Raincheck (Caldwell Brothers Book 6)

by Colleen Charles

  The question catches me off guard. “Hackers. So bad it’s good. Why, what’s yours?”

  “Sneakers.” His voice shifts into a passable impression of Ben Kingsley’s New England accent in the film. “‘The world changed on us, Mahhhhh-ty...and without our help.’”

  I chuckle. “Why did you ask?”

  “I figured we could do a double-feature when you get back. Just kick back, veg out, and enjoy ourselves after all that frantic work. Maybe eat something that wasn’t genetically altered in a lab.”

  “You mean unwind from six days in a row of staring at screens together...by staring at a screen together? Sounds perfect. I’ll bring the popcorn.”

  I lean in for one last kiss and sashay out of the bedroom, more determined than ever to help Hawk find happiness by learning his mother’s identity. I feel like if I can help him with this, it will be like I have a connection to his past.

  Stepping back into my own place after such a long time away feels pretty damned odd. Sure enough, everything’s located just so, just like I left it. The stuffy air full of dust motes assaults my nostrils, so I open some windows to let a breeze in. Part of me wonders why I wasn’t more concerned about the idea of Dante torching my place or something as a warning while I’ve been gone. But that wouldn’t have accomplished much for him, and even though his obnoxious attitude and brazen threats yank my chain in a way I’ve never experienced before, he seems like someone who’d be too careful to risk associating himself with unnecessary crimes – especially one as flashy and attention-grabbing as arson.

  If he knew I’d been gone this long, then he probably also realized that nothing too valuable gets left behind in this house, and certainly nothing related to the SkyEye project. There’s all of my customized gear, sure, but it wouldn’t be difficult for me to rebuild and replace most of it.

  Besides, I’ve been extremely distracted these past few days, and not just by the work on the project, either.

  My labia throbs once as if to give me the vaginal thumbs up.

  As I sit at my computer and switch it on, I think about Hawk’s earlier Disneyworld joke. Now that we’re done with SkyEye, why not take a little vacay? Maybe not Disney and definitely not for six months, but there’s a whole world to explore, and I’ve seen almost none of it except for weekend trips to tech conferences. For me, getting away has always meant escaping into my private world of bits and bytes and pixels, and if I had to guess, I’d say the same is probably true for Hawk.

  We haven’t been together long. In fact, we’ve barely connected like a couple while we’ve been together, with all the focus on the software – and it would be a big step. But maybe that would be a good way to test our relationship and see if we’re still as into each other when we’re in different contexts and locations. Traveling can bring people closer together.

  Or further apart.

  I sweep that negative thought away since it doesn’t fit well inside my fantasy. So where should we go? Paris? Rome? Tokyo? Montauk? Hell, maybe we could even have a few ironic laughs if we go to Disney after all. It’s not like money’s ever been a problem for me...not that he knows that yet. I know I’ll have to tell him about my father’s immense wealth at some point, and it’s not like it’s some big, dark secret that I should be afraid of disclosing. Judging from the size of his place, it’s not for him either which means my financial status won’t intimidate him or cause friction between us.

  Still, one of the main lessons my childhood taught me is that when people find out you’re from a super-rich family, the look in their eyes changes and they start to treat you differently. It’s hard to explain – it’s like they expect less from you, and they become more hostile and dismissive, as though you’ve somehow managed to disappoint them before you’ve even done anything. Or worse, they start trying to be your friend just so they can ask you for a bunch of stuff, like they’ve found their own personal fucking genie and they’re just waiting for the right moment to rub the lamp.

  I don’t think Hawk would act that way toward me. In fact, I’m sure he wouldn’t. I’ll get around to telling him.

  Eventually.

  I stare at my screen, my hands poised over the keyboard like a concert pianist. Where should I begin?

  Based on what Hawk told me a week ago, I know he already tried the basic stuff, like searching the Alabama hospital records for birth certificates. He said they were lost in a fire, and I have no reason not to believe him – but I’m still too OCD to take anything for granted, so I check again anyway, like someone checking her pockets for her lost keys for the second time.

  Sure enough, nothing useful. There’s the huge gap in birth certificates and a bunch of news articles from the end of 1988 about the fire that consumed them. No surprises there.

  The next logical step seems to be searching the computer files of social services and foster care organizations around that time period. The parts I’d need to check out are kept classified with encryptions, firewalls, and password protection – it takes me all of twenty-five seconds to hack my way past each of them, one by one.

  It’s extremely illegal to access this information, of course, but hey, that’s only a problem for people who get caught. And by the time I’m done, they’ll never have any idea I was snooping around in their system. Besides, I’m doing this for a man’s highest good and not for something nefarious. No one gets hurt in this security breach.

  But that’s not the problem. The problem is that we’re talking 1988. Hardly the “dawn of the digital age.” Official records weren’t automatically created and stored for things like this until much, much later. Generally, they’d be compiled in towering file cabinets stuffed with a whole rainforest’s worth of paper, and eventually, maybe, possibly, someone would get around to building a database and entering all of this stuff manually.

