Page 2 of Mimosa (Murphy's Pub #2)

Chapter Two

“Mims,” Haze called from the bookcase door of the secret room. “You here?”

“I’m here,” he called back, watching the download’s speed slow further. “We need better bandwidth or I’m going to literally lose my mind!”

“You won’t,” Haze said as he came into the room, kissed him on top of his head, and sat in the metal chair beside the comfortable computer chair where Mims perched.

Haze was so beautiful, it was hard for Mims to look at him and remember he was his best friend. All the men of Murphy’s Pub were beautiful, but Haze held a special place in his heart.

“What is it you need?” he snapped, then immediately regretted it.

“Snippy, Mims. What’s wrong?”

He sat back hard in the computer chair and sighed, “My boyfriend. He postponed our date again.”

“Does he have a previous engagement with his wife?”

Mims growled, “He’s not married! I asked!”

“You do know that some people lie, right, babe?”

He was sweet when he wasn’t being overly honest with Mims. His dark eyes locked dead-on with Mims’s slightly lighter ones so Mims couldn’t possibly look elsewhere. “He isn’t. I can tell.”

“As long as you can tell,” he teased.

His smile was wide, bright and framed in full, dark lips that only made his thick lashes and perfectly shaped face look even better. A beauty, too young, and his best friend. Life wasn’t fair at all.

“How are we looking at the Maxfield Parrish? Have you found where it was sent?”

The painting they’d been after for three years had been almost in their grasp, but it was sold right from the place the original owner had sent it to be repaired. They hadn’t found the buyer or the painting, but Haze had already made the copy, so they were determined.

The men at Murphy’s Pub were not only bartenders. Sure, on the weekends, the six beautiful men, including Mims and Haze, did tricks, danced, and entertained the big crowds that came. Mixing drinks, doing body shots, flirting, it was all done at Murphy’s.

What was in the basement, in two secret rooms that only those living in the apartments above the pub knew about, however, was where they planned their other jobs.

Stealing.

They had many experts in the men at the pub. Mimosa, AKA Mims, was their computer hacker, Haze, as in Purple Haze, planned the routes they took to and from the jobs and plans for buildings they were boosting things from.

Absinthe, or Abs, their lithe, blond friend was hands on with security systems, Gold Rush, AKA Goldie, staked out the places they were hitting, doing research for weeks or even months to assure they knew who and what was around the place.

Hypnotic, or Hippy, was the weapon man and Cosmo, their newest recruit, boosted cars for getaways or to sell.

Their benefactor and owner of the pub was Connor Murphy. He and his husband, Eazy, had two beautiful little kids, Katie and Little Mick, who also lived in the pub, in the upper floors that were made into apartments. Little Mick was named for Connor’s dad, Mick, who lived with Connor and Eazy. Rounding it out, so did Connor’s oldest son from a previous marriage, Ryan, who had just started being allowed to possibly take a role in the jobs.

It was a family. Even Cosmo, who’d come to them very recently and hadn’t wanted anything to do with family, was one of them now. They all loved him like a brother, and his cat, Daiq, short for Daiquiri, was shared by them all.

There was a rule that none of them could date each other, but it wasn’t really needed. They were all in love with each other, but they were family. Anything else would only interfere with that.

“What about the BBC? Any word on them?” Haze asked him.

“Sure, but nothing concrete. It’s all speculation.”

Cosmo hadn’t only come into the family recently, but he brought with him a boyfriend who just happened to be a federal agent. Taran and his partner, Campbell Rymes, were after a group of cops who called themselves the BBC. They were bad, really bad, and Murphy had agreed to help bust them.

Murphy and his boys only stole from those that could afford it, and Cosmo had insisted, and they all agreed, they were going to use part of their ill-gotten gains to help others.

The dirty cop squad, however, was hampering their extra cash grabs. They’d already taken over the best car fence in the city and were threatening the rest. Cosmo had one connection, but he was small time and couldn’t handle the more expensive cars, at least not giving them what they should get for them.

“Well, Taran’s coming to see Cosmo and talk to us tonight. Cosmo hasn’t seen him in two weeks,” Haze mentioned.

“Two weeks without sex. Yeah, we’re not talking to Taran until morning at least.”

Haze laughed. “You could be right.”

