“Riley Carr,” Meira demanded putting both hands on the counter. “Where is she?”
The woman scrunched her nose in apparent confusion. “She is probably on her way home, no?”
“I’m her mother.” Meira moved back from the counter and started walking down the hallway. “She’s not at home. I need to know what classroom she’s in.”
“Eez probably Mr. Grantham’s classroom. She has him for first period and homeroom…down the hall, turn left and he’s the second room on the right. But he’s already outside, he eez on bus duty.”
“I know where his class is, thank you very much. Bus duty? What’s that mean?” Meira peered out the front doors of the school.
She had come in that way, but the buses had already left the parking lot.
“He makes sure the kids get on safely and there is no horseplay when the buses are pulling out.”
Meira was only half listening as she jogged back through the glass doors.
“Grantham!” she yelled and startled a few kids sitting around waiting on rides. “Mr. Grantham, are you out here?”
For a moment, no one said anything and she didn’t see Riley’s teacher anywhere. And then he popped his head up from an old green Volkswagen.
“I’m Mr. Grantham,” he said cautiously. “What can I do for you… umm…?”
“Meira. Meira Carr,” she said walking toward him. “I’m Riley’s mother. Can you please tell me where my daughter is? When did she leave? Did you see her get on the bus? Did she get in a car with someone?”
“Whoa, whoa,” he held up his hands. “I didn’t see her at all. I didn’t see her this morning and she wasn’t in homeroom after school either. She didn’t come to school today.”
Meira’s world froze. Everything around her seemed to stop moving and the world went dark.
“Oh no! Hell no!” Troy spat the words out with the cooked meat. “That definitely ain’t it. That tastes like horsemeat with cream dumped all over it.
“Freakin’ shit,” Barry slammed the ladle back into the pot of stew in front of him. “I dunno what else to try, and frankly, I don’t give a shit either. Let’s just pack this stuff up and send it out.”
“Dude,” Troy said. “We cannot send that stuff out. It’s just bad meat. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”
Barry shook his head. “I do not know what the hell you just said, but we are definitely sending this shit out.”
“Nope, it don’t taste right at all. You messed up the recipe or somethin’.”
“Well, here Martha Stewart,” Barry tossed the ladle to Troy. “if you think you can do better, have at it.”
“Just get out the way junior and watch a pro at work,” Troy said walking toward the pot. “Get me some horseradish…lot’s of it.”
“Horseradish?” Barry huffed. “What the hell’s that for?”
“To cover up the awful taste you’ve created in this pot. Currently, it tastes like a pot of mashed buttholes.”
Barry snorted and walked to the cooler. “Whatever.”
He pulled out a large bottle of the off-white relish and tossed it to Troy. He opened the lid, sniffed it to make sure it hadn’t spoiled, and dumped the entire contents into the pot.
“Damn, dude,” Barry laughed. “You ain’t messin’ around.”
Troy stirred it in and leaned over the stew. He took a long sniff.
“There we go. Now we’re gettin’ somewhere.” He inhaled deeply and looked at Barry. “Hot sauce. Get me all the hot sauce we got.”
“What the—” Barry started, but Troy interrupted him.
“Just get it. I ain’t playin’ no more.”
Meira was back on the road moving a little faster now that school traffic was starting to clear. She scrolled through her phone and called Riley again. Nothing. Straight to voicemail.
“Dammit.” She cursed and tapped again.
The message played again and she spoke trying not to sound frantic. “Riley, this is your mother. Call me right now.”
She hung up and scrolled over to call Troy. His phone rang, but he didn’t answer. She tossed her phone into the passenger’s seat and sped up.
“Doesn’t anybody answer their damn phones anymore?” she huffed.
She wracked her brain trying to figure out where in the world her daughter might have gone. She didn’t have many friends that she would visit or go home with. She wasn’t the type to hang out at the library. Hell all she did was play that stupid game—.
Her thought came to a halt. The game shop. What the hell is the name of that game shop? She grabbed her phone and searched until she recognized a name. Leviathan, a small gaming shop with video games, board games, models, collectibles, comic books…all that nerdy stuff. She punched the arrow that would start the navigation program and headed toward the store.
A few minutes later, she pulled into the strip shopping center. The stores were predictable enough—tanning, mattresses, pizza, coffee, and on the end, the game shop. She pulled into the handicapped space in front and ran inside.
There were a couple of tables inside where several teenaged boys with unfortunate acne problems sat hunched over books and game boards with all manner of dice and figurines scattered around them.
“Riley Carr?” Meira demanded. “Anyone in here know Riley Carr?”
Nobody moved. In fact, no one even glanced at her. Meira looked around in shock.
“Really? Nobody? I’ve spent so much damn money in this place and—”
She stopped mid-sentence. Next to the register there was a rack of various gift cards in ascending denominations. She reached up to the top of the tower.
“One hundred dollar gift card to the person who can tell me anything they know about my daughter.”
One of the boys near the door raised his hand.
“What is it doofus?” she demanded.
“Um, I think Riley was in here, like, yesterday or something. She was sitting with a boy.”
“A boy. Okay, that’s fantastic. Can you be more vague?”
