Thirty-Five
THIRTY-FIVE
Zalen
I’D NEVER MET BYRON’S grandmother before. I’d never even phoned or texted her. All I had was a number with a local area code and a name—Beatrix Delgado. No address, although it was an unusual enough name that I could probably track one down without too much effort.
Instead, I called—even though it was the middle of the night. The phone rang and rang without ever going to voicemail, making me think it might be that rarest of endangered technology, a landline.
I tried texting the number anyway, with no luck. So, for lack of any better options, I called again and just let it ring. And ring. And ring .
The sound of a receiver being picked up stopped my breath. Then an irritated voice barked, “ What the hell do you think you’re doing, pranking an old woman in the middle of the night! ”
Before she could slam the receiver down, or worse, hang up and leave it off the hook, I blurted, “I’m sorry, ma’am—it’s about Byron!”
Silence descended, broken only by the sound of breathing.
“ Say that again? ” The voice sounded a bit calmer, but something about Beatrix Delgado’s tone raised the hairs on the back of my neck. Alpha , I identified.
“Byron has gone missing,” I said—keeping the words level, even as I fought the feeling of being a wet-behind-the-ears pup confronted by a stern pack elder. “I’m Zalen Price, his housemate and employer. You’re listed as his emergency contact.”
Another pause. “ Do the police know he’s missing? ”
“Yes, we reported it yesterday night, as soon as we realized something was wrong,” I told her. “He disappeared with two other people from a restaurant in Soulard. Unfortunately, the police don’t seem interested in making the case a priority at this juncture.” I swallowed my surge of frustration over their unwillingness to act.
“ No surprise there ,” she muttered. “ Mind you, this is Byron we’re talking about. You sure he didn’t just go off somewhere to have sex with these other two people? ”
I nearly choked on spit, clearing my throat awkwardly before I could respond. “Quite sure, yes. A cell phone belonging to one of the other people was found damaged in the alley behind the restaurant, as though there might have been a struggle.”
She cursed under her breath. “ Look, you’d better come over here so you can tell me everything face to face. I hate talking over the phone. Let me give you the address .”
Forty minutes later, I was pulling into the driveway of a tiny house in one of the older parts of Florissant. The clock on my dashboard said four-thirty a.m., and my eyes felt like someone had rubbed them with sandpaper.
There was no doorbell, so I rapped lightly on the frame of the metal storm door. Within seconds, the front door opened, revealing an elderly female alpha in a tatty bathrobe, with pink curlers in her hair. Once, she would have been as tall as I was, if not taller. But age had stooped her shoulders, making her look as though she carried a heavy, invisible weight. Her face was strong and deeply lined, jowls just starting to sag.
“Come in, but keep it quiet,” she said, barely above a whisper. “Got someone asleep in the back bedroom.”
I nodded to show I understood. “I’m sorry to bother you at this hour,” I said, keeping my tone equally low. “I wasn’t sure who else to contact.”
She waved the words off and gestured me to a battered high-back chair upholstered with faded gold floral print. Once I was seated, she sat down in a similar but mismatched chair across from me.
“I’ll tell you right up front that I haven’t heard from Byron in a couple of weeks,” she said quietly. “He hasn’t got himself back in trouble with the gangs, has he?”
I hated that she needed to ask that, and hated even more the way I would have to answer. “We don’t know anything for certain, except that their disappearance is deeply out of character for all three of these people. But, yes, it’s possible a gang is involved. If so, I don’t think it had anything to do with Byron directly. It’s more likely he was caught up in it by chance.”
Beatrix frowned and tapped gnarled fingers on her thigh in a thoughtful rhythm. She drew breath as though to speak, but the interior door leading into the sitting room squeaked open, and a teenage boy with a tousled head of black hair peered in.
“Bea? What’s going on? Is everything all right?” asked Tony Scalise... the kid who’d gone missing after running away from his sexually abusive father.
He turned to me. We blinked at each other, both of us gaping in shock.
“... Zalen?” Tony asked in a small voice.
