harder than I meant to. He looked at up me, shocked.
“Could you please stop and tell me what the fuck you’re doing?”
Ripley frowned. “Okay, wow. First, let go of my arm.”
I did, and he rubbed his wrist. “What the hell, Ellie?”
I took a slow breath in through my nose. “I’m sorry,” I said, only half meaning it. This new Ripley was a bit of a know-it-all. “I just need you to slow down, please. I don’t speak computer.”
“Okay,” he said, shaking out his wrist. “Next time, just ask.”
I had asked, but I bit my tongue.
“Here.” Ripley double-clicked an unfamiliar icon, and the screen on my laptop changed. It looked vintage now, like it was running an old version of Windows.
“This is her screen,” he said, pointing. “I’m controlling her PC by remote.”
“How?”
He twisted the ring on his middle finger. “She did the internet equivalent of leaving her keys in the car and the windows down.”
Ripley started scrolling through Turner’s browser history. “Recipes, online banking . . . huh.”
“Huh what?”
“She’s gone to LotZilla like a thousand times.”
“Isn’t that the site you were using to look for Devereaux’s house?”
He nodded. “It lets you search property values. She was looking at houses on the west side.”
“She said she was in real estate.”
“That would explain it.” He scrolled. “She’s got an eBay problem, too. And, wow. Craigslist personals?” Ripley turned to me. “Will your people stop at nothing to obtain sex? You realize it literally warps your mind.”
“Wait,” I said, pointing at the screen. “Scroll back to the LotZilla stuff.”
“What am I looking for?”
“A warehouse somewhere near the Strip.”
He scrolled up, shook his head. “These are all condos and townhomes. . . . Wait.” He clicked on a link, and a new browser window popped up. A satellite map of Las Vegas appeared with a red dot just east of the Strip.
“Can you zoom in?”
The red dot marked a large warehouse located behind a restaurant on Hinson Street, a few blocks west of I-15.
My head was buzzing. “Does it say who owns it?”
He clicked and scrolled. “Flying Man Holdings, LLC.”
My heart stopped. “That’s it.”
Ripley and I pulled up across from the address he’d found on LotZilla. The building facing the street wasn’t a restaurant as the website had indicated—it was a strip club. Blacked-out windows, faded red awning, blinking marquee that read The Strip—High Steaks, Hot Girls.
“That’s profoundly gross,” Ripley said.
“Pull into the lot in back.”
“Ellie, we don’t have time to satisfy your perverse cravings.”
“Can you not make stupid jokes right now?”
Ripley put his hands up like he was surrendering, then pulled into a spot at the far end. While he opened my laptop, I looked around to see if anyone had noticed two teenagers parking at a strip club. A girl in a long coat was vaping and texting near the back door, but she didn’t look up. There was no one else in sight.
I turned my attention to the warehouse. It was signless, beige, and roughly the size of a cineplex; if Devereaux wanted a low-key place to workshop illusions and store props, this was perfect.
“Got anything?”
Ripley grunted. “If you want to know what kind of emails the manager of a strip-club-slash-steakhouse gets, I could tell you in about five minutes. But the Flying Man network is password protected.”
“Can you hack it or not?”
He turned to look at me. “Did I do something to offend you?”
I clenched my jaw. I couldn’t lose my temper right now; I needed Ripley’s help.
“There’s just a lot riding on this. Can you do it?”
“Probably,” he said, with a condescending what’s wrong with you? expression. “But it’ll take me a while.”
“How long is ‘a while’?”
“I don’t know, Ellie. Twenty minutes? An hour?”
I wanted to snap back at him, but I held it in. “I’m going to look around.”
Ripley started to speak as I got out of the car, something about cameras, but I slammed the door before he could finish. I paused for a moment outside the car. I should open the door and apologize—I was getting more irritable by the minute—but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was like being stuck in the RV again with the power steering locked: I could see where I was going, but I couldn’t change course. Without looking back, I headed toward the warehouse.
As I walked around to the back, I saw what Ripley had been talking about: there were security cameras mounted on the building. I pulled up the hood on my sweatshirt to obscure my face