I snagged a set of keys out of Bax’s office and decided on a brand-new Chevy Stingray that belonged to a dermatologist who had foolishly borrowed money from me to pay his student loans. Considering I charged a thirty-five-percent interest rate on money I loaned out, I had no idea what he was thinking, but the car was sweet and looked all kinds of sexy and fast. If the skin doctor didn’t come up with the cash he owed, maybe I would just keep it. I didn’t have the heart to try and rebuild another classic. It hurt too much to watch it burn.
I grabbed Brysen’s dead laptop and called my buddy Stark to tell him I was on the way. Stark was the ultimate computer nerd. I don’t think he had seen the light of day in over five years, considering he was always glued to this game or that, but he could find anything I had missed in her computer, so I was willing to brave his Cheetos and Mtn Dew–filled domain for some answers. Stark was actually the only person from the Hill I still stayed in contact with. He was also an erstwhile rich kid who had been tossed aside by his well-to-do parents. Granted, Stark’s disownment followed on the heels of him getting declared a threat to national security after a raid from Homeland Security that had been all the talk in the upper elite for months. Turns out hacking into a secure NSA database to see what the government was actually monitoring wasn’t an awesome idea.
Fortunately for Stark, he was a veritable genius and had managed to find a software development company that paid him bucketloads of cash just to have access to his superbrain. He made almost as much money as I did just by answering e-mails when the company sent them.
I pulled up in front of a perfectly respectable town house that was located just at the base of the Hill. When Stark answered the door, I had to admit he didn’t look like any computer hacker or gamer guy I had ever seen before. He was shorter than me by a few inches, had dark hair that tended to lean toward a reddish tint, and he wore black, Buddy Holly–style glasses over a sharp gray gaze. All of that was pretty normal and basic; what wasn’t was the fact that the guy was jacked. I mean ripped like an action-hero movie star and big enough that he could probably hold his own in the Pit against any of Nassir’s juiced up brawlers. The other thing that would never have people pegging him as an über-nerd was the fact that he was covered in ink.
Colorful tattoos started at his collarbone and wound and twisted all the way down his massive arms and across the backs of his hands. I didn’t get the theme behind all of the designs and characters, but it was all very bright and detailed and totally belied the fact that Stark was a mellow, mild-mannered guy who played around on the Internet for a living. He really looked like as much of a thug and a criminal as Bax did.
“Hey, man. Thanks for taking a look at this for me.”
I handed the laptop off and followed him into the darkened town house. There were electronics and wires, as well as monitors and a variety of TVs everywhere. It resembled what I figured a command center of a spaceship had to look like. I accepted the beer he offered and took a seat in a giant leather recliner that was placed in front of a TV that was the size of a movie-theater screen.
Stark sat on the couch and started poking at keys on the computer.
“What exactly am I looking for in here if the hard drive is shot?”
I shrugged. “Anything that doesn’t belong there. My girl has a stalker, and whoever is fixated on her is messing with her life. They made a fake e-mail, a fake Facebook, and even a fake phone number, all pretending to be her. Whoever it is has managed to get pretty deep inside her life already.”
He looked at me over the top of the computer. “You got a girl?”
“Why does everybody keep saying that?”
He snickered at me. “I’ve known you a long time, Race. I remember the way you ran through girls before you fell in with Bax and started screwing around with cars instead of cheerleaders.”
I slumped in the recliner and scowled. “I guess when I found out I had a little sister and that she had been living in squalor, was fighting to survive every single day, it made me have a new insight into the chicks I was wasting time on.”
Not that I had lived like a saint at any point in my life, but from the second I met Dovie, took her under my wing, I made sure that any girl I hooked up with, messed around with, knew the score. I was in it for one thing and one thing only and they had to be okay with that. That was one of the major reasons I knew Brysen was different from the get-go. She hadn’t bought into my charm, into my practiced flirtation, and that alone made me want to get to her. But it was the fact that even with her feigned dislike of me, I knew, just simply knew, that I wanted her for way more than just sex. I wanted those sky-blue eyes to look at me like I was her hero, I wanted her to smile at me because I made her happy, and I wanted all that pretty, pale skin to get pink and warm because I turned her on and she wanted me just as much as I wanted her.
“How is Dovie?” More rapid tapping on the keys followed by a noise and his eyebrows dipping under the rim of his glasses.
“Good. She has a job she loves and makes pretty good money doing it. She’s going to school to get a degree, and despite everything I thought I knew about her and Bax, they seem to be a perfect couple. They’re making it work. She’s happy, she makes him happy—well, a Bax version of happy—and I guess that’s all I can ask for as a friend and a brother.”
He shook his head and laughed a little. “You getting serious about a girl is surprising, Bax settling down is downright unbelievable. I thought for sure he would be in prison for the rest of his life by now, not playing house.”