The Black Coats(34)

Mirabelle grinned, the drunken girl gone and in her place a woman who stared down at her prey like a starved lion. “Oh, I don’t think so. I think you planned on doing exactly to me what you did to those other girls.” She nodded to Team Banner. “Get it done.”

“Quickly now,” hissed Thea. Two Black Coats swept past her, as Bea searched his shelves and Casey attacked his computer.

“What are you doing?” Arthur snapped. “Don’t . . . don’t touch that!”

Casey pulled out a small USB stick and inserted it into his tower before she began typing like mad, her voice steady. “I’m guessing you’re pretty smart, Arthur. Smart enough to hide the files on these poor girls. Do you know, when I was in middle school, a sixteen-year-old girl started sending me messages? I told her things, things I wasn’t ready to tell my parents. After a while I agreed to meet her at a department store because I liked her. I took the bus like she told me to, and when I got there, there was no one in the parking lot, no one except for a forty-five-year-old man with a gray van. As soon as the bus pulled away, he tried to grab me.” The entire room was frozen, listening to Casey’s story. “I fought, and then I ran. I escaped, but I will always see his face in my nightmares. So you could say I have a particular hunger for men who prey on women online.”

She leaned back in Arthur’s chair. “I’m guessing you have your victims in an innocent-looking folder, encrypted with a . . .” She laughed. “Ah, here. Found it. Did you know you can hack hidden files by setting an attribute to extract them? It’s like the opposite of a virus.”

Arthur’s face was turning red as he stared up at Mirabelle. “How dare you? You stupid whore—”

Mirabelle clamped her hand down over his mouth. “Yes, we’re all whores when we call you out on your bad behavior. I’m so done listening to you talk, Arthur. Twenty minutes was more than enough for a lifetime.”

“Careful,” warned Thea. “Don’t block his nose.” She was suddenly hyperaware of how quickly this could all go wrong. So many variables were at play here. She realized in that moment why they had so many classes, so much training, because Arthur was a cat in a cage. She watched now as his hand grasped at the covers, searching for a weapon.

Louise pinned his hand under her foot. “Nope.”

Bea shrieked with delight from his bookcase. “I think I found something!” Mirabelle lifted her hands to clap.

Thea stepped over to join Bea, who was running her fingers along a strange piece of wall behind the bookcase. She gave it a push and a shoe-box-size portion of the wall came crumbling out. Bea flicked a flashlight out from the sleeve of her coat, and Thea let a grin spread across her face.

“And what do we have here?”

Arthur was beginning to sweat. “Don’t touch that! That’s mine! You . . .” He dissolved into a series of demeaning curses, words that normally would have made Thea flinch, but now she didn’t even blink. The coat stretched across her shoulders protected her, and she let the words bounce off its wool as she pulled everything out of the hole: a dozen USB drives, along with three heavy file folders filled with photographs and what looked like emails and contractual agreements. There was also a gun. Oh my God.

Her motions easy, Thea switched on the safety and unloaded the chamber before slipping the weapon and every item from Arthur’s secret trove of blackmail material into her backpack. The Black Coats didn’t ever use guns, but they did know how to handle them. She turned back to the boy, who was now crying fat tears as he begged Mirabelle to let him go.

“Please, this isn’t my fault!” he sputtered. “I owe someone money, and I needed to—”

“We don’t care,” spoke Louise quietly.

Casey snapped her gum over at the computer, where she was digging into Arthur’s files. “You blackmailed women. You took advantage of intoxicated girls by filming your encounters and selling them. You’re a predator.”

Fury was rising in Mirabelle’s face. “Are you sure this is a Code Morning?” She squinted at Thea. “I think maybe just a punch or two, just to knock out some of these pretty white veneers.”

“No.” Thea didn’t even look up. “Not one scratch.”

“Fine.”

“Got it! Is that it?” Casey pulled out her USB drive and leaped up from the desk and began unplugging the computer from the wall.

Thea nodded. They had been in the room less than ten minutes, but it already felt too long.

Casey stood up from the computer desk and swiftly made her way past Thea, Arthur’s computer towers in her arms.

Arthur let out a cry. “Wait, what are you doing with that? Do you have any idea how expensive those are? Stop!”

With a wink, Casey opened his window and then looked back at Arthur. “Oh, you mean these computers? I actually do know how expensive they are.”

Thea leaped forward to stop her, but it was too late; Casey shoved both computers out the window. The resounding crash of metal and plastic exploded up through the windows.

“You bitch!” he screamed.

Casey stared at him. “Oops.”

Thea pulled the backpack onto her shoulders. “We need to move! You girls, go now! Get the car. Dammit!”

Arthur turned his head to the side, defeated. Mirabelle continued to hold him down as Thea bent over him, her lips brushing his ear. “Just because they were drunk, just because they were high, just because they were naive doesn’t make this okay, you human piece of garbage. We’re going to make sure that you never, ever do this again. Dear Daddy is going to get all of this: videotapes of you with these girls, your contracts with the porn websites, and your emails back and forth with the bros who helped you.”