Take Down

by Jess Anastasi

  “No sign of him.” Hayes dragged a hand across the gray stubble growing in on his cheeks; the man hadn’t been home in nearly twenty hours. “The passenger-side window of his truck was busted out, and his knuckles are a mess. There’s reportedly a lot of blood smeared across the inside—”

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” he blurted out before the sheriff could even finish. Jake knew he was beyond reason now; he wasn’t looking at this from a logical standpoint. He was ignoring the facts in favor of hope. But he’d stopped trying to be cop Jake hours ago. Boyfriend Jake wasn’t giving up or going to listen to reason until he had Danny back, one way or another.

  For the first time all night, the sheriff’s expression took on an almost pitying edge as he looked at him.

  “Perez, I don’t want it to be true any more than you do, but we have to face what’s right in front of us.”

  The last thread of logic, the last little piece of him that could look at this from a stance of his officer training told him the sheriff and Stevens were probably right; it sure as hell looked like Grant Jones had done something to Danny. But his instincts were telling him it didn’t feel right. Actually, he couldn’t tell any longer if it was his instincts, or his heart in stubborn denial of reality, refusing to lose Danny when he’d only just found him.

  “They’re taking Grant into the station. I’m going to head out to his pickup to make sure the crime scene is being handled properly so Stevens doesn’t have a reason to bitch. Then I’m going back to the station to see what the detective can get from him, even though he’s probably not sober. What do you want to do?”

  “I’ll come.” He needed answers; however he wasn’t ready to see Grant Jones just yet, especially if the man was too drunk to answer their questions.

  He and the sheriff climbed silently into the SUV, and neither of them said a word as they drove a little ways out of town to where Grant Jones’s pickup was in a ditch on the side of the road and wrapped in yellow tape.

  While the sheriff went to speak with the two officers who’d found the truck, Jake took out a flashlight and cautiously went forward to peer into the broken window. There was shattered glass inside, as though the window had been broken from the outside and fell in. Blood was smeared across the interior, but not as much as Jake had feared—not as much as he’d expect if there’d been a dead body or seriously injured person stashed in there.

  He shifted back again and did two slow laps around the vehicle, sweeping the flashlight as he looked for any other signs of blood or drag marks in the dirt and grass, but thankfully didn’t find any obvious evidence that Grant had taken Danny somewhere nearby to dump him. Still, as he glanced around in the darkness, he was almost overcome with the need to call out and go searching in the surrounding fields and forest.

  Jake startled slightly as the sheriff set a hand on his shoulder. “Come on, I think we’ve seen enough here.”

  Nodding, he shoved away the fear Danny was out here somewhere in the shadows and silently followed the sheriff back to his SUV, his back and shoulders aching from every muscle knotted in stress. The tension only became worse the closer they got to the station. Every fiber of his body was dreading the moment he laid eyes on Grant Jones, terrified the man would confess to hurting his son.

  Losing Luis had nearly broken him. He didn’t think he could do it again so soon: bury someone he cared so deeply about, someone so young who should have decades of life stretching out ahead of him… all that time they were supposed to spend together stolen away so brutally.

  By the time they reached the station, his stomach was hurting and he was trembling—shock, probably, he distantly realized. Shock and stress and lack of sleep. He hurriedly excused himself from the sheriff and locked himself in the men’s room.

  For a few moments, he let the apprehension and desperation overwhelm him, but held in the sob that tried to convulse through his chest. Besides the fact he was hanging on by a thread over Danny, this was dredging up all the memories and buried emotional trauma of Luis’s death. The shock, the disbelief, the anger. And just when he’d thought he’d managed to start coming to terms with it all, the trial had started and he’d gone through it all over again, only to have justice whisked out from underneath him.

  No. He wasn’t going to go through that again, even if it already felt like his heart was slowly but steadily shredding inside his chest. They hadn’t found Danny yet. And until he saw proof otherwise, he was going to hold on to the belief that Danny was alive with every breath in his body.

