Chapter 29 Ghost
GHOST
When I strode into the room, I was actually the last one there. The men grinned at me, and I had to recheck to make sure I pulled my mask up.
Which was enough for Doc’s jaw to drop.
“You showed her?” he asked.
I pointed at him. “Shut up.”
Scout’s face lit up. “Ho. Ly. Fuck.”
“Wait, seriously?” Brutus asked from his dark corner.
I grumbled to myself as I went and perched in my own corner.
I turned and saw Cap grinning at me.
“All right, all right, all right,” our president said as he held his hand up, “church is in session.”
The room immediately died down and all eyes were on him.
“Scout,” Cap said with a nod of his head.
Scout stepped forward and slapped a file folder of papers onto the table. “I decoded the minutes from the meetings. She’s got three-years’ worth of them on her laptop, but I’ve managed to decode the meetings going back eleven months.”
“What did you find?” Ranger asked.
Scout drew in a deep breath and shook his head. “A lot. This firm is most definitely involved with the trafficking ring.”
The room grumbled about, but Cap simply held up his hand to gain their attention again. “What did you find?”
Scout shrugged. “A lot. Those decoded meetings are proof positive that this law firm is running with this ring. For starters, those cars? They’re not advertisement cars.”
I spoke up from the shadows. “They’re cars that are being used to mask what the trafficking ring is doing whenever they’re traveling around.”
Cap’s eyes darted to my dark corner before heading back to Scout. “Is that true?”
Scout nodded. “The financial tiers that customers have to pay into for logos? That’s just code.
What they’re really doing is using the cars as decoys, most likely to do their bidding with kidnappings, because who would ever suspect that a vehicle with a prestigious law firm’s logo on it really had a woman trapped in the trunk? ”
“Fucking hell,” Brutus grumbled from his dark corner.
“What else?” Cap demanded.
Scout folded his arms over his chest. “We also have confirmation in these minutes that they are, in fact, buying up businesses not just in Redd Valley, but all around us. In the documents, I’ve got them talking about businesses two fucking towns over.”
“In King’s territory?” Cap asked.
Scout nodded. “Among other areas. And from a lot of the coded language, it almost sounds like this law firm is providing legal fucking counsel to this trafficking ring, whenever they get into sticky situations.”
Cap pinched the bridge of his nose. “So the cars are most likely part of their alibi, should the ring get caught.”
Scout pointed at him. “That’s my theory, yes.”
Cap scrubbed his hands down his face and groaned. “Ranger.”
“Yep?”
“Talk to me about the laptop.”
“I got it successfully cloned and we have eyes on all levels of that law firm,” he said.
The room erupted into a mountain of questions before Cap stuck his hand into the air. It quieted us all down in a heartbeat before he spoke.
“Seen anything on those cameras yet?”
Ranger just shook his head. “Clean as a whistle, so far.”
“I can help with those cameras, especially at night since that’s when they seem to have these fun little meetings of theirs,” I said from my corner.
Cap pointed at me. “Ranger will take the day shift with those cameras, and you take the night shift.”
“Want to talk to them about what we’ve been doing?” Wrecker asked.
He was pretty silent for a while up until this point. Then again, he spent a fuckton of time with that woman of his. I would have teased him about it otherwise, but now, I understood.
The need to be around them.
The need to make sure they were safe every second they breathed.
So I kept my jokes to myself.
“Sure,” Cap said as he motioned for Wrecker to continue.
Wreck cleared his throat. “Cap and I have regularly scouted, especially just after nightfall. Him and I have taken regular rides around the outskirts of Redd Valley, just trying to keep track of things. Keep an eye out on the community.”
“What’d you find?” I asked.
Wrecker looked in my direction. “Cap and I have done ten patrols, and on four of them, we’ve found tire tread tracks seven miles both north and south of our location.”
Doc’s eyes bulged. “Wait, five miles from the clubhouse?”
Wrecker nodded. “Yep.”
“They’re watching us,” Brutus said.
“Circling like fucking vultures,” Ranger muttered.
Everything was silent after that until Cap finally spoke. “All right. What are we sending to our DOJ contact?”
“Actually,” Ranger said as he raised his hand, “if I could get everyone’s attention for a second.”
Our eyes snapped to him and Cap nodded for him to continue.
I’d never seen Ranger look so conflicted before.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Ranger looked over at where I stood, usually in my dark corner, before he drew in a deep breath.
“I know we’ve got a lot spinning already, and that’s great.
For the record, I think we should send whatever we find to our DOJ contact.
It’s not our job to parse through things, it’s just our job to collect it. ”
Cap folded his arms over his chest and nodded. “Noted.”
Ranger nodded back before he cleared his throat. “But yes. I got Marla talking.”
“That her name?” Wrecker asked. “Marla?”
Ranger nodded. “Yeah, Marla.”
I paused. “Wait a second, she wasn’t talking to you?”
Everyone’s eyes slowly turned to face me and that gave me the answer I was looking for.
