“Oh!” we heard from Claire. “You mean what your boss told us at the meeting! That’s not their own money!”
“Exactly. The feed of the camera is tied to their network drive. But the camera itself is also streaming the videos to a cloud storage. And I couldn’t find any hint to that cloud access on the owner’s devices. I don’t think he even knows about it. Maybe, he doesn’t know his accomplices can watch while he handles their money.”
That was definitely way too much money for a single bookie to handle at once, unless he just had a whale lose. I counted thirty Bricks, so they amounted to something between $30,000 and $3,000,000 in pristine cash, depending on whether they contained $1 or $100 notes! After what I had discovered on their menu, though, Hundred-Dollar bills would make more sense.
Bill was probably right about this guy. Which meant potential extra trouble for us if anything went wrong. And the possibility of them not just letting bygones be bygones after I got rid of the videos increased drastically. I needed an additional contingency plan. I was totally lost in my thoughts, when I noticed Claire and Ava stare at me with concerned looks. Seemed like my worries were visible on my face.
“What is it?” they asked.
“Nothing.” I said, pensively. “Probably just overthinking it.”
Claire watched me for a second longer, then realized her drink was empty. When she looked up at Ava, raising her glass to her like she wanted to tell her about it, she seemingly realized why Ava was with us in the first place and jumped off my lap.
“Oh! I’m sorry, Sweety. Let me just get dressed!” she said, as she ran out of the room.
Then Ava was the one watching me, but I was already busy going through the connected network drive, copying the surveillance video for my backup plans. By the time I looked up again, Ava was gone too.
I spent the entire weekend hidden away in my bedroom, going through their surveillance videos, copying whatever seemed useful, making up plans and throwing them out again. I just couldn’t decide how to handle this. But I also managed to get into the phones of his entire staff and all of his frequent patrons. The one saving grace for this whole fucked up situation was that I couldn’t find anything even indicating that they already uploaded or shared the videos.
The other nice thing in all of this, though I was reluctant to admit it, was the fact that the family seemed to eagerly try and actually take care of me. They kept checking in on me, bringing me a plate with food whenever I didn’t show up for lunch or dinner, and asking me maybe two-hundred times a day if I was feeling Okay and whether the pain was manageable. I decided to just enjoy it and let them know how much I appreciated it, but knew that it would come to a close once this whole shitshow with Logan’s debt was over. Only then could I actually believe that they weren’t just doing it to keep me in a helping mood.
While Logan hated every second of it, I was surprised to see absolutely no hesitation in Ava when it came to caring for me. I went to bed alone on Saturday night, but I awoke cuddled up next to my half naked sister on Sunday morning. I didn’t know when she had crawled into my bed, but sometime during the night, my hand had moved underneath her shirt to hold her small (compared to the other two I had held so far) bare breast. Grabbing breasts in my sleep seemed to quickly have become a habit.
What woke me up, though, was Logan opening my door. He was standing in my doorway, one hand still holding the doorknob, watching us with an incredulous expression on his face. His expression quickly turned to anger when he looked at Ava’s face, and then he suddenly stormed off like a petulant child. I was just wondering what the hell his problem was while trying not to loudly laugh at his way of leaving, when Ava suddenly spoke.
“He doesn’t like that you’re in charge.” she said in a matter of fact kind of way.
“The hell!?” I asked in shocked confusion. I hadn’t even known she was awake, or I’d have removed my hand from her breast. Ava, however, seemed to think my statement was solely directed at her comment about Logan.
“You haven’t noticed?” she asked in a slightly amused tone, “We talked about it the first evening while you were pulling your all-nighter. Uncle John and Aunt Danielle told us how relieved they were when you immediately knew how to get rid of those videos. And Mom and Dad were too. They were really proud of how you just ... took control and got Logan to talk, while we were all too horrified to even think straight. And then you, like, immediately had a plan. None of us had any idea you could do all that, and Granny and Gramps are really impressed. Though they called it ‘being reliable’. And after Mom and Dad came back from the meeting with your boss, nobody questioned your plan anymore. If those videos come out, it would literally destroy our lives! So ... ever since you knocked Logan down on Thanksgiving, you’re just in charge.”
