“Wyatt!”
He winced and turned the faucet back off with a jerk. “Sorry, I forgot.”
He spat into the sink, then wiped his hands on the legs of the black drawstring shorts he was wearing for pajamas. His favorite old Bama shirt was a faded red, the Crimson Tide logo barely visible.
Maggie shut off the water, and Wyatt grabbed a towel from the rack and held it open for her as she flung open the shower curtain. She turned around in it, then knotted it over her chest.
“Are you single?” Wyatt asked her.
“No.”
“Rats.”
Maggie’s phone buzzed from the floor where her jeans and tee shirt where piled. She bent and slipped it out of her back pocket. It was an SO landline. “Maggie.”
“Maggie, it’s Quincy,” she heard. “There’s another YouTube video. It looks like Adrian Nichols is with Ryan Warner.”
“What??”
“What?” Wyatt echoed.
Maggie tapped the speaker icon, and Quincy’s voice became tinny and bounced off the bathroom walls.
“Uh, it looks like we might have a hostage situation.”
“Which one’s the hostage?” Wyatt asked.
“Nichols, believe it or not,” Quincy answered.
“Is Newman there?” Wyatt asked.
“Wait a minute,” Maggie said, handing Wyatt her phone. “I thought that YouTube channel was shut down.”
“Yeah, this isn’t Newman’s channel. It’s Adrian’s.”
Maggie dropped her towel and started pulling on her blue-striped pajama pants. “What’s the name of it?”
“I’ll text you the URL in just a second,” Quincy says. “We’re gonna pull it up on the conference room monitor, see if we can see where it was filmed. Meanwhile, we’re thinking he used his cell to upload it, so we’re trying to get a ping on it again.”
“Okay, call us back if you do,” Wyatt said, disconnecting and opening the bathroom door as soon as Maggie had pulled her ancient Papa Joe’s tank top over her head.
She followed him as he stalked down the hall, past Sky’s closed door, and went to Kyle’s half-open one. He rapped on the door once out of habit, as he was already walking in. Kyle was on is laptop at his desk.
“Kyle, buddy, we need to use your laptop,” Wyatt said quickly.
“What’s up?”
“We need to see something,” Maggie said.
“Did I do something?” Kyle asked, getting up.
“No, buddy, we just need to borrow it,” Wyatt said.
He and Maggie were both Luddites, neither one of them fond of computers except for work. Maggie’s hard drive had been corrupted several weeks back, and she wasn’t too motivated to fix it. Wyatt hadn’t seen his power cord since they’d moved.
“What are you looking at?” Kyle asked as Wyatt sat down in his chair.
“A YouTube video, but I don’t think you should watch it.”
“If you mean Dwight, I already did,” Kyle said softly.
Wyatt looked over his shoulder at him. “You shouldn’t have,” he said gently.
“What’s going on?” Sky was leaning in the doorway.
Maggie turned to look at her daughter. “Ryan and Adrian are in a YouTube video together.”
“What do you mean?”
“Somebody uploaded a video,” Wyatt said, minimizing the Wikipedia page on tropical weather patterns and pulling up YouTube. “Maggie, do you have that URL?”
Maggie had her text screen open. She put her phone down next to the laptop so Wyatt could read it. “Maybe we should just watch it on my phone.”
“I want to see it big,” he replied. “See if we can see any details, see where they are.”
“They’re doing that at the SO right now,” she said unnecessarily.
“I know.” He looked over at her. “Should the kids go into the kitchen or what?”
“No, it’s nothing violent,” Maggie said. “Quincy would have said so.”
“Okay.”
He hit ENTER and YouTube came up. The still shot from the video was of Adrian Nichols’ angry face. The title of the video was “No More Bullies.”
Wyatt took a deep breath, let it out in a whoosh and clicked.
“This is bull, man!” Adrian Nichols barked, but there was uncertainty in his eyes.
“Do it,” Ryan’s voice said, close to the camera.
