Page 24 of Gator

“Yeah. I made a bunch of weird turns just to make sure, and they stuck with me all the way here.”

“That was really smart, and so was coming here. Now let’s go upstairs, and you can tell me the whole story. Then we can see if we can figure out who these guys are.”

I held out my hand to him, and he took it, letting me pull him up. I pulled him into a hug, and he relaxed into me. I let out a relieved breath now that I knew he was alright. “Okay, let’s get you upstairs.”

I waved at Janna as we went by to the elevators. As soon as we were on, he leaned back against the wall and let out a long breath. I reached over and pressed my thumb to the pad before pushing the button to take us to the ops center.

As soon as the elevator started moving, Julius sighed. “Fuck, that was stressful.”

“I bet it was. Most people go their whole lives without ever evading a tail.”

He let out a wry chuckle and opened his eyes. “Gator, I’ve never been most people.”

“And thank God for that, sugar.”

One corner of his mouth quirked up in a grin as the doors opened. We stepped out into what we called our operation center. There wasn’t a lot going on today, which was a good thing because that meant Kat would be able to focus on finding out who these guys were and why they were following him.

“Wow.” Julius looked around the ops center. “This is impressive.”

Sometimes I forgot just how large this area was. The building had previously been the corporate headquarters of a home goods store, and this floor had housed the customer service call center. It was bigger than we needed at this point, but Wolfe’s had a vision for Three Bears where we would have multiple teams out in the field and would need space for investigators and handlers for each team.

“If you think this is impressive, wait till you see Kat’s setup. She runs our IT department. She has monitors galore and every other kind of tech you can imagine. We’d be lost without her.”

I led him across the room to Kat’s work area. She looked up when she saw us and motioned to a couple of chairs. “I’m already on it. Janna alerted me to the situation.”

She pulled up a static image of a black sedan and zoomed in on the face of the guy behind the wheel. “Do you recognize this guy?”

Julius leaned forward to get a closer look. “Yeah, I mean, I don’t know his name, but he was one of the guys who was out in the alley that night.”

She nodded and switched to another image. “And this one?”

Julius shook his head. “No, I’ve never seen him before.”

She pulled the first image up. “This is Ronald Digby, aka Rocco Digs.”

Julius scrunched up his face. “Ronald? Really?”

I laughed. “That’s probably why he goes by Rocco. So he’ll sound tough.”

He turned to look at me, one eyebrow raised. “Really,Gator.Tell us all about how you might choose another name to sound tough.”

Kat chuckled, and I didn’t get a chance to respond because she continued with her briefing. “He has an arrest record a mile long, but no convictions, so he has someone in his corner.”

“So if he was driving the car, I guess there’s no chance it was my imagination he was following me then.” Julius let out a sigh.

“Nope. I pulled up some of the CCTV footage between your shop and here, and they were definitely following you. You did a great job evading them, though.”

She went back to her keyboard and started typing. “I also managed to get the tag number—”

“CSF one-three-two-seven,” Julius said. “I did, too.”

“Right.” Kat gave him an approving grin. “And it’s registered to a shell company called Marawood Holdings. It’s going to take some digging for me to find out more, but I’ll get there.”

“I don’t know how they found you.” Gator shook his head. “Someone must have told them who you were.”

“I don’t think so. I saw one of the guys at the wedding today.”

“What were you doing at a wedding?” he asked.