last couple of days on the street?”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“No,” Dylan admitted. “I was going to head home after stopping at the bar for a drink. I wonder if I would have changed my mind between leaving the bar and actually going home.”

“If you had, what would you have done?” Mars asked.

“Probably found a sleazy motel, and hunkered down until my money ran out.”

“Well, that is not what you’ll tell Webb when you talk to him,” Alastair said. “You were scared, terrified, had nowhere to go. You wandered the streets, wondering what to do.”

“Saw some homeless people and got an idea.” Dylan nodded. “It could work. I saw them, figured nobody ever really looks at the homeless, so if I pretended to be one of them…I, yeah, I checked one of those donation dumpsters the charity thrift stores have, got the most used looking pair of pants and shirt I could find…and a sweatshirt that had seen better days. And bingo, I became invisible. But…”

“Umm?” Mars said.

“But I was damned if I was going to spend the rest of my life like that. I remembered Tommy mentioning Webb, one night when he was more than half drunk and telling me about how stupid the cops were. Or rather—how smart he was to be able to run his other business without any trouble because he had the right people in his pocket.”

Mars grinned, looking at Alastair. “I told you he’d be good at this.”

“You’ll get no argument from me,” Alastair replied. “I think he’s a natural.”

Dylan snorted. “I may have a good imagination. I’m still not at all certain I can pull off going undercover, which is what you want me to do.”

“It was your suggestion,” Mars retorted.

“Me and my big mouth.”

“You can handle it, after I’ve walked you through all that’s involved.”

“Which will take until the Twelfth of Never.”

“Nope. You’re going to get the patented Mars Marsden crash course.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Have no fear, you’ll be as good as I am by the time I’ve finished with you.”

Dylan turned to Alastair. “Is he as good as he seems to think?”

“Better,” Alastair assured him. “Much better.”