The lots the custom-made houses in this particular neighborhood were on were huge in comparison to the rest of the homes in this region of Southern California. They were coming upon a stately mansion normally secured behind tall black gates that rendered it inaccessible to the rest of the world. But at the moment, the gates were standing wide-open. A parade of hugely up- scale automobiles were winding their way through the gates, including the black sedan they were following. The cars all appeared to be headed toward a large, imposing-looking, multicolumned mansion in the distance.
Clusters of expensive cars were parked everywhere, with valets hurrying to and fro between them. Tiana sat up a little straighter, taking everything in at once.
“I think it looks like we’re going to be crashing a party.” “Not with that kind of security on duty,” Brennan pointed out, indicating the men
stopping each vehicle as it came within yards of the house. “Those guys are far too menacing-looking to be valets.” Tiana suddenly had an idea. “Pull over to the side,” she instructed. “Why?” Brennan asked, following the single-word question with another one. “Where?” “There, go to the extreme rear,” she said, pointing out where she wanted him to turn. “Where the delivery trucks are.” She definitely sounded as if she had a plan. They worked well together, he couldn’t help thinking. Brennan drove to exactly where Tiana had pointed. “What
do you have in mind?” “Well, we can’t crash the party as guests,” she reasoned. “But nobody really ever notices the help at one of these functions.” “We’ll need uniforms if we’re going to try to blend in,” he pointed out. She’d already thought of that. “We either bribe two people who are approximately our size—or knock them out and tie them up, whichever way you think works
best.”
Brennan laughed, turning the headlights of his vehicle off as he snaked his way around the rear of the mansion. He was heading for a row of mature Leyland Cypresses. “Roland might or might not be smarter than he looks, but you are definitely more devious than you look,” he told Tiana. There was appreciation as well as admiration in his voice. His comment warmed her. They left his sedan parked behind the Leyland Cypresses. The trees, which
resembled large Christmas trees, looked like tall, dark green sentries and hid the car well.
* * *
The moment they were parked and he cut off the motor, Brennan called Duncan as he’d arranged earlier. He filled his brother in as to where they were by providing the address—and told him to wait for his call before coming onto the property. “What are you going to be doing in the meantime, ‘partying’?” Duncan asked, only half kidding. Brennan would if he could, but that wasn’t an option. He and Tiana needed to move around unnoticed. “You know that oath we all took to protect and serve? Well, we’ll be doing the serving part,” Brennan told him just before terminating the call. He knew he’d fired up Duncan’s curiosity and he got a kick out of that. Within a couple of minutes, he and Tiana were inching their way closer to the rear of the house and the three large trucks that were the center of the activity here. Brennan played it by ear.
In the end, he decided it was easier to do it both ways. With Tiana’s help he knocked out two food servers, a man and a woman whose sizes approximated theirs. The uniforms they were wearing were stripped off. Unconscious, the duo offered no resistance. The couple were subsequently bound and gagged and left in their underwear. The servers were then deposited in the trunk of Brennan’s sedan, but not before several large bills were tucked away on their person, payment for their “cooperation,” as unwilling and unintentional as that service might have been. The trunk locked, Brennan and she made their way back to the hub of all the activity. All types of food and liquid libation, not to mention everything that went with the serving of that food, made its appearance in the vicinity and was then taken inside. “Good fit,” Brennan commented as he looked Tiana over just before they merged with the ebb and flow of all the activity. “Now what?” She looked at him, clearly surprised that he was asking her. “Hey, it’s your plan. You call the shots.”