“Tony?” I said, my voice rising in disbelief. “What... what are you doing here?”
Abruptly, Tony’s expression grew cagey. Beatrix, meanwhile, had been looking between the two of us with sharp eyes that belied her age.
She sighed. “Told you to keep your head down whenever anyone came to the front door, pup.”
A hint of defiance entered Tony’s gaze. “It’s oh-dark-thirty in the morning! It coulda been anyone—a burglar, even!”
My brain was frantically shuffling and reshuffling puzzle pieces without much to show for it. I held up a hand. “No. Sorry. I need an answer, Tony. What are you doing here ?”
Tony’s brown eyes darted away. “Lying low, like Byron told me to.”
“Like... Byron... told you to,” I echoed slowly.
“The pup needed a soft place to land for a bit,” Beatrix said. Her expression dared me to make an issue of it. “I do that for people sometimes.” One iron-gray eyebrow lifted, deepening the wrinkles in her forehead. “You didn’t think I was Byron’s biological grandmother, did you?”
I stared at them both for a long moment, temporarily lost for words.
“As a matter of fact, I did ,” I said. “Not that it matters... or that it’s any of my business.”
Tony’s gaze narrowed. “Wait, what are you doing here, Zalen—if it’s not to check up on me? Where’s Byron?”
“That does seem to be the question,” Beatrix murmured. “It appears he’s gone missing.”
“ Missing ?” Tony said, his eyes going wide.
“He disappeared from a restaurant last night with two other people,” Beatrix said, before I could protest that this wasn’t the kind of thing to dump on a teenager—especially one who had his own set of problems.
“Oh,” Tony said. “Shit.”
Beatrix glowered at him. “ Language .” Her attention returned to me, laser focused. “As I told you, I’ve had no contact with Byron since a routine phone call roughly two weeks ago. The best I can do is put you in touch with an old friend of his who might be able to dig up some information, assuming this ends up being gang related.” Her expression soured. “Although, I’m not certain friend is the right word. And by putting you in touch , I mean I can tell you where this person tends to spend his time.”
I glanced between the kid that Byron had apparently been hiding from his parents without telling the rest of us, and the wizened old mother hawk who’d taken him under her wing. The lawful course of action here would be to send the police around to pick up a runaway teen and return him to his family.
Was I going to do that?
Pfft . The fuck I was.
“I’ll share all the details we know. Any possible leads you can offer me would be deeply appreciated, ma’am,” I said, and pulled up the note-taking app on my phone to jot down the information.
The pool hall Beatrix had directed me to didn’t open until ten. Knowing that my adrenaline would crash at some point, I drove back to Ladue to check on the others and catch an hour or two of sleep.
The process of elimination led me to Luca’s nest, where I found Emiel sitting among a mountain of pillows that smelled of green grass and honeysuckle, with Mia fast asleep in his arms.
“I talked to Byron’s grandmother,” I whispered, poking my head into the nest but not entering. “She gave me a possible lead, but I can’t track him down until later this morning.” I hesitated. “Also, Byron stashed Tony Scalise at the grandmother’s house. He’s... safe. He seems well.”
Emiel tensed, his dark eyes flashing surprise in the dim light. Mia whimpered in her sleep, and he consciously relaxed his body before replying. “Are you fuckin’ kidding me?” The words were so low they were barely audible.
I shrugged helplessly. “I’m as surprised as you are. Anyway, this contact she gave me might have information, if SSG or another gang is behind the disappearance.”
Emiel seemed to struggle with himself for a moment.
“I got gang contacts, too,” he said eventually. “Could talk to ’em. Ask some questions.”
A deep pit of dread opened up in my stomach at the prospect of Emiel getting sucked back into the same world that might have taken Byron and Luca from us.
“No,” I said, giving into that sinking worry. “Emiel, please let me take the lead on this. I’m asking you to trust me, because I need you here taking care of Mia and keeping her safe.”
Even in the low light, Emiel’s internal battle was clear on his face. After a few moments, his expression settled into stoic lines. “’Kay,” he murmured. “I trust you, Zalen.”