“Look, we were just messing around,” Adrian said. “You’re the one that blew everything up into some big mess!”
“You haven’t been messing around for a year, Adrian!” Ryan yelled. “You’ve been making every single day hell for me.”
“You need a thicker skin, man!” Adrian said, a little desperation creeping in, despite the bravado coming out of his mouth. “Guys get razzed all the time.”
Maggie got distracted from the screen when she sensed movement beside her. She looked. Sky had come to stand next to her, her eyes glued to the monitor.
“This isn’t about getting razzed and you know it,” Ryan was saying. “Hitting isn’t razzing. Knocking people down isn’t razzing. Closing their fingers in lockers isn’t razzing.”
“That wasn’t me, that was Newman,” Adrian said.
“You’re the instigator! You’re the one that started all of it, and you’re the one that kept it going!”
“Yeah?” Adrian yelled. There was more fear in his voice than anger. “Well, I’m not the one who shot the cop, though, am I?”
There was no answer for a moment. They could hear a chair or some piece of wood creaking as Adrian appeared to shift position. The camera only covered him from his upper chest to his face. With the camera that close, it was impossible to see if he was restrained in any way, or to make out any details behind him, other than a scarred brick wall.
The camera was jostled a bit, and Maggie could hear movement close by. Ryan.
“I want you to tell everybody what you did.”
“You just said it, man!” Adrian was sweating. The sheen on his upper lip was magnified by the light coming from roughly overhead.
“You say it!” Ryan yelled. “Come on, you’ve had so much to say all year long. All your hard work making me freaking miserable and you don’t want to brag about it? You want to be a big deal on YouTube, right? Talk.”
“Come on, Ryan,” Adrian said, more quietly. “Just. Come on, put the gun down and go. Or let me go. Just—everybody hears you, okay?”
There was another moment of silence. Then, “It doesn’t matter if everybody hears.”
There was shaky movement of the camera again, and then it was Ryan’s face on the screen. Too close. He looked so different from the last time she’d seen his face, just a few hours again, that Maggie was shocked. She couldn’t even pinpoint what it was. He looked haggard, exhausted and ten years older, yet ten years younger at the same time. Looking straight into his eyes this way, so close, she felt him as an actual, living, breathing, frightened kid for the first time.
“I didn’t mean to hurt that police officer,” he said. “Watch the video these guys plastered all over the internet. I didn’t mean it. He was trying to help me.”
The video stopped, and they were looking at Adrian’s angry face again. The room seemed so quiet suddenly.
Wyatt stood up. “I’m gonna go call in, see how they’re doing with his phone.”
He walked out of the room. Kyle sat back down in his chair and closed the screen. Maggie turned to go and almost bumped into Sky.
“Somebody needs to find him, Mom,” she said quietly. “I’ve probably only said hello to him like five times since that first week of school, but he’s never looked like that. Or sounded like that.”
“We’re trying.”
“Can’t you use Find My Phone or something?” Maggie had it for Sky and Kyle’s iPhon
es; she had since they’d started going places without her.
“For some reason, that’s not an option for us. I don’t remember why. There are a couple of guys trying to locate his phone by what cell towers he pings off of, but he’s been turning off his phone,” Maggie said.
Sky looked at her for a moment. “Okay,” she said, and walked out of the room.
The mood around the conference table the next morning was grim. Dwight was in surgery, and everyone kept one eye on their watches or cell phones as they waited for news that wasn’t going to come anytime soon.
Instead of an armed kid who’d accidentally shot an officer and a runaway kid hiding from the law, they now had a kid with a hostage. Judging by the video, Ryan still had his gun. Judging by the fact that no one had seen or heard from Adrian Nichols, he still had him, too.
“Okay, so the video,” Bledsoe was saying from the head of the table. “It was uploaded to Adrian’s YouTube Channel, as most of you know, I guess. So, we can assume that Ryan is able to…what do we want to say? Manipulate the kid. Since the kid mentioned the gun in the video, we can figure that’s how.”