The kid’s mouth opened in apparent confusion, but he didn’t say anything else.
The other guy at the table didn’t look up. “Yeah, she was in here with Red Orc.”
“Red Orc? What the hell does that mean?”
The kid looked up and sniffed in disdain. “That’s his username. He’s a gamer. Don’t know his real name though.”
“Great. That’s just great. That doesn’t help me at all.”
“Sorry, that’s all I got. Guess you’ll have to do the best you can.” The kid held his hand out.
“Really?”
“Deal’s a deal,” he said and tapped his palm with his finger.
Meira slapped the card down in his palm. He looked at it and squinted his eyes.
“You have to load the balance on the card first.”
“Sorry, that’s all I got. Guess you’ll just have to do the best you can.”
Meira ran out and hopped in the truck. Shit, this is going nowhere, she thought. Surely, Riley would know better than to run off with some boy…Red Orc or whatever the hell his name is. Her phone chirped and she jumped. She grabbed it in a frenzy and touched the screen. It showed a message had come through.
“Oh, thank you sweet Jesus,” she said but then her excitement was crushed when she saw it was from Troy…not Riley. The message was short and odd.
-You got any good recipes for crab?
What the hell?
-Sorry not a good time.
-My bad, no worries. Catch you after work?
She typed out a non-committal response and then deleted it.
-I need to see you now.
-Ok, well, I’m at the store. You can drop by if you want.
-On my way.
-I get it. Just couldn’t wait to see me again?
She would have smiled, but she was still too worried about Riley. She didn’t answer. Instead, she turned the truck south and headed to the Austin Seafood Company.
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Barry Olsen Barron sat on the counter watching Troy dump all manner of strange spices and ingredients into the pot of…crabmeat. He almost couldn’t help but laugh as the man kept taking spoonfuls of the mix and sipping it, licking his lips thoughtfully and licking them again. The poor bastard had no way of knowing he was crafting a soup made with ten percent crab meat and ninety percent headless girl meat.
“Man, there’s no way you’re ever gonna get that to taste good.” He sniffed as he said it.
The man in the straw cowboy hat held up a finger to shush him. “Watch and learn, sonny boy.”
That pissed him off a little because his dad used to call him sonny boy. But he’d punched that son of a bitch in the face the last time he did and that had taken care of that. Troy held out a spoon of the soupy mix urging Barry to try it.
“Not a chance,” he grunted. “That shit ain’t goin’ in my mouth.”
“Seriously,” Troy shrugged. “I need another opinion. It’s not half bad really.”
Barry eyed the spoon. It didn’t look like there was any meat on it, just the creamy stew. He inhaled slowly and took the spoon. He put it to his lips and took the tiniest sip. He thought his immediate reaction would be to spew it out, but he didn’t…
“Holy shit, dude,” he looked up at Troy. He was grinning under his beard. “It ain’t too nasty. Hell, it tastes like chicken.”
Troy laughed and slapped Barry on the back. Barry almost smacked him upside the head with the ladle of crab-human soup, but he calmed himself before he did.
“I told ya so.” He crossed his arms over his apron and leaned back on the stainless steel counter. “Sometimes back in Afghanistan, we had to make do with dirt and water. You’d be surprised what the right mix will do to fill yer belly.”
Barry felt his jaw drop in surprise. “You were a Stanner?”
He watched as the man’s jovial smile became a tight line between his lips. “I think the word you’re lookin’ for is Ganner. And yes, I was.”
“Whoa, man, I had no idea. How many of those bastards did you kill?”
He hadn’t expected Troy’s jaw to clench and unclench so many times. The man had become a face of stone.
“It’s not somethin’ I talk about.”
“Hey, it’s cool with me. I’m not gonna hate on you for murderin’ those pieces of shi—”
Barry was surprised how fast Troy had moved. He’d grabbed his shirt and slammed him up against the cooler door before Barry could finish his sentence.
“I said…it’s not somethin’ I talk about.”
Barry felt his vision go red. Nobody talks to Tryon the Tyrannical that way, his mind growled. He put his hands on Troy’s shoulders, prepared to throw the man off him, but he was disappointed that even though he felt like an Orc warlord, he certainly wasn’t one in real life. His eyes twitched to the counter beside them and he saw his knife. Not his special mail order Dadao, but a scaling knife. It’ll gut the man just the same, he thought. He was about to reach for it when he heard the bell on the front door tinkle. Someone was here. He felt Troy’s grasp ease on his shoulders and he felt his feet touch the ground again. Holy shit, had that guy been holding me up off the ground? He made a mental note not to be taken by surprise again.
“Hello?” a voice called from the front of the store.
Troy sniffed and nodded toward the sound. “I’ll just um…check it out…see who’s here. Okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah.” Barry rolled his shoulders back. “Cool, bro.”
When Troy got to the doorway he turned back. “I’m sorry, kid…I just…sometimes…it’s not my fondest memory.”
“No worries,” he said and gave him a single thumbs up.
