Page 15 of Badass Alien Boss

* * * *

“Everything go okay?” she asked when he returned to his office.

“Yeah,” he fibbed. “Why shouldn’t it?”

“You look a little disgruntled. You weren’t trying to get me fired again, were you?” Her cheeks dimpled.

“Not this time.” He smiled. “I’d flagged some expenses that seemed out of whack, and Korsan let me know I’m too decrepit to travel.”

“Okay. You’re leaving out a lot in the middle, but I don’t think you’re decrepit at all.”

“You don’t, do you?”

“No.” Her open, honest, gaze met his, and he felt an electric sizzle.

“What did you want to show me?” he said.

“Pull up a chair.” She scooted over, and he rolled a chair to the desk and sat. Her flowery scent wafted over him, and this close, he could see the smooth perfection of her skin. An electrified heat spread to his groin. That often happened in her presence. Getting hard had become an occupational hazard of working with her.

“I have three holograms to show you. The first is from the bank across from the alley entrance. The second is a compilation of several vids. I acquired all the footage I could of the route you took from the convention center to the alley and edited them together with the appropriate time sequence. The third one is a fortuitous find I got this morning.”

“What is it of?”

“Wait and see.” She smiled cryptically. “Okay. Vid one.” The 3D image of the alley entrance appeared atop her desk. “I tried to guess the time frame in which your attackers might have slipped into the alley ahead of you, so the vid begins twenty minutes before you left the convention center.

“I’ll fast forward through it because nothing much happens, but keep an eye on the pedestrians.”

“Watch for the attackers?”

“Yes.”

The hologram progressed. Fairly late in the evening, pedestrian traffic was light, but every few minutes, somebody strolledpastthe alley. It was pretty quiet. Pretty boring. “Nobody’s entering the alley,” he noted.

“No.” She kept her eyes on the time counter. Nineteen minutes into the holo-vid, she slowed it to normal speed. “Okay, now, here you are.”

His gut knotted as he watched himself approach the alley and enter.

“I’ll speed it up a little.” She zipped through several minutes and then slowed the vid. “Now, this.”

A drone careened into the alley. According to the counter, four minutes had passed since he’d entered.This is when I was being attacked.

Five minutes and thirty-nine seconds later, police charged into the alley.

It had only taken a little more than nine minutes to alter his life. “Nobody followed me in, and it doesn’t look like they arrived ahead of me.”

“Not unless they got there really, really early,” she agreed.

So, where did they come from?

“Let me show you the next one. It’s only five minutes.”

In the second holo-vid, he left the convention center and strode down the street, his gait brisk and purposeful. He could see he kept an eye on his surroundings. He passed a few people headed in the opposite direction. They nodded at each other, but nobody paid him undue attention. No one followed him or paced him on the other side of the street.

So, he definitely wasn’t followed. “The attackers had to have been in the alley already, or maybe they came out of one of the businesses backing up against the alley?” He didn’t know how he could have missed four men approaching him.

“That’s what one would think until you see the third hologram,” she said. “The alley isn’t straight. It’s winding. Around the bend from where you were attacked is the back entrance to a bar.”

“The men came from there?”