by Avelyn Paige
I gape at my stepmother, setting my glass next to hers. “I think I’m gonna need more of that moonshine.”
Hashtag
The last twenty-four hours have ticked by slowly with no news from Kasey, and radio silence from Shelby, though the latter is deserving for the way our last conversation went. I was right to be angry after everything she’s done, but I should’ve kept my emotions in check. Hayden’s life is hanging in the balance, and yelling at her mother for our past isn’t going to bring her back.
After my chat with Judge, the tunnel vision I had over Shelby’s betrayal faded away, allowing me to focus only on Hayden. I just have to keep it that way.
For what feels like the hundredth time, I try to locate Hayden’s phone, and for the hundredth time, I get nothing. My head falls into my hands. Nearly a day without sleep is wearing on me. She’s still out there—I know she is. Of all the shit things in my life, whatever higher power is out there wouldn’t take her from me. I have to find her before it’s too late. And until I’ve found her, fuck sleep.
Brushing the weariness from my face, I try again. This time, my screen lights up like the Fourth of July. Fucking bingo! My eyes lock onto the area where her phone is currently active. Austin. She’s here in Austin, not far from a newer strip mall downtown. I push out of my chair and grab my keys before walking out the door.
“Judge!” I yell out.
He steps outside one of the small meeting rooms, with GP and Twat Knot flanking him. “Got something?”
“Yeah. Downtown. Her cell phone’s active.”
“Go,” he orders. “Take these two with you.”
GP and TK look to each other with a nod.
“We’re in, man.”
“You lead, we’ll follow.”
The three of us head out the back door where a row of bikes are lined up behind the clubhouse. I pull my phone and wireless earbuds from my pocket. Putting the earbuds in place, I punch in the address for the strip mall near where her phone pinged a tower, and the directions pop up. I mount my bike, as does GP and Twat Knot, and we ride out of the parking lot toward our destination.
The ride takes roughly fifteen minutes with the construction traffic downtown, and the strip mall comes into view on our left. I find a secluded spot near the far-left side of the buildings and pull off. As I dismount my bike, I scan the area and groups of people milling about. This isn’t going to be easy. Hayden could be anywhere in this crowd.
“What’s the plan?” GP asks.
“Take her picture.” Pulling an image I’d taken from Shelby’s stack out of my back pocket, I hand it over to them. “You two check the businesses, ask the employees if they’ve seen her. I’m going to try to track down her phone signal.”
“Sounds good.” GP and Twat Knot disappear toward the businesses. Watching until they enter the first retail shop, I take my phone from my pocket and pull up the site. It pings again after I enter her number. Still active, and still here.
I consider my options carefully. I could try calling or texting her phone, but if she isn’t in possession of it, it could spook whoever does have it into bolting, taking this opportunity with them. One wrong move and it’s over until if, and when, Kasey can get the records from the game developer.
My phone rings.
“Hello?”
“We may have something,” Twat Knot declares. “Gamer shop near the middle of the mall. Owner says he’s seen Hayden in the last couple of weeks for some gaming competition he was running.”
“On my way.” My feet pound the pavement hard until I reach the store. Once Inside, I quickly scan the room. The shelves on the walls are stocked full of comic books, gaming systems, and pop culture merchandise. A wet dream for any kid at her age. Hell, if I wasn’t hunting her down, I’d love nothing more than to bring her to a place like this.
Near the back corner is a group of computers placed in a square. A young boy sits alone, typing away on the keyboard, while a man lingers nearby, flipping through some comics. I find the guys standing off in the corner, talking with an older man. I stalk toward them.
“You’ve seen her?” I blurt out.
“Yes. She’s one of the more regular customers I have. She and her mom come in every couple of weeks. Good kid.”
Dammit, Shelby. You’ve brought her to Austin, knowing exactly where I live, yet you couldn’t be bothered to introduce me to my kid? Judge’s advice from earlier echoes inside of my head, bringing me back to reality. Shut that shit down. Focus on Hayden, not her mother.
“How long has it been since you last saw her?”
“Her mom brought her here for a BloxWorld National Tournament qualifier over the weekend. She placed in the top ten nationally. She was really happy when she left,” the older man adds. “Did something happen to her?”
“She’s been missing for a few days.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that. She’s a sweet kid. I wish I knew more to help you.” The shop owner’s face falls into a worrisome look. “You guys private detectives or something?” He eyes the patch on my chest.
“Something like that,” GP grumbles. “We just want to find her, so any other information you can think of, we’d really appreciate it.”
“Were there other kids here playing in the tournament?” Twat Knot asks.
“Yes. In fact…” Pivoting on his heels, he looks in the area where the computers I noticed are set up. The man perusing the comics takes one look at us and heads straight for the door, but the kid’s still there. “That young man over there played in the last tournament.”
“Thanks,” I mutter, snatching the photo from the old man's hand as I walk toward the kid. He notices me when I get close, and quickly exits out of his screen. Typical kid move, hiding what they’re not supposed to be looking at from their parents. Suspicious, but not unheard of. He starts to shove a few things into his backpack when I reach him.
I shove the photo in front of his face. “You see this girl before?” He pretends to study it, but recognition is clear on his face. He’s seen her before.
