38 Chapter 38 The Passion

"Paige, since you seem to have more experience with boys, can you give me some advice?" Missy asks Paige, who was sitting on Connor's bed.

"I'm not sure I can say much about it to you because the boy I like doesn't seem to pay any attention to me," Paige says, looking out the window at Connor playing with Mike.

Missy, realizing what it was about, nodded and said, "Don't worry about him, Connor is like an old man; he probably has some ideas about you but won't take the initiative because he thinks he's too young for relationships. But we're girls, we have different needs, I believe," Missy says, pouting. "So at the schoolyard, I met a boy... No, I saw a very handsome boy. He was wearing a baseball cap and playing ball with his friends. He had beautiful blond hair that brushed his forehead, black eyes, in other words, he was very handsome. Do you have any tips on how to approach him?"

At that moment, Paige looked at Missy with a strange look, thinking 'she practically gave herself the answer,' and then she says, "Missy, pay attention to the words you just said, and think about what he likes to do in his free time."

Missy put her finger on her lips and tilted her head up, saying in doubt, "Baseball?"

"Exactly, so there are two ways to win a guy over, which I believe are the most correct. The first is through his stomach, the second is by having similar hobbies. For example, he likes baseball, so if you talk, the subject that will eventually come up will be baseball. All you need to know is about baseball and how to play, so you can have a proper conversation with him and strengthen your relationship," Paige says.

Then Paige pauses before continuing and points to Connor at the window, saying, "Look at Connor. When we met, Sheldon was trying to challenge me intellectually but failed in the end, and then Connor intervened, and we started talking. We realized we had similar hobbies and ended up becoming friends."

At that moment, Missy had an idea; a large fatherly figure appeared in her head, a man who knows a lot about sports, George, her father. Connor wouldn't do; he doesn't seem to like ball sports, and then all that would be left is her father.

So Missy gets up and goes to the kitchen, where she finds her father struggling with the sink pipe. She approaches with her hands in her pockets to hide her nervousness and says, "Dad, are you busy?" At that moment, George stops what he's doing and still lying down says, "Do you think I'm busy?" and Missy retorts, "I don't know how you are; you're under the sink."

Then George sighs at Missy, still fiddling with the pipe, and says in a gruff tone, "What do you want?" and Missy gets straight to the point, "Can you teach me how to throw a baseball?"

At that moment, George, confused, raises his head and looks at his daughter, saying, "Where did you get that from?"

Soon Missy has a flashback of the scene in the schoolyard where she saw the boy, even if it was just from afar.

So she shrugs and says, "I don't know; it just seems fun to do. I've become quite interested in sports lately, spending time with Paige and Connor."

George looks at her suspiciously. His daughter has never been one to spend time with her father. Usually, she prefers to spend time with Connor, and it's rare for her to ask him for anything. The last time she spent time with him, she fell off the boat near an alligator, and he had to rescue her, feeling guilty for that time. George looks at his daughter and says, "Sure, why not!"

And then Missy leaves cheerfully, saying, "Great, I'll get my gloves," and then runs straight to the garage to share the news with her friend.

In the background, you can hear George shouting, "Nooo, not now," but Missy completely ignores that sentence.

After a while, George was teaching Missy how to throw a ball in front of the house, and in the garage, a conversation was taking place between Paige and Connor.

"Paige, have you managed to locate if there's anything wrong in the area?" Connor asks.

Paige at this moment grabs the laptop and sits next to Connor, leaning her head on his shoulder, and says, "So I narrowed down the possibilities to the borders with Mexico, where illicit activities would likely occur since it's very easy to cross the border. So I hacked into some transportation companies' systems and found some shell companies, where a truck would cross the border every month, from the city of San Antonio to Dallas, and then the truck stops and returns to Mexico. My speculation is they probably divided among some car groups and cross the cities. I couldn't locate the routes of the remaining cars, but I got some images of some suspicious cars leaving Dallas in groups and then splitting up soon after in different directions."

And then she shows me some images of some cars, which seem to be from a camera of some establishment facing directly onto the street. In the image, you can see a convoy of cars with a few meters between them leaving the city, like ordinary passersby.

So I say, "All we have to do now is go to Dallas and investigate what's going on there for a week." At that moment, Paige gives me a surprised look and says, "How did you know they would operate this week? I spent hours researching and analyzing patterns to reach the result!" and then pouts and turns to the side, and then I say, "I knew there would be an operation these days; I just didn't know which day exactly."

And then Paige looks at me, returning to the look of a serious worker, and says, "I managed to analyze the patterns; they will do this operation next Saturday. We have five days to prepare," she says with a serious look.

"So what are we waiting for? Let's start planning."

  -End of the chapter-