Chapter 9: Jason

Whoa, too intense for me, time to go check on my family and get the hell out of dodge. Geez, you could cut the tension in that room with a knife. As usual, when things got sticky, and my family was anywhere around, I always made sure they were safe no matter what safety measures were in place.

I saw my nieces and nephews running around outside, and the men and women Mancini had there to watch over them. Though there was no way for anyone to approach the island without being seen and the water was a good ways away from the house, there was no guarantee that one of the million kids they had running around here wouldn't head that way.

I went in search of my sister and found her in a roomful of women. The whole place went quietly still as soon as I walked in, and I wished I'd have looked in before stepping in there. I swallowed hard and tried to backtrack, but it was too late. There were about four or five pregnant women in there, and maybe that's why the air was so rife with hormones. I felt like a piece of meat.

"Ooh, a live one. Who's this delectable morsel?" a redhead with a tummy out to here grinned my way, and I felt like a specimen in a petri dish. "Uh, Ash, just checking in to make sure you're okay."

"Ladies, this is my little brother Jason. Jason, these are my friends." She went down the line like I was going to remember the names of almost twenty damn women.

"Little, huh, he doesn't look so little to me." That one comment started off a barrage, and that was my cue to head out. I left to the sounds of raucous laughter and hoots and hollers. One of them commented on the shape and size of my ass, and I couldn't get the hell out of there fast enough. My sister didn't even try to save me. I'm not sure she wasn't one of the ones laughing like a loon.

I headed downstairs to my assigned room. I've been around wealth for the past ten years and have seen some sh*t that the other half does with their money, but this Mancini guy takes the cake. I'd already done a walkthrough of my rooms, and if everyone else had digs like this, then the utility bills on this bitch must be enough to feed a small country each month.

There was a bedroom, a sitting area, and a full bathroom. There was also what I could only deem as an entertainment center equipped with state of the art everything. That's where I was headed now for the computer that I was supposed to use while here. I couldn't use my personal laptop even though Gideon had outfitted it with all the bells and whistles to make sure it remained secure and off-grid. This Mancini guy was taking no chances.

I did a little research of my own before retrieving the piece of paper with the contact information he'd given me earlier from my pocket. This Track guy was younger than me in years, but his resume made mine look like a kindergarten kid. The private dossier Mancini had left on my desk as if he'd already decided that we two would be working together was even more enlightening.

The kid worked for the Pentagon in the past and was part of ANONYMOUS, the latter I found more impressive than the former. That meant he knew his way around a computer, something I'm okay at but nothing spectacular. He does his tracking with technology while I do mine the old fashioned way.

I hunt assholes using common sense and their own f*ck-ups. I spent a good while reading about his supposed ancestor and got sucked in. I did pretty well in school, but you learn something new every day. The richest man to ever live was a brother. Even by today's standards taking into account inflation and everything else, he had the kind of money that would give Bill Gates a hard-on.

According to history, his descendants had pretty much f*cked it all away, but according to Mancini's records, that had not been the case. At least one of his descendants had had the foresight to sock away some of that wealth, as was evident by that bank account Mancini had pulled up earlier.

This kid, Track, and his dad were the sole heirs of some serious coins, and the kid was all of nineteen, damn. I put in the number on the computer, and his face came swimming onto the screen a few seconds later, like he'd been waiting for me. "Hey Track, I'm Jason, Mancini told me to get with you."

His smile was warm and inviting, and you wouldn't know by just looking at him that he was anything more than a college geek into computers. Except most people's ideas of a geek does not look anything as handsome as the kid did, or as built. Most computer nerds didn't go for the gym life, but it was obvious that he did.

There was a gorgeous black female standing next to him with her hand on his shoulder. "Jason, this is my wife, Valerie. Go hang with the others babe; I'll be here for a while." She leaned down and kissed him, and he whispered something in her ear that made her giggle before walking away.

Nineteen and married. He looked back at the screen with that boyish grin on his face, and I wondered about Mancini's pairing the two of us together. Then I remembered his resume and decided that the old adage never judge a book by its cover held true here.

The kid looked like your average college teen unless you looked closer at the eyes. You wouldn't know that he was swimming in money either unless you knew what the Graff Diamond Hallucination watch on his woman's wrist was worth. Damn, and I thought Gideon was over the top in the gift-giving department.

"Okay, I'm guessing you're up to speed on what we're dealing with here. So how do you propose we do this"

"First, we retrace our perp's steps going back to the first kill in the pattern."

"And how do we do that? I'm sure you know that I don't usually work this way. I do most of my hunting on the ground."

In fact, I think this person, whoever they are, might be doing pretty much what I do. I hunt down assholes and take them out. I guess you can say I'm nothing more than a glorified bounty hunter; the only difference is, I don't hunt men and women down for bail, and my finds hardly ever make it into courthouse.

"That's where I come in. I'll pick up the trail using anything that connects through technology, and you can be the man on the ground. Are you ready?"

"As I'll ever be." I have no idea what the f*ck I'm doing here.