“Caramel Latte Macchiato.” I answered aloofly.
“Thank you!” she said, with a disturbingly bright smile on her face, as she leaned back into me to kiss my cheek for the second time in just as many minutes.
I couldn’t help but glance down and notice her still being in nothing but her panties. The urge to play with her nipples came back again, and the distinct feeling of blood rushing into my lower parts got me worried for a moment. A short lived moment, though, because it prompted me to think about last night.
I asked myself why I let it continue as far as I did. Sure, I was horny and exhausted, and after years of researching the topic of my family’s recreational activities, the thought of having sex with them wasn’t disturbing in any way anymore. The way Claire was behaving now, however, had me worried she would just think everything was good now. Like one quick fuck, while I was barely awake and she assumed I was drugged, would somehow make up for four years of pain. The way she had plopped herself into my lap, acting all loving and completely glossing over the comment she had just made, told me this was exactly what she seemed to think.
As my thoughts revolved around this, my eyes remaining on her body, my door opened and Ava stepped in, seemingly looking for Claire. When she had opened the door, her mouth had instantly opened to say something, but seeing Claire basically naked in my lap made her stop and apparently forget what she was about to say.
I quickly raised my eyes back to the monitor, trying not to look as drawn into my mother’s mature and admittedly distracting body as I really was. Just in time to see the staff place shrink-wrapped bricks of cash into a safe in the owner’s office, and a few Straps into a box underneath the counter!
I immediately realized how fucking stupid I was!
They operated a legitimate sports bar. All they had to do was ring the register a few times throughout the day to sell imaginary drinks or food, and pay with the cash from one of the bricks. Just like that, in a single night, they could easily turn eight to ten Grand of the gambling proceeds into legitimate revenue from the bar. I checked their menu on their website, and discovered that every item on it came as an even ten-spot after including taxes. They didn’t even have to deal with change after placing the notes from the bricks in the register! And any decent evening would amount to more than a hundred dollars per guest.
I leaned forward a little, unintentionally alerting Claire and Ava to having seen something interesting. Ava, upon seeing her mother immediately scanning the monitors for whatever I had seen, rushed over and joined us.
“What is it?” Claire asked.
I didn’t answer. Instead, I put the feed from the office in full screen on my bigger display, trying to make out what kind of notes were in those bricks.
“Holy FUCK!” Ava shouted. “How much is that!?”
“Well ... if they follow the norm, like we do when transporting money, each Brick would be made up of ten Straps. Each Strap would be made up of a hundred bills. So, one thousand notes of the same value per Brick. I can’t make out what kind of notes those are, though.” I explained.
“Holy Fuck!” Claire repeated Ava’s words.
“Can’t you zoom in on them?” Ava asked.
“I could, but I won’t. They are handling a shitload of money right now. It’s possible someone is keeping an eye on these people through the feed, to make sure nobody succumbs to temptation. If the camera suddenly starts moving or zooming, they will know someone else is not only watching too, but also has control of their surveillance system.” I explained.
“Someone’s watching them?” Ava asked.
“Oh!” we heard from Claire. “You mean what your boss told us at the meeting! That’s not their own money!”
“Exactly. The feed of the camera is tied to their network drive. But the camera itself is also streaming the videos to a cloud storage. And I couldn’t find any hint to that cloud access on the owner’s devices. I don’t think he even knows about it. Maybe, he doesn’t know his accomplices can watch while he handles their money.”
That was definitely way too much money for a single bookie to handle at once, unless he just had a whale lose. I counted thirty Bricks, so they amounted to something between $30,000 and $3,000,000 in pristine cash, depending on whether they contained $1 or $100 notes! After what I had discovered on their menu, though, Hundred-Dollar bills would make more sense.
Bill was probably right about this guy. Which meant potential extra trouble for us if anything went wrong. And the possibility of them not just letting bygones be bygones after I got rid of the videos increased drastically. I needed an additional contingency plan. I was totally lost in my thoughts, when I noticed Claire and Ava stare at me with concerned looks. Seemed like my worries were visible on my face.
“What is it?” they asked.
“Nothing.” I said, pensively. “Probably just overthinking it.”
Claire watched me for a second longer, then realized her drink was empty. When she looked up at Ava, raising her glass to her like she wanted to tell her about it, she seemingly realized why Ava was with us in the first place and jumped off my lap.
“Oh! I’m sorry, Sweety. Let me just get dressed!” she said, as she ran out of the room.
Then Ava was the one watching me, but I was already busy going through the connected network drive, copying the surveillance video for my backup plans. By the time I looked up again, Ava was gone too.
I spent the entire weekend hidden away in my bedroom, going through their surveillance videos, copying whatever seemed useful, making up plans and throwing them out again. I just couldn’t decide how to handle this. But I also managed to get into the phones of his entire staff and all of his frequent patrons. The one saving grace for this whole fucked up situation was that I couldn’t find anything even indicating that they already uploaded or shared the videos.
The other nice thing in all of this, though I was reluctant to admit it, was the fact that the family seemed to eagerly try and actually take care of me. They kept checking in on me, bringing me a plate with food whenever I didn’t show up for lunch or dinner, and asking me maybe two-hundred times a day if I was feeling Okay and whether the pain was manageable. I decided to just enjoy it and let them know how much I appreciated it, but knew that it would come to a close once this whole shitshow with Logan’s debt was over. Only then could I actually believe that they weren’t just doing it to keep me in a helping mood.
While Logan hated every second of it, I was surprised to see absolutely no hesitation in Ava when it came to caring for me. I went to bed alone on Saturday night, but I awoke cuddled up next to my half naked sister on Sunday morning. I didn’t know when she had crawled into my bed, but sometime during the night, my hand had moved underneath her shirt to hold her small (compared to the other two I had held so far) bare breast. Grabbing breasts in my sleep seemed to quickly have become a habit.
What woke me up, though, was Logan opening my door. He was standing in my doorway, one hand still holding the doorknob, watching us with an incredulous expression on his face. His expression quickly turned to anger when he looked at Ava’s face, and then he suddenly stormed off like a petulant child. I was just wondering what the hell his problem was while trying not to loudly laugh at his way of leaving, when Ava suddenly spoke.
“He doesn’t like that you’re in charge.” she said in a matter of fact kind of way.
“The hell!?” I asked in shocked confusion. I hadn’t even known she was awake, or I’d have removed my hand from her breast. Ava, however, seemed to think my statement was solely directed at her comment about Logan.