Chapter 11
BONES
I'm putting four stitches into Maverick's forearm and only half of me is in the room.
The other half is on the phone, face-up on the steel tray, dark and quiet and waiting.
"You flinch, I make it crooked," I tell him.
"It's already crooked."
It is. He caught it on something he won't name and lied about how. I tie off the last one, snip the thread, press a square of gauze down over the work, and tell him to keep it dry, which he won't. He didn't get his road name by accident.
It's near five. The day's burning down gold through the bay door and the garage smells like cut metal. I'm thinking about a girl and a dinner. I'm thinking I'll take her somewhere with a fancy tablecloth and a fancy menu, watch her go shy about it, then take her home and undo all the good behavior.
She gets off at four-thirty. Text me when you're done, I said this morning, and she said I will. So I wait, because waiting on my Bandit is a thing I've decided I like.
By five-fifteen I stop liking it.
I pick up the phone. Nothing. I tell myself the floor ran long, somebody coded, she's elbow-deep in it and can't pick up her phone. I send a text anyway. Hungry? Watch it deliver. Watch it sit there with no answer climbing under it.
Five-forty. I call.
It rings out into her voicemail, her voice on it, bright and a little embarrassed, you've reached Riley, and I hang up before it asks me to leave anything.
I clean my instruments. I lay them out in a row that doesn't need straightening and straighten it. Maverick says something I don't catch and I don't ask him to repeat it.
Six. I call again.
No answer. The longer the screen stays dark, the worse the quiet gets, until it isn't a quiet at all. It's a sound. It's the one I spent a decade learning to hear before the bleeding starts.
I go find Angel.
He's in church alone with a ledger and reading glasses. He looks up at whatever's on my face and sets the pen down.
"She's not answering," I say.
"She's twenty-one and she's at work," he says, in a very reasonable tone. A man talking a brother down. "Give it an hour. They run those floors hard. She'll surface."
"It's been two."
"Bones."
"I clipped your pin on her this morning."
He frowns.
When he gave it to me, I told him it was the most paranoid thing I'd ever been ordered to do.
"Fine," Angel says, already moving. In a minute his laptop is open.
"It's not real-time," he says, fingers going. "It logs. Pings out a location every fifteen, banks it. If she's wearing it, I've got where it's been."
"She's wearing it."
He doesn't answer. He's studying his screen.
I stand at his shoulder and watch a list build with timestamps and coordinates resolving into places.
"Eight, Brightmoor." He scrolls. "Eight-fifteen, still at Brightmoor. Then —" His mouth thins. "She moves. Eight-fifty she's on the interstate. Northbound."
"North … She left work?"
"Nine-fifteen, still north. Out past the county line." His finger drags. "Nine-thirty she's off the highway, county road. Ten-oh-five …" He stops. Reads it twice. "Little town I don't know. Hour and change out. Nothing out there but trees and money."
Cash has come in behind me without me hearing him. I don't know how long he's been there.
"Solstice Cove," Cash says. Quiet. "That's the Solstice Cove exit."
Angel looks at the screen and shakes his head.
"And?"
"And nothing." He turns the screen so I can see the last line and the white space under it where the next line should be and isn't. "That's the last one. After that it just … stops."
"Battery issue?"
"No, there would have been a warning. These throw a low-power flag hours before they die.
There's no flag. There's no shutdown. There's no last little ping crawling off somewhere.
" He sits back. "One second it's reporting clean every fifteen minutes like it's supposed to.
The next there's nothing. That's not a tracker dying, Bones.
That's a tracker getting destroyed or locked in a place it can't transmit out of, like a safe. "
The room's gone very small and very loud.
"What do you think she's doing in Solstice Cove?" Angel asks.
I have no clue. This was supposed to be a regular day ending with me picking her up at the bus station. Unless …
"Unless Kessler sent her to the other facility like she asked him …"
Cash pulls out his phone. "I'm calling Glitch," he says. "We need to find out if there's a medical facility in that part of town."
Angel nods. "Just what I wanted to do today, go through fucking property records."
"We're looking for anything with Kessler's name on it or somehow related to Brightmoor or Halcyon,” I say. "And yes, we need Glitch to cross-reference the law firms who created the shells for Halcyon."
Fuck, this is my fault. I gave her a false sense of safety when I pinned a useless charm to her chest and called it safe. I've finally had someone worth keeping, and I didn't keep her safe.
What if Kessler didn't buy her curious student act and saw her for what she is for him: a loose end.
"Bishop," I call out. "Someone get me Prez!"
We're not just hunting for Darling anymore, I want my Bandit back.