An alert popped up on the screen and Haze leaned in while Mims opened it. “It’s a new Amber Alert. A teenage girl’s gone missing in Aurora.”

“Aurora. Where the BBC is headquartered, right?”

“Last we heard from Taran and his partner. So? Is this them?”

Haze spoke cautiously, “We can’t jump to conclusions, Mims. I mean, it could be, but there are other things that happen. It could be a parent that lost custody and kidnapped the kid, or something like that.”

Mims read over the alert and then he turned slowly to Haze. “Stranger abduction.”

The door opened again, and Cosmo hollered to them, “Hey! Taran’s here and he’s got something he needs to talk to us about. We’re all coming in.”

Mims and Haze hurried to the next room where there was a long table set in the middle of the room and more than fifteen metal chairs set around it. They all took their seats after Murphy arrived inside the room and the bookcase door was tightly closed. Even Tallulah Murphy, Connor’s sister, was there, as she was for most of the important things.

“Everyone,” Murphy started, and looked around at all of them. “We are about to have a new undercover cop hanging around, and you all will know who he is, but like Taran, it’s under wraps. It’s just us that knows.”

“Who are we gonna tell?” the sandy haired Hippy said, after pulling down his beret. He playfully elbowed Cosmo. “This one is the only one seriously dating anyone, and it’s the other cop in our midst.”

Cosmo laughed and said, “Thanks, Hippy.”

Their relationship was much better than it had been. Hippy hadn’t trusted Cosmo at all when he first came to the pub and brought with him a fed for a boyfriend. Since then, however, they were getting very close and could be found together most days. Hippy was even trying to get Cosmo into the blues scene, with which he surrounded himself.

“Excuse me,” Mims said to Hippy. “I have a serious boyfriend.”

Everyone at the table rolled their eyes.

“Hey!”

“Sure, you do, babe,” Haze said, coming to his defense. “Even if he does keep putting you off.”

Mims stuck his tongue out at his friend before Murphy cleared his throat to regain their attention.

“Anyway, boyfriends or none, this is under wraps like Taran. He’s not coming yet, he still has to wriggle himself into position to be the member of the BBC that comes here.”

“Member of the BBC?” Haze asked. “What the hell, Murphy?”

“Yeah, Paps,” Mims said. He was the only one that called him Paps, and Murphy pretended to hate it, but Mims knew he liked it just fine.

Taran stood to speak to them. “It’s true, he’s inside the BBC. I told you all that we had someone inside, and we actually have two. They were placed undercover into the BBC by Internal Affairs Division of Denver PD. When our two agencies collided, we decided to try to work together. No one is truly thrilled about that prospect, but already we’ve shared information that is valuable.”

“But…how can you be sure he’s actually not really in the BBC?” The dark and delicious Goldie asked. His big arms showed with the muscle shirt he wore and Abs nodded in his agreement with Goldie.

“Yeah, Taran? Maybe he’s trying to see what the feds know, and then he’s going back and telling the others.”

“Believe me, the information he’s given is truly worth the risk.”

“Maybe for you,” Tally said. “What about the boys here?”

Taran eased, “I knew you’d worry. I’ll bring him as soon as it’s safe to meet you all.”

“Not here,” Murphy said. “We’ll meet somewhere else.”

“Fine. I can actually arrange that sooner. How about we get on to other business?”

Cosmo reacted before the others could pounce on Taran for that question. “I think that would be great. We do have other business, after all, like the Maxfield Parrish painting. Taran has an idea of where it ended up.”

Murphy sat and gestured to Taran. “Let us in on it.”

“Okay, well, the previous owner didn’t want the painting back, since he’d had to repair it. He’s a snob that way, but he did sell it in perfect shape, which with the small repair, it is.

“From what we’ve been able to gather, it was a deal done through the mail. There is a small publication that art enthusiasts subscribe that sellers can post their wares. Art thieves,” he said, as he smiled to Mims, “have internet skills, so a lot of sellers post in the magazine and then use landlines and snail mail to do their deals.”

“Well, that’s not really fair,” Mims whined.

“Not fair to the thieves, no. In transit is when a lot of art pieces are stolen. It’s so much easier than to break into the homes and galleries that have great security.”

“So, if he simply posted the painting for sale, how do you know who bought it?” Cosmo asked.