“N—No…” he stutters nervously. I push the image closer, but he looks away, practically staring a hole through the floor. Bingo. Junior here has definitely seen her.
“She’s my daughter,” I offer up to see how he reacts. “Someone’s taken her. You know anything about that?”
“I don’t know her.” This time, his voice is more panicked.
“You sure about that, kid?”
“Yeah, mister, I’ve never seen her before. Look, my dad’s waiting for me outside. I really need to leave.” The kid turns away from me and starts to pack his bag again. He’s in a hurry to leave, but I don’t think he has anyone waiting for him. On a hunch, I pull out my phone and punch in Hayden’s number. A vibration inside his bag starts the second my call connects.
He turns around in horror when he realizes I have a phone in my hand. Before he can move, I snatch his bag from his hands and start digging inside. Karma and GP run toward me, blocking him from leaving. In the front pocket, I find the vibrating phone—Hayden’s phone. The kid’s face pales.
“Don’t know my kid, huh? Where’s my daughter?”
“Please, don’t hurt me.” His hands cover his face, thinking we’re going to pound some sense into him.
“I’m not going to ask you again, kid.”
“I don’t know her,” he bellows.
“How’d you get her phone?”
“I found it!” he cries. “A few blocks away, near the park.”
Convenient story, but conviction flashes across his face. He’s telling me the truth. Or, at least, believes he is.
“I’m going to need more information than that. Where specifically did you find it?”
The kid’s body quivers in fear from being flanked by the three of us. “In a pink backpack by the dumpster.”
“You want to take him with us, Hash?”
I consider it, but the kid can’t be more than sixteen. The last thing the club ne
eds is some Karen of a mother slapping us with a kidnapping charge for what we’re doing now. We have to let him go. Catching a charge isn’t an option.
“No. Cut him loose.”
The kid pushes through Twat Knot and GP, running straight out the door. GP shoots a look over at me.
“You’re just letting him go?”
“I am. We have her phone. We’ll check out where he said he found it and see where it leads us.”
“And if he lied to you?”
Shifting the phone down, I reveal the ID card I took. “I snagged this out of his bag. We got his name, photo, and address. Tracking him down won’t be hard.”
Twat Knot smiles. “Sneaky, man. I like it.”
“What’s next?”
“Let’s head down to the park. We’ll look for her bag.”
I wave to the owner as we leave, but the look on his face tells me the second we step out the door, he’s picking up the phone and reporting us to the police for talking to that kid the way we did. Just what we need, the fuzz up our ass. But hey, I could be wrong.
We make tracks toward our bikes, just as the familiar sound of sirens sound in the distance. I guess I wasn’t wrong. I hate it when I’m right sometimes.
“You two lead the police on a wild goose chase. I’m going to head down to that park to check it out. Call Judge and let him know the situation.”
“You got it, Hash.”
The two of them take off south, away from the strip mall, when a cruiser comes speeding around the corner, taking off after them. The coast is clear. Firing up my bike, I head north, around the back of the strip mall toward the only park in the area I know is still down here—Garfield Park.
It only takes me five minutes before I reach the parking area near the side entrance of the park. At this time of day, it’s filled with kids running around the playground while their nannies, or parents, sit glued to their phones on one of the nearby benches. A little girl with dark pigtails comes zooming by me as I walk down the sidewalk.
“’Cuse me,” she giggles.
I wonder what Hayden was like at her age. The thought makes me realize how much of her life I’ve missed, like her birth, her first steps, first words, first day at school. All of her firsts. Things I never knew I missed, and now so desperately wish I’d been there to witness. I can never get that time back.
A big blue rubber ball goes flying through the air, nearly missing my nose, landing near a large trash barrel on the other side of the walkway. Two little boys freeze when I look over to them. I stalk over to retrieve their ball when something pink peeking out from behind it catches my eye. Could it be? I quicken my pace and charge toward the barrel, finding a bright pink backpack with Hayden stitched across the front of it.
The kid wasn’t lying. Clutching the bag, I unzip it with shaking hands. Inside, I find a couple of notebooks, a set of keys, and a little black wallet with Iron Man’s logo stitched along the side of it. My stomach drops. There’s nothing that’ll point me in the direction of where to find her.
Fuck. Another dead end. She’d been here. Or, at least, near here. How had no one seen anything? Everyone has their cameras out these days to capture every single moment on their cell phones. How did they miss this?
Cameras. That’s it! I spin around, looking at all the businesses nearby. They’ll have cameras. One of them may have been able to capture Hayden’s abduction. Pulling my cell phone out of my pocket, I pull up GP in my contacts and hit his number.
He answers on the first ring. “Yeah?”
“You lose the cops?”
“We did. Pulled into a big parking garage and hid behind some box trucks. What’s up?”
“Meet me at Garfield Park. I think I may have found a way to see when she was taken.”
Shelby
I shove my way through the front door of the clubhouse, my anxiety clawing its way up my throat. “Where is she?” I ask when Wyatt comes into view.
“I don’t know yet.” He skirts around the table, moving through the group of very large, leather-clad men. “I found this, though.” There, dangling from his finger, is Hayden’s pink backpack.