That seemed pretty obvious, but Maggie was trying to like him because of what he’d done with Dwight’s benefits.
“Okay. The kid apparently uploaded using his cell phone, because we have a ping from the tower over off Bluff Road a little before the video was posted. Unfortunately, the phone was turned off by then, and didn’t pin anywhere else, but we’ve got a six people assigned just to Bluff Road to see if we can find the kids out there.”
Maggie’s old house, where her parents now lived, was at the end of Bluff Road. It ran about five miles out of town, and besides all the houses out there, there were also acres and acres of woods.
“That’s a tough place to search with just that to go on,” she said, thinking out loud.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t get a chance to ask the kid to do it downtown,” Bledsoe said irritably. “Let’s continue. We have a BOLO out for Adrian Nichols’ car, and we also have watches on each and every gas station in the area. Myles says this kid didn’t usually have much gas in the tank.”
“Do we know if Ryan has any money on him?” Wyatt asked.
“No. His Mom said he had a little bit in the bank, and had about $85 dollars saved up in cash, towards a new laptop for school, but she doesn’t know where he kept it, so she doesn’t know if it’s gone.”
“What about the money in the bank” Quincy asked.
“Still there,” Bledsoe answered. “Okay. Wyatt. Channel Four wants to do a story, and they’ve already been in touch with both mothers. Adrian’s mother doesn’t want to go on TV. Ryan’s mother does. She’s hoping he’ll watch it and turn himself in.”
“Okay,” Wyatt said cautiously.
“Okay, so you have a press conference out front here at 3:15.”
“I think my time would be better spent out there looking for these kids, don’t you?”
Bledsoe had shown himself to be a real press hound in the several months that he’d been there. Wyatt would be okay if there was no press at all.
“I think I still need you to do your regular job,” Bledsoe said testily. “I’ve got the governor up my butt about kids who shoot cops and manage to hide from beaucoup law enforcement officers in a town that doesn’t even have a Walmart.”
“We don’t want a Walmart,” Wyatt said slowly, and Maggie knew he was put out by about Bledsoe’s tone and was trying to tick him off.
“Can we play around next week?” Bledsoe asked.
Wyatt picked up his Mountain Dew and took a long drink.
“3:15,” Bledsoe repeated. “Out front. Now, let’s all get going and get this crap over and done with before we all get fired. You’ve got your to do lists, lets go do.”
Wyatt stood, and waited for Maggie to grab her file folder and phone. Once Bledsoe was out of the room, Myles looked at Wyatt. “Boss? What do you give for odds we can get both of these kids back in one piece?”
Wyatt sighed as he followed Maggie to the door and held it open for her.
“I don’t know, Myles,” he said. “But let’s try and keep that as our main priority.”
As Maggie stepped out into the hall, she heard raised voices at the other end of it. “Sounds like somebody’s not too happy to be here this morning,” she said.
“I’m not too happy about being here.”
They rounded the corner and saw Bledsoe and a couple of deputies standing with their backs to them. Facing them was an angry looking man in his late thirties or early forties. He had blond hair that had clearly been bleached blonder than birth by the sun. There was at least two days’ growth of beard on his deeply tanned face. Maggie pegged him as a commercial fisherman though she didn’t know his face.
“Aw, crap,” Myles said behind them.
“I want to know why everybody’s talking about finding this Warner loser and nobody’s telling me what they’re doing to find my kid!” the man was yelling.
“Nichols kid’s father?” Wyatt asked.
“Yeah,” Myles answered. “Which is why I have to go do stuff.”
Myles turned around and went back the way they’d come. Maggie and Wyatt joined the little group at the end of the hall.
“Mr. Nichols, I told you on the phone last night, and I’m telling you this morning, we are looking for each of these boys with equal urgency,” Bledsoe was saying.
“Yeah? That’s not how it looks from where I’m standing.”
“I’m sorry if you can’t see that, sir, and I sympathize with your concern for your boy, but standing here in the hallway isn’t helping us find anybody’s son.”