  Resolve strengthened, he splashed cold water on his face, settled some composure over himself, and made his way out to the interview rooms. Detective Stevens and Sheriff Hayes were standing in the middle of the hallway, deep in conversation.

  Just as he reached them, the sheriff gave a sharp nod and then stepped quickly into the room.

  “What’s going on?” he asked as he followed Stevens into the observation room next door.

  Stevens made an annoyed face but didn’t tell him to leave. Instead he crossed his arms and turned his attention to what was unfolding on the other side of the glass. The sheriff greeted Grant, who was slumped miserable and bleary-eyed in front of a small paper cup of coffee. Hayes seated himself at the table, very little tension in his body and tone almost gentle as he spoke to the other man. Jake couldn’t understand how the sheriff was managing to keep so calm when Danny was practically a son to him and he was now sitting across from the man who had possibly hurt him.

  “He’s still completely wasted,” Stevens finally answered. “Says he didn’t do anything to Danny, but also that he can’t remember what he did since he left Monroe’s. Could be he’s blocked out the trauma of it, or he really is that drunk he blacked out when he confronted Danny. Either way, he’s too defensive with me. I figured we might get more out of him if he talks to a familiar face. Otherwise, we’ll have to wait a few hours until he sobers up.”

  Stevens didn’t have to tell him a few hours might mean the difference between life or death for Danny if Grant really was responsible for hurting him and had dumped him somewhere. The thought that Danny was out there, alone and hurt in the darkness, gnawed at his insides, making his stomach ache again and leaving him swallowing against the burn in the back of his throat.

  God, Danny, where are you?

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  DANNY WAS used to waking up from nightmares, not waking up into them. His head throbbed mercilessly as he forced his eyes to focus against the shaft of weak sunlight slanting directly across his face. From the chirping of birds and fresh waft of air over his exposed skin, it must have been dawn.

  His hands were tied and arms stretched uncomfortably behind his back. He’d been left lying on his side, cheek pressed into the packed-dirt floor beneath him. He was in some kind of tool or garden shed, the faint smell of oil, gasoline, and stale cut grass assaulting his sinuses with each inhale.

  He gingerly rolled onto his back, trying to shift his arms into a more comfortable position, which was pretty much impossible. They’d mostly gone numb anyway. In fact, his whole body was numb, like he was so fucking terrified he’d started having some kind of out-of-body experience.

  Everything after the garage was a blur. He remembered being hit in the side of the head; his hair was matted with dried blood. The blow hadn’t fully knocked him out, but it’d dazed him enough not to fight back and left him unable to do anything except struggle to remain somewhat conscious as he’d been dragged and thrown into the back of a pickup truck. He didn’t remember most of the ride to wherever this was, and only had snatches of memory from being lugged into the shed, so he must have blacked out once or twice on the journey. And after initially trying to kick the door open, he’d gotten too dizzy to move anymore and finally lost the fight against unconsciousness. Must have been out for hours if it was now dawn.

  Shit. He had to get out of here before he came back. The icy gleam in his eye, the absolute hate and loathing, Danny had no doubt he was
going to kill him, even before he’d outright said so. Why he hadn’t already, he wasn’t going to question. He just knew if he didn’t find some way out of this, his life was going to end, probably right here on the dirt floor of some random garden shed, with no one knowing what’d happened to him.

  Jake. He must have been going out of his mind. Probably tearing the town apart trying to find him. Thinking about his boyfriend dragged him partway out of the too-calm numbness, and a new wave of fear exploded in his chest, making it hard to breathe.

  Oh God, oh God. He didn’t want to die. He wanted to see Jake in that second more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. Wanted Jake to burst through the door in his uniform with a dozen other cops and save him like this was some cliché movie. Except how the hell was Jake supposed to work out where he was when even he didn’t know himself?