I gape at it, looking it over, internally pleading for it to tell me where my baby girl is. “Where did you find that?”
He drops the bag at his feet. “Garfield Park. I also found her cell phone.”
For a split second, the panic I’ve felt since Wyatt had texted me, telling me to meet him here, is replaced with hope. “That’s a good thing, right?”
Wyatt presses his lips together, worry creasing his handsome face. “I don’t know, Shel. I’ve been trying to locate her phone all along, but it was always off, or the battery was dead. But today it worked. I tracked it down to a comic book store in Austin. There was a kid there—a boy—who had her phone, saying he found it at Garfield Park. You neglected to mention the tournament Hayden was in not long ago.”
The accusation is more in his words than his tone. I glare at him, forgetting the men surrounding us. “I didn’t think it was important. Hayden is always online. What does the tournament have to do with anything?”
Wyatt throws his hands up in the air. “Jesus, Shelby! Everything is fucking important right now. The tournament might not play any part in this at all, but I find it pretty damn suspicious I found her phone with a kid from that same tournament, in the same place it was held, don’t you?”
A lump forms in my throat when I realize I may have had a clue to where Hayden’s been all along, but was too stupid to see it. “I’m sorry,” I whisper, tears racing down my cheeks. “I take her to that store all the time.”
Wyatt’s head drops forward and he exhales what I can only assume is a cleansing breath. While he attempts to get himself under control, I once again become aware of the mountain of muscle all around me, their eyes focused on Wyatt and I. My cheeks feel like they’re on fire. “Can we do this in private?”
Raising his head, he meets my gaze, his brows still furrowed in frustration. “No, we can’t. This is a family matter, and whether you like it or not, Hayden is my family, and so is every one of the men in this room.”
My emotions are all over the map, swirling and spinning inside of me like a hurricane, making it nearly impossible to know what to think or feel.
“There were three businesses with video cameras around the perimeter of Garfield Park,” he says, no longer just addressing me.
I watch as he walks to the front of the room, and for the first time, I notice his computer, and a long cord running to the big screen television they have mounted on the wall. “The convenience store had a camera up that pointed to the sidewalk out front, but apparently, it hasn’t worked in years.” Reaching down, he clicks on a few keys, and I watch the television where his screen is mirrored. A tiny arrow moves this way and that as he clicks on things so fast, I can barely read each item before it’s gone. “The liquor store had a camera that only shows a small portion of the road and sidewalk. They emailed me a copy of their footage. I’ve already scrolled through hours of it, starting with the day Hayden disappeared, but I didn’t see anything that had to do with the Kevin kid, nor her.”
The arrow on the screen moves one last time, and a video window pops up, a play button and counter running along the bottom. “The last bit of footage took some finessing to get. The bank has four different cameras set up on the outside of their building. Two of them face the street.”
Suddenly, there’s my baby on the screen. Her pink backpack is strapped over her shoulders as she walks along the sidewalk. Her long, dark hair is tucked behind her ear as she looks down at her phone. The video is grainy, and you can’t make out her features, but there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s Hayden.
“I almost gave up,” Wyatt says, walking to the front of the room as the rest of us watch the footage. “So many hours of video, each one boring as fuck. And then I see this.”
The room is silent as we watch the soundless video. Hayden walks a little farther, her tiny frame
almost out of the picture when she comes to a stop. My heart races as she looks up and appears to say something. Who is she talking to?
A young boy appears. I don’t recognize him, but Hayden seems to. Maybe it’s a boy from school? Camp? The pair have only been speaking for a few moments when a rusted white van pulls up. The side door opens, and Hayden’s pulled inside. I watch in horror as the young boy jumps inside and slams the door closed before it speeds away. It all happens so fast. One minute she’s there, talking to a boy, and the next, she’s gone. Both of them are just... gone.
“You recognize that kid?” Wyatt asks.
I shake my head, assuming he’s talking to me. “I’ve never seen that kid before in my life.”
“That was the fucking kid who had her phone,” GP snarls from beside me.
“And the kid who lied to my face when I asked him about Hayden. We need to find this fucking kid. And once I’ve found Hayden, I’m gonna kill him.”
Hashtag
The kid is the key to this whole fucking thing, I know it. The security footage proves his involvement without a doubt. He’s the missing link in finding my daughter.
Judge walks into the room, just as I slide the ID from my pocket and lean it against the top of the keyboard.
“Heard about the video. What can I do to help?” His eyes go straight to the ID. “Who do we have here?”
“Snagged it off the kid from earlier, the one in the video.”
“Good work,” Judge declares, squeezing my shoulder.
“You stole the kid’s ID?” Shelby asks. “How did you do it without him seeing it?”
“The kid was too busy pissing his pants when Hayden’s phone rang, he didn’t even notice.”
“Do you think he knows where she is?” Her big brown eyes are filled with hope and anger.
“Mr. Kevin Tucker here knows who has our daughter. And we just watched Hayden be forced into that van. He was involved in her kidnapping.” I type in his full name and the address from the card into my favorite search engine before picking it up and showing it to Shelby. “This is our insurance policy.”