20. Rishi
20
Rishi
T he parking garage swam back into semi-focus around me, and I struggled to get to my feet, cursing my missing firearm. I found my phone instead, though I blanked for a second on who I should call.
John was my first speed-dial, so I went with that.
“Rishi, how can I help you?” John’s voice asked.
“Cas— Casimir has been taken. I was hit—” I felt the painful spot on the back of my head carefully and swore when my fingers came back covered in blood. “I need to call…”
“You need to call Luis, Rio, and Captain Donovan. Call Luis first; he can do some of that,” John said. I knew that I shouldn’t call 911 for some reason, but right now, I couldn’t remember what the reason was.
“Umm, I,” I started to reply, but the words weren’t coming together right.
“Rishi,” I refocused on John’s voice, which was now softer. “Let me call Luis. Stay on the line, alright?”
“Yes, sir, thank you,” I managed to agree. My head was pounding, and I wanted Cas. I wanted to go after Cas, but the way to do that seemed… unclear. John would tell me soon.
I glanced around me and spotted the van. I was sure I needed to retrieve something from it. By the time I had crossed the endless distance to the van, I sank to the floor and leaned my back against it. I just needed to sit down for a moment.
***
“Rishi? Rishi! Rishi, man, wake up.” I felt a hand tapping the side of my face and I opened my eyes to see Rio’s dark eyes looking at me with concern. “Rishi, come on.”
“Rio,” I said. “They have taken Casimir.”
“I got him, he’s conscious,” Rio said into his phone, still looking at me. “Rishi, do you know where you are and what happened?”
“Casimir had an appointment… a van pulled up. I am bleeding, I think they hit me. They took Cas.” I frowned. “They have Cas. They’re going to hurt Cas.” I felt the fog dissipate as adrenaline flooded me, along with the knowledge that Cas was finally in the clutches of the very dangerous, completely ruthless man that I had been tasked to protect him from.
“We’ll find him,” Rio promised me. “It’s all hands on deck. John called Cas’s captain and the officer who’s in charge of the Fernandez investigation, and Marcus is tracing Cas’s phone. It’s still moving, and once I have you on your feet we’re going after him.” He paused and looked at me with concern. “If you’re sure you can.”
I let Rio help me to my feet, and then I remembered that I was unarmed. “I have to get my gun from the van.”
“I’ll grab it,” Rio said. “Are you sure you don’t want to get checked out?”
I shook my head. “No. Later. We need to find him first.”
“We’ll find him,” Rio promised, then clapped my shoulder. “Let’s go, we’re gonna follow his phone.”
***
I wasn’t sure where we were going. I was letting Rio handle that. My mind was full of horrible thoughts. I kept picturing the different awful things they could do to make Cas tell them where Elena Fernandez was. And I knew they would have to. Cas would hold out for as long as humanly possible.
I remembered Cas’s friend Antonio and his ruined hands in their braces at the therapist’s office. Cas had told me that Fernandez had done that to send Cas a message: I’ll get what I want, and then I’ll punish you.
Now Fernandez had Cas, and he could do whatever he wanted to do to him.
The fear was so strong in me that I was dizzy with it. I could hear Marcus on the phone with Rio, directing him to follow Cas's cell phone, and I could see that we were heading toward an industrial area.
Of course, it would be a warehouse of some kind; stand-offs and gang interrogations always happened in warehouses. A part of me wanted to roll my eyes at the Hollywood predictability.
We followed the phone for a long time, or at least it felt like it. Marcus told Rio it had stopped moving, and when we got close to the location, Rio parked, and we walked in.
Rio stopped outside a big graffiti-covered building and stooped to pick up a phone off the ground.
"Cas's?" He asked, holding it out for me to see.
I took it and looked at it, nodding. I couldn't open it, as it was fingerprint-secured, but I recognized the navy-blue case and the lock screen of four men, bare backs to the camera and arms around each other's waists, looking at the ocean as the sun went down.
I knew one of them was Cas, I recognized the strong line of his back and the scar on one scapula, but I didn’t know who the others were. I had been curious, but I did not like to pry; I was raised to believe it was inappropriate.
I decided I would ask when I got him back. I would ask him many questions and store away the answers. I would ask how he got the scar, where the beach was that the photo had been taken on, and who the other men in the picture were. There was no end to the things I wanted to know about Casimir.
Rio was looking around the outside of the warehouse. I glanced around too, looking first for cameras, then for anything else of note.
No cameras were visible, and the door was bolted shut from the outside. There were fresh tire tracks, though, and I wondered if they had just stopped and tossed Cas’s phone out or if they had transferred him to a different vehicle. I studied them closely, ultimately deciding that they were all from the same vehicle, presumably the van that Cas had been stuffed into in the parking structure.
Luis pulled up and parked alongside Rio’s car. He eyed me closely as he joined us, and winced at the sight of the blood on my shirt, but he didn’t say anything.
Rio’s phone rang.
“Talk to me, Marcus,” Rio said.
“I’m reviewing footage from traffic cameras and any other public surveillance I can get my hands on. Your boy is still moving. It looks like they’re heading for Riverside or somewhere similar. I’m guessing they want to get him out of the LA area and make it harder to find him. Once they’re on the 91, though, I’m not sure how well I can follow them.”
“Intel on his associates in the Riverside area?” Rio asked, still glancing around.
“Working on it. He has ties to a section of the city but not as tight as LA.”
“Locations? Can we get eyes on known holdings?”
“Working on it,” Marcus said again. “Is Rishi all right?”
“Yes, I am fine,” I said shortly. “I just want to find Casimir.”
“On it,” Marcus said. I was getting tired of that phrase, but I knew there was little else he could say.
Rio sighed and opened his mouth to speak but a sharply indrawn breath over the line cut him off.
“Ah! Fuck yeah. They’re definitely heading south,” Marcus said. “They’re in the carpool lane.” Marcus laughed. “Okay, so maybe this isn’t going to be quite as hard as I thought. If they keep using that, I can follow them on the traffic cameras and see which exit they get off at.”
Rio’s smile looked deadly, and I knew exactly how he felt. “Load up,” Rio ordered me. “Luis, are you well enough to ride? Gotta say you both look like shit, but I know I’m not keeping Rishi out of the action.”
“I’m coming,” Luis said stubbornly.
“ Esta bien entonces si tu lo dices,” Rio said. “Luis, if we leave your car here, you might as well file the insurance claim now, so you’ll have to follow us.”
“ Si, ” he said, heading back to his own car. I planted myself in the passenger seat of Rio’s and looked at it, only just now noticing that it wasn’t a rental.
“You buy a car?” I asked him.
“ Si, ” he said. “Moved here, got my license changed and everything.” He grinned. “You gonna have to do the same thing?”
I thought of Cas’s arms around me, his lips on mine, and the way he looked at me. “Yes, I think I will.”
“ ?órale! Let’s go bring him home to you.”