“Sure,” I said after a moment of snapping back to reality. “That’ll work.”
“Good,” he said, “because I think that’s about all we’ve got in this town.”
He pulled over and parked in front of the small diner and killed the engine.
I took off my seat belt and went to open the pickup door.
Jake stopped me with a hand on my shoulder before I could lift the handle. “Hey. Sure you’re doing okay?”
“Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?”
“That’s just a lot of shit with your sister. I mean, anyone hearing that kind of stuff, that has do a number on them.”
I sighed, settling back into my seat. “Well, you know, after finding all that stuff back at her ex’s apartment, I was really expecting the worst. But, those guys, they said she never did the drugs. And, honestly, that was what had worried me the most. Weird as it is, the hustle part of it, to me that’s Eve. Her stealing little bits here and there, getting the prescriptions on the pills, that really doesn’t surprise me all that much. Disappoints me, but doesn’t surprise me. I’m just—I’m really glad she’s not hooked on this stuff. I mean, as far as I know, at least.”
He nodded and ran a hand down his face. “Yeah, I see your point. One thing you can come back from, the other on top of it would just make things rougher.”
“So you’re worried about me?” I teased. “That’s sweet.”
He smiled a little. “Just checking to make sure we’re both on board, that’s all.”
“Uh-huh. Sure.”
He rolled his eyes as his stomach took its turn and grumbled. “Come on,” he said, opening his door and climbing out, “let’s get something to eat.”
Chapter Twenty-seven – Jake
The man in black waited until Elise had left to use the restroom before he sat down at our booth in front of her half-eaten plate of country fried steak and mashed potatoes.
“This spot taken?” he asked, his voice like shuffling footsteps over a crypt’s floor.
The man was middle-aged, with salt and pepper hair, and looked about as out of place with his suit and overcoat in this diner full of working class people as I would have if I’d been standing as a wolf in the middle of a flock of sheep. His face was normal and clean-shaven, but he had a scar right at the base of his neck, like a long slit had been stitched back together. He had full lips and a medium-sized nose—basically what you would expect half the middle-aged white guys in America to look like. All but his eyes. There was something about those unfeeling blue eyes of his. They reminded me of the mornings over the SoCal desert, as blasted and faded as the space where the horizon goes white just around the edges of the sun.
I knew who he was. I knew the people who employed him. And I knew why they employed him.
Most murderers I’d met, I could smell the remorse on them. I could smell the regret they carried in their souls, the knowledge that they’d removed a mother or father, son or daughter, brother or sister from this world. Peter, Richard, Matt, and Frank? They were soldiers, but each death they’d inflicted on the world sat in their breast day in and day out. And it weighed heavily on them.
This man, though? This man was a killer. A cold-blooded killer, no doubt about it. He looked at people the same way my pack mates and I looked our prey. Just creatures, nothing more than a part of the food chain. Lower parts of the food chain, to be exact. Specimens.
Before I could respond one way or the other, he slid his long leg beneath the booth’s table and took Elise’s spot.
I settled back in my seat, already having a good idea of who he was. “And you are?”
“Oh,” he rasped, “I think you know, Mr. Wayne. Just as surely as I know who you are.”
“Trigger Thomas, then?”
“Jacob Wayne. Work with Frost Security, former Marines Force Recon, ex LAPD, Homicide division. You’ve been around, Mr. Wayne. Quite the illustrious career for one man. Thought that was the list of commendations for your whole platoon when I saw it, not just you.”
“Well, then, Trigger, now that we’re all acquainted, to what do I owe this pleasure? Need to me flag down a waitress, get you a cup of coffee? Gotta be a long drive back to Denver from here. Maybe a glass of tea? You look like an iced tea drinker.”
“No. Certainly won’t be necessary.” He didn’t crack a smile. “Came here to give you something, Mr. Wayne.”
“What’s that?”
“Reprieve,” he said. “Reprieve from retribution by me and mine on both your girl in the lady’s room, and her little sister.”
He knew? I kept my face straight. Who were we kidding, of course he knew.
“Think I wouldn’t figure it out?” he rasped, the slightest of smiles curling his lips. At first that little curl seemed so out of place on him, it was like his whole face would crack. But then, quickly, it somehow changed, like his face almost remembered what it was like to smile. “That a black haired girl shows up in the last town we’d seen Lilith? From New Mexico? Spitting image of the girl we’re looking for? Come on, Jake, what do you take me for?”
I shrugged and gestured to my food. “Do you mind? Food’s getting cold.”
His eyes traveled down and took in my food. He gave a wave as if to say, “Be my guest.”
I dug into my lunch with gusto, picking up the burger and taking a huge bite out of it. Not as good as Dixie’s, but still pretty decent.
Trigger Thomas continued despite my chewing. “I know all about that little trick you pulled yesterday before you left town. Finding Kevin. That come from all your time in Homicide, you being able to find him like that? Thought we’d might make it till spring before our former partner began to reek.”
“Did you kill him?”
“Did I? No, of course not. Think I would have let you find him if I had?”
