Page 58 of Taste of Blood

He insisted he was feeling a hundred percent when he woke up. I would’ve preferred he take a day, let me care for him. Spend it in bed with him, but he insisted he needed to get back out there to stop this threat.

I don’t like it, but I let him go. The last thing I want to do is start a fight when we seem to be getting along. He did promise to keep me updated on things, so at least I have that.

“What do you have?” I ask Elaine as she plops down on the chair in front of my desk. “And explain it to me in terms I’ll understand.”

She grins. “Okay, so I was having no luck with my usual methods so I set up a search parameter to crawl everything on the web and alert me if the name ‘the Python’ pops up.”

“And?”

“And I got a hit. It was on a private Reddit chat, of all things. I could tell they were talking in code, but someone mentioned ‘the Python will be there.’”

“Where?”

“That’s what I’m trying to dig up right now. I’ve combed through pages and pages of this chat looking for mention of a location, but I did find a weird series of numbers and letters that could be a coded GPS coordinate. I’m running a cipher on it right now.”

Could this be what Cord is looking for? “How long will that take?”

Her phone dings and she looks down at it. “How about right now?”

She jumps up and heads back out to her computer with me on her heels. Her screen is flashing with a number that even I recognize as a GPS location. She pulls up a map and plugs in the coordinates and it takes a few seconds before zeroing in on a location in the city.

“Can you zoom out on that to tell where it is?”

We both watch as the screen changes, revealing street names. “Looks like an industrial complex in the Meatpacking district.”

I pull out my phone and call Cord. He answers on the second ring.

“Miss me already?”

“Can you come by my office? Elaine has found something.”

Yeah, I could’ve just given him the address, but I’m using any excuse to see him.

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

I’m waiting for him when he walks off the elevator with several of the people who work for me. It’s strange seeing him in this environment. He stands out among the conservative suitsand dresses, his muscled, leather-clad body seeming larger than life and bristling with danger.

It’s only the second time he’s been here, the first being when I initially moved my company into the building, though that time we came at night when no one was present and proceeded to christen the couch in my new office. Just the thought of that incident sends a flush of pleasure through my system.

I push that thought aside and take him to Elaine’s desk, introducing them. She seems especially in awe of him.

“So you’re the guy responsible for my sleepless week?”

He glances at me and shrugs. “You’re the computer genius?”

She grins smugly. “That would be me.”

“What’d you find?”

“I’ll get to that in a minute. First tell me what’s the deal with this Python guy, because he covers his tracks like a pro.”

Cord looks at me and is no doubt wondering how much Elaine knows.

I nod to him. “She’s up to speed.”

Elaine has known about me almost from the beginning. It’s the only way I could convince her to go along with some of the shady shit I’ve asked of her over the years. And maybe it’s because she has her own secrets to keep or the fact that I kept her out of a federal prison and pay her an ungodly amount of money to do exactly what she loves and give her no restrictions other than don’t get caught. Yes, she works long hours, but it’s not because I ask her to. She’s just a workaholic.

“Ever heard of an Outlier?” Cord asks.