“We have the phone records,” Taran said simply. “All of the landline calls from the time the publication became available to subscribers and in galleries and sales channels. There are surprisingly few calls on his landline. Five. We’ve done reverse number searches and found all the names. The rest, I’ll leave to you, the experts.”

“Give me the list, I’ll start now,” Mims offered.

Taran’s eyes widened. “I left it in the car.”

“I’ll get it,” Cosmo offered then left the room.

“Sorry, everyone. I was…”

“Excited to come and see your boo,” Goldie told him, laughing.

“Okay, I can admit that.”

Everyone laughed and Taran sat down while his pretty face reddened like an apple. “Look,” Mims said. “He’s red! For Cosmo!”

The men all had nicknames for drinks, but those names also corresponded to a color. It was easier for Murphy to keep track of their employee folders if they all had a separate color, and that went so far as to their rooms. Eazy was an interior decorator, and he’d matched their colors to their separate rooms in the two apartments they had built for the bartenders.

Mims’s room had orange accents, an orange comforter and rugs, and he hadn’t liked it at first, but it had grown on him. Now orange was his favorite color.

Abs pinched Taran’s cheek after getting up and running around the table. Before Taran could squeal about it, Abs was already back in his seat, next to his huge best friend, Goldie.

“You all are terrible.”

Cosmo came back into the secret room and handed the folder to Mims, who got up and asked, “Is the rest of this done?”

“Should be for now,” Taran said.

“Let the man go get with his pookie,” Hippy said. “Mims, work your magic.”

“I’ll have info in just a bit.”

In front of a computer monitor was the one place in the world that Mims felt in control. The rest of his world felt like he was holding onto a palm tree in the middle of a hurricane. His hands slipped, threatening to blow him far from anything he knew.

It was like that when he was just a kid, too. His family was all about money, possessions, status. He was the first and only child of seven that was born in America. Maybe that was why he didn’t understand his family like his siblings had. They’d twisted themselves into knots to make their father happy. One smile from their father made them so happy. They strived to do more to attain more of those simple, tight smiles.

Ali, however, had never made his father smile. Perhaps the old man had known what his son was long before anyone else. Long before Ali had confessed his love of men instead of women.

He was only sixteen when it happened, but he was asked to leave his parents’ home that very day. He made money to live by hacking banks and big stores, but he was caught and sent to juvy.

It was when he came out, scared, broke and ready to find a way to die, that he met his old crew. He worked with them until he was twenty-two and Murphy was introduced to him.

That had changed his life. No more living in a studio apartment with ten other hackers, spending his days playing video games they’d pirated. He had a real life, real friends, and a way to use his skills to make his new family prosper.

He pulled up the names of those on Taran’s list and started a search to find out everything there was to find on them. Even if they’d paid to have their names scrubbed from the internet, he had ways of getting around that. The internet is forever, no matter how much anyone could pay to have their lives taken off of it.

None of them had bothered, he found. They didn’t have the need, not with the small things they were mentioned in on pages such as society pages and art lover’s lists. Nothing big and certainly nothing to indicate if any of them had bought the piece.

He did a deeper dive and discovered that two had social media accounts and three had well known CPAs.

Smiling as he started to go into the CPAs, he felt at home.

Oh, the entire pub made him feel that way, but no matter where he’d ever been, a computer had been there, welcoming him into its world.

Yes, it could be a small world, letting someone in Japan have intimate and long conversations with someone from Sweden, but really, it was much bigger. It was as big and wide as anyone could need it to be.

And no matter how big it was, it was a cozy nook for Mims. The relaxing clicking of the keys, the hum of the monitor, the colors, lights, pages of every color. Mims knew the names of all the fonts, how to tell if a picture or page was AI made.

Haze sat next to him, smiling over in his way. “Hey, babe.”

“I’m not even close to done yet.”

“I don’t care about that. You’ll find it. I just like watching you get into your groove. You’ve felt out of sorts lately.”

“I’m always out of sorts when I’m not in front of a screen,” he whispered, like it was a secret.

“Well, my friend, if you could marry a screen, I’d be your best man.”

“I might figure out a way to do that,” he said, laughing. “Now, go get Daiq before Abs does. I want some cat time tonight.”

“Sure, babe. I’ll have Goldie keep Abs busy and I’ll run up and get him.”