Free Wait for Morning (Sniper 1 Security #1) by Nicole Edwards Page B

again.
    And this guy, the head SOB, Max, he wasn’t
one to play around. He wanted answers, which was the only reason Barry had
called up his informant in the first place. He would’ve preferred to handle
shit without him, since the guy who’d hired him had put them in contact
initially, but he found he didn’t have much of a choice. He’d lost track of
Marissa Trexler, and he needed to find her ASAP.
    “That’s not how this works,” Barry told
the informant now. “I’m paid to find this girl. In turn, because my boss is a
dick, I’m giving you a cut. And if you expect to earn your payment, you’re
responsible for giving me information. Hence the term informant .”
    “I don’t know,” the guy growled. “They’re
becoming tight-lipped. Last I heard, they’d stopped in Virginia, but I don’t
think it was for long.”
    “You’re not paid to think, goddammit.
You’re paid to tell me what I want to know.”
    Barry was met with silence, which only
pissed him off more. Taking a deep breath and exhaling slowly, he peered
through the front windshield. He’d stopped at a rest stop to take a break.
That’d been three hours ago. The two-and-a-half-hour nap he’d managed hadn’t
done a damn thing for his mood, but at least he knew he’d be able to drive for
a few more hours without running the risk of driving into a ditch. More than
once, he wished he hadn’t shoved Jimmy out of the car. He could’ve used the
extra body to drive while he slept.
    Since that was no longer an option, he’d
had no choice but to stop.
    “The minute you find out where they are,
you better call me. And I don’t mean when they get back to Texas. I need to
find them before that. Once they’re ensconced with the family, my chances of
snatching her decrease exponentially.”
    Another moment of silence and Barry
couldn’t help but wonder if his informant even knew what those words meant.
Maybe he should’ve used smaller words, something simpler to get his point
across.
    “You understand me?” Barry snapped.
    “Yes. I’ll call you back.”
    The line disconnected. Barry drew the
phone away from his ear and stared at the screen.
    This wasn’t working out the way he’d
planned. He should’ve grabbed Marissa Trexler himself, instead of letting
Dennis go in after her. If he had, he wouldn’t be sitting on the side of the
highway waiting for a snitch to feed him information.
    The thought made him smile.
    He hoped, when this was all done and the
girl was in his possession, that the snitch was identified. Hell, Barry didn’t
even know his name. Although the guy had provided him with information thus
far, that didn’t mean he liked the guy.
    Barry’s cell phone vibrated in his hand,
his eyes darting back to the screen once more.
    Shit.
    He thumbed the button to silence the call.
He wasn’t prepared to talk to the cranky asshole right now. Actually, he wasn’t
prepared to talk to him ever again.
    Luckily, he didn’t think he was going to
have to.

Eight
    Wednesday morning
    Thirty-four hours
later
    Dallas, Texas

 
    Trace stared at the iPad screen, watching
as Z drove through the massive iron security gate that Trace had opened with
the push of a button only seconds before. Although
the compound was surrounded by an eight-foot-high stone wall—as well as another
gate that they could all access using a numeric code and their
fingerprint—Trace had opted to man the interior gate around Marissa’s parents’
house manually today.
    Just as an added precaution, he told
himself.
    Truth was, he was feeling a bit
overprotective ever since he’d arrived back in Dallas with Marissa yesterday evening,
and watching over her, keeping her safe, had become his one and only obsession.
    Not that he liked the sound of that. Not
at all.
    Admiring the sleek,
monochrome Ducati 1199 Superleggera idling as the gates slowly opened, Trace watched on the screen as the massive
guy on the bike punched the gas, the motorcycle launching forward as he