I grabbed my napkin from my lap and cleaned my mouth as I shook my head. “You’re a little more professional than that, I think. Aren’t you, Mr. Trigger?”
He nodded. “Professional. Exactly. So, let’s make a deal. Ever see that show with old Monty Hall?”
“A little before my time, but I caught it on Nick at Night a couple times.”
“Old Monty, he’d give someone from the audience something to trade, then they’d decide to trade them or not without seeing what they were trading for. Bad prizes? They called those a ‘zonk’ or some stupid shit.”
“This got a point?”
That little bit of a smile again, like the last sliver of moon before the sky goes dark except for the stars. “Getting to it. Now, what I’m offering you here is by no means a ‘zonk,’ Mr. Wayne. What I’m offering you is the lives of these two women.”
“In exchange for what?”
“Lilith took those drugs from her boyfriend. Disappeared with them.”
I took a bite and chewed my mouthful of burger slowly as I considered his words.
“Her biker buddies up here made her disappear. You find me those drugs and deliver them, we wash our hands of the deal. Kevin’s dead already, he’s paid for his sins.”
“His sin of getting in business with you?”
“More accurately, his sin of being careless. You get me what belongs to the family, we consider the debt paid.”
“What if Lilith doesn’t have the drugs, though? Those bikers didn’t seem to think she did.”
“In that case, I suppose you better find some. Despite that used pickup of yours, I know you’re worth a pretty penny. What’s the price of two young, attractive women’s lives to a man like you?”
So that was the deal. Find the drugs for him or they got whacked. I eyed him carefully as I ate a French fry. Trigger here might have been the blackest of black hearts I’d met, and I had more than enough experience in that realm, but he was also a man with his ass on the line.
“You say Lilith’s biker buddies helped her run off? Why don’t you go ask them about where she went, then?”
“Because you’re already hot on the case, Mr. Wayne.
Why start a turf war with some biker gang over some girl who happened to lift our product? Why do that when I’ve got a professional already looking for her?”
“Only problem is I don’t work for you or the Florentino family.”
“You should consider it. We haven’t got a 401K, but the pay is top notch.”
I flashed him a toothy smile. “Thanks, but no thanks. Think I’ll stick to this side of the fence.”
He chuckled, a sound like arid bones sliding over one another in an open grave. “Suit yourself.”
“I’ll take your offered deal under advisement, though.”
“Just remember,” he rasped, “you ensure the package is delivered in as close to its complete form as possible, I ensure both Lilith and Elise walk away from this like it never happened. No problems. No fuss, no muss.”
I took another bite of my half-pounder as he stood.
“One last thing, Jake. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can protect them. You can’t. Well, maybe you can, you seem the resourceful type. But for how long? You’ll have to pull some real wit-pro level maneuvers to keep them from harm’s way. That girl Lilith going to be prepared for it? Or her big sister? Are you prepared to watch over them every hour of every day, always looking back over your shoulder, just so you can make sure they’re both safe?”
He turned and left before I could give my response, his long black overcoat nearly dragging on the ground behind him as he breezed through the diner like the Angel of Death. I almost expected patrons to start choking on their French fries as his coat almost brushed them.
“Was that…was that Trigger?”
I’d been so taken aback by his sudden departure that I hadn’t even heard Elise come back from the restroom.
“God, it was, wasn’t it? He knows Eve is my sister, doesn’t he?”
She came around and sat down in her seat and looked down at her food like they’d mixed cockroaches into her country fried steak’s batter.
I nodded slowly as I finished chewing.
“What are we going to do, Jake?”
I shook my head, trying to think of the right thing to say. When the right thing wouldn’t come to mind, though, I just admitted the truth. “I have no fucking clue.”
Chapter Twenty-eight – Elise
Jake’s words hit me in the chest like a sledgehammer, and the whole diner seemed to go silent around me, a fog descending over my senses as he told me what Trigger had said. That they believed Eve took the drugs and would kill both me and her if they weren’t returned. Not even he knew what to do or how we’d get out of this. The man I’d come to depend on in the last two days like the air I breathed.
“Elise? You okay?”
I glanced down, realized he’d grabbed my hand. I looked up at him, at those warm, calm eyes of his. I stared back at him, my lips pressed into a tight, thin line as I brushed a curl from my face and tucked it behind my ear.
“Just because I don’t know now,” he said quietly, leaning in close, “doesn’t mean we won’t figure it out. Okay? We’ll do it together. We’re going to figure it out together, just as soon as we find your sister.”
Damn, how could he be so fucking optimistic about this? We were screwed, and I knew it. This wasn’t a glass of water half-full, half-empty thing. This was a glass full of poison, and the two of us being forced to drink it down.
He squeezed my hand tighter, as if he was reading my mind. “We’re going to figure it out. Just try to eat as much as you can and get your energy up. We’re not stopping for anything but junk food and gas on the way to Casper. And, according to the GPS, it’s one hell of a drive.”
I nodded back numbly and began to eat my food. What had tasted wonderful before I’d disappeared into the restroom, though, barely tasted better than ash now.