  But this is social services, not to mention a bunch of understaffed and underfunded foster programs. They probably never had the time or resources to do anything but jam paper files into drawers and then promptly forget about them. And who knows how many of those foster programs are still around twenty years later? The ones that closed down or were absorbed by other agencies probably hired a shredding company to cart the files off and turn them into confetti – that way, they wouldn’t be liable for any sensitive information accidentally being released, and they wouldn’t have to cart around enough boxes of paperwork to build a house from.

  And what’s more, Hawk probably figured all of this out long ago during his own search.

  This is bullshit. A goddamn dead end. I’m smarter than this.

  Come on, Waverly. I berate myself with my inner mean girl. Think.

  As I try to come up with new ideas and approaches, I think about what it would be like to give a child up for adoption. Was Hawk’s mother too young to take care of him? Had she been assaulted, or was the father someone she’d been dating? If so, had he forced her to give the baby up against her will? Had her parents? Or maybe she was mentally ill or physically challenged somehow, and she wouldn’t have been able to take care of...

  I shake my head, irritated. There could be a zillion different reasons why a woman would give up her baby, and it seems impossible for me to connect firmly with any of them. The more I try to come up with these scenarios and walk my way through them in search of clues, the more they feel like melodramas, thin plots on daytime soap operas – even though rationally, I know that these things happen every day.

  But what do I know about motherhood, anyway? Not a damn thing. I could come up with endless backstories and try to pursue them to their logical conclusions, but in the end, the thing that baffles me most is the concept of a baby growing inside a woman to begin with. I’ve never given it much thought before, but now that I’ve had sex – now that I have a boyfriend or whatever he is, even those thoughts suddenly don’t seem so remote.

  Do I want to have kids someday? Most women do, right? Even ones like Hawk’s mother who aren’t prepared for it at first probably
eventually end up getting married, having more kids later on in life, and keeping them.

  But Jesus, how weird would that whole process be? Having something live and grow inside you and feeling all the changes to your body that go along with it. Weight gain, swollen feet, raging hormones, insane cravings, not to mention all those trips to the...

  I gasp.

  The trips to the doctor.

  That’s it. I’ve got it. I’ve found the answer.

  Because unless Hawk’s birth mom was some crazy, off-the-grid hillbilly chick who lived in a cabin in the Alabama woods and visited a damn midwife, she’d have to have received treatment from an OB-GYN during her pregnancy, wouldn’t she?

  The trick is to comb through the medical records of OB-GYNs based in Alabama from that time period, and then cross-reference them with the hospital records I’ve already looked at to determine which ones don’t have corresponding birth certificates. These offices are probably in a better position to convert all outdated paper files to digital ones for easier reference. They’ll be kept confidential too, and probably with better security software than social services and the foster agencies had. Still, hacking into them won’t be too much trouble. I’ve hacked national defense databases on a dare, so these should be fairly easy by comparison.

  I take a deep breath.

  Okay. It’s a good idea, but it’s still not perfect.

  First of all, going back and forth between the two databases to compare records would probably take months, at least.

  And taking a little sneak peek at restricted files is one thing but shuffling around in them for prolonged periods is a good way to get caught and arrested.

  And there might also have been a lot of cases where the baby didn’t make it, which would also mean no birth certificate.

  And, and, and...

  All right. One thing at a time, Waverly.

  It’s not difficult to quickly cobble together an algorithm that will go through the two databases and find the files I’m looking for. That will reduce the search time from months to minutes.

  Plugging into both databases to cross-reference them without being detected is a bit more of a challenge. I come up with a list of OB-GYN offices in Alabama that have been around since 1988 or have merged with ones who have, and hack past their slick security measures effortlessly, disguising my efforts with a couple of prototype stealth encryption protocols I once found while fucking around in the NSA system on a bored and rainy afternoon. If anyone happens to access the systems while I’m in them, it’ll look like their networks are running automatic disk defrag and cleanup programs – off-schedule, sure, but the average medical office secretary will probably ignore that.

  The death issue isn’t a problem if I specifically program the algorithm to exclude records which show something like that. This gives me an idea, and I also program it to look for files which mention “adoption” and/or “social services” in case the patient told the doctor her thoughts. Who knows? She might have asked him for additional information about her options, or the physician might have suggested counseling to deal with the related psychological issues. I can even program it to exclude files that indicate infant wellness visits.

  I sit back and watch the results populate on the screen. When the algorithm stops working, I’m left with about a dozen names. A quick search online shows that four of them are deceased, so I delete them. If she’s dead, and he’ll never be able to connect with her, there’s no point in relaying that information to him. No, this is only a gift if I can give him a chance of reuniting with her. Otherwise, it’s just shitty news.

  But hadn’t he also said he moved to Vegas because he’d received information that she was out here too?

  I find a people-searching website, consider hacking it, and enter my credit card information instead. Professional courtesy, right? Whoever programmed this site is trying to make a living, and it’s not like I can’t afford to pay for the service. There’s nothing sillier than a millionaire cheapskate, after all.

