“Who pooped in your omelet today?”

I look up to see Emily standing in front of my desk.

“No one. Why?”

“Could’ve fooled me from that scowl.”

Midnight has been so tied up with work, she’s not getting in until eight or later every night. Then she pretty much collapses into bed. I’ve taken dinner to her a couple of times, but she fell asleep in the middle of it. I’m giving her space. We talk a lot on the phone but that’s about it. On the weekends, she’s busy brushing up on any script changes so she’s on top of things for the upcoming week. I’ve got to give her big bonus points. She’s worked harder than I ever imagined. Maybe that’s why I’m scowling. I haven’t gotten any lately. Now I sound like a spoiled, selfish frat boy.

And then there are my best friends. Both Prescott and Weston are giving me a hard time. They’ve called a few times, but I keep avoiding them. It’s because they’ll dig into what’s going on and I don’t want to discuss Midnight with them. For the first time, I’m hesitant to discuss my love interest with my best friends. It’s strange because they are the two closest people in the world to me. Is it because I’m ashamed she was a former porn star? Does that part of her life bother me more than I’m admitting to myself? Or is it because I really know very little about her? She’s put disorder into my orderly life and that definitely is disturbing.

“Hello, anyone in there?” Emily asks.

Shit, I forgot she’s still standing here. “Yeah, sorry. My brain went to Hawaii for a minute.”

She clicks her fingers. “You know what? That’s what you need. A vacation.”

“There’s too much going on here.”

“Oh, like you don’t trust we can handle it?”

I need to tread carefully or feelings will get hurt.

“Not in the least. I just know things are crazy and you guys need time off too.”

“Pfft. We’ll get time off. Why don’t you go visit your friends? Or do something fun? It’s getting close to the holidays.”

“Nah, I’m good. Maybe in the spring.”

“You should plan a ski trip.”

“Maybe.” I wonder if Midnight would like to take a vacation after her filming is over.

Leland swings in and asks, “You going skiing? I was thinking about Tahoe in January. Want to go?”

Fuck. “Maybe. We’ll talk.”

Then he says, “We have a new client I need you to check into.” Leland tells me it’s a professional footballer who was caught with a minor in his hotel room after a game.

“Was it just the two of them?”

“Yeah.”

“Any drugs involved?”

“Cocaine and alcohol.”

“Fuck. How was he caught?”

“Her parents confiscated her phone and everything was on there. Videos, pictures, texts.”

Rubbing my temple, I feel the beginnings of a headache. “Christ. When will they ever learn?”

Leland shrugs. “Never. It’s why you’re in business, boss.”

“True. Did you tell him he fucked his career?”

“Pretty much.”

“In order to do anything, we need that phone, and then God only knows who else has seen what’s on it.”

“Truth. Where do you want to start?”

“Get him in here and let’s see if we can’t get our hands on her phone.”

Later that afternoon, we find that our guy picked the wrong girl to party with. She’s seventeen going on thirty, a total flirt, yet completely illegal for him in the eyes of the law. And did I mention her daddy is one of LA’s most famous attorneys?

When the client comes in, I sit down with him. Once he hears what we have to tell him, he freaks out.

“Are you saying this could end my career?”

“Yes. Don’t you think you should’ve thought about that before you did cocaine with someone you knew nothing about?”

“I didn’t do any. I just gave her the money to buy it.” He hangs his head. What a dumbass.

“So let me clarify. You gave her the money to score the drugs?”

“Yeah. I can’t do drugs. If they run a random test, I’m screwed. I only wanted to fuck her. She was hot, man!”

“And you didn’t know she was filming you fucking her?”

“Yeah, I knew, but I figured if she didn’t care, why should I?”

My headache starts banging out Lil Wayne and Wiz Khalifa’s “Sucker for Pain.” Time for a few Advil. I have to remind myself that clients like this are why I’ve made so much money over the years.

“Have you notified your manager and coach?”

“Yeah. I told them I was clean. They’re giving me forty-eight hours to clean it up, which is why I called you guys. I hear you’re the best.”

I appraise the big guy and then say, “Will you excuse us for a minute?”

Leland and I move over to my office. “What’s the chance of getting that phone?”

“One in a hundred thousand.” Leland laughs.

“Who do we know that can steal it?”

“First, we have to figure out where it is.”

“My guess is it’s in Daddy’s desk drawer, or a safe in his office. If not there, it’s in a safe in his house.”

“The cleaning service.”