“Hey, just clarifying,” I said as I held my hands up.
All eyes went back to Ranger before he sighed. “Marla has been through hell. I’ve had to use a lot of de-escalation tactics that we all learned in the military on her just to keep her calm so that she can become more familiar with this space she ran to.”
“She all right?” Cap asked.
Ranger shrugged. “Depends on how you define the word. She’s still in my closet. She refuses to come out. But I do have her eating a bit, and she is talking with me, finally.”
“Good,” Brutus said.
“I think that part of her unwillingness to talk was the fact that she was so dehydrated and malnourished when she first ran up on us. A week of eating and drinking some water seems to have brought back some memories.”
“Like…?” Doc asked.
“Like,” Ranger said as he slid his hand into his back pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper.
He unraveled the folded article and smoothed it out on the table right beside where Scout dropped that stack of papers, “a trail drawing of the route she ran and what she saw from point A to point B, when she took off and started running for us.”
“You’re fucking kidding,” Cap said as he snatched the map right off the table.
Wrecker, Cap’s second-in-command, hovered over his shoulder to gaze at it himself.
“She remembered landmarks,” Ranger said, “she remembered the types of trees. It’s rudimentary, but her map alone makes it clear that she entered town from—”
Cap slowly looked up. “The same side of town Ariel and I emerged from.”
Ranger nodded. “You said you and Ariel set a bunch of people free before you made a run for it, yeah?”
Cap swallowed. “Yeah.”
Ranger just sighed. “I think she may have been one of the people you inadvertently freed.”
Cap shook his head. “But that means she was on the run for—”
The entire room fell silent before Ranger finally responded. “For a while. She was living in the woods, not realizing where she was for a while before she found the edge of the woods and ran into town.”
Cap mindlessly passed the map to Wrecker, who proceeded to pass it around to all of us.
Even I got a look at it, and Ranger was right.
The map was rudimentary, at best, but anyone who lived in Redd Valley for any length of time recognized the statues and the trees that got marked with spray paint every summer because of the kids that got bored just before school started back up.
“There’s only one problem,” Ranger said as I passed the map to Brutus.
“What?” I asked.
Ranger tilted his head. “I don’t believe she was being held where Cap and Ariel were being held.”
That snapped our president’s attention to him. “What makes you say that?”
“This,” Brutus said as he emerged from his darkness, pointing at the map. “I don’t recognize this.”
“What?” I asked as I came out of my corner as well.
We all gathered around him to see what he pointed at and… he was right.
“The fuck is that?” Wrecker asked.
“Hell of a question coming from the person that grew up here,” Cap muttered.
“Seriously,” Wrecker said as he took the map and oriented it in front of his face, “what landmark is that?”
Ranger piped up. “Want to know what I think?”
“Yes,” Cap said, “tell us your theory.”
Ranger nodded at the map as he folded his arms over his chest as well.
“I think that where Cap and Ariel were being held was an offshoot jailhouse. Somewhere they took disobedient merchandise to be held until further notice. I also think that when Cap triggered whatever it was he triggered to make sure everyone was able to get out before him and Ariel made a break for it, I don’t think he triggered just the cells in that house where they were. ”
Cap crooked an eyebrow. “You think what we triggered was connected to something else.”
Ranger shrugged. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. I mean, Wrecker and Amanda, where they were being held? From what they’ve told us? Tech galore. Who’s to say they don’t have two jailhouses out there that are connected to one another, with one trigger to blow open all of the cells at once?”
The room went quiet at that, so Ranger continued.
“Think about it, do you recognize her, Cap?” he asked.
Cap just shook his head. “No, but Ariel and I also didn’t get the best view of everyone before we all ran.”
“But this is you we’re talking about. You’re always assessing your surroundings. Did even her voice, when she screamed for us, sound familiar?”
Cap tilted his head. “No.”
Ranger pointed at him. “Exactly. But you did trigger their cell openings, right?”
Cap nodded. “Yeah.”
He just shrugged. “If they have even half of the kind of tech in their headquarters that Wrecker and Amanda saw—”
“They do,” Wreck said, interrupting him. “I’ll swear that shit in a court of law.”
Ranger pointed at him. “Then they’ve been out there for a while, hooking shit up. I think they’ve got holding cells out there in numerous abandoned buildings and makeshift encampments. And I think whatever Cap triggered, opened all of them at once.”
Doc whistled lowly. “That would explain why they want to come so heavy at us right now.”
“And why they’re policing our clubhouse,” Brutus said.
Ranger shrugged. “Right now, it’s the only theory we’ve got that fills in all of the blanks with all of the information we have at our disposal.”
Cap was silent for a long time before he spoke. “So you’re telling me that there’s the possibility of a third fucking place this trafficking ring has set up in the fucking woods?”
Ranger’s smile was sad and half-hearted. “For all we know, there could be several.”
And as I stayed silent, taking everything in and making sure I committed all of the facts to memory, only one thought crossed my mind.
What in the absolute fuck was going on?