  The results come back almost immediately. Only one of these women moved to Las Vegas, a Dixie Pendergrass.

  Wait... Dixie? Haven’t I heard that name somewhere recently?

  I dig around social media sites for a few minutes until I find her. Again, it doesn’t take long. It’s not exactly a common name. When I see the photos of her, it takes me a few moments to place her.

  The sous chef. The one who served us tableside Caesar salad at that restaurant when we were...what? On our “first date?” It’s strange to think of it like that, since we started the evening wanting to rip each other’s throats out.

  Anyway, we can figure out a proper first date soon. But meanwhile, my mouth hangs open in disbelief, looking at the middle-aged woman smiling in the pictures. Could this really be Hawk’s birth mother? How many times has he eaten in that place? All his searching, all his despair – and she’s been right in front of his face the whole time? That can’t be true, can it? It’s insane. It’s unbelievable. It’s like something out of a Lifetime movie.

  I smile and waves of relief flow over me. Well, if the past week has taught me anything, it’s that just because something’s implausible, that doesn’t mean it’s not true. And Hawk might feel gobsmacked by this revelation when he hears it, but ultimately, at least he’ll be happy to finally learn his mother’s identity.

  I try to imagine what it will be like when he tells her, and honestly, I can’t. I can only hope it goes well and promise myself that I’ll be there for him if it doesn’t. She certainly seems like a warm, friendly, open woman based on my brief interaction with her, and her social media posts.

  Still, I’m sure it will be a shock to her, this sudden and unlooked-for blast from her past. A quick glance at her medical file doesn’t reveal anything about the circumstances that made her give her child up – it just says that she asked her doctor about the process and that he gave the teenager some adoption information and suggested counseling for her, which she refused. Then the records say she had a healthy baby, went through with her plans to give it up, and then...nothing.

  No matter how Dixie reacts to it – if Hawk even decides to confront her about it – at least I’ve accomplished my goal. I’ve helped him. I’ve managed to give him something he’s been searching for almost since he was born, information, and a choice. Hopefully, handing this over to him will show him how much I care about him and want him to be happy.

  Suddenly, I start to laugh until my belly shakes. I try to stifle it, then give up and throw my head back, cackling to the empty room around me until tears stream down my face.

  Holy jackpot, Batman, can you imagine looking for your mother your whole life...and finding out that her name is Dixie Pendergrass from bumfuck Alabama?

  You just can’t make this shit up.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Hawk

  After downloading both of the movies, I snuggle into the couch and wait for Waverly to return.

  I’ll admit, I feel a little pang of jealousy, even though I know that’s ridiculous. It’s not as though I think she’s actually gone to see someone else. She was right when she teased me about that – if there were anyone else, I’d have seen plenty of evidence during all of our time working together.

  No, it’s the fact that she didn’t give me a straight answer. She’s hiding something.

  Well, why not, right? People keep secrets from each other all the time. And even though it may feel like we’ve known each other a long time after all the time we’ve just spent together, the truth is, we’ve only been part of each other’s lives for a short while. I shouldn’t expect her to have told me absolutely everything about herself yet. Relationships are a process during which trust is built. I haven’t really been in an actual relationship for a long time, so I’ve forgotten that. Patience is required.

  But...

  I know it’s irrational, but I don’t want to be patient. I want to know everything about Waverly, all of her secrets, right now, this
minute. I haven’t felt so voracious to learn all there is to learn about something since I started coding. Yes, that’s what she reminds me of – the first time I saw this machine language, this secret cipher of ones and zeroes, and desperately hungered to understand every part of it, to be in on it.

  Plus, whatever reason she had for leaving, it seemed like it must be fairly important for her to stammer around it nervously and give silly excuses. What’s so big that she’d feel like she needed to hide it from me? And if it is that big, why hasn’t it come up in the past week while we’ve been together?

  I wonder whether I should ask Waverly about it when she gets back. Her first instinct might be to hide it again. But if I tell her that it’s okay – that whatever it is, she can trust me with it – maybe she’ll feel safe enough to let her guard down. Especially if I tell her my reasons for wanting to know. I’m not used to sharing my feelings like this, but if I’m going to have any real future with her like I want, I’ll need to become comfortable with it.

  Besides, it seems like she’s not used to communicating on this level, either. So at least we’ll be feeling our way through the darkness together. My shoulders droop at the thought, and I want to snatch the thoughts back. As I accept the fact that I’m already in too deep, I find there’s perfection in my fear.

  I hear the front door open and close. It’s the same sound I’ve heard almost every day since we started working on this project when she’d go out to pick up food for us. My heart flips over, and my body tightens as I wait for her to make her way into this room, just like every other time.

  Then I turn around. Dante stands in the doorway, and my blood turns to ice in my veins. How does this fucker keep bypassing my security?

  “You shouldn’t leave your door open, even in a nice neighborhood like this,” he comments mildly. “You never know what kinds of desperate characters might try to walk in.”

  I try to sound tough and stand my ground. “No gas can this time, Smokey the Bear?”