“I'm sure you do but, in the meantime, you still get to go swimming.” He walked toward her, stopping a few inches away. Keeping an eye on her expression, he looped his arms around her. He expected her to pull away, to turn and walk away. For all her confidence, Dani was skittish when it came to him. But when she didn't move away, when she leaned into him a tiny bit, his reaction was instantaneous. His arms tightened and her head came to rest below his chin.
“Is that a gun in your pocket, Detective, or are you just happy to see me?” He could feel her smile against his throat.
“When this is all over, I think we should go somewhere where we can swim. Naked.” His voice was gruff.
She sighed. “Sounds nice. But, in the meantime, in the real world, we need to track down our wetsuits.”
* * *
Thankfully, they didn't need the wetsuits quite so early in the morning. Instead, Ty had arranged a little educational session so that they could all learn everything there was to learn, and probably more, about Getz's underwater surveillance system.
“Well, damn, look what the cat dragged in. We haven't had anything that gorgeous set foot in here in months,” Jay commented as Dani and Ty walked into his office.
“He is pretty gorgeous, but you're not really his type,” Dani quipped with a smile.
Jay tossed his head back and laughed. Ty rolled his eyes.
“Dani, Jay. Jay, Dani.” Ty made the introductions once Jay stopped laughing.
“So you're DEA,” Jay commented as he assessed her. She hadn't missed his initial male reaction to her, or his subsequent evaluation that, for a split second, as his eyes swept her body, conveyed doubts about her ability and about how she might have gotten to where she was. But when his eyes met hers in a gaze that didn't waver for a second, Jay nodded in acknowledgement of what she knew he saw there—intelligence, confidence, and the kind of wariness that came with seeing too much of the world and all its nasty bits.
“Well, that's that, then,” Jay said, rising from his seat. “Did you bring the aluminum foil?”
Twenty minutes later, they stood with a couple of guys from Cotter's team in a small conference room in the building where Jay kept his offices. Sitting on the table in front of them were the Hunley and Abram. Both machines were the same make and model as those that surrounded Getz's peninsula.
“This is the Hunley,” Jay said, placing his hand on the larger of the two machines. It was about two feet tall, a foot in diameter, and shaped like R2-D2. “It's the acoustic monitor Getz has around his place. If it picks up a certain kind of noise, an alarm will sound in the house and you can be sure that, within minutes, some of Getz's finest will be both on and in the water.”
“What kinds of noises will trigger it? How does it differentiate between regular ocean sounds and abnormal sounds—sounds worth triggering the alarm?” Dani asked.
“It's a smart system,” Jay began to explain to the group. “It goes through a two-week recognition period where it familiarizes itself with the surrounding sounds. It knows the basics when it's installed but it takes some time to learn the subtleties and the nuances. Once it picks up and stores information on the regular, everyday sounds, it will only trigger an alarm when it hears something else.”
“Like what else?” Cotter asked.
Jay shrugged, “Anything, everything. Excess bubbles that come out of a regulator, the sound of any kind of weapon being loaded, human sounds. Even the sound of oars hitting the water or scraping against a boat would set it off.”
“Yeah, but aluminum foil will, uh, foil the system?” Dani's lips twitched at the bad pun. A couple of the guys laughed. No one could quite believe it.
“Yeah,” Jay smiled back as he tossed each of them some papers detailing the specs of the system. “It's true, we tested it when we found out. But you still need to understand what might set it off, in case you lose your force field.”
“Just how much foil are we talking about here?” Spanky asked. Dani heard a couple of the guys shift behind her. They were used to a lot of things: seeing a lot of things, doing a lot of things—ugly things. But not a single one of them relished the idea of covering themselves in