Nodding in relief, I withdrew before I ended up waking Mia from her restless doze. After firing off several emails to inform everyone that the Hope Project would be closed until further notice, I faceplanted onto my mattress and managed a couple of hours of nightmare-plagued sleep.
I felt worse when I got up than I had when I’d gone to bed, but I dragged myself together and called the police station for an update. There wasn’t one, beyond ‘ we’ll get around to it when we can .’
After popping several ibuprofen for my pounding headache, I checked in on the others and found the shower in the guest bathroom running. There was no sign of Emiel, but I knew he wouldn’t shirk his assignment as Mia’s impromptu bodyguard.
I left them to it, arriving at the run-down pool hall on the other side of the river promptly at ten a.m.
The place was nicotine stained with patches of mildew on the ceiling, although the pool tables were all well maintained, and the bar looked clean. Ish .
“Morning,” I greeted the bored looking bartender. “I’m looking for the guy they call Mouse. Friend of a friend.”
“He’s not here yet,” said the man, barely deigning to look up at me. “If you wanna wait for him, you gotta buy something.”
I ordered a Coke and settled in to wait. Only a handful of people came and went in the first hour—two for a quick round of day drinking, and the others for a game at one of the tables. Finally, a thin, shabby beta man somewhere in the nebulous range of thirty to forty years old slunk in.
If the long, twitching nose and receding chin hadn’t given him away as someone fitting the nickname of Mouse , the bartender’s subtle jerk of his head would have. I set my untouched drink aside and closed on him.
“Hello,” I said, taking in the man’s instinctive flinch as he clocked my approach. “I’m a friend of Byron Harper’s. His grandmother Bea told me I should speak to you.”
Mouse had backed up against the pool table as though I’d come at him with a meat cleaver instead of a friendly greeting.
“Byron?” he said, in a tone of deep mistrust. “You mean Blondie?”
“Well,” I replied. “He is blond. Though I’m pretty sure it comes out of a bottle.”
At that, Mouse let out a bark of cackling laughter and relaxed a bit. “Yeah, he was always a vain little fucker. What’s Bea doin’, sending you here to me?”
I took a deep breath. “She thought you might have heard something. Byron and two of his friends disappeared last night from behind a restaurant in Soulard—the Elderflower Inn. There’s reason to think SSG might be involved.”
Mouse blanched. “Goldie was at that Elderflower place last night? What the hell for?”
My heartrate sped up. “We know the owners. You’ve heard something about the restaurant?”
Mouse’s thin face closed off. “What if I have?”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out my wallet, freshly stuffed with hundred-dollar bills after a stop by an ATM.
“Two hundred dollars to tell me what you know,” I said.
He pursed his lips. “Four hundred.”
“Three hundred,” I countered, pulling out the crisp bills and holding them up temptingly.
Mouse licked his lips, his muddy hazel eyes flicking back and forth between my face and the money.
“Head of SSG was planning to try and strong-arm the owner of the place into selling it,” he said, and reached for the bills.
I jerked them back. “SSG’s boss? That’s Blake Berlusconi, right? They call him Blaze?”
Mouse’s gaze darted around the place nervously. “You don’t wanna be throwin’ his name around, son.”
“He made his move last night?” I pressed. “Kidnapped the owner, and maybe whoever else was with him?”
“Dunno nothin’ about that,” Mouse said, eyeing the money I was holding just out of reach.
“But you could find out,” I told him. “And maybe find out where they’re being held, too. If you did, there’d be a cool thousand dollars waiting for you. Along with a one-way ticket to someplace sunny with a beach, if you wanted it.”
Mouse wavered visibly. I passed over the three hundred bucks, which disappeared inside his worn suit jacket in a flash.
“Guess I could ask around,” he muttered, not making eye contact.
“You do that,” I said, trying not to let hope creep in. “Meet me here tonight, an hour before close?”
“Yeah,” Mouse replied. “Sure.”