But when Troy walked out to the front, Barry tucked the filet knife into his pocket…just in case that asshat tried anything like that again. He heard a woman’s voice say hello to Troy and he peeked through the swinging doors out front. She was pretty, but she was old, like Troy…and she was frantic about something.
Troy was surprised to see Meira Carr in the front of the store. He shook off the confrontation with Barry, held out his arms, and smiled.
“What’s happenin’, babe?” he asked.
“She’s gone, Troy. I don’t know where she is. She’s not home. She didn’t go to school. I can’t find her.”
She was hysterical nearly to the point of tears.
“Whoa, now.” Troy put his hands gently on her arms and pulled her close.
When he did, the floodgates opened and she began to sob.
“You have to help me, Troy,” she said. “I don’t know where else to look. I’ve been driving all over town trying to figure out where she could be.”
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Didn’t Duffy say he saw her at school?”
“He did. But I went over there and I spoke to her teacher. She never showed up in the morning and she wasn’t there at the end of the day either. She’s gone. Oh, God, what’s happened to her, Troy?”
He took a deep breath. This was bad…really bad. Some freak was killing girls in town about Riley’s age and she was missing without a trace. Not good at all, he thought.
“Okay, just slow down and tell me where you’ve been.”
She shuddered a few times, wiped her eyes on her sleeve and sniffed back her tears.
“Well, I went home and she wasn’t there. Her alarm clock was going off, so she wasn’t there to turn it off this morning.”
“Could she have forgotten it and maybe hit the snooze or somethin’?”
“Not Riley.” She shook her head. “I don’t think she’s ever used the snooze button in her life. She’s a morning person—not like me.”
Troy nodded.
“And then I went to the school. She didn’t check into homeroom in the morning and she wasn’t there in study hall at the end of the day.”
“So, no chance she could’ve missed just those two classes?”
She shrugged. “I mean, I guess it’s possible, but…”
“Right,” Troy agreed.
“Oh, and then I went down to the game store.”
“Game store?”
“She likes video games, board games, role-playing stuff. I don’t know much about it, but they seemed to know her. Said she’d been down there with some boy…Red Orc or something…whatever the hell that means.”
“Red Orc? Is that some kind of screen name or character name?”
“I have no idea, but that’s all I have. He was the last person to see her.”
“So,” Troy said and scratched his chin. “We need to find this kid, right?”
“I’m not even sure how to do that,” she groaned. “And he’s got my baby.”
The sobs came back and Troy put his arms around her.
“Maybe we can play the game using her password and whatnot and see if we can track him down?”
She leaned back and blinked the tears from her eyes. “Shit, Troy! That’s genius!”
She pulled out of his arms and ran to the door. He was startled by it and took two steps toward her.
“Wait, Meira,” he called.
She looked back as she pushed the door open. “Don’t worry, Troy. I’m just heading home. Come over when you’re off work.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going orc hunting,” she said through gritted teeth.
The door whooshed shut behind her and Troy exhaled. He wasn’t sure what to do. He was supposed to finish up the stew and deliver it, but he felt like he should go with her. He pushed through the swinging doors into the kitchen and opened his mouth to ask Barry if he could cover.
His voice caught in his throat as he realized the kitchen was empty. Barry was gone. Dang kid, he thought. Bailed out on me again. He sighed and took his apron off. He picked out a piece of the meat and bit into it. Not bad. Definitely tasted like chicken. He poured the huge pot of stew into a plastic tub and sealed it. Then he stuck it in the cooler and called for a taxi.
“Kid owes me one for this,” he muttered as he started to clean up the kitchen.
Barry leaned against the back of the building just outside the door. He struggled to slow his pulse, but his heart threatened to beat out of his chest. They’re onto me, he thought as he finally slowed his breathing. Gotta figure this thing out. He slunk out to his car in the shadows.
Barry started his car and pulled out of the lot. Time to call in a favor from old pops. He didn’t turn on his lights in the coming dusk until he was a mile away from the Austin Seafood Company.
18
I’m On A Boat
Riley Carr woke in a daze. Her first thought was that she was blind. She couldn’t see anything at all. Then came the pain. Her head cried out with a sharp pain on the top of her skull. It felt as if someone had nailed a spike into her brain. She sobbed as she touched it and felt something crusty in her hair—probably blood. The second thought that came to her when she heard the clinking of a chain and felt the weight of some kind of bracelet around her wrist. I’m chained, she thought, like some kind of prisoner. A moan escaped her lips as she realized she wore similar clasps around both wrists and both ankles. She was sitting on a floor that felt like metal under several inches of water. She was soaked and freezing.
“Hello?” she said into the darkness. “Is anyone there?”
She waited, but no one answered. As she sat there in her daze, she began to realize that she could see…but just barely. The faintest trickle of blue light seeped through a crack above her. She strained to see the room around her, but the details were hard to make out. There were no windows of any kind and the walls seemed to be just beyond what she could see in the dim light. She pulled herself up to her knees and crawled slowly along, tracing the chains that held her back to a massive metal loop hanging on the wall. She grasped the chains on her arms and pulled as hard as she could to no avail. The metal held fast.
Skull Wave (A Troy Bodean Tropical Thriller Book 5) Page 14