Page 35 of Rough Choice

“Only one, sir,” Luca confirmed. “I checked all the other cameras at the same timestamp, and there’s nothing. Barely a bird flew by.”

“Where is this one?”

“On the eastern side, just before the gates of the beach,” Luca replied. He pulled out a map of the compound that had all the cameras and their radiuses in red. “Whoever he was must have come from the road here,” Luca said, indicating the gray line that represented a street. “It’s two miles of woods in every direction, but here, where the road bends, it’s barely half a mile to the wall. That would be my guess.”

“Do we have eyes up there? Can we tell what vehicle they’re driving?” Kye asked, taking the map and looking it over.

“No, sir,” Luca said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “We’ve done our best to keep the compound secure, but we can’t have eyes everywhere. The more we run cameras, the more attention we draw to ourselves.”

“Alright,” Kye said, standing. “It’s only one person. Let’s hope it’s a local who got a little too curious. For now, let’s keep the floodlights off at night and have the night patrol equipped with night vision. Can you put in some overtime this week? I’d like you to oversee a couple of drone patrols. You can hook up the infrared camera to it, right?”

“Yeah, of course,” Luca agreed, spinning around in his chair to watch Kye make for the door. “Is all this necessary for one little blip?”

“Probably not,” Kye said grinning, “but I’d be the biggest jackass alive if I had all of this security and didn’t use it.”

Luca shrugged as he turned around in his chair and set to work equipping the drone helicopter.

* * *

“Man, I need to talk to you,” Kye said, bursting into the building. Grier was sitting at the end of the bar looking over his ledgers. The bar he had set up was a glorified food truck with a cantina-style roof, some tiki torches, and a few picnic tables. The walls were mostly old tin siding slabs he’d drilled into the concrete floor.

“Who’s trying to kill us now?” Grier asked without looking up from the paperwork. Kye snuck around the backside of the bar and poured himself a glass of whiskey. “You gotta pay for that, man.”

“Yeah, put it on my tab,” Kye snapped and downed the glass with one long gulp. “I’m serious— I’m a dead man.” Grier sighed and set aside his paperwork to look up at his friend. Though he’d sounded overdramatic, the panic on Kye’s face was evident. He was scared shitless.

“Kye, settle down. It was one infrared blip. I’ll spend a few days at the compound, and if we need we can call in a few troops from Texas. They can fly down, be here in a couple of days. No problem,” Grier said and watched as Kye poured himself another glass.

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Kye said, grimacing as the liquor burned his throat from how quickly he’d downed it.

“What is it then?” Grier asked, feeling Kye’s nervousness was contagious.

“It’s Eliana, she’s talking about babies.”

“Babies?” Grier asked, eyebrows knit together. “Like… human babies?”

“Yeah, human babies. Diapers. Bottles. You know…” He made a motion as though pushing something out of his crotch clearly pantomiming labor. “Babies.”

“Why is she talking about babies? Who has a baby?”

“No one yet, thank God!” Kye said and filled his mouth with more of the strong alcohol.

“Then why is she talking about human babies?”

“Not just human babies, not just any babies, but like… our babies. Her babies with me,” Kye said, jabbing a finger into his chest. Grier balked at him for a moment and reached over the counter for an empty glass and poured himself a drink from the bottle Kye was chugging away at.

“You’re having a baby with Eliana? Let me process this,” Grier said and drank. Kye swallowed his mouthful and shook his head.

“No, not yet, she’s not pregnant. She said she wasn’t, but I think she’s disappointed about that. She was talking about going off her birth control and shit,” Kye said in an almost whining voice.

“Did you act like this when she brought it up?”

“No, I kinda ran away…”

“So, what you’re saying is she isn’t pregnant, hasn’t gone off the pill yet, but only mentioned it to you and you’re freaking out?”

“Exactly,” Kye said, and when his glass was empty, he refilled it. Grier sat back staring at his friend who was two shots shy of a nervous breakdown.

“Man, you’re a pussy.” The comment lingered in the air for a moment, then Kye glared at him.”