Both Ends Burning (Whistleblower Trilogy Book 3) by Jim Heskett Page A

now.”
    “Nice,” I said, bobbing my head and trying to look knowledgeable.
    “Come on, man, have a seat.”
    He patted the chair next to him, and I hunkered down as he opened up a Photoshop window. “Who you wanna be?” he said.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER EIGHT
     
     
    I took a late afternoon flight to Dallas, grumbling at how much last-minute plane tickets cost. Securing safety for my family was going to bankrupt me.
    Flying with a fake ID had been a lot easier than it seemed. No one had cared that I paid cash for the flight. I slogged through the TSA line, thinking that, at any second, men with walkie talkies were going to yank me out of line and throw me into a little room for questioning.
    But it was smooth sailing the whole way.
    I couldn’t escape the irony that I was going back to Dallas one more time. Back to the land of congested highways and toll roads and abundant fried Mexican food, where people said y’all and didn’t think there was anything strange about it. Back where I’d come from, although I didn’t like to consider that fact.
    But I had a purpose. I had a plan.
    The plan was half-baked, dangerous, driven by impulse, and almost guaranteed to fail. I was going to break into the home of IntelliCraft’s CEO and snoop through his possessions to find some kind of incriminating evidence of drug dealing or whatever the hell it was they were doing. Something to replace whatever was lost on the memory card Thomason was searching for.
    Did I know for sure that he had anything like that? Not at all. Was I grasping at straws because I had nothing else to go on? Roger that.
    Via some public information that was too easily found on the internet, I’d discovered that Edgar Hartford lived in the uber-fancy Dallas suburb of Southlake. Not too far from DFW airport.
    I’d hunt around for a crawl space or an attic window, and circumvent the house alarm that way. I didn’t know for sure that he had an alarm, but fancy houses usually do. It was a risk, but worth a shot. Maybe he wouldn’t even be home.
    I took a cab to the neighborhood, a place snootily named Monticello Estates. My jaw dropped as we entered the area, full of towering houses set back from the road, lit up by thousands of dollars of Christmas lights. Down every side street, I saw the kind of houses that had names on the gates, like The Willows and Ivy Cottage and Green Acres. Some of these places, you’d need a golf cart to get the mail every day. I’m sure at least one of these houses used one.
    “Nice neighborhood,” the cabbie said as we drove through. “I had a buddy used to do yard work for one of these families. The guy shorted him for twenty hours of labor, on account of the fact that he used the wrong kind of fertilizer. Ain’t that messed up?”
    “Sure is,” I said.
    “You try to do right, and the world shits on you anyway. My wife says it all evens out in the end, but I don’t buy it. I’m always telling her you can’t get justice in this world. Maybe in the next, eh buddy?”
    “Maybe so.”
    I had the cabbie drop me off a few streets over from my destination, just in case. Told him I was meeting a friend. The cabbie didn’t care, he just wanted to get paid. I saw him press a button on the meter at the last second to kick up the fare a few bucks. Maybe he figured he could squeeze it out of me, given the neighborhood. No justice, indeed.
    I walked the streets of Monticello Estates with my jacket collar up and my cap pulled low. Neighborhoods like this usually had private security firms patrolling. If one of them saw me, might be game over. But there were no people out walking or cars driving around now, nighttime in December in the cold.
    “Pay no attention to me, good people of Monticello Estates,” I said to no one in particular. “Please go back to your private theater viewing rooms, drinking your fine barrel-aged bourbons and leveraging your liquid assets to plot your next corporate takeover. I