Chapter 31
JAGGER
I looked out the window as Hawk tore down the main road leading away from Blackwell Falls, some kind of heavy metal blaring from his speakers at a volume that was probably doing permanent damage to my hearing.
I didn’t mind. It gave me a chance to think without making conversation. Someday I’d be old and deaf and it would be all Hawk’s fault but that was a problem for another time.
I wasn’t someone who usually thought much about the future. Except now, I was definitely thinking about the future. Not my future as a hearing-aid wearer but my future — our future — with Cassie.
It had crept up on me: taking for granted that Cassie would live with us forever, that she’d always be our mouse, not just to fuck but to hold and take care of and love.
Not that I was in love.
I wasn’t cut out for love. None of us were.
But I did want to give her a soft place to land after all she’d been through, I did want to see her face every morning when I woke up and every night before I went to sleep.
I did want to talk to her about her feelings because it kind of seemed like no one had been doing that, like she’d gotten used to not doing it too.
Also, I wanted to feed her and kiss her and buy her a new car, both because she needed a new car and because I wanted to buy her something huge and indestructible — like a tank — so no one could ever hurt her again.
Which didn’t mean I was in love. I just wanted to do things for her. Starting with finding out who the fuck had dared to hurt her, which meant finding out who was behind the murder of her parents, because they were undoubtedly the same people.
There was only one problem. Well, there were a lot of problems actually, but one of them loomed over our situationship like no other.
Cassie’s obligatory ninety days with us was up in two weeks.
In the weeks after Cassie had come home from the hospital we’d been able to avoid Bram by leaving the house when he arrived with Maeve for his visits.
Now that Cassie could see again, she visited him at the loft or he came to see her at the coffee shop, and it was obvious Bram was waiting out her ninety days with us, assuming she’d go back to her old life when they were over.
I was under no illusion: no way was Bram Montgomery going to let his baby sister stay with us past that ninety-day mark.
And he definitely wasn’t going to let her be with us, something I was just starting to admit to myself I wanted.
“Think he found something?” I had to shout the question over not just the music but the roar of the hot summer wind filling the car from the open windows.
Hawk insisted that air conditioning was for pussies and that cars were meant to be driven with the windows down in all kinds of weather, which meant freezing our asses off in the winter and baking like a cake in the summer, all to the soundtrack of Hawk’s heavy metal playlist.
“He wouldn’t have asked for a meeting if he hadn’t,” Hawk yelled back.
He slowed down as we approached a small squat building with peeling white paint about five miles outside of Blackwell Falls.
A dusty red pickup truck, a motorcycle, and an older brown sedan were lined up on the gravel parking lot out front, a faded yellow and blue sign that read Last Stop emerging from the ground.
The Last Stop diner looked like what it was: a forgotten hole in the wall known only by locals, one that was passed by the tourists filing in and out of Blackwell Falls in favor of the familiar chain restaurants off the highway.
Hawk pulled next to the red pickup and turned off the car. The sudden silence was blissful and I rubbed at my ears, half expecting them to be bleeding.
“Let me do the talking,” Hawk said as we got out of the car.
It didn’t need to be said but I understood why he said it. Talking to his former coworkers from the FBI wasn’t a no-risk proposition. It was easy to think they were still on the same side, but the work we did — and the work they did — made them enemies.
We walked the short distance to the diner’s single glass door and stepped into a large room with scuffed white linoleum floors and a long counter on the other side of the kitchen, which was visible through a wide passthrough.
A middle-aged woman with platinum hair and bright-red lipstick poured coffee for the two locals at the counter while a rotund guy in a grease-spattered apron worked the grill on the other side of the wall.
“Morning!” the woman called out.
She reached into the pocket of her apron and set a ticket on the table in front of the guy whose coffee she’d just poured.
“Morning,” I said.
Hawk homed in on a guy sitting at a table in the back of the room, as far away from the counter as you could get, his baseball cap shielding everything but a mustache that looked like it belonged in the 1970s.
“Coffee?” the waitress asked as we passed the counter.
“No thanks,” I said.
After almost three months of living with Cassie, I’d gotten spoiled. Her shop really did make the best coffee.
I nodded at the guy with the baseball cap and slid into the chair by the wall. Hawk took the seat directly across from his FBI crony.
“Morning,” Hawk said.
“If you say so.” The guy took a drink of his coffee, then wolfed down bites from the plates on front of him, a smorgasbord of half-eaten food that ran the gamut from French toast to meatloaf to a club sandwich.
Now that we were closer, I caught the shadow of a strong nose and dark eyes under the baseball cap
“Thanks for meeting me.” Hawk glanced at me. “This is my friend, uh…”
“John Smith,” I said.