  If no one knew what’d happened to him, then he couldn’t rely on anyone else to save him. Somehow, he had to get out of this himself. Despite the way his head was throbbing, he wiggled around, grunting as he put his weight on his aching arms, shooting pain into his shoulder blades as he managed to push himself up into a sitting position. He swayed for a moment, his head going on a long spin that almost sent him back down. Closing his eyes, he swallowed down the bile rising in the back of his throat and breathed desperately through his nose, waiting for his mind to regain some equilibrium.

  When he thought he could move without throwing up, he opened his eyes to study the inside of the shed now light was coming through the single grimy window and a crack along the edge of the door where the timber had warped.

  The place was practically bare; no garden tools or mowers to be seen, though considering the oil stains in the dirt, there had been at some point. A rickety bench was shoved into one corner and had some random stuff on it—a wallet, a watch, a trucker hat, and some kind of red apron like they wore at the hardware store. There were a couple of empty burlap sacks sitting with dust and cobwebs in the other corner and what looked like the broken handle of a shovel or rake, but the head was missing so it wouldn’t exactly make for a dangerous weapon.

  There wasn’t anything conveniently sharp sitting around for him to cut the bindings on his wrists, whatever he’d been tied with. It felt like some kind of cord, digging uncomfortably into his skin. So he wasn’t going to be able to free his hands, but maybe if he could get outside, he could make a run for it and hopefully find someone to help him.

  For a second he considered yelling for help, but that might only bring him back if he was somewhere nearby. Instead, he shifted over to the door and dropped to the ground again like he had last night, bracing himself as best he could in the awkward position with his arms behind him, and using both legs to kick the door. The impact was so hard it jarred all the way up into his hips. But he didn’t care about the pain. It barely rated against the ache in his head anyway, which throbbed more deeply at the violent movement. He drew his knees back and tried again, even harder this time, desperation driving the strength behind his legs.

  The door jerked out a little, but then a rattle told him it was probably chained from the outside. Likely the best he could pray for was that the handle gave way in the rotted wood and came free. Hopefully before that bastard came back.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  JAKE WAS fuming and debating the merits of going to find a bucket of ice water as he paced up and down the hallway outside the holding cell where Grant Jones was passed out.

  The sheriff hadn’t been able to get anything out of the man, not anything that made sense, anyway. He’d ranted drunkenly for a while about his son, but if he’d actually done anything to Danny, he either couldn’t remember or was too drunk to hold a thought long enough to tell them what’d happened.

  The sheriff had eventually decided the best they could do was let him sleep it off and ask him again in the morning when he was sober. Jake’s inability to do anything to find or help Danny was like an itch under his skin that no amount of scratching would resolve. As the small hours of the morning had dragged by, Jake found himself standing in front of the whiteboard they’d set up in the sheriff’s office with all the information about Leroy Hobbs attached to it.

  He couldn’t escape the niggle of worry, caught in a corner of his mind like a burr that wouldn’t budge. What if the reason Grant Jones didn’t remember doing anything to Danny was because he hadn’t done anything to Danny? What if, for whatever twisted reason, Leroy Hobbs was responsible for this and they’d wasted the night searching for and interrogating the wrong man?

  They hadn’t managed to compile much information on Hobbs before the whole situation had blown up in their faces when he’d realized Danny was missing. Hobbs had his name on two official reports with the Everness Sheriff’s Department over the past month. One from the first week he’d turned up—he’d been given a warning for squatting in an old abandoned house. Obviously, that was before he’d made good with the leader of the local white-nationalist group on the outskirts of town, which was where he was reportedly now living. And the second was a charge for disturbing the peace after he and a group of ALP members had gotten into a fight with some locals at the town founder’s festival a few weeks back.

  The sheriff had been right; there was nothing to suggest Hobbs had anything to do with the two murders or had been the guy Danny said seemed to be following him. Nothing except for the feeling sitting heavy in his gut that told him his history with Hobbs had somehow gotten mixed up in all this and now Danny was the one paying the price.

