Hell for Leather (Black Knights Inc. #6)(21)
He’d learned that the hard way…
Boy, howdy, had he ever. Barely a week went by when he wasn’t reminded of the pain Jolene’s leaving had caused. Barely a month passed when he wasn’t wrenched from his sleep by the nightmare of her betrayal and what it had cost him. And sometimes, when he was all alone, he could still hear the sound of a strangled voice calling her name in the darkness.
“We haven’t been able to access your uncle’s text messages,” Becky said. “But we have been able to access his call log and Sander’s number is the only one with a southern Illinois prefix. Plus Charlie is a nickname for Charles, and—”
“Well, that’s—” Delilah shook her head a little frantically. Her slim, pale throat—a throat Mac didn’t want to touch and kiss and lick; liar, liar, pants all the freakin’ way on fire!—worked over a hard swallow. “That’s got to be him, right?”
Her excited tone hit Mac in his soft, gooey center. And, yes, he had a soft, gooey center. Because even though he may be determined not to let history repeat itself, not to let himself get caught up in her sticky web of seduction, that didn’t mean he wanted to see her enthusiasm ground to dust either. Fortunately—thank you sweet baby Jesus—Zoelner saved him from the unenviable task of having to be the one to douse that spark in her eye. “Don’t get too excited,” the ex-spook said. “This could be the guy we’re searching for, or it could just be coincidence. We still need to run his name through military records to see if he was a Marine.”
“Yeah.” Delilah nodded again. “Okay.” Mac could tell she was trying hard, and failing miserably, to temper her enthusiasm.
“Then, if he was a Marine, we can start looking for his last known address,” Zoelner added.
“Sounds good.” Delilah licked her lips. The dart of her pink tongue made Mac’s—
“Ow! Goddamnit!” he hissed. “Lord have mercy, Steady,” he groused, frowning up at the man. “Are you usin’ a seven-gauge needle to stitch me up, or what?”
“Oh, pipe down, you big baby,” Steady replied. “I gave you a local. And besides, this is just a little stab wound. People get stab wounds all the time.”
Mac turned to Delilah, one corner of his mouth quirked, his expression all about the I told you so. But he was thwarted from speaking the words aloud when Zoelner yelled, “Bingo!”
“What’ve you got?” Boss strolled into the conference area from his office, then immediately ordered, “Good God, Ozzie! Turn that shit off!”
“What?” Ozzie lifted his hands, blinking innocently. “I’m kicking mad flava in your ears. I’d think you would all thank me for it.”
“I’ll thank you by way of a boot up your ass,” Boss growled, throwing an arm around Becky’s shoulders when she came to stand beside him, bending to smack a quick kiss beside the lollipop stick protruding from her lips.
“What is with everybody wanting to put their boots up my ass?” Ozzie asked the room. “I know it’s a particularly cute ass, but—”
“Ozzie!” a chorus of voices, including Mac’s, yelled at once.
“Sheesh!” The guy held up his hands and Mac noticed his T-shirt was printed with the Starfleet logo and the words: Are you out of your Vulcan mind? “Tough crowd tonight,” he grumbled, twisting to switch off the music. Boss shook his head before pinning Zoelner with a no-nonsense stare. “What’ve you got, Z?”
Leaning forward, studying his computer screen intently and still typing, Zoelner said, “Charles Sander was in Delilah’s uncle’s Marine Corps unit. And I’m using his cell phone number to locate a phone bill, which should give us his last known address. Uh…give me a second here.” More rattling as the former–CIA agent attacked the keyboard. “Well, shit,” he said after a few seconds, sitting back and raking a hand through his hair. “I have no idea how to find his last known address. All I’m getting for him is a post office box.”
“He has a house,” Delilah insisted. “My uncle always talked about what a shithole it was.”
“Yeah.” Ozzie shrugged. “But how do you suggest we find it?”
For a couple of intense, breathless moments, no one moved. Mac racked his brain, trying to figure out their next move. There has to be something. There has to be a way to—And then Delilah came up with the answer for him.
“The IRS,” she said. “I know a back door into their database. We can cross reference Charles’s name with his PO box and check to see if he’s getting a yearly property tax bill.”
“No way.” Ozzie shook his head vehemently. “There’s absolutely no way I’m hacking into the Internal Revenue Service.”
“Why the hell not?” Mac frowned, wincing when Steady hit another particularly sore spot. He was beginning to think there’d been nothing but sugar water in that syringe of so-called numbing agent. “You hack into the NSA’s and CIA’s databases all the time.”
“Uh, yeah.” Ozzie pulled a face. “But the IRS is scary.”
Delilah snorted and pushed up from her seat, strolling over to Ozzie and his bank of computers. Mac didn’t let his eyes ping down to watch the sway of her ass. Or if he did, it was only for a nanosecond…er…okay, so maybe it was two nanoseconds. “I do it all the time for the law firm,” she said, claiming the seat Becky had vacated. Raising her arms to twist her hair quickly into some kind of sloppy updo thingy, she began lightly, but efficiently typing on the keyboard.