Chapter Nineteen
Luke
My walk to the fitness club is eventless.
I’m at the club check-in desk, scanning my electronic entry pass, also compliments of Blake, in about three of the ten minutes I’ve given myself. I’m questioning the sanity of that timeline vow right about now but still determined to see it through. Ana will come after me and I need her in that room and protected.
I’ll make the damn ten-minute mark.
Once I’m on the other side of check-in, I evaluate the workout area and size up any potential threat. I find everyone in my view either eyeing how they look in the mirrors lining the walls, focused on chatting it up with a friend, or sweating up a storm. No one sets off alarms.
The locker room sign directs me to my right, on the other side of the leg equipment, and as it turns out, down a set of stairs. Once I’m inside that private room, I find a bunch of sinks, a shower room, and then several cubby-like rooms with benches surrounded by lockers.
As for people, there are none outside of a couple of guys in the showers talking it up like a couple of naked fools. I mean holy hell—what makes a man stand next to another man naked and think it’s time to talk about the Broncos football season, specifically their ball-handling skills?
Get me the fuck out of here, I think, eyeing the numbers on the first cubby of lockers and moving onto cubby number two. Once I’m there, this mission ends quickly. Darius’s locker is wide open and empty. It’s clear to see there’s also no lock. Damn it to hell. Please, Lord, tell me he wrote the number down wrong. It’s a long shot, but I have to try to find a better answer than I have at present. I survey the rest of the lockers, looking for a similar number, and actually try the key in the locks.
Some big-bellied dude, in a barely-there towel, rounds the corner and huffs out a protest. “Hey, man, that’s my locker.”
“Sorry, man. I could have sworn it was mine.” I scrub my jaw. “My bad.” I leave him standing there in his itty bitty towel and I can’t do it fast enough.
Darius taught us all a lesson about pushing our luck. Not with a dude in a barely-there towel in the locker room, and definitely not with our enemies.