22. LOCK N ROLL
My short list of places to put Maximus Lyle did not include Lock n’ Roll Self Storage. I would have avoided that horrific place for the rest of eternity, but the investigative team had different plans when I arrived at work Monday morning.
“We found Councilman Danvers’ missing car,” Felix announced.
Councilman Danvers, better known to me as Yankee Doodle, was last seen at the downtown construction site where he’d been photographed shaking hands with volunteers assisting the disaster recovery efforts. The same construction site I’d been loaned out to like living heavy machinery, then spent half a week sweating alongside grungy, grumpy workers who didn’t count mental work as real work, or me as much of a real man.
I doubted any of them would hesitate to talk if asked about my whereabouts that Friday afternoon when I bailed on my work assignment to deliver the councilman into my brother’s semi-capable hands. I left his car with Donovan, too, and never bothered to ask what he did with it.
Hearing that Felix had tracked it down stirred dread in me. I wanted to text Donovan immediately, but my urgency was matched by Holland’s as she insisted that we go right away to the location Felix pinpointed.
Pulling up to the office outside Lock n’ Roll, it was all I could do not to face-palm. Apparently, Donovan had done the bare minimum when stashing Yankee Doodle’s BMW by pulling it into the nearest available unit and closing the door.
Curse words and a crappy attitude followed me out of the patrol car, and I waved my cigarette pack at Holland as the reason for my delay in following her inside. She nodded curtly and went ahead, a woman on a mission.
With a cigarette bitten gingerly between my teeth, I fished out my cell phone and clicked to return the most recent missed call from my brother.
One ring in, Donovan’s voice cut sharply across the line. “Fitch, you dick, where have you been?”
My snort puffed smoke into the crisp air. “Don’t start with me, Donnie.”
Yanking the cigarette out, I stalked around the tiny office building to the side without windows. Once there, I flicked ash at the wall and took another drag before continuing.
“Currently, I’m at Lock n’ Roll, reminiscing on old times and wondering how bad you fucked up.”
“Me?” he yelped. “What’d I do? ”
I paced the strip of dry, scrubby grass, keeping my voice at a low rumble in case Holland came looking. “They found the damn car. Great idea leaving it here. Very convenient keeping everything in one place.” I glared across the endless rows of storage buildings, all the same corrugated metal with roll-up doors. “Did you put the unit in your own name, too?”
“What car?” Donovan asked. The grunt that followed announced his realization. “Oh…”
I barked a laugh. “Oh is right. Do you realize how fucked I am?”
“ You’re fucked?” he retorted. “It’s my name on the damn thing.”
The warmth drained from my face. “You didn’t really… I was joking, Donnie! Why are you signing your name on anything? You’re supposed to be dead!”
“I didn’t think about it!”
“Jesus Christ.” Pulling the phone away from my cheek, I pinned it to my chest instead. I slumped against the brick wall, tilting my head back to stare at the sky. On the other side of that same wall, Holland was no doubt in mid-interrogation, questioning the owner of this place who, unlike Isha, had no loyalty to me or secrets to protect.
Donovan’s voice buzzed through the cell’s speaker loudly enough I could tell he was shouting my name.
Before he could call out again, I put the phone to my ear and snapped, “What am I supposed to do about this?”
“Why are you asking me?” Donovan retorted.
I huffed a hot breath .
After another long pause, my brother’s sigh whooshed across the line. “When are you coming home?”
“That’s my next stop.” I rolled my head toward the front corner of the building. “Unless they throw me in jail first. I gotta go.”
Pressing the End Call icon, I pocketed the cell and took a final, lung-swelling drag off the cigarette. Without knowing how far Holland had gotten into her conversation with the owner, I could be walking into anything from how’s the weather pleasantries to an antimagic shock collar and a pair of handcuffs with my name on them.
I needed a plan. A convincing lie, at least.
Holland was aware that Donovan was alive due to our clash during the Thorngate prison escape. Last I knew, the investigator was on board to help get my brother out of town. But that would change when she found out he was an accomplice in a string of kidnappings-turned-murders.
Finding Yankee Doodle’s BMW was the start of a steep decline. One storage unit would lead to eight others, some of which might contain the evidence of captives held here for weeks on end. Not to mention signs of Donovan’s comings and goings. And mine.