All I could think of was whether or not Eve actually took the drugs. Whether she’d pulled herself into this world. It didn’t seem like her, on the one hand, but on the other it totally did. Just her kind of rash thinking, that she’d just be able to disappear with the drugs.
That just didn’t make any sense, though! What would she need all those drugs for? Did she want to set herself up as some kind of dealer?
With all these thoughts swirling in my mind, forming a dark pit where no light escaped, I tried to finish my meal. I pushed the remaining third of the steak away from me, shaking my head. I couldn’t do it anymore.
Jake got our check and paid at the register, then we were gone.
We were back on the road before he mentioned Eve again.
“Do you think she took it? Is that like her? I know they caught her shoplifting at the gift shop–”
“No,” I said, a little more forcefully than I’d intended. “I know what you’re thinking, but no. She wouldn’t want anything to do with those drugs. I just know it.”
“You’re sure?”
I shrugged weakly as we sped back down the highway, headed for our turn off that would take us up to Grand Junction, and from there to Casper. “I mean, I can’t know for sure, but it just doesn’t feel right. Like, okay, if she did take it—not saying she did—she’d have to have a good reason. A damn good reason.”
“Okay,” he said, the word coming out so slowly it might as well have been two separate ones, “then what? What would her reason be?”
“I think, I mean, she’d have to have a good reason to her. It wouldn’t need to make sense to us, just Eve. She’s like that. She was always more like Mom.”
“So she might have taken it? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No, I said if she took it,” I replied, emphasizing the word if. “That’s different.”
He rubbed his hand over his temple. “Alright, alright. I think I get you, I think I understand.”
“Only way to know for sure, though, is to find Eve and see if she has the drugs. And, if she does, we get them back to Trigger…”
“And hope he doesn’t try to kill us when we make the drop,” Jake finished for me.
“Don’t trust him either?”
“Not as far as I can throw Pike’s Peak. Besides, I think everyone in this has an agenda of some kind.”
“Agenda?”
“Like, why would those bikers help her out? Because she was good at getting them pills? That doesn’t make sense, does it? Who is this Jasmine girl up in Wyoming that she went to meet? What’s her deal? We don’t know anything about her, other than her staying at some place called the Sage and Sun.”
“Well, dammit Jake, who do you trust in all this? Who do we have left?”
He glanced at me, smiling a little. “Really wanna know?”
“I dunno, do I?”
“You,” he said with a quiet sureness. “You’re about the only one I know in all this, and you’re the only who seems completely honest. You just want your sister safe. Everyone else seems to have some angle they’re trying to work.”
“Me?” I asked, looking away as a blush rose to my cheeks despite all the fear sitting in the pit of my stomach. “But you hardly know me, Jake.”
“That surprise you?”
“Well, yeah.”
“You trust me, don’t you?”
I looked carefully over at him, at his dark, soulful eyes gazing out through the windshield at the snowy and slushy Colorado landscape, the mountains and trees surrounding us on all sides. I gazed at his full beard and strong chin, those powerful arms of his that had already protected him during a fight for me, and gotten information out of another man. Yeah, I did trust him. Just something about him seemed honest, dependable, and true.
“Yeah,” I said finally, “I do. Think I’d trust you with my life.”
“Good,” he said, settling back in his seat as he put one hand on the steering wheel and the other along the back of the bench seat. “Forgot to ask, you can drive a stick, right?”
I nodded, smirking a little at the double entendre. “Yeah, of course. But I thought I told you you’d have to wait for that drink till after we find my
sister?”
He chuckled dryly. “Hilarious. Seriously, though, we’ll be at Grand Junction in a few hours, and we’re going to have to switch out. Try to get some rest. We got almost nine hours ahead of us.”
I pulled my winter coat from my back and, bundling it up against the door, tried to snuggle in as best I could with it as a pillow. Despite it only being a hair past noon, I was out like a light in no time.
Chapter Twenty-nine – Peter
Home. Home is where the heart is. It’s where you can hang your hat. It’s where you can sit like a king in a castle.
Or, it’s where you can desperately try to get some paperwork done while your adopted teenage daughter blares her music and TV shows louder than any girl has any need to.
Peter sat at the kitchen table, a shifter adrift in a sea of paperwork, sipping on his drink. The wheat beer had been sitting out for so long it had already warmed up to room temperature, but he didn’t care. Drinking the lager was as much about physical memory and habit as anything else. Just another little ritual to help him relax at the end of the night while he delved into Frost Security’s account currents, prospective clients, and pending cases.
This was the majority of Peter’s work. Papers. Administration. It hadn’t been like this. Not always.
On the stove, a little covered saucepan full of enough stew for two sat reheating on the burner. It was a good stew, his favorite, even if it was just leftovers from the weekend. He preferred things that way, to have a dependable meal at the end of the day. It took an additional worry out of his life, one more thing he didn’t need to fully concern himself with as he dealt with trying to run the office and maintain the health and well-being of his pack or his adopted daughter.
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