Page 85 of Booked for Theft

TWENTY-ONE

If anyone learned the truth, we were all screwed.

As the kittens still needed to pass their health checks and go back to the vet, we left them at home with Ajani before spending the rest of the day with our parents. While I couldn’t ride Sunflower, I took a turn on Majestic, who spooked at the existence of a bucket, tossed me halfway to the moon, and fled in the general direction of his stall. I picked myself up, dusted off, retrieved Bradley’s horse, led him to the offensive metal contraption, and spent more than a few minutes acclimating the animal to its frightening presence.

Once he tolerated the bucket, I got back on, managing to stay in the saddle without taking another flying lesson.

An afternoon of peace helped, and by the time Monday evening rolled around, I held some confidence we might find answers in the piles of papers. Two new boxes of papers, courtesy of Bradley’s mother, had been hidden among a shipment of six more loads of books, all of which counted as felonies if I were to share them with anyone.

On the outside, Bradley’s mother maintained her status as excessive.

If anyone learned the truth, we were all screwed.

After Bradley’s mother left, we went to work. Bradley ordered fried chicken for us to snack on while we sorted papers and attempted to create a plan capable of disrupting hundreds of years of government control. The more I learned, the less I believed we’d win, but I would try anyway. If we did win, millions upon millions of lives would be saved—and improved.

I needed no other reason to put everything on the line.

“How do you want to approach this?”

“I want to find all the memos from President Castillo; the ones we’ve located so far have been fairly damning, so maybe we’ll learn something more from those. Put all financial documents in a pile, anything dealing with campaign operations in a pile, memos in a pile, and charity stuff in a pile. If it doesn’t fit in one of those categories, we’ll decide if it needs a pile of its own.” I snatched one of the memos I had found, which was yet another warning that Senator Maybelle needed to stay in her lane and stop trying to steer her campaign away from the game plan. I waved it in the air. “Memos like this one make it clear that the candidates are not permitted to promote themselves in the way they see fit. It’s all scripted.” I returned the sheet to the pile, searching for the one that’d indicated she would be receiving additional responsibilities. “This memo is interesting; a month into her campaign, President Castillo indicated she might be receiving extra work to adjust for something.”

Bradley took the memo from me, read it over, and nodded. “I have a bunch of those, too. For the most part, they’re similar. It looks like he was sending daily memos to her campaign.”

“So much bullshit and red tape,” I muttered.

“Why don’t you start sorting them by day while I blitz through and pull out as many of the memos from these boxes as I can?” he asked.

I took all the memos, went to one side of the table, and cleared enough space for me to be able to work by month. “That’s a better plan than the one I had.”

“You had a plan?”

“I really didn’t.” Shaking my head, I slapped papers down, wondering if we might really succeed at making progress just from having stolen from—and burned down—a gas station and warehouse. “Does the news have anything interesting in it today?”

Bradley chuckled. “In good news for me, I’ve been checking headlines for all the nearby states for months on a daily basis, so nobody is going to think twice about my behavior if they do check my internet usage. I’ve also been buying numerous newspapers from the stand around the corner after you’ve been going to work.” While I sorted, he searched for evidence of the fire being noticed. “Yep. The fire has an honorable mention in several newspapers. In good news for us, we took precautions—there was a functioning security camera with limited view of the warehouse and gas station on a neighboring building. It spotted a broken down gas tanker, which the driver repaired before leaving. It showed the significant puddle of gasoline unfortunately close to the sparking wire. The initial investigation deemed it to be an accident. The security camera did not catch the license plate of the tanker.”

Sometimes, luck did favor us, although we’d taken many steps to prevent detection. “Your father is a marvel.”

“He really is. Honestly, I’m shocked that worked. The pictures of the building afterwards are spectacular. The explosion scattered the papers, the papers ignited, and the whole thing turned into a bonfire. The pictures just show ash, structural rubble, and so on. The firefighting crews focused on the gas station, which provided a challenge with the fuel left in the tanks. The explosion did a good job of opening the tanks, breaking up the asphalt over the tanks, and otherwise creating chaos. There was minor damage to a neighboring building.”

Damn. “How minor?”

“Three broken windows.”

That wasn’t bad. “Does the article mention if the owner is insured?”

“They’re insured, so try not to worry about it.” Bradley set his phone on the table and resumed sorting through the documents. “This changes everything, though.”

“We thought we were after vigilantes, but we’re not. It might really be government eliminating people who didn’t play to the script.”

“And we don’t even know what their endgame really is,” he muttered. Sucking in a breath, he stared at a sheet of paper, his eyes widening while his face paled.

“What’s wrong?”

“President Castillo sent a memo to Senator Maybelle informing her that she would be assigned most of Senator Godrin’s duties.”

I narrowed my eyes. “What’s the issue with that?”

“It’s dated a week before his death.”