“It was the son – Jimmy Connors – and a friend last night that our guys spooked. Not a big surprise. But Dave Connors said the high school kids are starting to feel distinctly unfriendly toward us.”
“A girl disappeared two weeks ago.” Walsh had the article pulled up still, and passed his phone to Mercy.
At least, he tried to. Fox snatched it away, earning a glare from his brother.
Ghost didn’t smile, because he tried not to encourage sibling rivalry. But. It was hilarious to see the always unflappable Walsh make faces at people.
“No leads?” Fox asked, lifting his head. He had that look on his face: the faint crimp that meant his mind was already racing, spinning a half-dozen possibilities.
Walsh held out his hand for the phone. Fox looked at it, then looked at his face, and continued to hold the phone.
“They found her car,” Ghost said. “A hunter called it in, off the old mill road. But no hide nor hair of her since the night of the party.”
“She was snatched,” Mercy said, frowning. “By who?”
“Not to jump to conclusions…” Fox said.
“Give me thebloodyphone,” Walsh hissed.
Fox held Ghost’s gaze, a sideways smile breaking across his face, and set the phone in his brother’s palm, pinched delicately between two fingers. A delicate grip that he maintained, though. “What’s the word?”
“Piss off.”
Fox released the phone, and his expression grew serious again. “This is exactly the sort of thing Eden wants shuttled her way: missing girl, no signs. That’s what was happening out west. American girls being snatched and sold into the sex slave trade. Three of those are still missing.”
“This girl disappeared two weeks ago,” Ghost said. “It’s not connected to what happened in Texas.”
“Luis got away,” Fox reminded, and the wind picked that exact moment to come funneling in hard off the water, still chilled by the last fingers of winter, despite the spring sunshine beating down on their heads. “And then he called Candy to gloat. We’d be hearing from him again, he said.”
“What are the odds it’s him? Already? Snatching one high school girl here in Knoxville?” Ghost asked. But he’d been alive, and in the life, too long to dismiss ideas just because they seemed too far-fetched. According to Fox, in the debriefing they’d held in the chapel after his return from Amarillo, the FBI – if they could be trusted, which wasdoubtful– believed Luis might have been reaching out to a crime syndicate that was rapidly forming in New York.
Which wouldn’t have been their problem if not for their New York chapter. And Luis’s avowal that they would be seeing him again.
“It’s probably just your garden variety kidnapping,” Mercy said.
And what kinda world was it when a kidnapping was “garden-variety”?
Walsh and Fox looked two varying shades of unconvinced.
“Mind if I throw it Eden’s way?” Fox asked. “This is right up her alley, and she can approach it as a PI, and not as the club.”
Ghost nodded. “Tell her to have at it.”
“Our graffiti problem, though. It was kids last night, but I don’t think it was at first.”
“We’ll keep digging,” Walsh said.
Ghost nodded, and swung a leg over his bike. Internally, he felt an uncurling of disquiet in the pit of his stomach. Why, oh why, could things never stay calm?
~*~
“He’s damn lucky Dad didn’t demand they buy us new plywood,” Aidan said from the next garage bay. “Make the little shits hammer it up themselves.”
“So they could hate us even more?” Tango countered. “No. I think he’s handling it the right way.”
“Psh.”
“What I don’t get is the whole angle with the high school hating us,” Mercy said. “What would make those little shits so bold they’d start vandalizing stuff? If they really think we kidnapped that girl, why provoke us?”