“And the safe?”

“Our man, Teddy. He can tap into anything.”

“Security cameras?”

Leland laughs. “Rashid, who else?”

“They’re closed circuit.”

“You know damn well he can hack into those and send some phony video feed to the security guys. Don’t ask me specifics. I’m not smart like that, but remember how he did it when we had to get into that office over in Beverly Hills? He did some magic thing that worked like a charm.”

“Yeah, but maybe they all don’t work like that.”

“Call him. He can at least tell you what he’d need.”

I call Rashid and he says he would need to hack into their system and control it from his end. How he would do it, I have no idea. I’ll let him worry about that. All I care about is that there’s a possibility it can work. I give him the name of the law practice and wait to hear back from him.

Motioning to Leland, I say, “Let’s go tell dumbass what’s going on.” When we get back to the conference room, our guy looks like he’s ready to cry.

“Okay, here’s the deal. We can’t do anything for you unless we get the phone. So give us a few days to work on it.”

“Like I told you, I only got forty-eight hours.”

“Then we’ll work on it for forty-eight hours. If we can’t deliver, we don’t charge. But if we get the phone—and don’t ask us how we got it—your bill is gonna be pricey.”

“I can work with that.”

I stare him down. “One more thing. No more fuck-ups. I don’t work with people twice for shit like this.”

“You got it.”

He tells us everything he possibly can about this girl. I don’t care if it has to do with how many times she farted, but we need details. Believe it or not, his memory of her is pretty fucking amazing—even the non-naked parts. The girl ran her mouth. Told him all kinds of shit. Emily records everything. From what we gather, sounds like Daddy will have everything we need at his office.

Now the fun starts. The next night our guy joins their cleaning crew. Rashid does his thing with the security cameras. He’ll run a loop that will block out what’s going on while our guy is in Daddy’s office, cleaning. Luck happens to be in our camp. The phone is in the drawer and not the safe, which our guy found when he picked the lock with ease. He takes the phone, and makes sure the power is off.

As soon as he has it, he cleans the office and leaves. We signal to Rashid to bring up the camera again and it’s back online, with no one the wiser. We meet our guy to retrieve the phone.

Now comes the fun. We disable the tracking by putting it in airplane mode while our video/photography expert goes to work on the phone. He alters each video and photo our client is in, removes him, and inserts a different man with his face cut out or blurred to the point where he can’t be recognized. Every text is also deleted. Unless the videos were uploaded to a flash drive or computer, we’re good. If they were, our client is still up that shit creek.

We take the phone back to our guy who’s waiting for us and call Rashid. He spins his magic again with the security cameras; the phone is taken out of airplane mode and delivered back to Daddy’s drawer.

Two days later, our client calls and says the charges against him were dropped. He’s crying like a baby. I let him know to keep the tissue around because he’ll be crying again when he gets my bill.

That attorney must not have been very smart. Had that been my daughter, I would’ve made duplicate copies of those videos and photos. But then again, I’m a suspicious fucker because of this business I’m in, so go figure.

Leland is in my office and I grab the back of my neck for a second before I ask, “You don’t think he forced her to do anything she didn’t want to do?”

“You’re joking, right?”

“No.” I look him squarely in the eye. He doesn’t budge.

“This wasn’t the first time that girl did this. My guess is she’s been around that dog-and-pony show a few times. I’m not sure you paid attention, but it looked to me she was auditioning for a porn. She had her phone at the perfect angle, set to capture everything. Did you pay attention to what else was on her phone?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Let’s just say Daddy needs to keep a better handle on what she does. There were a lot of nude pictures on there, and they weren’t of our guy.”

I have a flashback to my days at Crestview. Some of the girls there were fairly aggressive, particularly Felicia Cunningham. She had a thing for giving blow jobs. She seemed to corner either Prescott or me all the time. I think half the guys in school were either sucked or fucked by her. But she never wanted to be videoed. Then again, we didn’t have phones that could video back then, not that I can remember anyway.

“Maybe she just likes fucking. Who knows?” I ask.

“Well, we can expect a hefty bundle because of that appetite of hers.”

That young girl has me thinking about the porn industry and my mind flips to Midnight. I wonder what she’s up to. We haven’t talked since yesterday. It’s not that I don’t want to see her, because that couldn’t be further from the truth. I want to see her too much. But she’s busy with work. That’s what my brain is telling me.

But something entirely different is in my heart. And I’m ignoring it. Completely.