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Of course, it was okay for him to fall for his enemy, but us mere mortals—with the exception of his beloved Drew—couldn’t do the same. It pissed me off so hard.
“Okay, now that we’ve cleared that up, are we done here?” I stood up and snatched my jacket from the couch behind me.
“Not even close. Sit your ass down, and listen the fuck up.” Just one punch. I could launch just one, good, solid swipe, and take him the fuck out. It would probably be my swan song—no pun intended—from college, but some sacrifices were worth making.
Who the hell was I kidding? As much as it would give me momentary pleasure to knock Xavier’s head from his shoulders, he wasn’t even close to being worth jeopardizing my future for. And more to the point, of all us Cygnus brothers, I could least afford to be a college drop-out. It wouldn’t matter that I’d dropped out of one of the most prestigious schools in the country, or that, while there, both my grades and my ball career killed the game. All people would see would be another failed black kid going nowhere, and fast.
“Okay. You’re right. It won’t work, for all the reasons you said.” Drew was way more magnanimous than his evil twin, and far more likely to put his hands up when he screwed up. “But what about a variation of that idea?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, didn’t you say something about her tailing you for the Herald article?”
“Yeah. Apparently, she’s going to have to spend a good chunk of time with me sometime soon.”
“Perfect. So how about we put that to good use, and pay her room a little visit while she’s with you? That way, not only will we know for sure that she’s not going to walk in on us, but we also provide you with an alibi, in case she’s suspicious enough to think you were involved.”
“Which I am.”
“Well, we know that, but she doesn’t have to.”
“Okay, that all makes sense, but it still leaves the same issues we had before—lurking around in masks is going to make us stand out like a dog’s ball sack. But if we go in without disguises, we’re pretty much signing our own arrest warrants, so how do we get around that?”
“We hide in plain sight.” The gleam in Drew’s eye told me that he had a hot idea brewing.
“Meaning what?”
“Well, there aren’t cameras in the halls by the rooms, so any footage they did have would be kind of circumstantial. Even better if we were already in the hall, or on another floor within the building, and then when the time came, we slipped into Lois’ room, and ‘hey presto’…you know the rest.”
“Actually, I don’t. What is the point of this? If she’s not going to be there, then she’s unlikely to get the message that she should move on, and forget she ever heard of us, let alone what she thinks she saw that night.”
“She’s not about to forget it—at least, not without a fight,” Drew admitted. “The fact that she hasn’t taken what she saw further tells us she’s got skin in the game. We need to know what she knows, or thinks she knows, what her interest is, and what she’s planning on doing with the information. Getting into her room can serve two purposes, if we’re lucky—giving us some intel on what the hell she’s playing at, and also sending her a message to back the fuck off.”
“There are so many holes in this plan, it looks like a wheel of Swiss cheese.” I hated to be the merchant of doom, but it was true.
“Holes like what?”
“Don’t be defensive. Bear’s right. This plan sucks.” Xavier’s voice sent a hush through the room, cutting off Fox and Kane’s side conversation.
“Holes like the fact that I’d be willing to take a guess that any information she has on us is on her laptop, and from what I’ve seen, she takes that thing everywhere with her. So even with her trailing me for the day, we wouldn’t have access to the thing we’d need the most to make this whole fishing expedition worth it. But even if we did get lucky and find she’d left it behind, there’s no way it wouldn’t be password protected, making it useless to us, anyway.”
“Unless we could get it to Dillon. He could work his magic for sure.” Xavier’s data guy strikes again.
“Do you think he’d be okay with doing that?”
“He’ll be okay with whatever I ask him to be okay with.” Of course. Because the world existed solely to further Xavier’s interests.
“Okay. How about this?” Kane’s eyes lit up with excitement as he spoke. “We get into her room—how are we supposed to do that, by the way? It will be locked.”
“I can pick locks.” All eyes focused on Fox.
“Do I even want to know why you possess that particular skill?” I both did and didn’t.
“Whether you want to or not, it’s probably best you don’t.”
“Okay,” Kane continued. “So we break in, we take the laptop and we get it to Dillon to work on. I presume that he’s going to need a few hours at least. So you—” he turned toward me “—need to keep her occupied all day.”
“And how exactly am I supposed to do that?”