I wasn’t giving this fucking fed my name.
“Dave Jones,” the guy said, washing down his food with another swig of coffee.
Touché.
The waitress appeared with the coffee pot.
“Get you two anything?” she asked, pouring coffee into “Dave Jones’” coffee cup.
“We’re good,” Hawk said.
“Give a shout if you change your mind.”
Hawk waited until she was out of earshot to speak again. “I take it you got something on that transaction record?”
Jones sat back in his chair, picked up a toothpick from the table, and started picking at his teeth. “You could say that.”
Hawk had highlighted the black SUV’s gas station transaction based on the time stamps of the video footage and we’d sat back to wait, hoping “Dave Jones” would be able to trace the owner of the credit card.
It had taken weeks for him to call saying he wanted to meet, and we’d almost given up that he would find something on the identity of the guy who’d driven Cassie off the road.
“An ID?” Hawk prodded.
“It’s a company card,” Jones said.
“A company card?” I was supposed to keep quiet, but the words slipped out around my surprise.
Any hope I’d had for a breakthrough flew right out the window. The last thing I’d expected was for the driver of the SUV to be some mid-level manager out for a drive.
“Shell company,” Hawk said, like he’d just realized what Jones was getting at.
“Bingo,” Jones said.
Hawk leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “Fuck.”
“I’m not done,” Jones said, chewing on the toothpick. “Turns out, the people behind said shell company are already under investigation.”
Hawk frowned. “For what?”
“Sex trafficking, among other things.” Jones leaned forward with a scowl. “What the fuck have you gotten me into?”
Hawk shook his head. “No idea. I just wanted an ID on a guy who ran an innocent woman off the road.”
“Well your ‘innocent woman’ is mixed up in some serious shit. And now I’m mixed up in it too, which I don’t appreciate.”
“I owe you,” Hawk said.
“No shit.”
“Can you tell me anything about the investigation?” Hawk asked.
Jones looked around, like he half expected a bunch of spooks to appear out of the woodwork and haul him away. “It’s big, been going on for almost three years now.”
I thought about the missing girls, the sex trafficking ring at Aventine, that shit the fucking Blackwell Beasts had been mixed up in.
“What can you tell me about the people under investigation?” Hawk asked.
“Fuck you,” Jones said, his voice flat. “I can tell you exactly fucking nothing.”
“Come on,” Hawk urged, leaning over the table, his voice a fevered whisper. “There’s gotta be something I can run down on my own. It’s not like I’ve got anyone to tell.”
I didn’t know the details of Hawk’s ouster at the bureau, but I knew he’d created enough of a firestorm that he was persona non grata there. There were only a handful of people like Jones even willing to return Hawk’s calls.
Jones tapped his fingers on the formica table. “I will fucking kill you if a word of this ever gets out.”
I got a glimpse of Hawk when he’d been a fed when he leaned back in his chair again, giving Jones space.
“Noted,” Hawk said.
Pressure, space, pressure, space.
All while Jones dripped information, dancing around the sensitive shit, covering his ass.
They’d had the same training, and I couldn’t help being fascinated by the interplay.
“Word from friends in the investigation is that the org is connected to Dimitri Kaprolov.”
I raised my eyebrows. “The Russian oligarch?” Hawk looked at me in surprise and I shrugged. “His fingerprints are all over international money, the transparent kind and otherwise.”
“That’s the one,” Jones said. He looked at Hawk. “I couldn’t confirm it but you know how investigations go. They leak like fucking sieves, internally at least. Especially the long ones.”
Hawk rubbed at his cheek with his thumb, a dark scowl playing across his face while Jones eyed a new customer at the Last Stop, a guy in his twenties wearing a camo vest who’d just slid onto a seat at the counter.
“Why would a Russian oligarch I’ve never fucking heard of run a local woman off the road?” Hawk asked.
Cassie, I thought. Not just any local woman.
Our woman.
“I don’t know shit except what I told you,” Jones said, pulling his baseball hat lower on his face.
“That fucking card is linked to a shell company being investigated as a front for sex trafficking. Word is Kaprolov is one of the sick bastards who might be implicated. That’s all I got.
” He stood. “Don’t call me again about this shit. ”
Hawk and I sat in silence until the bell on the door dinged behind us announcing Jones’ exit.
“How the fuck would a Russian oligarch be connected to the missing girls in Blackwell Falls?” Hawk asked.
“I don’t know.” I thought back over the last two months, all the pieces of the puzzle that didn’t seem to fit anywhere. Except now I was starting to see it: the outline of an image, the corner pieces that might anchor the others, the border filling in. “But I know someone who might.”