I stood outside until I feared my absence would become suspicious, certainly longer than it took me to power through a single cigarette. I considered lighting another. Let Holland come looking and find me burning through the whole pack, living it up while I could. Smokes were hard to come by in prison .
Smoothing my suit coat and tugging on my tie, I walked to the windowed front of the office building. I drew a steeling breath before pushing through the door. Inside, a cardboard cutout of Elvis greeted me. I dodged the King and scanned the crowded space.
Every wall and the front of the service counter was papered with posters of rock music legends. The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, and more Elvis. Foil music notes hung from the ceiling, and a jukebox in the corner proved commitment to the theme. All of that paled in comparison to the owner’s wardrobe of a white button-down and pink poodle skirt.
In the weeks since I’d last been here, she hadn’t changed. Still gray-haired, hunchbacked, and smelling like sweat from the stuffy heat in the building. I hadn’t changed, either, and was banking on the Clark Kent effect of my suit to turn me into someone unrecognizable.
She and Holland stood on opposite sides of the service counter. The investigator jotted notes in her trusty memo pad while the owner prattled on. Hoping to avoid notice, I made a sharp turn toward the dusty jukebox.
“Can I help you, young man?” The owner’s voice crackled from the grit of a lifelong cigarette habit.
“He’s with me,” Holland interjected, clearly determined to keep me from ruining what could have been a productive witness testimony. “About the councilman’s car,” she continued after the scarcest pause, “you said a young man paid for the unit?”
Across the property, Tobin and Vesper had already gone to the unit in question, intent on scrubbing the BMW for clues. Felix remained behind at the Capitol, reviewing traffic camera footage and finding everything his lucky little heart desired. And here I was, trapped and waiting for the gavel of condemnation to fall.
“Yeah,” the owner replied. “Sweet thing. Came through about twice a day for a few weeks. Bringing boxes.”
Pizza boxes. I shuddered.
“I figured he was loading one of those units in the far back. They got rented out a few days before he started coming. Eight in a row.”
“Eight of them, you say?” Holland’s pen scribbled furiously while I clicked through The Doors discography. “And the BMW was in the ninth?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Were they all under the same name?”
Here it comes. I braced myself against the jukebox, breathlessly waiting.
“Let me get my book,” the owner rasped.
I didn’t turn. Didn’t dare watch the old woman scrabble through her papers until I heard her announce. “Yep, that’s the one. Corbin Calloway.”
Relief escaped me like a puff of steam from a boiling kettle. Donovan’s name, yes, but not the one our parents had given him. Dead men needed aliases and so did abducted little boys. Donovan based his own new identity on the main character from a book series he’d been obsessed with at the time.
Glancing over my shoulder found the two women bent over a three-ring binder. The owner stabbed a gnarled finger at an interior page, and Holland pushed up her sunglasses to squint at what must have been my brother’s handwriting.
The jukebox was free to play, and I found myself desperate for something to break the tension in the room. I picked “When the Music’s Over” from the song menu and settled in for eleven minutes of musical accompaniment.
When the first notes kicked in, Holland shot me a scathing glare. “Could you not?” she asked.
Shrugging, I gestured to the machine. What had been started couldn’t be stopped.
The investigator returned her attention to the business owner. “Do you happen to remember what the young man looked like?” Holland asked.
I could kill her. The owner. Make it look like a stroke or a fatal blood clot. Just let her keel over while Holland watched and I pretended to be surprised.
“I’ll do you one better,” the owner replied. “Got plenty of camera footage of him coming and going. Not in the Beamer, though. He drove a big brown car. Ford, I think?”
I turned fully.
The owner had pivoted to a desk on the wall, layered with outmoded computer equipment and a grid of tiny, black and white television monitors. Four cameras surveilling this whole place was a pittance of a security system, but the feed currently broadcasting from the entry gate was damning enough to make up for it.
If what she said about Donovan coming every day was true, there would have been ample opportunities to ID his car and his face. And me, driving the same “big brown car” after the investigators did their best to send mine to the scrap heap.
The owner eyed me, her expression fraught with suspicion. “Might take me a bit, but I can pull up some shots for you,” she told Holland. “Maybe get his plates?”
“Well, aren’t you helpful?” I forced a saccharine smile.