“How come you’re going on TV about this Ryan kid, but you’re not putting the word out about Adrian? Explain that. I saw the commercial this morning.”
“Mr. Nichols, the press asked your wife to participate and she declined,” Bledsoe said with a sigh.
Nichols glanced over at Maggie while Bledsoe was talking, and the distaste with which he looked at her let her know two things: he didn’t like cops and he especially didn’t like women cops. Those guys were pretty easy to spot.
He looked back at Bledsoe. “Well, tell the reporters I’ll talk to them.”
Bledsoe sighed. “Mr. Nichols, that’s something you’ll have to talk to them about yourself,” he said. “Now, I need you to go on and let us get back to work. Finding your son.”
The man looked Bledsoe up and down, then turned and headed for the door, his heavy boots making him sound bigger than he was.
Bledsoe turned around and saw Maggie and Wyatt. “Now that another five minutes has been wasted, let’s get back to it.”
“It was kind of nice of him to stop in, though,” Wyatt said quietly to Bledsoe’s back. “We should have people over more often.”
Apalachicola Chocolate & Coffee was in a restored building on Market Street, amidst several boutiques, cafes, artisanal stores and art galleries. Maggie just called it Apalachicola Coffee, because chocolate was irrelevant. She’d been going there since it had opened.
It was 2:40, and she had five minutes left to live if she didn’t get her latte. She and Wyatt walked up the sidewalk, and Wyatt pulled open the door.
“Do me a favor, let him make my coffee before you start giving him a hard time,” he said under his breath.
“What?!” Maggie stumbled over the little transition strip she always forgot was there. “I treat the guy like a maharishi just so I can get a cup of decent coffee.”
She and the new owner, Kirk Lynch, had gotten off on the wrong foot about a year ago, and never switched over to the other one. Wyatt accused her of liking the battle of sarcasm she had to go through every day, but Wyatt was a jerk.
There were a few customers milling around the gelato and chocolate counters on the left side of the shop, but Maggie only had eyes for
the coffee counter at the back. There were two customers there already, a young couple who were clearly just back from the beach. They both wore SGI tank tops over their bathing suits, and the back of her shorts sported a smiling dolphin.
As Maggie and Wyatt got into line behind them, Kirk looked over their heads at Maggie. His face was artful in its complete lack of expression. He had his graying, light brown hair tied up in a ponytail, and a Grateful Dead bandana on his head.
“What about the vanilla chai latte?” the young woman was asking her companion.
The one thing Maggie couldn’t stand, besides everything else, was people who thought spices and flavorings and Grape-Nuts or whatever had any business being anywhere near high-quality coffee. Why Kirk allowed it confounded her, though he whined about the market and trends and other crap Maggie couldn’t care less about.
“I don’t know, babe,” the young man said, with a tinge of whining himself. “I’m thinking about getting one of those truffles over there. I think the flavors would clash, don’t you?”
Kirk looked at Maggie, made a show of looking at his watch, and then smiled at his customers. “Would you like to try one of the truffles, just to make sure?”
Maggie’s lower jaw dropped just a bit, and she looked up at Wyatt, then busied herself looking at the huge burlap coffee bags that hung on the wall and the sign that said to grab life by the beans.
“Uh, you know, that would be awesome,” the young woman said, sounding excited. Maggie was so pleased for her.
Kirk raised his eyebrows at Maggie, like an extra-polite bullfighter swinging a red blanket. “Lemme just get Spaz,” he said mildly, his eyes on Maggie, and she felt her chest cave in.
“Spaz!” Kirk called over to the chocolate counter.
Spaz was a man in his sixties or seventies, with dyed blue-black hair and an expression of perpetual disenchantment. He also moved at the speed of wood. He looked up from the counter he was wiping and dropped his mouth open in silent reply.
“Would you bring these folks one of the almond truffles we just brought out?”
Squall Line (The Forgotten Coast Florida Suspense Series Book 9) Page 9