Then it hit Mercy, who snorted, expression disbelieving.
Carter got it a moment later. “Oh.”
“FredandRicky?” Ghost asked. “Thoseare their names?”
“Yeah…” Jimmy glanced between them. “What? That’s what they said.”
Ghost shook his head. “Never mind. They were at the party?”
“Yeah. They – after Allie, you know, shot me down – they, well, Ricky, he said, ‘You should go after her.’ But I’d had too much to drink. So he drove me…”
Carter felt a tingling sense of disquiet at the back of his neck; he nearly shivered.
“What happened to Allie?” Ghost asked.
Jimmy took a few more breaths, and then the tears started again. Through choked sobs, he managed to say, “I don’t – I don’t know. We were – we caught up to her. At a red light. And Ricky got out. We drove her and her car out to the mill, and I just wanted totalkto her. If she would just listen – if I could tell her – then she’d go out with me. But she – she ran. And Ricky went after her. And…and I don’t know. That was it. She was just gone.”
“You haven’t seen her since?”
He wiped at his face with shaking hands. “No.”
“And Ricky? Fred?”
“We talked on the phone. He told me – told me what I had to do.”
Ghost’s face settled into grim lines; his hand twitched, and for a minute, Carter thought he would lean across the table and cuff Jimmy in the side of the head. But he just said, “Give me their numbers.”
~*~
Carter was sent outside to wait for Jimmy’s dad to show up. He’d been sitting a few moments, enjoying the mild temperatures, trying to ignore the pull of post-adrenaline exhaustion in his muscles, when Mercy joined him, a glass in one hand and a bottle in the other.
“Top you off?”
Carter held out his glass with a quiet thanks.
“I sent the three stooges to go search the boat,” Mercy said, climbing up to sit beside him. The table creaked, but held. “See if there’s anything useful there.”
Carter nodded.
“You pick up on the Fred and Ricky thing?”
“Yeah.I Love Lucy, right?”
Mercy nodded and took a swallow of Scotch. “I get giving out fake names. But those? Whoever this is, they’re having fun. It’s a joke. Fred and Ricky. They’re laughing at us.”
Carter sipped his own drink. “So that spray paint out at the mill. I’m guessing it’s definitely a message for us now, and not just kids screwing around.”
“Looks like it.”
They sipped in silence a moment. “How’s Reese?”
“I checked on him before I came out here. All bandaged up.” He lifted his brows. “Tenny helped, he said.”
“Nothing says ‘I’m sorry for knifing you’ like a little first aid.”
Mercy chuckled. “Aw. Poor kid.”
“Which one?”