Holland’s shades dropped onto the bridge of her nose. “Fitch, I’ve got this.”
I recalled her plea at Saturday night’s party, asking me to stop giving her a hard time at work. That, coupled with the knowledge that she’d been getting advice from her dad—Grimm—on how to manage me, worsened my already foul mood.
I didn’t revel in my role as a problem child. In fact, it grated on me. Grimm never missed a chance to tell me what a disaster I was. A fuck up. A failure. I didn’t want to become Holland’s bane, too.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” I said.
Dodging cardboard Elvis, I exited the building into the crisp, clean air outside. It was so crisp and clean that I decided to pollute it with another cigarette. This time, I smoked in plain sight, leaning against the side of Holland’s patrol car while glaring at the security camera mounted on the corner of the office’s roof.
Feed from that ancient thing was bound to be low-resolution and grainy. Hard to discern the face inside a car window, but the make and model of a car would be readily apparent, as would the letters and numbers on a license plate. Donovan’s Bronco would be easy to track with Felix on the case. If he could follow Yankee Doodle’s BMW to Lock n’ Roll, he could find the brown Ford SUV leaving the place less than fifteen minutes later when I drove it back to the jobsite where the councilman was last seen.
He might see it sitting in the Capitol parking garage during the weeks of the disappearances or spot it in recent days pulling into the lot by the houseboat docks. I’d driven it to crime scenes, the Lazy Daze Motel, the Bitters’ End, and the Blooming Orchid the night I kidnapped Lover Boy. That damn car was all Holland and her team needed to blow the case wide open. They would easily tie me to the crimes, and Donovan’s alias was only a thin wall between him and incrimination or at least guilt by association. All I could do was sit by and watch it happen.
Holland stepped out of the office building and approached, jingling her keys. “A real lead,” she said. “Finally.”
I threw down the half-spent cig and ground it out against the pavement.
The investigator unlocked the sedan and opened her door before pausing to meet my gaze across the low top of the car. “Thank you for excusing yourself,” she said. “That was better… I think.”
My lips formed a crooked smile. “Glad it was good for you.”
Once inside the vehicle, my thoughts raced the familiar track that ended with imprisonment and death.
Since signing on at the Capitol, nothing had gone according to plan. I agreed to work with Holland in exchange for Donovan’s safety and passage out of the city. Then came the plague, the kidnappings, and the missing persons investigation, and there had been no time to work toward my actual goal. The fact that I had failed to uphold my end of the bargain by getting the investigators even an inch closer to taking down the Bloody Hex was yet another shortfall.
Holland started the car and left it idling, too engrossed in typing from her notepad into her phone. I needed her with me, not against me, and if she learned the truth about how I’d been spending my energies as a Capitol consultant, our fragile alliance would be shattered.
“Did that name sound familiar to you?” she asked, jarring me from contemplation.
“What name?”
“Corbin Calloway.” She glanced up from her cell. “Has a certain ring to it. I’ve heard it before.”
My grunt of acknowledgment joined the quiet as Holland continued swiping across her phone screen. Concern unsettled my stomach, and I pitched forward to aim the vents to blow cold air on my clammy cheeks.
After a few seconds of scrolling, Holland chuckled. I glanced over to find her cell turned toward me and open to an internet search window.
“ The Calloway Chronicles .” She indicated the top result. “That book series we read when we were kids. You owned all of them. Don’t you remember?”
I waved her off. “That was a lifetime ago. And it’s probably a coincidence.”
“Or a fake name. I’d guess the brown Ford is registered to the same alias.”
She would guess correctly.
“So, that’s helpful,” she continued, “but not enough. I’ll run the plates, of course, but more for the sake of tracking the vehicle than hoping to find the owner.”
“Tracking it where?”
“To our suspect’s home, hopefully. Or as close as we can get. Fingers crossed he doesn’t live in the suburbs. No traffic cams out there.”
They would find it at the docks. Even if Donovan had done as instructed and stayed put during the hours and days I’d left him unattended, we’d just taken Maggie in the Bronco for a late-night snack run last week.
Holland plotted out loud while I made plans of my own. I needed to get ahead of this. For once, I could see what was plainly coming for me, and that was an advantage I couldn’t afford to waste.