  “He’s awake.”

  Jake glanced over his shoulder at the sheriff standing in the doorway of his office. Though the man hadn’t been home—actually, no one had with Danny still missing—he’d taken the time to shave and freshen up and didn’t look quite as ragged anymore.

  He probably needed to take a leaf out of the man’s book and go tidy up himself, maybe even put on his uniform. But his brain had stalled on doing anything and everything to get Danny back as soon as possible. He didn’t have the emotional energy to care about anything else at this point.

  “Stevens is taking him back to the interview room,” Hayes continued when he didn’t reply.

  “You think the detective would let me sit in?” he asked, crossing his arms as he joined the sheriff.

  “Is that a good idea?” The sheriff’s brow creased in concern as he looked over him. “Sorry to say, Perez, but I doubt you’re operating at your best right now.”

  He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. I don’t need to say anything. I just want to look the bastard in the eye when Stevens asks him about Danny.”

  “Having you in there will probably make him angry.”

  He didn’t bother trying to hide the grimly satisfied smile that spread over his face. “Exactly.”

  The sheriff looked surprised for half a second, but then understanding lit his gaze. “You’re hoping it’ll spur him into remembering or saying something that’ll implicate himself.”

  He nodded as they reached the interrogation room. “At the very least, I want him to know there are people out here who love Danny for exactly who he is, and if anyone is wrong, it’s him.”

  Hayes gripped his shoulder for a brief moment. “You’re a good man, Perez. You and Danny deserve to be happy together, no matter what anyone in this damned town says. You’ll always have me at your back.”

  A lump of emotion blocked up his throat and he could only nod his reply.

  Hayes didn’t seem to need anything else from him, however, as he turned to rap briskly on the closed door. A second later, Stevens opened it and looked out.

  “Perez wants to sit in on the interview,” Hayes told him, tilting his head in his direction.

  Stevens settled a considering gaze on him. “He’s too emotionally invested in this investigation.”

  It wasn’t a yes, but it also wasn’t a no.

  “I won’t say a word. I just want in. I want Grant Jones to have to sit across the table from me and know exa
ctly what I mean to his son.”

  Stevens raised an eyebrow, almost looking impressed. “That’s just going to piss him off.”

  “Yeah, it sure will,” the sheriff drawled.

  Stevens cracked a quick smile and then shifted back, pulling the door wider. “Then by all means.”

  He nodded his thanks as he stepped forward, and when he drew even with the detective, the other man leaned closer.

  “Not a word, understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” he replied dutifully with an ease of acceptance drilled into him by the Army.

  As he shifted clear of the doorway, Grant Jones spotted him and his expression immediately soured.

  “What’s he doing here?” Grant demanded, loathing and disgust practically dripping from every word.

  “Officer Perez is aiding the investigation into the disappearance of your son,” Stevens replied in calm counterpoint to the antipathy from Grant.

  “Danny is missing?” Some of the man’s bravado slipped away to be replaced by confusion.

  It took all of Jake’s willpower not to demand how the man didn’t remember a single thing about the night before. To rant about how many times both the sheriff and detective had asked him if he knew where Danny was.

  “Yes, Mr. Jones,” Stevens returned firmly. “Do you recall any of what we discussed last night?”

  Grant’s expression creased slightly, as though trying to recall the night before was causing him physical pain. Jake hoped it was. Hoped the guy had the hangover from hell.

  “I remember Alan wanted to talk about Danny, but I thought it was to do with—” The man scowled, attention darting to Jake for a second before looking pointedly back at Stevens, obviously deciding he was going to ignore the fact Jake was even in the room. “I didn’t realize Danny was missing. What happened to him?”

  Huh. The man almost sounded worried. But how concerned could he really be when twelve hours ago, he’d threatened to kill his son? Probably he was more anxious to cover his own ass.