All That Remains - R.J. Scott Page 0,5

He was a big man, capable, with a focus I admired. I imagined he was very much the action hero I expected an Army Ranger to be. And yes, I had dossiers on all the cops in the town, as well as the key characters from my grandpa's research and the extra I’d done myself. I knew all about Sawyer becoming captain after the former chief, Peter Sandoval, had retired, a cop who had been part of that group my grandpa called corrupt; Sandoval had been one of the newest of the team but had risen through the ranks quickly as people died or moved on.

I held a private theory that Sawyer Wiseman was the best thing to happen to Lancaster Falls PD, based on what I’d gleaned from research. Inevitably, I’d form more fact-based conclusions as the days wore on.

The gate was wide open, a yawning hole in the otherwise solid, barbed wire-tipped metal fence. Sawyer took a deep breath and glanced at me. I considered that maybe he was waiting for me to instruct him on what happened at the scene, but he would know it wasn’t me who was in charge. This wasn’t my case.

Yet.

After a pause, he spoke. “We take this slow. We assume the other dogs are in here somewhere, not all friendly. I want your body-cam on Logan. We take photos where we can, and we’re cautious. Got it?”

I nodded along with Logan.

Cautious was my middle name.

Two

Josh

The burner phone vibrated and danced across the desk, and I caught it one-handed as I continued to type with my right. I'd been expecting this call since I’d woken up, and I lodged the cell between my neck and ear, just like everyone tells me not to do, then answered.

“Yeah.”

“It’s a plausible deniability case,” the voice intoned.

Well, shit. They were the worse kinds of projects, the ones where if I was caught, then absolutely no one would come to my rescue and announce that I was one of the good guys.

“Why?”

“This is off-the-books but department-mandated.”

Fuck. Another thing on my shit list.

“How much is the client paying?” I wanted to get to the roots of this immediately because I wasn’t chancing my family for anything less than the amount I needed to fix the stove and the furnace. I looked at the quote pinned on the wall. A little less than twenty-thousand dollars would see the furnace fixed, and one cold-ass Pennsylvania winter would be covered. I’d had to close for three weeks last Christmas, and that included over some of the lucrative Festival days—a loss I couldn’t imagine for a second year in a row.

“I’m authorized to go to twenty.”

“Thirty, and it's a deal.”

“Twenty-two.”

“Twenty-eight.”

This dance would continue, the same as it always did, and finally, we would settle on twenty-five thousand, which was more than enough to cover the furnace, plus maybe get new fittings in some of the untouched rooms. I didn’t know why my contact always did this with the money dance, but I let him get away with it because it made me feel I’d come out with more money than I’d wanted in the first place.

“You’re killing me,” he muttered, then sighed. “Twenty-five,” he agreed.

“Usual rules, half now whatever happens, and half after,” I insisted.

More muttering. “On the understanding that—”

“If I don’t crack it, I get to keep the half, but—”

“You need to prove—”

“Just send me the freaking details.”

I shut down the conversation and ended the call. Then I logged into my encrypted space and scanned what was sent over, taking a mental note and already running scenarios through my head as to how I’d approach this issue. First off, I’d need a good six hours of uninterrupted work, which meant waiting until my son was in bed, but it wouldn’t be the first time I’d pulled an all-nighter. The times Harry had knocked on the door asking for his dad and waking me from a deep sleep at my desk weren’t worth listing, but so far, he'd just proclaimed that playing games on my PC was boring, and what did I expect. Also, locking my door made him think I was up to other things. Given he was nearly a teenager now, I didn’t have to imagine what he thought I was doing.

Hacking into supposedly unbreakable security systems for money wasn’t on his list, for sure. In his eyes, I was his much older and mostly uncool dad, although given it wasn’t that many years that separated us, I hoped I wasn’t